But there was one class upon whom these woes fell harmlessly, and this class was the Jews. It is bitter for men to be driven from their homes and deprived of their rights of citizenship. But the Jew had no home to lose, no right of citizenship to forfeit. His nationality had long been destroyed, and could not be taken from him. He was like Ladurlad, in Southey’s poem, whom the flood could not swallow up or the sea-monster destroy, because Kehama’s curse had rendered him secure against all minor ills. If the country in which the Jew was a sojourner was threatened by the approach of an invading horde, he simply removed elsewhere, and took his money with him. Nay, the march of the barbarian armies, which brought terror and destruction to others, was to him a source of profit. When some bloody defeat on the battle-field, or some frightful sack of a populous town, had plunged a whole people in misery and desolation, the Jew would drive a thriving trade with the ignorant conquerors, purchasing of them the spoil they had obtained by the plunder of palaces and churches, for, it might be, the twentieth part of their value, and conveying it to lands which were, as yet, safe from invasion; where they sold it again at an enormous profit. Their establishment in all the great cities of the known world, and the strong bonds of brotherhood which subsisted among them, made it easy for them to carry on mercantile transactions of this kind; nor can the rapidity with which they acquired wealth—and which was popularly attributed to their alliance with the Evil One—be any cause of wonder to us. Even in times when the principles on which commerce is conducted have become generally understood and acted on, the Jews have always had the advantage over their Christian neighbours, by reason of their greater astuteness and perseverance. But in those days, when they alone understood those principles, even in the rudest manner, it would have been a marvel indeed, if they had failed to gather riches, almost as easily as a child gathers pebbles on the shore.