The commission proved powerless, and nobody was punished. Similar outbreaks soon occurred in other cities of Castile, and spread to the neighbouring kingdoms of Navarre and Arragon. On a certain saint’s day in 1391 there was a terrible massacre in Barcelona.[20] The Jewry was sacked, the synagogues were pulled down, and the streets were heaped with dead and outraged bodies. In this riot, however, some Crown property was destroyed by accident, and so punishment was dealt out to some of the ringleaders. =4. The Marannos, or New Christians.=――For a hundred years this state of things went on throughout the Catholic dominions of Spain, which, by this date, included nearly the whole of the country. Not only did the unrighteous laws set Jews apart in their dwellings and in their occupations, but in their dress also there was a mark set upon them. They might wear only the coarsest materials, and no trimmings or ornaments; and the men might not shave nor the women adorn their hair. These impertinent, everyday degradations must have sorely hurt a people like the Jews, who delight in taking life pleasantly. The alternative of baptism became a terrible temptation, and very many yielded to it. They let the waters of baptism flow over their limbs, and they stood, unprotesting, whilst the sign of the cross was made on their foreheads. In the eyes of the Church these men, who lied with their lips and in every outward action of their lives, were new Christians, and eligible for all offices of trust and state. In the language of the synagogue, they, who thus sold their souls and took the profit, were Marannos, a corruption of the word maranatha,[21] which means ‘anathema,’ or ‘curse on thee.’ In their own sight they were Jews still――‘Jews in their hearts,’ they would have said, for secretly, and at some risk, they practised Jewish rites, holding the Passover service often in cellars, and singing the Sabbath hymns under their breath, with doors and windows fast shut. Perhaps the truth lies between the two extremes, and it needs Him who ‘sees with larger, other eyes than ours’ to judge justly of this human weakness and hypocrisy. If the sin was great, so also was the penalty. =5. An Effort at Argument.=――Early in the fifteenth century an attempt was made by a Jewish convert to have the question between Judaism and Catholicism discussed and settled, if possible, by force of talk. Under the presidency of the Antipope Benedict XIII. a prolonged sitting was held at Tortosa, in Spain, between Rabbis and monks. The conference held sixty-eight meetings, and lasted twenty-one months (from February 1413 till November 1414). It must have been conducted rather on the model of the famous argument between the wolf and the lamb in Æsop’s fables, for, as the upshot, the Rabbis were dismissed, and the Pope issued a bull imposing new penalties on the Jews, and forbidding them, among other things, to read the Talmud.