Tolerance has not failed to produce once more the results which history has taught us to expect. As in Alexandria under the Ptolemies, in Spain under the Saracen Caliphs and the earlier Christian princes, and in Italy under the Popes of the Renaissance, the Jews cast off their aloofness and participated in the intellectual life of the Gentiles, so now they hastened to join in the work of civilisation. When the fetters were struck off from the limbs of Israel, more than the body of the people was set free. The demolition of the walls of the ghettos was symbolical of the demolition of those other walls of prejudice which had for centuries kept the Jewish colonies as so many patches of ancient Asia, incongruously inlaid into the mosaic of modern Europe. The middle of the eighteenth century, which marks the spring-time of Jewish liberty, also marks the spring-time of Jewish liberalism. It is the Renaissance of Hebrew history; a new birth of the Hebrew soul. The Jew assumed a new form of pride: pride in the real greatness of his past. He became once more conscious of the nobler elements of his creed and his literature. And with this self-consciousness there also came a consciousness of something outside and beyond self. Moses Mendelssohn did for the Jews of Europe what the Humanists had done for the Christians. By introducing it to the language, literature, and life of the Gentiles around it he opened for his people a new intellectual world, broader and fairer than the one in which it had been imprisoned by the persecutions of the Dark Ages; and that, too, at a moment when the shadows of death seemed to have irrevocably closed round the body and the mind of Israel. This deliverance, wondrous and unexpected though it was, produced no thrill of religious emotion, it called forth no outpourings of pious thankfulness and praise, such as had greeted the return from the Babylonian captivity and, again, the Restoration of the Law by the Maccabees in the days of old. The joy of the nation manifested itself in a different manner, profane maybe and distasteful to those who look upon nationality as an end in itself and who set the interests of sect above the interests of man; but thoroughly sane.