=4. How Jews became Traders.=――Leisure and a sense of security are needed for any industrious or cultivated occupation. The irruption of the barbarians, with the warfare which it brought in its train, not only gave little leisure for industry, but the constant movement of armed hosts made settled work of any sort impossible. There was also the less occasion for skilled labour, as food and clothing and weapons were the principal wants of those conquering and uncultured hordes from the North. The misery, however, which these men caused as they marched was felt less by the Jews than by the natives of the soil, whose peaceful homes and whose growing crops were destroyed. Jews, by this time, were used to most minor hardships. They had, for very long, been wanderers and pariahs. They had been learning now for centuries, to ‘hold all mortal joys with a loose hand.’ ‘I do not call my wife wife, but home,’ said a Jewish scholar once. The tender little love speech came to have a very wide and literal meaning. Home, in our sense of the word, was to the Jew often roofless, and his pack served for his pillow. But steadfast, faithful affection, as often, walled the roofless dwelling round like a fenced city, and wife and children made ‘home’ to him out of the most unlikely places. Jews accepted the new state of things. They bravely adapted themselves to the altered circumstances of their lot, and made the best of it. They had to live, though a hard and hurried and undignified sort of living it became. With a quickness which experience taught and self-interest quickened, they tried to make themselves useful and acceptable. Their own wants, as wayfarers in strange lands, made them swift to perceive the wants of others. They used their sorrows for stepping-stones. They had known ‘straitness and the want of all things;’ surely they could supply some. Such property as they managed to keep must needs have been of a portable sort, and much of it of a serviceable kind, and likely to prove useful to rough new-comers. Barter would naturally ensue, and what the purchaser could not get from the Jew at hand could probably be obtained, through his medium, from a Jew farther off. And this was the very small beginning of the great system of international trading, in which Jews have so large a share. The descendants of David the sweet singer, and of Ezra the Scribe, and of countless unrecorded generations who ‘gathered in their wine and their oil,’ and were ‘skilful in all manner of workmanship,’ turned to buying and selling, and often to haggling and to hoarding. It was circumstances which made traders out of the studious, vine-growing handicraftsmen of the Book. And it was circumstances, quite as much as their own wits, which made them successful and proficient at their new calling. Jews were widely dispersed and yet closely connected, and were forced to be onlookers rather than actors in the world’s affairs. This position gave them exceptional opportunities for trading.