Reaching Bagdad, at that time under the rule of Mostanged, a prince who protected and favoured the Jews, he found as many as twenty-eight synagogues, and ten courts, each presided over by one of the chief men of the nation. These ten were called the ‘ten idle men,’ and were subject to an official whom he styles, after the ancient title, ‘the Prince of the Captivity.’ He affirms that the authority of this dignitary extended over all the Jews under the dominion of the Caliph of Bagdad, from Syria eastward as far as India. He assures us that he was regarded in the light of a potentate to whom even the Mahometans were obliged to render reverence, rising up when he entered their presence, and bowing their heads as he passed; and he was escorted wherever he went by a hundred soldiers. It is difficult to reconcile these statements with what we are told of the entire suppression of the Princes of the Captivity nearly two centuries before. Leaving Bagdad, he visited Resen, Hela, Cufa, and Thema, in each of which he found large and flourishing Jewish populations, and then passed on into Egypt. Here he found his countrymen still more numerous. He mentions a city which he visited, called Chouts, where there were as many as thirty thousand. But no city so called is known to geographers; and it is plain, from the errors with which this part of his narrative is filled, that he either picked up information at second-hand without inquiry, or was extremely hasty and superficial in his researches. He next explored the Holy Land, which, if his account is to be trusted, had been at this time almost emptied of its Hebrew inhabitants, those who still dwelt there having been reduced to a condition of poverty and wretchedness. In Ascalon he found but one hundred and fifty Jews; in Tiberias, anciently the central point of Western Rabbinism, there were but fifty; in Jerusalem itself, scarcely two hundred. In Tyre and Shunem they were more numerous, five hundred in the one, and three hundred in the other. But, as a rule, the cities of Palestine could hardly have contained ten Jews out of every thousand inhabitants. The disappearance of the Hebrew residents was probably owing to the exterminating swords of the Crusaders. Leaving Palestine, Benjamin travelled through Greece, Constantinople, Italy, and Germany, in all of which the Jewish population was greatly less than we should have anticipated—due, it is to be feared, in a great measure, to the cruel and devouring sword of persecution, which had been at work with fatal effect for several generations past. FOOTNOTES: [113] Among his other accomplishments, he was, we are told, a skilful chess-player. The Jews were famous for their passion for and skill at that game. Among Aben Ezra’s writings was a poem on chess, which was rendered into Latin, and published at Oxford in 1694. CHAPTER XVIII. A.D. 1200-1300. THE JEWS IN FRANCE AND GERMANY.