=2. The Schools.=――Once given a fair field and some choice, Jewish activity showed itself, as of old, in an intellectual direction. The schools of Spain soon became as famous as the _kallahs_ of Babylon. Cordova and Granada and Toledo took the place of ancient Sora and Pumbaditha, and of yet more ancient Jamnia and Tiberias. Cordova under the kaliphs was the Athens of the Middle Ages to Southern Europe; and as for Toledo, a Hebrew poet[15] shall speak for himself on the subject of its charms: ‘I found that words could ne’er express The half of all its loveliness; From place to place I wandered wide, With amorous sight unsatisfied, Until I reached all cities’ queen, Tolaitola,[16] the fairest seen.’ And among the fairest of the sights in these fair cities were the crowded colleges in which Jew and Arab learned often side by side, and from which Jewish Arabic professors turned out students by the score, wise in literature and in philosophy and in medicine, as well as in their own especial theological line. It is said on good authority, that at this period, nearly a thousand years before the era of Board schools, there was not a Jew in Spain who could not read the Bible in Hebrew and in Arabic. =3. The First Nagid of Spain.=――One day in the year 948 there was a sudden stir and commotion in the famous college of Cordova. A knotty point had come on for discussion, and puzzled silence had ensued in place of ready answers, when, from an unnoticed corner, a very shabby-looking stranger quietly got up and solved the difficulty. All eyes were turned on the ragged scholar, and the president rose impetuously from his high seat, and in tones of earnest admiration exclaimed to the astonished assembly, ‘Yon slave in sackcloth is my master, he must be yours.’ It was a hasty decision to come to, but it was fully justified by the facts of the story. The stranger in the mean garments was in truth an escaped slave, or, to speak quite accurately, a captive redeemed. In the lately closed schools of Babylon he had been one of the most learned of the Rabbis. He had had thrilling adventures since those quiet days at Sora, which place he had left, accompanied by three other scholars, for the purpose of collecting contributions for the maintenance of the schools in Babylon. His wife and his young son had travelled with Rabbi Moses ben Hanoch, and all of them had fallen into the hands of pirates, and had been carried on board a privateering vessel engaged in the slave trade. In dread of worse than captivity, the wife had thrown herself overboard during the voyage, the three companions had been sold at ports at which they touched,[17] and Rabbi Moses and his son were exposed for sale in the slave market in Cordova. It was considered, in those days, a paramount duty of every congregation to redeem captive brethren, and a kind-hearted Jew, seeing