Until the dispersion of the Eastern colleges in the eleventh century, no great rabbis came into Spain with pretension of authority to enforce Talmudical traditions. When zealots of the sort did come, they found a community of Hebrews far superior to the Jews of Palestine. No Assyrian had bribed them to worship the gods of Nineveh. Their neighbors the Carthaginians, so long as Carthage stood, had persisted in worshipping the Baal and the Ashtaroth that recreant Israelites in Samaria and Jews in Jerusalem worshipped for ages; but, while those gods had altars in Sidon and in Carthage, we do not hear of any altars being raised to them in "the captivity of Jerusalem, which was in Sepharad," or Spain (Obadiah, 20); neither do we hear that those Jews betrayed any ambition to make a hedge to protect God's law, instead of taking care to keep it. But the first propagators of traditionism in Spain came from the East, on the breaking up of the great schools of Babylonia by the Persians. Ancient or Karaite synagogues remained in Spain until the expulsion of Jews at the close of the fifteenth century, and yet much later in the provinces that were not annexed to the United Kingdom of Castilla and Leon under Ferdinand and Isabella. Some of the strongest features of biblical learning imparted to the literature of the Reformation in its earlier stages proceeded from the converted Jews of Spain. About the year 1470, when the persecution of both Jews and Mahometans was at its height--except in the kingdom of Granada--and when the testimony quoted from the Old Testament against worship of images must have been extremely galling to the worshippers, the priests thought it necessary to enforce the prohibition of vernacular versions of the Bible. Such versions, we know, were then circulated more freely in France, Spain, and Portugal. In Spain, one of the chief translators was Rabbi Moses of Toledo. To put a stop to Bible-reading, an appeal was made to Pope Paul II, who prohibited the translation of the holy Scriptures "into the languages of the nations." This authority was quoted in the Council of Trent by Cardinal Pacheco, in justification of the practice of the Church of Rome in his day; but another cardinal, Madrucci, arguing against him, replied with cutting calmness that "Paul, of popes the second," or any other pope, might be easily deceived in judging of the fitness or unfitness of a law, but not so Paul the Apostle, who taught that God's word should never depart from the mouth of the faithful.