It was perhaps through James’s influence with Ferdinand of Castile that the attempt to rouse popular feeling against the Jews in Saragossa, A.D. 1248, proved a failure. A report was circulated, that a chorister, named Dominic, belonging to the cathedral, had been stolen by the Jews and crucified. The crime was discovered through the appearance of a miraculous light over the chorister’s grave. The body was disinterred and carried into the cathedral, where it was treated as that of a martyr and saint. The usual amount of obloquy and insult to the Jews resulted; but no steps were taken by the authorities, and no excesses permitted. In 1263, James, who in his later years is said to have been greatly under the influence of the Dominicans, ordered a public disputation upon the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity to be held at Barcelona. The advocate on the side of the Christians was one Pablo, a Jewish convert; on that of the Jews, the renowned Rabbi Nachmanides. The inevitable result followed—both parties claimed the victory. It was at all events so far favourable to the Jews, that it excited the alarm of Pope Clement IV., who urged James to drive the Jews out of his realm, as being dangerous to the faith of the Christians. But the king took no further step than that of levying a tax on them, to defray the expenses of the Christian advocate, Pablo, who was sent on a kind of tour through the great Spanish cities, with authority to hold conferences with the Jews wherever he pleased. Nachmanides, the Jewish champion, possibly dreading Clement’s hostility, soon afterwards migrated from Spain to the Holy Land. The Jews had two other protectors in Ferdinand III. of Castile (already mentioned), commonly known as Saint Ferdinand, and his son Alphonso, called in history ‘the Wise.’ Ferdinand, who reigned from 1217 to 1252, uniformly treated the Jews with justice and leniency. When his son captured Seville from the Moors in 1248, he set apart, doubtless by his father’s direction, three parishes (those of Santa Maria, Saint Bartholomew, and Santa Cruz) for the residence of the Jews, as well as three Mahometan mosques, which they might convert into synagogues. Under these princes the celebrated college at Cordova was transferred to Toledo; which henceforth became the principal school of Jewish learning in Spain.