Most of these pontiffs, refined, intelligent, and irreligious, in fighting the reformers fought enemies to their own power, not the enemies of Christ. While opposing the spirit of rebellion which the licentiousness of some of them had brought into existence and the literary culture of others to maturity, they seem to have ignored the eternal heretics, the Jews. Under their rule Israel enjoyed one of those Sabbaths of rest which invariably preceded a new reign of terror. When an academic feud rent the learned world of the University of Padua into two factions, instead of the philosophical question under dispute being, after the fashion of the times, settled at the point of the rapier, it was submitted to the arbitration of a Jew, the great scholar Elias del Medigo. This worthy, vested in the professorial robes, addressed the students of Padua and Florence, and his decision was accepted as final. Lastly, the gulf between Jew and Gentile in Italy was bridged by a common philosophical faith. The Italians of the period, in their eager search after truth, often strayed into strange paths. Many of them, weary of groping their way amid the darkness of the scholastic wilderness, rashly ran after any will-of-the-wisp that held out the promise of light and rest. Among these aberrations from commonsense was the rage for the Hebrew mysticism of the Cabbala, which found many susceptible disciples among the _literati_ of Padua and Florence, and led to close and cordial relations between representatives of the two creeds. The omniscient youth Count Giovanni Pico de Mirandola, who had been initiated into the mysteries of the Cabbala by a Jew, maintained that these mysteries yielded the most effective proof of the divinity of Christ, and, what is more remarkable still, he had even converted Pope Sixtus IV. to his way of thinking. Pico de Mirandola placarded Rome with a list of nine hundred theses, and invited all European scholars to come to the city at his own expense that they might be convinced of the infallibility of the Cabbala, while the Pope took great pains to have the Cabbalistic writings translated into Latin for the enlightenment of divinity students. Innocent VIII. was far too old-fashioned to favour new absurdities; and, while he persecuted witches and magicians in Germany and preached abortive crusades against the heretics of the West and the infidels of the East, he prohibited the reading of Pico’s nonsense. But the craze seized Leo X. and the early Reformers, and not only theologians but also men of affairs and men of war fell captives to it. Statesmen and soldiers devoted themselves to the study of Hebrew, in the pathetic belief that they had at last secured the magic key to universal wisdom.