the Jews would seem to have prized scholars more than ‘princes.’ At any rate, the Gaonim came to the front, and the office of Head of the Captivity grew to be of less and less importance. Finally, under the combined influences of neglect from the Jews and of some jealousy from the Mahomedans, the office, after having existed for 700 years, expired altogether, as we shall see, in the tenth century. =3. Spain in the hands of the Mahomedans.=――Eighty years after the death of the Prophet, the Koran and the sword, having made their triumphant way in Asia and in Africa, the Mahomedans proclaimed the one and sheathed the other in Europe. In 710 the flag with the crescent floated from the cathedrals and citadels of Spain, and Mahomedan kaliphs ruled in the place of Catholic kings. It made an enormous change in the condition of the Jews. Christian legislation had been hard on them for centuries. In public life it kept them from ‘use and name and fame,’ and in private life it prevented any sort of dignity or pleasantness. A Jew might neither be born nor be married, neither love nor work nor play, without penalties and restrictions. He might have the children he had begotten, or the servants he had bought, taken from him at any moment without excuse or possibility of redress. He could be forced into a church and made to listen unwillingly to bad sermons, and if he resisted he might be scourged. Would he be converted, or would he have his property taken from him? was a common form of question to the Jews. And when, about the date of Mahomed’s death, a Catholic king named Sisebut was reigning in Spain, even so much of choice, as was implied in this, was withdrawn. Not conversion or confiscation, but baptism or exile, was the alternative presented to his Jewish subjects by this royal fanatic Sisebut. It was a terrible state of things, for the difficulty to the Jews was to find any place where they should be better off. Dagobert was the contemporary king of France, and the laws he administered, and those that his predecessor Clotaire had had to administer, were precisely of the same sort. Heraclius, the ruler of the Byzantine Empire, had only lately renewed those edicts of Hadrian and Constantine which forbade Jews to approach Jerusalem; and with his recent experience of the part which Jews had taken in his struggle with Chosroes, Heraclius could not have been in a very friendly mood towards Jews generally. They could anticipate no welcome in any corner of Heraclius’s dominions. They might perhaps have tried Italy, where the Popes were powerful; for the Popes, as a rule, were not unjust to the Jews. And some did, and found in the comparative kindness of the heads of the Church good cause for believing that religion was not always a motive for persecution, though it too often served as an excuse for cruelty and plunder. And many had migrated to the East; and many, who were obliged to remain in Europe, had taken upon them, in hate and fear