no history. There are but two very slight mentions of them in all the Saxon Chronicles. They would seem not to have settled in England in any numbers before the Conquest, when probably some came over from France in the train of William the Norman. The interest centres now in Southern Europe, and chiefly in Spain, where the kaliphs attained to their greatest state, and where the Jews attained to their greatest prosperity since the captivity. =4. The Policy of the Early Kaliphs.=――When the empire that had been founded by help of the Koran and the sword was once firmly established, the sword was sheathed, and the Koran ceased to be flourished as a weapon. The kaliphs resolved to uphold their sovereignty by the seductive arts of peace rather than by the exterminating process of war. They aspired to something beyond barbarian chieftainship. They aimed at becoming leaders of men and patrons of learning, and of controlling the thoughts as well as the destinies of nations. To this end they cultivated the Jews. The Arabian rulers had the keenness to appreciate the reserves of patience, of loyalty, and of scholarship in the Jewish people. They desired to graft these valuable qualities on their own rather rough and ready followers. They wanted the arts of civilisation to adorn their new dominion; they longed to be as great in the schools and in the marts of the world as they had proved on its battle-fields. ‘The teachers of wisdom are the true luminaries and legislators of the world,’ was a saying of the Kaliph Al-Mamun, who ruled from 813 till 832. The Mahomedan rulers knew how much of all that they desired could be learned from the Jews in their midst. And so, throughout the kaliphate, political and social equality was granted to its Jewish subjects, and the energies and the capacities of the nation were given room to grow.