At Toulouse, for example, it was the traditional custom to slap a Jew on the face every Good Friday. The Count opened the ceremony by publicly giving the president of the Jewish community a box on the ear, and his subjects followed suit, until the blow was commuted for a tribute in the twelfth century. At Beziers pious wantonness took the form of an attack on the Jews’ houses with stones from Palm Sunday till Easter. The use of other weapons was contrary to the rules of the game; but none other were needed. A sermon from the Bishop was the regular preamble to the commencement of hostilities, and this Christian pastime continued in public favour year after year until a prelate, less cruel or more practical than his predecessors, abolished it for a consideration. In May 1160 a treaty was concluded providing that any priest who should stir up the people against the Jews should be excommunicated, while the Jews, on their side, pledged themselves to pay four pounds of silver every Palm Sunday. Elsewhere, an old pagan rite for the propitiation of the powers of vegetation was cloaked in the devotional cremation of a straw “Judas” during Holy Week; a custom still surviving in many parts of Europe. But racial and religious animosity, especially when fuelled by material grievances, knows no seasons. In Germany Jew-baiting was a perennial amusement of gentlemen impoverished by usury, and the _Judenstrasse_, or Jews’ street, a not unusual field of ignoble distinction. However, during the earlier Middle Ages, the Jews, though exposed to popular hatred, were generally shielded from popular outrage by the princes, spiritual and temporal, who countenanced their usury, sharing the profits, and availed themselves, not without strict precautions, of their medical skill and administrative ability. We find them as land-owners, physicians and civil officials in Provence and Languedoc. At Montpellier, under the wing of the Count of Toulouse, there flourished a Jewish academy where medicine and Rabbinical literature were cultivated successfully--an institution which helped much to create and promote a medical profession throughout Southern Europe, while the great School of Salerno also owed much to Jewish talent. In a word, medical studies in the Middle Ages were deeply indebted to the Hebrew doctors. They were the first to discard the ancient belief in the demoniacal origin of disease and to substitute physic for exorcisms. Their adoption of rational methods in the treatment of patients helped to revolutionise the theory and practice of medicine, to emancipate the European mind from superstition, and to earn for them the cordial detestation of the monks and priests, whose relics and prayers were discredited and whose incomes decreased in proportion to the Jewish practitioners’ success. Thus the animosity of the lower clergy against the mediaeval Jew may, in part, be traced to professional rivalry.