were much superior to the rest of the Jews in France, both in position and in cultivation. They did not, however, diffuse much of their superior sweetness and light; on the contrary, they were so very anxious to preserve both from any possible deterioration, that when, during the reign of Louis XIV. (1761), fugitives from less fortunate parts of France sought asylum in Bordeaux, they received no sort of welcome from their co-religionists, who gave a chilling support to the State order to move on. The most numerous section of French Jews was to be found in Alsace, which province, from the date of the treaty of Westphalia (1648) till the termination of the Franco-German war (1871), was French. The nationality of the Government, however, made very little difference to the Jews who lived under it. Their position in the Rhenish provinces was most miserable. They were limited to the lowest forms of trading, reviled for pursuing such, and then taxed far beyond any honest possibilities of payment. It was not till Mendelssohn’s efforts, towards the close of the eighteenth century, had begun to bring about a change in the general position of the Continental Jews that these Alsace Jews, among the rest, began to share in the result. =4. Social Life in Germany.=――In the Austrian and German principalities, although wholesale massacre, and conversion by means of fire and rack, were slowly passing away with other miserable customs of the Middle Ages, yet expulsions, and exactions, and disabilities of all kinds were still in full force against the Jews. Throughout the many separate states which in these days constitute the great united Empire of Germany, the race, as we have seen,[59] were reckoned as serfs of the Imperial Chamber, and were thus under the nominal protection of the Emperor. A typical instance of the sort of ‘protection’ which the German Jews enjoyed is afforded to us by the ancient Jewish charter of Frankfort. By the terms of this document we find that it was only on the most humiliating terms that Jews gained the privilege of living there at all, and that this official permission had, in every case, to be renewed on petition every three years. The inhabitants of the Jewish quarter might not leave it, except within rigidly fixed hours; nor could they receive a guest, nor even remove a sick person, without a special magistrate’s licence. Worse hardships were not unusual, and irritating and petty restrictions of this Frankfort charter type were general in all the cities of Germany where Jews settled.