We have seen that the persecution of the Jews in mediaeval Germany, from the awful carnage in the Rhineland (1096 foll.) to their expulsion from Ratisbon (1476), had for its proximate cause the hatred entertained towards them by the Catholic Church. The orgies of the Crusaders were mainly dictated by pious vindictiveness; the violent efforts of the Dominican friars and of the Inquisition to convert the Jews were prompted by the desire to save them from heresy and to prevent them from infecting others by their example. All the heresies from the Albigensian, through the Hussite, up to the movement which culminated in Luther’s secession from the Roman fold, were considered by the Church as having their roots in Jewish teaching and practice. The adoration of the Virgin, of Saints, and of relics, which offended the Jew in the Roman cult were also the special objects of Protestant detestation. They had both suffered for the sake of conscience; dissent, the crime of Judaism, was the glory of Protestantism; Rome, the secular foe of the one, was also the sworn enemy of the other; and they were both branded by Rome with the common epithet of Heretics. We might, therefore, have reasonably expected that Luther and his brother-reformers would have regarded the Jews with sympathy. But history does not confirm this _a priori_ conclusion. Protestantism from the first proved as hostile to the Jews as Catholicism. It has been suggested that Luther’s animosity was due to the fact that the enthusiasm for Reform and for the simplification of doctrine and worship had produced a tendency towards Hebrew Unitarianism, the leaders of which movement were stigmatised as _Semi-Judaei_. It would perhaps be nearer the truth to say that the hostility towards the Jew was so old and so deep, and it sprang from so many sources, that not even community of interests and enmities could obliterate it. We have already seen Jews and Christians both lost in the same maze of Cabbalistic mysticism; but this partnership in folly did not improve the relations between the two sects. Nor did the Reformers’ attachment to the Hebrew Bible produce any affection for the race of whose genius that Bible was the fruit. The Jew was detested in the concrete as much as he was admired in the abstract. Luther’s disappointed hope of converting the Jews to Protestantism may have also influenced him. But, be the origin of the feeling what it may, the promoters of the Protestant cause and their followers, from the sixteenth century onwards, adopted a most unfriendly attitude towards Israel. Nor, so far as Luther is concerned, is this development altogether unintelligible.