Notwithstanding Voltaire’s unfriendly utterances regarding the Jews, the general tenour of his teaching was, of course, in favour of toleration, and it was on the French side of the Rhine that Lessing’s intellectual dream was to find its first realisation in practical politics. ♦1748♦ Montesquieu, moved to righteous indignation by the sight of the suffering Marranos in Portugal, had already protested against the barbarous treatment of the Jews in his _Esprit des Lois_, stigmatising its injustice, and demonstrating the injury which it had caused to various countries. Nor did he argue in vain. Since the middle of the sixteenth century there had been Jewish communities in France, consisting of refugees from Spain and Portugal. But they were only tolerated as pseudo-Christians. Dissimulation was absolutely necessary for self-preservation, and these hypocrites in spite of themselves were obliged to have their marriages solemnised at church, and otherwise to conform to rites which they detested. To these immigrants were gradually added new-comers from Germany and Poland, whom the Portuguese Jews despised and persecuted in a most revolting manner. An internecine feud between these two classes of refugees at Bordeaux gave King Louis XV. an opportunity of interfering in the affairs of the community. ♦1760♦ The Portuguese section passed a resolution calumniating their poor co-religionists, and trying to procure their exclusion as sturdy beggars and vagabonds. The communal resolution was submitted to the king, and every stone was turned to obtain his ratification of the iniquitous statute. Truly, there is no tyrant like a slave. Soon after Louis XV. issued an order expelling all the stigmatised Jews from Bordeaux within a fortnight; but in the chaos which pervaded French administration at that time there was a gulf between the issue and the execution of royal edicts, which, happily for the wretched outcasts, was never bridged over. ♦1776♦ Meanwhile the protest against the servile position to which Israel had been doomed for ages gained in strength, and, as its first result, the Jews of Paris obtained a legal confirmation of the right of abode in the capital of France.