There can be no doubt that the Jews were the most potent factors in the dissemination of folk-literature in the Middle Ages.[23] Various causes united to make them the natural carriers of folklore from the East to the West, and from the West back again to the East. They never became so completely localized as to break away from the community of their brethren in distant lands, and to develop distinct national characteristics. The Jews of Spain stood in direct relations with the Khazars of Russia, and it was a Jew whom Charlemagne sent as ambassador to Bagdad. The Jewish merchant did not limit his sphere of action by geographical lines of demarkation, and the Jewish scholar was as much at home in Italy and Germany as he was in Russia or Egypt. Again and again, in reading the biographies of Jewish worthies, we are confronted with men who have had their temporary homes in three continents. In fact, the stay-at-homes were the exception rather than the rule in the Middle Ages. In this manner not only a lively intercourse was kept up among the Jews of the diaspora, but they unwittingly became also the mediators of the intellectual life of the most remote lands: they not only enriched the literatures of the various nations by new kinds of compositions, but also brought with them the substratum of that intellectual life which finds its expression in the creations of the popular literature. The Jews have always possessed an innate love for story telling which was only sharpened by their travels. The religious and semi-religious stories were far from sufficient to satisfy their curiosity, and in spite of the discussions by the Rabbis of the permissibility of reading foreign books of adventure, they proceeded to create and multiply an apocryphal and profane folk-literature which baffles the investigator with its variety. Most addicted to these stories were the women, who received but little learning in the language of their religious lore, and who knew just enough of their Hebrew characters to read in the vernacular books specially prepared for them. Times changed, and the education of the men varied with the progress of the Hebrew and the native literatures; but the times hardly made an impression on the female sex. The same minimum of ethical instruction was given them in the eighteenth century that they had received in the fourteenth, and they were left to shift for themselves in the selection of their profane reading matter. The men who condescended to write stories for them had no special interest to direct the taste of their public, and preferred to supply the demand rather than create it; nor did the publishers have any more urgent reason why they should trouble themselves about the production of new works as long as the old ones satisfied the women. Consequently, although now and then a 'new' story book saw daylight, the old ones were just as eagerly received by the feminine readers. And thus