eyes of the outer world the Jews of Central Europe, in these centuries, were just a big mercantile firm planted in a community of boors and warriors. The circumstances of the age, as we have seen,[22] made traders of them, and the tendency of the age was to despise trade, and, while profiting by Jewish enterprise, to put every difficulty in its way. Jews were thus a caste apart. ‘Society,’ in the Middle Ages, knew of only two classes――the lords who owned the soil, and the serfs who, swearing on the Gospel their oaths of fealty, tilled the soil and went with it. In neither rank――in that of landowners nor in that of land-cultivators, were Jews to be found. In the feudal system there was no place for Jews. The only two socially recognised professions were the Church and the army. The first, Jews could not enter; and the second, in almost all Europe, they might not. Shut out from all else, they became the universal providers of the Middle Ages. They promoted commerce by the interchange of commodities, and they promoted civilisation by the constant communication so kept up between the East and the West. It was a descent, perhaps, from the scholarly rank which Jews had held in the past; it was less pleasant, certainly, than their old pursuits of tilling, and sowing, and planting the grateful earth: but the position was forced upon them; they had practically no choice in the matter, and there was no reason why they should not cheerfully make the best of it. They accepted the state of things, and so long as they were let alone, commerce, too, became in Jewish hands a dignified, a useful, and an honourable calling. They dealt in slaves, as was the necessity of the time, and these slaves were the better off for having Jewish masters; their trading fleets sailed on the Mediterranean, and their ready-tongued travellers brought the products of the East to the markets of the West. But gradually all this sort of commerce became impossible. The troubles of the tenth century, when the Eastern schools were closed, and the Eastern Jews migrated, and lost both their position and their wealth, affected the Jews of Europe. They found themselves deprived of correspondents for extended trading. Then, by force of feeling as well as by law, the slave trade was put down. And not only would the merchant vessels have less freight under these changed conditions, but the Norman pirates in the tenth and eleventh centuries made the peaceful navigation of the Mediterranean uncommonly difficult. Thus, from no fault of their own, all the larger mercantile undertakings of the Jews gradually failed, and they were thrown back on retail traffic. They were industrious, and honest, and patient, and they grew rich even on that; and then idle, envious eyes looked on them, and one after another of their rights and privileges, as traders, was taken from them. So far as Jews were concerned, trading was made difficult, dishonest, and disgraceful. Among Christians there existed