and trembling, the forced disguise of converts. Then came the conquests of the kaliphs, which brought about an altogether new state of things for the Jews. In Spain, we shall see that it made a brilliant silver lining to the clouds, a rift in that thick darkness which had descended upon the nation when Jerusalem fell. =4. The Karaite Movement.=――Mahomed did not succeed in converting the Jews, but nevertheless the indirect influences of the faith he preached, helped perhaps a little by communal disputes, did produce a distinct sect among the Jews about the middle of the eighth century. There is so little that is really new, that many historians call Karaism only an old school of thought revived under new conditions and with a fresh name, and consider Judaism to be quite as accountable for it as Islam. We know that there were anciently three Jewish sects: the Essenes, who never struck root in Judaism at all; the Pharisees, the best of whom developed into the great earnest body of Rabbis; and the Sadducees, of whom Josephus said ‘they were able to persuade none but the rich,’ and who did, in truth, all but die out with the prosperous days into which they had fitted so easily. With Islam triumphant the prosperous days seemed dawning again, and once more the yoke of the Law began to be grumbled at. The oral law was now a written and settled code, and the obligations of codified tradition were more numerous than the injunctions of the Law. The murmurers said that they would observe the text, but not the commentary; they would read the Law, but they would skip the traditional interpretations. These grumblers grew numerous enough to be recognised: they were called Textualists, or Scripturalists; and yet more distinctively Karaites, from the Hebrew root קָרָא, to read.[10] =5. Mahomedan Causes for Karaism.=――In their objection to tradition the Sadducees and the Karaites were alike, and so far it seems probable that the one sect was a survival of the other. But there were other influences at work, which may account for the appearance or the reappearance, as it may be, at this period of the later sect of separatists. The Arabs, by whom the impressionable Jews were surrounded, had enthusiastically accepted a most simple form of faith, a faith which had no priesthood and but one prophet. No sooner did tradition gather about Islam than a sect arose among the Mahomedans to throw it off. There had come quickly a Sunnah to the Koran, as there had grown slowly a Talmud to the Law. A party in Islam rejected the stricter traditions of the Sunnah, and a party among the Jews, about the same date, grew openly impatient of the Rabbinical ruling of the Talmud. Rebellion of any sort is catching, and there can be little doubt that each set of grumblers helped the other.