to ‘endure dispraise for fearing Him whose name is One. And never be through idols raised to power and might.’[32] But sometimes the undoubting belief in God which is breathed forth in these productions, takes, as is hardly unnatural under the terrible circumstances, an expression of passionate appeal to Him for active interference, or even of a more distinct cry for divine vengeance on the ‘tyrants and their race.’ The earlier of the _Piyutim_ are quite rugged and rhymeless, and about many of them there is considerably more suggestion of martyrdom than of minstrelsy. It must have been difficult for the _Chazan_ of the synagogue to make this so-called poetry form any musical part of the service. And here it is as well to note that the familiar title _Chazan_ is derived from the Hebrew word חָזָה, to see, and was used in the same sense as _Episcopus_, bishop, which means literally inspector, or superintendent. The חַזָן of the synagogue, in addition to other duties, read or intoned the prayers, and in course of time the reader or singer became, and was called, the minister of his congregation. And hence the word _Chazanuth_, a word which is only applied to the melody, and not to the poetry of the synagogue, and which may be rendered sacred minstrelsy. In actual fact, till about the tenth century the _Piyutim_, which up to this date are mostly anonymous, have little claim to any musical or rhythmical charm. They are more or less articulate cries of exile, uttered by patient generations of men, who told of miseries past singing, almost past praying about. Towards the second half of the tenth century, the French and Spanish Jews, who were more cultivated and more happy than the rest of their European brethren, begin to add their share to the store of national religious poetry, and at once a change comes over the style. It grows more polished in form, and less uniformly mournful in subject. In these _Piyutim_, God resumes His place as Creator and Father, as well as Protector and Avenger of mankind, and His glories and His powers, and man’s hopes and man’s duties, and the relations of the human spirit to the divine, are said and sung in more metrical language. ‘Let me make the ballads of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,’ was once acutely remarked, and the saying is often quoted to show how much influence national songs have upon national character. In this sense it is very interesting to find what was the general tone and tendency of Jewish ‘minstrelsy’ through all those long centuries of darkness and of degradation. And first we notice that it was mainly of a religious sort――that the intellectual wealth of the Jewish nation flowed chiefly into the channels of the synagogue. In all the unutterable misery of the Middle Ages, the national poetry of the Jews never ceased to be religious, and it never, under all that cruel provocation, became revolutionary. The tone of some of the _Piyutim_ is fierce and vengeful,