How this revolution came about has been explained at great length by historians: how, partly through Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s influence, the nobles and merchant princes of the Italian republics took the new learning under their generous patronage; how young Italian pupils repaired to Constantinople to study the language and literature of ancient Greece at the feet of men to whom that language was a living mother tongue; how Greek teachers were encouraged to bring their treasures to Italy; how they were received by a public as eager to fathom the mysteries of Greek grammar as a modern public is to fathom the mysteries of a detective story; and how the stream gradually swelled into the mighty flood that followed on the fall of Constantine’s city in 1453. But all this was only a period of gestation. Modern Europe was really born on the day on which an obscure Dutch chandler made known to the world the marvellous invention which was to supersede the scribe’s pen, and to draw forth the torch of knowledge from the monk’s cell, and from the wealthy merchant’s study to the crowds in the street. By a coincidence, apparently strange, the century which opened the prison-gates of the Christian condemned the Jew to a new dungeon. The age of the revival of learning and of the printing press is also the age of vigorous persecution of Israel in Italy. The compulsory attendance of Jews at divine service now began to be enforced in a manner more rigid at once and more stupid. Officials posted at the entrance to the church examined the ears of the Jews, lest the inward flow of the truth should be stemmed by cottonwool. Other officials, inside the church, were charged with the duty of preventing the wretched congregation from taking refuge in sleep. A Bull of Benedict XIII., issued at Valencia in 1415, decrees that at least three public sermons a year should be inflicted on the Jews, and prescribes the arguments that are to be employed for their conversion: proofs of Christ’s Messianic character drawn from the Prophets and the Talmud, exposure of the errors and vanities of the latter book, and demonstration of the fact that the destruction of the Temple and the woes of the Jews are due to the hardness of their hearts.