The higher ideals which keep men straight were sometimes lost sight of in the gloom. Honour and honesty came often to be regarded as impossible virtues. Life was so uncertain that it grew unduly dear, and men and women, in their terror, became, not unseldom, selfish and cowardly. Instances crop up in contemporary records, though they are happily rare, of Jews being denounced and betrayed by Jews. The carefully guarded secret of a co-religionist’s hidden hoards would now and again be disclosed to the enemy, as a means of averting the ‘evil eye’ from a too close scrutiny into the traitor’s own concerns. Men were even found capable of owning to untrue accusations, and of inventing stories of never-designed plots, with the object of gaining favour and ‘protection’ for themselves and their families. Under the terrible conditions of their life, the very virtues of the Jews turned to vices. The old Jewish characteristics of steadfastness, and prudence, and intelligence, seemed to take new and lower forms; for bare life’s sake, the loyal, large-minded Jew learnt to be narrow, and secret, and cunning. There was such awful need to be rich. Rich Jews could gain at best a lofty tolerance, and for poor Jews there must have seemed no cause nor excuse for living at all. Money-getting became the one absorbing pursuit of the race, the one ambition of life, the one possible protection against cruel and tortured death. And the money got, it brought no leisure, no gracious possibilities with it of refinement or of culture. To toil for wealth which they might not openly enjoy, and to passionately believe in a religion which they might not openly profess, was the portion of the Jews for centuries. It was a sort of suffering which sapped at the very roots of self-respect, and which inevitably resulted in defects of bearing and of conduct. The outcast Jew learnt to stoop where he should have stood upright, and to swagger and to push when standing room was grudgingly allotted him. He came by degrees to merit, in his outward aspect, some of the contempt which he had never earned, and in this sadly changed aspect of the heirs of the prophets, the darkness of the ‘dark ages’ was made visible.