Various communal ordinances (_takkanoth_) enforced this sentiment of mutual loyalty. For example, no Jew was allowed to compete with a brother-Jew in renting a house from a Christian, or to replace a tenant without the latter’s consent. A series of such laws, many of them dating from a much earlier period, were re-enacted by a congress of Italian Rabbis on the very eve of the creation of the Roman Ghetto. Thus the Jews virtually acquired a perpetual lease of their homes; their communal right to the house (_jus casaca_) being an asset which could be sold, bequeathed, or bestowed as dowry upon a daughter. The Popes were not slow to take cognisance of this ordinance. Clement VIII. legalised the arrangement, so that, whilst the rent was regularly paid, eviction was practically impossible. But one of his successors carried the principle of Jewish reciprocity to its logical conclusion and turned it against the Jews themselves, by making the community as a body responsible for the rent of all the houses in the Ghetto, empty as well as tenanted. The same reciprocity of interests was recognised in matters pertaining to the soul. Each member of the brotherhood was responsible for the sins of the rest, and the confession of the individual was a confession for the whole community. Israel, cut off from the world, created a world unto itself. Never did Judaism attain a higher degree of religious uniformity, never were the spiritual bonds that bound together the scattered members of the great family drawn closer than in this period of their sorest affliction. Language was gone, country, state; nothing remained to the Jews but religion. It was held that, if the teaching of the Law were allowed to disappear, it would mean the disappearance of the race. Religion was nationalised that the nation might be saved. The rigorous discipline of the Synagogue and the absence of social joy had always encouraged devotion. The Ghetto crystallised it into a code. Joseph Caro’s _Shulchan Aruch_, or “Table Prepared,” a handbook of law and custom, compiled in the middle of the sixteenth century, fixed the fluid features of Jewish life into the rigid mask which it continued to wear, throughout Europe, till the beginning of the nineteenth century. But deep beneath the ice-surface of ritual--the crust of dead and deadening rules and prohibitions--there ran the living and sustaining current of faith, all the stronger and fiercer for its imprisonment. The outcasts of humanity, in the midst of their degradation--despised, and in many ways despicable--preserved the precious heritage, and their pride therein, unimpaired. Numerous fasts and feasts assisted this preservation. Thus the community fasted on Sabbath afternoons in memory of the death of Moses, or on Sundays in memory of the destruction of the Temple. On the Day of Atonement they listened with reverence to the touching words in which a noble old Hebrew bard gave utterance to the sorrow of his race: