Nor ought the celebrated Moses ben Nachman, generally known as Nachmanides, to be passed over, though he belongs to a generation later than the above. He is chiefly remarkable for the part he took in the public disputation held at Barcelona in 1263, by order of the King of Spain, between the Jews and the Christians. Pablo, said to be a converted Jew, was the disputant on the side of the Christians, and Nachmanides on that of his own people. It lasted four days, and the reader has already been informed that both sides claimed the victory. Nachmanides subsequently emigrated to Palestine, where he died. But the writer of this period with whom we are most deeply concerned is not a divine or a philosopher, but a traveller, the well-known Benjamin of Tudela. He is one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of the mediæval travellers—two centuries before Maundeville and Marco Polo. Like the first-named of those authors, he appears anxious to record everything he has seen or heard, of what were in his day the strange and unexplored regions of the East. He cannot match with Sir John Maundeville for monstrous and extravagant fictions; but a very large percentage of his statements must be accepted with doubt and caution. Especially is this the case where the credit of his own people is concerned. He was born in Tudela, a city of Navarre, somewhere near the beginning of the twelfth century. He left Spain in 1260, and spent about fifteen years in visiting the various Jewish colonies in the East and West. He tells us that in Persia and the contiguous countries he found numerous communities of his countrymen, mostly living at their ease, and enjoying the free exercise of their religion. Thus, at Bassorah, a city situated on an island in the Tigris, he found a colony of four thousand Jews; at Almozal, a city built on the site of ancient Nineveh, out of the _débris_ of its ruins, there were as many as seven thousand, ruled over by Zacchæus, a prince claiming descent from David. Journeying thence to Bagdad, he passed Rehoboth, where he found two thousand, and at Elnabar, the ancient Pumbeditha, celebrated of old as the centre of Rabbinical learning, but now fallen from its high estate and sunk to little better than a village, there were still a few doctors and students, and two thousand inhabitants.