This ominous isolation was to the Jews a source of pride, with which no bribe could induce them to part. The thought of making themselves one with the uncircumcised was as repugnant to them as it had been to their ancestors on entering Canaan. Their poetical literature, which through the Jewish hymn-book supplied a bond of sympathy between all the scattered sections of Mediaeval Jewry, is a lasting monument of their sorrows and of their self-glorification; of their faith in the promises of the past and of their firm trust in the future. All these sentiments may be regarded as embodied in that love for an idealised and idolised Zion which brightened many a gloomy hour, and which was for the Jews what political ambitions and aspirations were for their Christian neighbours. They looked upon themselves but as sojourners in the land, and upon their residence among the Gentiles as an evil dream from which the Lord in His time would awaken them, and lead His people back to the land of their fathers. Israel still was the slave of the Idea, and its victim. This social isolation was symbolised and perpetuated by local segregation. The Jews everywhere dwelt together in special quarters, distinguished even amid the gloom and squalor of a mediaeval town by a darkness and dirtiness which contrasted curiously with the occasional magnificence of the interior of the houses and with the personal cleanliness of the inmates. In these quarters they resided, many families in one house, eating meat killed and cooked in a special manner, frequently fasting when their neighbours feasted, and feasting when they fasted; or, worse still, sometimes, by a fatal coincidence, celebrating their Deliverance while the Christians mourned the sufferings of their Saviour; as a rule, resting on the day on which the others worked, and working on the day on which they rested. They attended no mass, partook of no sacrament, showed no reverence for the crucifix and the saints; but they lived unbaptized, unblest and circumcised, worshipping their own God after their own fashion and in their own tongue, indulging in mysterious ablutions, observing the new moons and a thousand quaint rules of conduct, abstaining from touching fire from Friday evening till Saturday night, from eating pork, from drinking wine and milk, or from using vessels, touched by a Gentile. Their religious symbolism was alien to that of their neighbours; their allegorical wedding customs, their rejoicings and their wailings equally weird; their music as wonderful as their symbolism; the nasal sing-song strains that floated out of the windows of the synagogue of a morning, or those that filled the night air with their strangeness, as a funeral procession hurried through the street, sounded horribly harsh, unmelodious, and unmeaning to non-Hebrew ears. Their very children were unlike the children of the Gentile; precocious in worship as in work, they knew nothing of the sprightly brownies, elves, and