The first unambiguous indication of a changing attitude towards the Jew appears in Sir Walter Scott’s _Ivanhoe_. Scott in that work gives utterance to the feeling of toleration which had gradually been growing up in the country. It was in 1819, during the severest season of the novelist’s illness, that Mr. Skene of Rubislaw, his friend, “sitting by his bedside, and trying to amuse him as well as he could,” spoke about the Jews, as he had known them years before in Germany, “still locked up at night in their own quarter by great gates,” and suggested that a group of Jews would be an interesting figure in a novel.[140] The suggestion did not fall on stony ground. Scott’s eye seized on the artistic possibilities of the subject, and the result was the group of Jews which we have in Ivanhoe. Although the author in introducing the characters seems to have been innocent of any deliberate aim at propagandism, his treatment of them is a sufficient proof of his own sympathy, and no doubt served the purpose of kindling sympathy in many thousands of readers. Not that the work attempts any revolutionary subversion of preconceived ideas. The difference between Isaac of York and Nathan the Wise is the same as the difference between Scott and Lessing and their respective countries. The British writer does not try to persuade us that the person whom we abhorred a few generations before as an incarnation of all that is diabolical, and whom we still regard with considerable suspicion, is really an angel. Whether it be that there was no need for a revolt against the Elizabethan tradition, or Scott was not equal to the task, his portrait of the Jew does not depart too abruptly from the convention sanctioned by his great predecessors. His Isaac is not a Barabas or Shylock transformed, but only reformed. Though in many respects an improvement on both, Scott’s Jew possesses all the typical attributes of his progenitors: wealth, avarice, cowardice, rapacity, cunning, affection for his kith and kin, hatred for the Gentile. But, whereas in both Barabas and Shylock we find love for the ducats taking precedence of love for the daughter, in Isaac the terms are reversed. It is with exquisite reluctance that he parts with his shekels in order to save his life. Ransom is an extreme measure, resorted to only on an emergency such as forces the master of a ship to cast his merchandise into the sea. But on hearing that his captor, Front-de-Bœuf, has given his daughter to be a handmaiden to Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert, Isaac throws himself at the knight’s feet, imploring him to take all he possesses and deliver up the maiden. Whereupon the Norman, surprised, exclaims: “I thought your race had loved nothing save their money-bags.” “Think not so vilely of us,” answers the Jew. “Jews though we be, the hunted fox, the tortured wildcat, loves its young--the despised and persecuted race of Abraham love their children.”