About eight years afterwards another outcry was raised, this time it being affirmed that the Jews had been praying that disaster and ruin might befall the Christians. Their books were seized as a punishment, and carried off to Vienna, so that the Rabbins had to officiate in the synagogues as well as they were able, reciting everything from memory. We must suppose that this charge was disproved, as the other had been, for the books were soon afterwards restored. Even this was not the end of their troubles. Before the year was out, there came another peremptory order for all the Jews, except the ten privileged families, once more to leave the city and settle elsewhere in Bohemia; and this time it does not appear that they were allowed to return. Merseburg again—the capital now of one of the regencies of the Prussian States, which consists almost entirely of cessions made by Saxony in 1815—was another of the cities in which the Jews claimed to have resided without interruption for nearly fourteen centuries. Yet, so widespread had the feeling against them become, that they were forced, in 1559, to quit this city also, notwithstanding that the Emperor Ferdinand was willing to help them to the utmost of his ability. He not only protected them, indeed, but granted them a privilege which had been accorded to their ancestors in the East, many centuries before—that of having their own special ruler, who was known by the same title as that borne in the earliest Christian times by the Patriarch of the East, viz., the ‘Prince of the Captivity.’ In Moravia, in 1574, a similar flame of persecution broke out. We are not informed what were the precise charges, but no doubt they were much the same that were alleged against almost all Jewish congregations in Central Europe about this time. Many Jews, we learn, were burnt at the stake, and many more put to death in other ways. They appealed to the Emperor Ferdinand, who appears always to have been willing to assist his Jewish subjects to the best of his ability. He did interfere, and stopped the executions, but not before many victims had been sacrificed. In Franconia, six years afterwards, there was something of a similar outbreak. In this instance the Jews were accused, as they were in many other places, of having set on fire the town of Bamberg. But here they escaped without undergoing any further severity than having to make good the loss which those had suffered whose property had been destroyed. In Poland and the Ukraine a more merciful state of things prevailed. In both these the Jews enjoyed entire freedom alike from pillage and persecution. In the first-named country they were chiefly engaged in trade, which they almost monopolized; in the latter, almost exclusively in agriculture.