=5. Treatment of Jews in the German States.=――In the ninth and tenth centuries many French Jews had crossed the Rhine, and, emigrating into Germany, had established colonies there, which the crusaders, some two centuries later, on their way to the Holy Land, found conveniently handy to pillage. From Germany the Jews were never expelled in a body as they were from France and Spain, and, as we shall presently see, from England, but there were many local and partial expulsions; and German Jews, from the ninth till nearly the nineteenth century, lived, as it were, in the midst of alarms, and led, for the most part, a miserable existence. Throughout the Middle Ages, their legal position in these dominions was that of serfs of the Emperor, and they paid a certain tax for somewhat uncertain ‘protection.’ The Emperors themselves were often kindly inclined towards the Jews, and Frederick Barbarossa, who ruled in the twelfth century, was particularly humane. A greedy fanatic once entered this Emperor’s presence with the news that three Christian children had been found dead in a Jew’s house on the eve of the Passover; and ‘what was to be done?’ the man excitedly asked. ‘Three children dead!’ said the Emperor calmly; ‘why, let them be buried, of course.’ But all the Emperors of Germany were not like Frederick Barbarossa, and very few of the princes. The Jews were shunned and oppressed in the German states, even when and where they were not openly and violently outraged. They walked among men with Cain’s mark set upon them without Cain’s sin. Each city, each street, each house nearly in the German dominions could ‘tell sorrowful stories.’ And because _finis_ was never written on the page of Jewish history in Germany as it was for a while in Spain, and France, and England, the sad tale in this part of the world comes to no abrupt and dramatic conclusion, and breaks off with no certain and settled date. CHAPTER XXIV. JEWS IN ENGLAND. (1066‒1210.)