In theory and practice, in manners, outward appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were most conservative, some might even say stagnant or retrogressive. There came to be among their students many who inclined more to Kabbala than to Talmud, and to Talmud than to Torah; and then, towards the middle of the seventeenth century, fierce oppressions arose, with the effect of yet more completely lowering the standard. At this date, a Cossack chief, with the help of Tartars and Russians, overran Poland, and perpetrated unspeakable atrocities on the Jewish and Catholic inhabitants of the country. And when the Cossacks had finished their work, the Russians began theirs. Between 1648 and 1651, more than 200,000 Jews were slaughtered in the Polish dominions. Those who survived were not of the heroic stuff to rise superior to such terrible circumstances. They sank under them, both morally and physically. The small industries were given up, or pursued in a shambling way, and many schools were closed, and those that were kept open degenerated in aim and method. Crowds of Polish Rabbis were reduced to actual beggary, and emigrated in starving batches to Holland and Germany, or even so far as Italy and England. Those who remained in Poland relapsed into something, to superficial gaze, not very unlike barbarism. =3. French Jews.=――From France, in consequence of the edict of Charles VI., the Jewish race was exiled in 1394. This edict remained in force for nearly four centuries――till, in fact, the year 1784, when, during the reign of the good though weak Louis XVI., royal letters patent were issued which authorised Jews to live in any part of the French dominions. During this long interval, France, through conquest and by treaty, had extended her boundaries, and in the newer portions of her territory the rule of expulsion was not always strictly enforced. Gradually in the course of these centuries, and without any formal permission being granted them, Jews had returned to French soil, and in most cases the authorities had shut their eyes to these illegal infringements of an unrepealed law. Whenever legislation, however, was directed to the fact, it proved equal to the occasion, and generally recognised the presence of Jews in the spirit of Louis XIII., who in 1615 issued a solemn edict forbidding his subjects, under the severest penalties, to hold any converse with Jews, or to receive them in their houses. Still, though always socially banned, and often plundered and persecuted, these Jews in their French ghettos managed to exist and to hold their own. By the middle of the eighteenth century there were small communities of Jews established in various parts of France, and a settlement of some 500 in Paris itself. In Bordeaux there had existed an influential community of Marannos from the year 1552, when the first contingent of refugees arrived from Portugal. These Bordeaux settlers