CHAPTER XX. JEWS IN SPAIN. (711‒1150.) =1. ‘Like a dream in the night.’=――Life in Spain, for the four centuries during which the dynasty of Ommeyade kaliphs ruled, was to the Jews like a brilliant dream breaking in on the long night of their history. There was to be by-and-by a terrible awakening, but while the dream lasted they gave themselves up to its delight. ‘An earthly paradise,’ ‘a garden of Eden,’ Spain is fondly called by old Jewish writers of those days. The liberty it gave was so new, so wonderful, so sweet. Men might work and might worship at their will. Women might be fair without fear. Children might grow up clever, and find no locked doors, labelled ‘conversion,’ barring their pathway to success. Wealth might be honestly won and pleasantly enjoyed, taking its rightful place as a means for diffusing happiness. Each country, says a recent writer,[13] has the Jews it deserves. Mahomedan Spain deserved good Jews, and it had them, and it was richly repaid in its own generous coin. In the Middle Ages, Spain led the van in culture and in commerce, and in her loyal Jewish subjects she found, literally, her guides, philosophers, and friends. They stood by her as loyally on the field of battle as in the council-chamber and in the mart. Jews must have been also a valuable contingent of the army, for in 1086 we find the generals on both sides, on the eve of a decisive engagement, agreeing so to fix the day that it might not interfere with the Sabbath of their Jewish soldiers. The kaliphs took, too, an intelligent interest and a keen pride in their scholarly Jews, and there was plenty of space in that beautiful land for every one to enjoy his little corner and his little book.[14] The memory of the sunny skies and the gracious leisure of Spain took deep root in grateful Jewish hearts. The long dream of liberty was so sweet that the sharp awakening to persecution was forgotten, or, at least, the fragrant shade of the orange groves would seem to have been remembered longer than the fierce heat of the fagots and the stake. It is good to be able to ‘write injuries in dust, and kindnesses in marble.’ In 1492, the Jews were wickedly expelled from the land in which they had been, for centuries, so happy, and 200 years later we hear of descendants of those cruelly exiled Jews sending secretly to Spain and Portugal for citrons and branches of the palm, that their סוּכּוֹת might look ‘homelike’ in the bleak north lands in which their lot was cast.