These ideas received a fresh impetus from the publication of the Zohar, which, a Jewish writer tells us, "from the fourteenth century held almost unbroken sway over the minds of the majority of the Jews. In it the Talmudic legends concerning the existence and activity of the _shedhim_ (demons) are repeated and amplified, and a hierarchy of demons was established corresponding to the heavenly hierarchy.... Manasseh [ben Israel]'s _Nishmat Hayim_ is full of information concerning belief in demons.... Even the scholarly and learned Rabbis of the seventeenth century clung to the belief."[229] Here, then, it is not a case of ignorant peasants evolving fantastic visions from their own scared imaginations, but of the Rabbis, the acknowledged leaders of a race claiming civilized traditions and a high order of intelligence, deliberately inculcating in their disciples the perpetual fear of demoniacal influences. How much of this fear communicated itself to the Gentile population? It is at any rate a curious coincidence to notice the resemblances between so-called popular superstitions and the writings of the Rabbis. For example, the vile confessions made both by Scotch and French peasant women accused of witchcraft concerning the nocturnal visits paid them by male devils[230] find an exact counterpart in passages of the Cabala, where it is said that "the demons are both male and female, and they also endeavour to consort with human beings--a conception from which arises the belief in _incubi_ and _succubæ_."[231] Thus, on Jewish authority, we learn the Judaic origin of this strange delusion. It is clearly to the same source that we may trace the magical formulæ for the healing of diseases current at the same period. From the earliest times the Jews had specialized in medicine, and many royal personages insisted on employing Jewish doctors,[232] some of whom may have acquired medical knowledge of a high order. The Jewish writer Margoliouth dwells on this fact with some complacency, and goes on to contrast the scientific methods of the Hebrew doctors with the quackeries of the monks: In spite of the reports circulated by the monks, that the Jews were sorcerers (in consequence of their superior medical skill), Christian patients would frequent the houses of the Jewish physicians in preference to the monasteries, where cures were pretended to have been effected by some extraordinary relics, such as the nails of St. Augustine, the extremity of St. Peter's second toe, ... etc. It need hardly be added that the cures effected by the Jewish physicians were more numerous than those by the monkish impostors.[233]