In every country and in every city in Europe they remained sharply separated from their Christian neighbours, shunning intermarriage with them, and forming a perfectly distinct body of people, with the synagogue for its centre and its soul. The synagogue elected its own officers in accordance with the traditions of the Temple and the instructions of the Talmud, passing communal ordinances which, as in ancient times, regulated the whole of Jewish life: enforcing monogamy, prohibiting shaving, fixing the tax on meat, restraining gambling, forbidding the promiscuous dancing of Jews and Jewesses, dictating marriage settlements and divorce, defining the dress and diet of men and women. The State frequently levied the taxes on the Jewish community in a lump sum, leaving the assessment among individual members and the collection to the officers of the synagogue.[41] Justice also was administered by the _Beth Din_, or Jewish religious tribunal. Thus, despite much external interference, the Jewries constituted self-governing colonies--strange oases in mediaeval society. Their members were neither villeins nor freeholders; neither men-at-arms nor mechanics. Feudalism concerned them as little as Catholicism. They took no more part in the martial exercises than in the spiritual devotions of their neighbours. They belonged neither to the knightly orders nor to the commercial and industrial corporations; but they lived a life of their own, in closer communion of interests and tastes with their brethren in Cairo or Babylon than with their fellow-townsmen. In the ninth century, for instance, Babylon was to the Jews of Western Europe what Rome was to the Catholics--the oracle of Divine knowledge--and Rabbinical decisions issued therefrom were obeyed as implicitly as Papal Bulls. The Mediaeval Jews were as indifferent to the beauties of Chivalry as to its duties. The notes of the minstrel fell dead upon their ears, and the sterile subtleties of Talmudical exegesis thrilled them more than the amours of romance. Latin, the language of Western Christendom, was abhorred by the descendants of those whom the Roman destroyer of the Temple had driven into exile, and the study of the Torah was the one form of literature to which all Jews, old and young, rich and poor, devoted themselves with a single-minded earnestness worthy of the ancient Pharisees and Scribes. Even in their mutual greetings they retained the oriental formula “Peace be to thee,” “To thee a goodly blessing.”