Besides the absence of ecclesiastical fanaticism, there were other reasons to account for the Jew’s normal immunity from persecution in mediaeval Italy. The Italians had no cause to envy the Jew his commercial success. In Italy the sons of Israel found keen competitors in the native Christians. The financial genius of the Florentine and the Venetian was more than a match for that of the Jew. The Italians, therefore, did not exclude the Jews from their municipal and industrial organizations, but, by making the entrance to their Guilds less difficult for non-Christians, enabled the latter to engage in various trades elsewhere closed to them. Nor was the Holy See strong enough to ban usury in Italy and to fan the superstitious antipathy towards money-lenders as it did in other countries. Among the Italians the interests of the market counted for more than the interests of the Church, and canonical prohibitions were easily set at naught for the sake of convenience. Furthermore, the division of the peninsula into a number of States politically sundered, and often hostile to each other, but geographically connected, enabled the Jews to seek refuge in one place from persecution in another, and as soon as the tempest was over to return to their homes. For all these reasons we find the relations between Jews and Christians in Italy more cordial than in any other part of mediaeval Europe. The foreign origin and foreign connections of the Jew, far from being a source of prejudice, proved an attraction to the educated Italian. It is easy to imagine those old schoolmen, with their alert curiosity and unquenchable thirst for knowledge--in an age when books were rare, travel perilous, and all that was distant in space or time a desert, dimly known or utterly unknown--eagerly seizing at every chance of enlarging their mental horizon and of enriching their intellectual stores. A chance of this kind offered itself in the Jewish Rabbis, physicians, and scholars, and the Italians did not neglect it. Friendships between learned Hebrews and Christian divines were not uncommon.[75] In the tenth century we hear of a Jewish doctor Donnolo being on intimate terms with the Lord Abbot Nilus. One of the fruits of such friendships was the indirect transmission to the West of a few rays of Hellenic light long before the dawn of the Renaissance, through translations of the Arabic versions of the Greek classics into Hebrew, and from Hebrew into Latin. The most illustrious of these literary connections between followers of the new and the old Hebrew prophet was the tender affection which, towards the end of the thirteenth century, bound Immanuel, “the Heine of the Middle Ages,” with Dante, the poet of old Catholicism, and the embodiment of all that was true and pure and truly noble in mediaeval Christianity. The two friends must have formed a pair of extraordinary incongruity. Dante, grand, stern, and sombre, couching the gloomiest conceptions in the light and graceful