enfranchised. For the first time since the destruction of the Temple the children of Israel, who had hitherto sojourned as strangers in foreign realms, hated, baited, and hunted from place to place, without a country, without a home, without civil or political rights, are citizens. Henceforth the name Juif, made hateful by the horrors of centuries, is to be forgotten in the new appellation of Israelite. The storm that raged during the next three years left the French Jews comparatively unscathed. Israel had long taken to heart the lesson embodied in the oriental proverb, “The head that is bent is spared by the sword.” In some districts, it is true, the enemies of all religion also tried to suppress the Jewish “superstition”; but on the whole the Jews came through the ordeal better than might have been expected. The Constitution of 1795 confirmed the decrees of the National Assembly. Holland, as we have seen, had long been a home for the persecuted sons of Israel. But the full rights of citizenship were not conceded to them until 1796, when closer relations with France enabled the gospel of liberty, equality, and fraternity to complete the work of toleration begun by enlightened commercial policy. The gift, however, was not welcomed by the heads of the community. The jealous Synagogue, which had persecuted poor Uriel Acosta to death, and excommunicated Spinoza in the preceding century, was still determined to guard its masterful hold upon its members. The new duties and rights which accompanied the gift, it was feared, would render the Jews less dependent upon their religious pastors. The Rabbis, supported by the Portuguese element which formed the aristocracy of the community and, like all aristocracies, abhorred innovation, offered a strenuous resistance to emancipation. They indited a circular epistle declaring that the Jews renounced their rights of citizenship as contrary to the commands of Holy Writ. They endorsed all the objections raised by the enemies of Jewish emancipation--namely, that the Jews, owing to their traditions of the past and their expectation of the Messiah, are and shall ever be strangers in the land--and they prevented their flock from accepting the invitation to vote in the elections to the National Assembly. On the other hand, the Liberal party, led by Jews of German descent, endeavoured to weaken the power of the Rabbis. The two sections banned each other heartily, and the distance between them grew wider as the Liberals went further and further along the path of reform. This difference of views led to a schism between the lovers of the new and the slaves of the old.