The degradation of Israel was now complete. Persecution, cruel and, through all changes, consistent beyond a parallel in history, had at last achieved its demoralising work. The Jews, treated as pariahs throughout Southern and Central Europe, lost all feeling of self-respect. Spurned and dishonoured everywhere, they became day after day more and more worthy of contempt: slovenly in dress and dialect, dead to all sense of beauty or honesty, treacherous, and utterly broken in spirit. “Zeus takes away the half of his manhood from a man, when the day of slavery overtakes him,” says the wise old poet. The Jews now furnished a melancholy proof of the truth of the saying. Among the other gifts of servitude they acquired that of cringing cowardice. So little manliness was left in them that they, who had once astonished Rome with their dogged valour, dared not defend themselves even against the attacks of a street urchin; and the prophet’s terrible prediction was fulfilled: “You shall speak humbly from the ground, and from the dust shall proceed your word.” The dispersion of the Polish refugees over Europe resulted in the subjugation of Judaism in all countries to the sophistical and soulless teaching of Polish Talmudism. The long-ringleted Rabbis of Poland carried into every country their narrow subtlety and hatred of secular studies, so that at a time when the Middle Age was passing away from Christendom they restored it to Israel. From the sixteenth century the Jews fell completely under the domination of the Synagogue. Having abandoned all hope of being allowed to participate in the life of the Gentiles, they withdrew more and more severely behind the old moat by which their ancestors had surrounded themselves. Tribalism was their only alternative to utter extinction; and they seized upon it, nothing loth. They grew fanatical, entrusted the education of their children to none but the Polish Rabbis, clung to their bastard Germano-Hebrew jargon (Jüdisch-Deutsch or “Yiddish”), and even in writing a European language they employed the Hebrew characters. The Jewish literature of the period reflects the social and intellectual condition of the race. When it deals not with subjects of Biblical exegesis, it consists of rude popular songs and stories drawn from Talmudic and Cabbalistic sources or from German and Oriental folk-lore. But this Cimmerian darkness contained in it the promise of a dawn. The light of the eighteenth century was sooner or later to penetrate the mists of bigotry and to bring the Jewish Middle Age to an end. For while the Jew shares the general effects which persecution long drawn out inflicts, yet there is in him a power of resiliency which is his own peculiar possession and which saves him from falling permanently into the slough of degradation and disgrace. This power he derives in part from his religion, in part from his history. His religion gives him steadfastness; his history teaches him to hope. CHAPTER XVI IN HOLLAND