The Mahamad was a Council of Five, no less dread than the more notorious Council of Ten. Like the Venetian Tribunal, which has unjustly monopolised the attention of history, it was of annual election, and it was elected by a larger body of Elders, just as the Council of Ten was chosen by the aristocracy. "The gentlemen of the Mahamad," as they were styled, administered the affairs of the Spanish-Portuguese community, and their oligarchy would undoubtedly be a byword for all that is arbitrary and inquisitorial but for the widespread ignorance of its existence. To itself the Mahamad was the centre of creation. On one occasion it refused to bow even to the authority of the Lord Mayor of London. A Sephardic Jew lived and moved and had his being "by permission of the Mahamad." Without its consent he could have no legitimate place in the scheme of things. Minus "the permission of the Mahamad" he could not marry; with it he could be divorced readily. He might, indeed, die without the sanction of the Council of Five, but this was the only great act of his life which was free from its surveillance, and he could certainly not be buried save "by permission of the Mahamad." The Haham himself, the Sage or Chief Rabbi of the congregation, could not unite his flock in holy wedlock without the "permission of the Mahamad." And this authority was not merely negative and passive, it was likewise positive and active. To be a Yahid--a recognised congregant--one had to submit one's neck to a yoke more galling even than that of the Torah, to say nothing of the payment of Finta, or poll-tax. Woe to him who refused to be Warden of the Captives--he who ransomed the chained hostages of the Moorish Corsairs, or the war prisoners held in durance by the Turks--or to be President of the Congregation, or Parnass of the Holy Land, or Bridegroom of the Law, or any of the numerous dignitaries of a complex constitution. Fines, frequent and heavy--for the benefit of the poor-box--awaited him "by permission of the Mahamad." Unhappy the wight who misconducted himself in Synagogue "by offending the president, or grossly insulting any other person," as the ordinance deliciously ran. Penalties, stringent and harrying, visited these and other offences--deprivation of the "good deeds," of swathing the Holy Scroll, or opening the Ark; ignominious relegation to seats behind the reading-desk, withdrawal of the franchise, prohibition against shaving for a term of weeks! And if, accepting office, the Yahid failed in the punctual and regular discharge of his duties, he was mulcted and chastised none the less. A fine of forty pounds drove from the Synagogue Isaac Disraeli, collector of _Curiosities of Literature_, and made possible that curiosity of politics, the career of Lord Beaconsfield. The fathers of the Synagogue, who drew up their constitution in pure Castilian in the days when Pepys noted the indecorum in their little Synagogue in King Street, meant their