The Jewish historian finds himself in the same dilemma in which Gildas, commonly called “the wise,” found himself; who sadly lamented (in the beginning of his epistle, in which he has undertaken to give some account of the ancient British Church) the want of any domestic monuments to give him certain information. “For,” saith he, “if there were any such, they were either burnt by our enemies, or carried so far by the banishment of our countrymen, that they no longer appear, and therefore I was forced to pick up, what I could, out of foreign writers, without any continued series.” So it is with the Jewish historian. Fearful in length is the catalogue of the massacres, extortions, and persecutions which the Jews have sustained in this country during the dark ages of its annals. Consider how many times they were plundered, how often fire was set to their houses, which destroyed all their possessions. Behold them at York, how that before they destroyed their own persons, they first burnt every thing belonging to them――view them just before their final banishment, robbed on every side――all which I shall show more fully in their proper places. I say, take all this into consideration, and the probable reason will suggest itself――viz., that the Jewish records perished with their persons and other possessions. It is not too much to assume, for any one who knows the real character of the Jews, that they were in possession of valuable documents relative to their earliest introduction into this country, but which were lost with the rest of their valuables, by which not only they themselves sustained a great loss, but also their survivors. Deprived as we are of the Jewish own information respecting this important inquiry; and silent as are the ancient English historians about their first setting foot on Albion’s ground, which put it beyond the modern historian’s power to ascertain the positive date of their doing so: still any one who, having paid critical attention to the subject, must come to the conclusion that those English historians who fixed the time of their introduction into this country to be coeval with the Norman conquest, were wrong. It is highly probable that the Jews visited this country at a very early period. Be it recollected that the Jewish nation had been trained to be a wandering nation, to prepare them, no doubt, for their mighty dispersion. Their progenitor, Abraham, seems to have been a type of the same, who was commanded (Genesis, xii. 1), “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee;” and his descendants have ever and anon manifested a peculiar migratory disposition, as you always find in holy writ.