The antagonists met in the precincts of the Court, and a brilliant assembly of secular and spiritual magnates formed the audience. Donin warmly denounced the Talmud as a farrago of blasphemy, slander, superstition, immorality and folly, and the Rabbis defended it as warmly as they dared. The debate, though distinguished by all the scurrility and more than all the ferocity of a village prize-fight, seems to have been conducted on the principle that whichever side had the best of the argument, the Christian should win; and the Court of Inquisitors returned a verdict accordingly. The Talmud was found guilty of all the charges brought against it and was sentenced to the flames. Execution was delayed for two years through bribery; but it was carried out in 1242. Fourteen--some say four and twenty--cartloads of Rabbinical lore and legislation fed the bonfire. The grief of the French Jews at the loss of their sacred books was bitter, and the most pious amongst them kept the anniversary of the cremation as a day of fasting.[52] ♦1263♦ Twenty-one years later a similar tourney took place in Barcelona by order, and in the presence, of Jayme I., King of Aragon. Don Jayme had borrowed from his northern neighbours the axiom that the Jews were to be treated as royal chattels. Moreover, his conscience was in the keeping of Raymund de Peñaforte, the Master of the Dominicans, a great Inquisitor born before his time. King Jayme had led an amorous and not immaculate youth. He was, therefore, in his old age, peculiarly susceptible to his Confessor’s admonitions. The sins of love should be atoned for by acts of persecution. The religious freedom of the Jews should be offered up as a sacrifice of expiation. It was the logic and the morality of the Middle Ages. The outcome of Jayme’s remorse was a theological contest at the royal court of Barcelona. There again the lists were held for Christianity by a Dominican friar of Jewish antecedents, while the champion of Judaism was Nachmanides, famed in the annals of Israel as the greatest philosopher, physician, theologian, and controversialist of his age. Pablo Christiani politely endeavoured to prove that the prophets of the Jews had predicted the advent and recognised the divinity of Jesus. Nachmanides with equal politeness denied that they had done anything of the kind. After five days’ refined recrimination the Court unanimously pronounced in favour of Christianity. The books of the Jews were expurgated of all “anti-Christian” passages, Nachmanides’s account of the controversy was burnt publicly as blasphemous, and the author, then in his seventieth year, banished from Spain, ended his days in Jerusalem. Pablo, whose ambition was kindled by victory, undertook a tour through the Iberian Peninsula and Provence, and, armed with a royal edict, compelled the Jews to engage in religious controversies with him and to defray the expenses of his missionary journeys.