“JEWS massacred in France,” “Jews massacred in Germany,” “Jews massacred in England,” “Jews massacred in Germany and France,” “Jews massacred in Spain,” again and again and again. These headings, not to mention expulsions, oppressions and spoliations without number, stare us in the face as we turn over the pages of the history of Mediaeval Europe, and the cold lines assume a terrible significance as we peruse tale after tale of bodily and mental torment, such as no other people ever suffered and survived. And as we read on, and try to realise the awful scenes, the desolate cry of the sufferers rings in our ears, like a long-drawn wail borne across the centuries: “How long, O Lord, how long?” It would, of course, be an absurd exaggeration to assert that the life of Israel through the Middle Ages was an unbroken horror of carnage and rapine. There were spells of respite, some of them fairly long, during which the Jew was permitted to live and grow fat. But these Sabbaths of rest can be likened not inaptly to the periods during which a prudent husbandman suffers his land to lie fallow, in the hope of a richer harvest. They are only intervals between the acts of a tedious and bloody tragedy, with a continent for its stage and seven centuries for its night. But, though covering so vast an extent in space and time, the drama is not devoid of unity: the unity of plot. The motives and the characters are ever the same, each scene ends in strict accord with the foregoing, and the performance is a masterpiece of mournful monotony. Nor is it easy to bestow the crown of excellence on any European nation of actors without being unjust to their colleagues. The drama naturally divides itself into two periods: the period of spontaneous but unsystematic hostility, and the period of deliberate and organised persecution. While the Church was engaged in disseminating the gospel abroad, in rooting out heresy at home and in establishing her own authority, she had little time to devote to the persecution of the Jews; and the only canon law against them was the prohibition to dwell under the same roof with Christians and to employ Christian servants--a law which, in the absence of rigorous supervision, often remained a dead letter, and much oftener was observed, simply because neither side felt any violent desire to break it. The Jews consequently throve amazingly, their synagogues grew in number and splendour, and their antipathy to outside influences, though continuing to be as implacable as ever, found its chief expression in social isolation tempered by commercial exploitation.