The conditions of life for the Jew have not been the same there always. There is the usual story of vacillation and misfortune. France also has had her periods of persecution and expulsion for the Jews--particularly when she consisted of small provinces and factions. There was the usual story of malign charges and disputations, and Hebrew books now and then were confiscated and burnt as containing attacks on Christianity. The public burning of the Talmud at Paris, in the year 1242, the several expulsions during the fourteenth century, culminating in the expulsion of 1394--just about a century before the expulsion from Spain--are among the tragic incidents of medieval Jewish history. France did not escape the religious fanaticism which formed one of the dark features of the middle ages. But all in all, the Jews have had a glorious history in France, crowned by the fact that she was the first country in Europe to give full civil and political rights to the Jews, as she did during the Revolution, on September 28th, 1791. France thus inaugurated a new era in Jewish history. Indeed, she thus brought about the modern rebirth of the Jew--the Jew's full entry into modern life. Therefore, when it is said that every man has two countries--his own and France, we may justly apply it in particular to the modern Jew. Nor was the leadership of France in the modern emancipation of the Jew an accident. It was part of the liberal spirit which has found varied expression in France, and which could not ignore the Jew and the maltreatment that was meted out to him all over Europe. When Montesquieu wrote his great work, _The Spirit of the Laws_, in the year 1748, he did not forget all the services that the Jews had rendered to civilization, nor did he fail to deplore the outrageous way the Jews were dealt with. The Christians, he affirmed, were treating their Jewish neighbors in a more inhuman way than the Japanese of those days treated the Christians. Readers of Montesquieu could not help remembering that remonstrance, and it is quite likely that Louis XVI was inspired by it to the abolition of the Jewish poll-tax, as well as to the appointment of a special commission, under the presidency of Malesherbes, for the study of Jewish conditions, with a view to their improvement. But it is not commonly known that about forty years before Montesquieu issued his book, there appeared in France an epoch-making work, of which the leading Jewish historian, Graetz, has well said that it rendered an incalculable service to Judaism. This work was the _History of the Religion of the Jews_, by Jacques Basnage de Beauval, a celebrated scholar and writer, published in the years 1707-11. It marked the first attempt to write a complete history of the Jews from the time of Christ to modern times, and was designed by the author as a continuation of the historical work of Josephus.