On being told that his daughter’s doom is irrevocable, Isaac changes his attitude. Outraged affection makes a hero of the Jew, and for his child’s sake he dares to face tortures, to escape from which he had just promised to part even with one thousand silver pounds: “Do thy worst,” he cries out. “My daughter is my flesh and blood, dearer to me a thousand times than those limbs which thy cruelty threatens.” While emphasising the good qualities of the Jew, the author takes care to excuse the bad ones. Isaac is despoiled and spurned as much as Barabas or Shylock. But there is an all-important difference in Scott’s manner of presenting these facts. He describes Isaac as a victim rather than as a villain, as an object of compassion rather than of ridicule. “Dog of a Jew,” “unbelieving Jew,” “unbelieving dog” are the usual modes of address employed by the mediaeval Christian towards the Jew; just as they are the usual modes of address employed by the modern Turk towards the Christian _rayah_. The Jews are “a nation of stiff-necked unbelievers,” the Christian “scorns to hold intercourse with a Jew,” his propinquity, nay his mere presence, is considered as bringing pollution--sentiments which far exceed in bitterness those entertained by the Turk towards the Christian. Under such circumstances Isaac makes his appearance: a grey-haired and grey-bearded Hebrew “with features keen and regular, an aquiline nose and piercing black eyes,” wearing “a high, square, yellow cap of a peculiar fashion, assigned to his nation to distinguish them from the Christians.” Thus attired, “he is introduced with little ceremony, and, advancing with fear and hesitation, and many a bow of deep humility,” he takes his seat at the lower end of the table, “where, however, no one offers to make room for him.” “The attendants of the Abbot crossed themselves, with looks of pious horror,” fearing the contamination from “this son of a rejected people,” “an outcast in the present society, like his people among the nations, looking in vain for welcome or resting place.” Isaac has scarcely taken his seat, when he is addressed, with brutal frankness, as a creature whose vocation it is “to gnaw the bowels of our nobles with usury, and to gull women and boys with gauds and toys.” So treated, the Jew realises that “there is but one road to the favour of a Christian”--money. Hence his avarice. Furthermore, the impression of a craven and cruel miser, that might perhaps be derived from the above presentation, is softened by the author, who hastens to declare that any mean and unamiable traits that there may be in the Jew’s character are due “to the prejudices of the credulous vulgar and the persecutions by the greedy and rapacious nobility.”