and the oppressed.[281] Thus the memory of their past, and the commonplace occurrences of their daily life, continually strengthened the bonds that bound Jews together after twelve centuries of dispersion. In the thirteenth century of the Christian era, as in the first, they still regarded the Holy Land as their true home. Three hundred Rabbis from France and England went thither in 1211.[282] There Jehudi Halevi ended his days.[283] There Nachmanides taught that it was the duty of every Jew to live, and, true to his own lesson, he set out on his pilgrimage in the seventieth year of his age. And in his own and the next generation many Jews from Spain and Germany followed his example.[284] A Jewish traveller of the Middle Ages says of certain of the communities of his coreligionists that he visited: “They are full of hopes, and they say to one another, ‘Be of good cheer, brethren, for the salvation of the Lord will be quick as the glancing of an eye:’ and were it not that we have hitherto doubted, and thought that the end of our Captivity has not yet arrived, we should have been gathered together long ago. But now this will not be till the time of song arrives, and the sound of the turtle-dove gives warning. Then will the message arrive, and we shall ever say ‘The Name of the Lord be exalted.’”[285] Nowhere in Europe could such men have been content to live the life of those around them, to bind themselves with the ties of citizenship, to find their highest hopes on earth in the destiny of the town, or the country, in which they dwelt. They were but sojourners. They lived in expectation of the time when the Lord should return the Captivity of Zion, and they should look back on their exile as reawakened dreamers. Without the privilege of isolation they could not live; and if in England the communities of the Gentiles had been open to them, they would never have entered them. * * * * *