In Bohemia and its capital, Prague, Jews suffered unspeakable miseries. The more sensational sort may be omitted, but one instance will give an idea of the perfectly matter-of-course injustice with which Jews were treated in the concerns of everyday life. There died in Prague, in 1601, a certain Mordecai Meisel, a very rich man and an upright one, who had used his money in his lifetime most generously and justly. He died childless, and left his property to a nephew. The Emperor Rudolf, without the shadow of an excuse, or the smallest claim of any kind, set aside this will, and took the dead man’s property for himself. In Vienna, the Austrian capital, the Jews, in spite of disabilities, enjoyed for some time comparative prosperity. This happier state of things came to an abrupt close in 1670, when, under the Emperor Leopold I., the community was heavily fined, the tombs of their dead were burst open, half in hopes of pillage, half in wanton desecration, and their schools and synagogues first despoiled, and then turned into churches. In 1745 there was a revival of the older and more wholesale way of doing things. In midwinter of that year, by order of the Empress Maria Theresa, 20,000 Jews were suddenly expelled from Bohemia and Moravia. =5. Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.=――Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. Spinoza once wrote, ‘The heaviest burden that men can lay upon us is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but it is by the planting of hatred and scorn in our souls. We cannot breathe freely, we cannot see clearly.’ This subtlest effect of the poison of persecution seemed to have entered into the Jewish system. They would not speak the language of their enemies, they would not read their books. They huddled in their own close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a barbarous dialect, half Hebrew, half German, _Judisch Deutsch_, as it was called, and as different from the old grand Hebrew tongue as were they themselves from Palestinian or even from Spanish Jews. The love of religion and of race was as strong among them as ever, but the love had come to be of a jealous and a sullen sort. They dreaded progress or prominence of any kind. Long and miserable experience seemed to show that safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith lay, if anywhere, in being by the outside world altogether unnoticed and unheeded. The culture of the Christians they hated, with a hate born half of repulsion at its palpable effects