=3. Sephardim and Ashkenazim.=――Many delightful qualities have their corresponding defects. The refugees from Spain had some drawbacks to their cultivated minds and their refined manners. They were very superior, but they were also, on occasion, not a little selfish. They valued much their training in the old country, and the consideration which it gained for them in the new. They valued it, in fact, so much, that they desired to keep it wholly to themselves, and not to risk any loss of social standing by contact with less creditable co-religionists. Naturally enough, when the poor downtrodden Jews of Germany heard of this happy little settlement in Amsterdam, many journeyed thither, hoping to find toleration from strangers and a welcome from their brethren in faith. In this latter hope they were disappointed. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews kept themselves proudly and distinctly aloof from the German Jews, refusing even to intermarry with them. The Sephardim and Ashkenazim[45] Jews of Holland were, from the very first, entirely separate communities, worshipping in different synagogues, learning in different schools, supporting each their own charities, and using each their own prayer-books, with not even the pronunciation of the ancient language in common. The German Jews, as a body, were, it is undeniable, of a distinctly lower tone, in regard to occupation and education and refinement, to these others. It was impossible, from the widely different antecedents and experiences of both communities, that things should have been otherwise, and many of the differences between them were quite inevitable. Still, that resolute aloofness from the unattractive Ashkenazim was not a nice attitude on the part of the prosperous and respected Sephardim. Excuses may be found for them; their own position was certainly not very secure. Still the fact remains that the Sephardim, under pressure of circumstances, did what the prophet Isaiah warns us all from doing――they ‘hid themselves from their own flesh.’ =4. Spanish Jews in Holland.=――Quite as surely, if not quite as conspicuously, as the Ashkenazim showed signs of the treatment to which they had been subject in Germany, did the Sephardim bear traces of the experiences which they had undergone in Spain. The defects which persecution had developed in the one case were the more disagreeable and more apparent, but they were hardly as harmful as some tendencies which a long course of religious hypocrisy had created in the other. The German Jew had worn the yellow badge for centuries, and something of the look, and something of the habits, of an outcast disfigured him still; the Spanish Jew, to escape the fate of the persecuted, had taken upon him the disguise of the persecutors, and some remnants of the fierce, intolerant Catholicism of Spain unhappily clung to him for a long while after his close-fitting mask of New Christian had been flung aside.