Sarah Copia Sullam, our poetess, was an enthusiastic Jewess. The first literary effort which is recorded of her was an unsigned letter, bearing date of the year 1618, which she sent to an Italian priest, Ceba by name, who had written a poem on the Jewish subject of Queen Esther. Our poetess was so delighted to see a Jewish heroine praised, that her letter to the priest was full of gratitude and enthusiasm. The priest found out the name of his correspondent, and did his best to convert her. Sarah, however, was firm in her faith, and her replies give full reasons for her firmness. Recognising at last that his arguments had failed, the priest wrote to her again, begging permission to pray for the salvation of her soul. To this she responded, granting him his request on the condition that he would allow her to pray for his conversion to Judaism. We do not hear of any further correspondence between the priest and the poetess. Later on, she was accused by another Christian priest of denying the immortality of the soul. She indignantly defended herself from this charge in an eloquent manifesto. She seems to have applied herself with great zeal not only to literature, but to science, and she had a tragedy dedicated to her. Deborah Ascarelli, another Jewish poetess, translated many Hebrew hymns into Italian, and composed also original poems in Italian. =2. Polish Jews.=――It was at the northern extremity of Europe, in Poland, that the most dull and dismal night prevailed. Refugees of the very poor and hunted sort had found their way to Poland from the date of the eleventh century, and had met and mingled there with members of the Karaite sect, and, perhaps, with some remnants of that once powerful, converted nation of the Khozars, who flourished on the shores of the Caspian Sea in the eighth and ninth centuries.[58] One hears little concerning the Jews in Poland till the fourteenth century, when, under Casimir the Great, and possibly owing to the influence of a Jewess of whom the king was very fond, a certain legal status was accorded to them. It was not a very elevated one, and mostly of a ‘protective’ nature. Their lives and property were secured to them, and their synagogues and burial-grounds were defended from pillage and desecration. Rights of trading were granted, but public or state employment was withheld. This tolerable, but somewhat sordid condition of things continued till towards the middle of the seventeenth century, by which time the Jews of Poland, who were mostly German by descent and by language, formed a very large proportion of the middle-class population of the country. They were not, at any time, a very high class of Jews. The original settlement had consisted of cruelly hunted and persecuted small traders, and reinforcements had come from the like stock. It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of modern methods of manuring.