As has been seen, the money-lending transactions of the Jews had long continued to be carried on with the connivance of the Church and under the protection of the State, many princes being only too glad to avail themselves of the Jews’ skill in pecuniary dealings for the improvement of their own finances. Under mediaeval conditions of financial administration the Jew was literally indispensable to the State. The sovereigns of Europe, as yet unversed in the mysteries of systematic taxation, needed a class of men who would for their own sake collect money from the king’s subjects and keep it, as it were, in trust for the king’s treasury. At the worst, the Jews in a mediaeval country might be described as sponges which imbibed the wealth of the nation and then were squeezed for the benefit of the crown. At the best, they fulfilled the function of the clouds which collect the water in small drops and then yield it back to the earth in rich showers, the rainfall being only too often accelerated by artificial explosives. In either case it was the duty of a Jew to be wealthy. The growing wealth of the Jews must have always excited the envy and the cupidity of their neighbours. But it was not until the awakening of religious bigotry by the Crusades and the Mendicant Orders that the dormant animosity declared itself in wholesale persecution. Nor is the violence of the popular feeling, apart from religious motives, quite inexplicable or inexcusable. The Jews from the earliest times evinced a fierce contempt for the Gentile. Despite the doctrine of universal love inculcated by certain Hebrew teachers, the bulk of the community clung to the older lesson. Jewish tolerance of outsiders, like Christian tolerance, was the glory and the property of the few. A Jehuda Halevi or a Maimonides might preach broad humanitarianism, but it would be unreasonable to suppose that their preaching was more effective on their co-religionists than the similar preaching of a Thomas Aquinas or a St. Bernard was on theirs. And it is important not to forget that in every-day life it is not the minds of the cultured few but the instincts of the masses that count. With the ordinary mediaeval Jew, as with the ordinary mediaeval Christian, charity not only began but ended at home. The tribal spirit of their religion made the Jews hard to the non-Jew and callous to his needs. Moses had already said: “Thou shalt not lend upon usury to thy brother,” and Rabbinical law enforced the commandment; but the prohibition was accompanied by a significant permission: “Unto a stranger thou mayest lend upon usury,” an ominous distinction of which the Jews took full advantage, though Jewish moralists and Rabbis constantly opposed the extent to which reliance was placed upon it.