=6. Effect on the Jews.=――So long as the Mahomedan power was paramount in the Peninsula, the partial return to Catholicism made little difference in the position of the Jews. The Catholic kings did not like their Jewish subjects in the same way as did the Mahomedan kaliphs, but, in their newly established kingdoms, they found Jews too serviceable and too much respected to make it either safe or politic to ill-use them. Their own footing was hard to win and hard to keep. It needed constant fighting, and even then it was not too secure. Meanwhile, the whole business of life could not be carried on by soldiers. People had to be fed, to be taught, to be healed; and all these very necessary functions were most admirably filled by Jews. It would not have done for the kings to snub such useful subjects, and it was hardly possible at that stage to persecute them. One wants both hands free for earnest work of any sort. Catholicism was not yet strong enough in Spain to strike out a different line of action from Islam. It is even possible that the kings learnt some lessons from the kaliphs, and got to see, as they did, something of the value and of the virtues of Judaism. It is quite certain that at the close of the eleventh century, when crusades came into fashion, neither Alfonso (VI.) of Castile nor Peter of Arragon, who were both good Catholics, would allow the cry of _Hep, Hep,_[18] to be raised in their dominions. And it is equally certain that this same king Alfonso put down with a strong hand an outburst at Toledo, in 1108, which threatened Jewish peace and Jewish property. The early kaliphs of Spain practised toleration as a principle; the early kings, perhaps, more as a habit; but the result to the Jews was the same. Whilst the Ommeyade dynasty yet maintained its supremacy in Spain the Jews still prospered, and Judaism was unmolested.