Their isolation caused them no sorrow. Rather must it have been dear to them as a sign that they were faithful members of the one race to which in truth they belonged, the race of Israel. The interests that filled their mind were those that were common to them, not with the inhabitants of the country in which they lived, but with their brethren in faith and race scattered throughout the world. The rapidity and copiousness with which the stream of Jewish literature poured forth in the Middle Ages, showed how unfailing was the strength of the Jewish life which was its source. In Southern Europe the Jews waged among themselves fierce controversies over problems such as were suggested by the support that some of their Rabbis gave, or appeared to give, to the Aristotelian doctrines of the eternity of matter and the uncreativeness of God.[277] Among the English Jews, and in the communities of Northern France with whom the English Jews were in continual communication, literature, though less controversial and engaged with less deep questions, sufficed, nevertheless, even better to provide continual and engrossing interest for the orthodox. There were read and written, down to the last years before the Expulsion, commentaries and super-commentaries on the Bible and the Talmud, lexicons and grammars, treatises on ritual and ceremonial. The Rabbis discussed what blessings it was right to use on all the occasions of life, on rising in the morning, or on retiring to rest at night, on eating, on washing, on being married, on hearing thunder.[278] The English Jews were strict observers of the ceremonial law,[279] they made use in daily life of the minutiæ of Rabbinical scholarship, they drew up their contracts “after the usage of the sages,”[280] and thus, like all the Jews of mediæval Europe, they were continually reminded, in the pursuit of their ordinary interests and occupations, that they were a peculiar people. How proud they were of the position is shown by the poetical literature which, as preserved in the Jewish prayer book, is the most precious legacy that mediæval Judaism has left us. It was common to Jews in all lands; it commemorated all the sorrows of their nation, and gave expression to all their hopes. It made them feel that, scattered as they were, they yet had a destiny of their own, and it banished from their minds, as a counsel of baseness, the thought of making themselves one with the “Gentiles” around them. It reminded them that exile and persecution, and ultimate triumph were the appointed lot of Israel, and that the same teachers who had prophesied that the Chosen People should suffer, had also prophesied that in the fulness of time they should be redeemed. They knew that in the hour of danger and persecution there had never been wanting martyrs to testify in death to the unity of God and to the Glory of his Name. And they could not doubt that the Lord of Mercy and Justice would mete out due recompense to the oppressors