without the guiding hand of the rabbis as interpreters of the law. The guild of rabbis, on their side, chose a "college of judges," with fairly extensive jurisdiction, from among their own members. The organization of the Rabbinical Conferences, or the "Synods of the Four Countries," formed the keystone of this intricate social-spiritual hierarchy. The comprehensive inner autonomy and the system of Talmud academies (_Yeshiboth_) that covered the whole of Poland remind one of the brilliant days of the Exilarchate and the Babylonia of the Geonim. One element was lacking, there was no versatile, commanding thinker like Saadia Gaon. Secular knowledge and philosophy were under the ban in Poland. Rabbinism absorbed the whole output of intellectual energy. As little as the Poles resembled the Arabs of the "golden age," did the Polish Jews resemble their brethren in faith in the Orient at Saadia's time or in the Spain of Gabirol and Maimonides. Isolation and clannishness were inevitable in view of the character of the Christian environment and the almost insuperable barriers raised between the classes of Polish society. But it was this exclusiveness that gave peculiar stability and completeness to the life of the Jew as an individual and as a member of Jewish society, and it was the same exclusiveness that afforded opportunity for the development of a sharply defined culture, for its fixation to the point of resisting violent shocks and beyond the danger point of extinction through foreign invasion.