=2. The Toledo Synagogue.=――Toledo, the capital of Castile, had become in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a second Cordova. In 1360, when Pedro the Cruel was king, very serious trouble arose for the Jews of Toledo. Pedro earned that surname of ‘Cruel’ from his own subjects, and not from his treatment of the Jews. To them he meant to be kind, but he was a bad man, and even the tender mercies of the wicked, we read, are cruel. Like most of his predecessors, Pedro had a Jew, Samuel Levi, for his finance minister. One of the duties of such a minister is to raise taxes. This office Samuel Levi performed with such a will for his royal master that he became most unpopular with the people. Whilst they were groaning under their imposts, they saw this favoured Jew living in great state, accumulating a large fortune, and building at his own expense a magnificent synagogue in Toledo. They looked on this synagogue as built with their money, and grew to detest the sight of the worshippers in it. In an illogical sort of way they hated the man, and his religion, and his wealth altogether. It was but a step from feeling the hatred to expressing it. One sad day the Jews lost their beautiful synagogue, and poor Samuel Levi was tortured to death. His fortune was confiscated, and King Pedro, his sympathy notwithstanding, took a large share of it. Personally, however, Pedro seems always to have done his best to protect and be pleasant to the Jews, and they were wonderfully faithful to him. In a long struggle which he had with his brother Henry of Transtamare for possession of the crown, the Jews fought loyally for their liege lord Pedro. Henry triumphed in the end, and both during the civil war, and at the close of it, there was more slaughter and plunder of the Jews than could be put down to the strict account of the war. Religion was made the excuse for a great deal of the cruelty. ‘Kill them like sheep if they will not be baptized,’ said one famous knight of the period, Bertrand du Guesclin. The illustration had a grim and unintentional point about it. Jews were generally killed ‘like sheep,’ their fleeces being first carefully sheared.