Nothing is more characteristic of the general healthiness of the emancipation of the Jewish mind than the new type of renegade Jew which it brought into being. In the Middle Ages the Jew who renounced the faith of his fathers often considered it his sacred duty to justify his apostasy by persecuting his former brethren. The conditions which produced that vulgar type of renegade having vanished, there began to appear apostates of another kind--men who, though unwilling to devote to a sect what was meant for mankind, or, perhaps, unable to sacrifice their own individuality to an obsolete allegiance, yet never ceased to cherish those whom they deserted. In them the connection of sentiment outlasted the links of religion, and these men by their defection did more for their people than others had done by their loyalty. Heinrich Heine, born in 1799, was baptized at the age of twenty-five, prompted partly by the desire to gain that fulness of freedom which in those days was still denied to the non-Christian in Germany, but also by a far deeper motive: “I had not been particularly fond of Moses formerly,” he said in after life, “perhaps because the Hellenic spirit was predominant in me, and I could not forgive the legislator of the Jews his hatred towards all art.” The case of Benjamin Disraeli in this country was an analogous, though not quite a similar one. Among later examples may be mentioned the great Russo-Jewish composer Rubenstein who, though baptized in infancy, never sought to conceal his Jewish birth, but always spoke of it with pride--and that in a country where it still is better for one to be born a dog than a Jew. Many of these ex-Jews have attempted, and in part succeeded, in creating among the Gentiles a feeling of respect towards the Jewish people as a nation of aristocrats. And, indeed, in one sense the claim is not wholly baseless.