In the Toledoth Jeschu of Wagenseil, Simon Peter is represented as a Jew ruling the Christians in favour of the Jews. The Papacy must have been fully organized when this anti‐evangel was written, and the Jews must have felt the protection accorded them by the Popes against their persecutors. St. Gregory the Great wrote letters, in 591 and 598, in behalf of the Jews who were maltreated in Italy and Sicily. Alexander II., in 1068, wrote a letter to the Bishops of Gaul exhorting them to protect the Jews against the violence of the Crusaders, who massacred them on their way to the East. He gave as his reason for their protection the very one put into Simon Cephas’ mouth in the Toledoth Jeschu, that God had preserved them and scattered them in all countries as witnesses to the truth of the Gospel. In the cruel confiscation of their goods, and expulsion from France by Philip Augustus, and the simultaneous persecution they underwent in England, Innocent III. took their side, and insisted, in 1199, on their being protected from violence. Gregory IX. defended them when maltreated in Spain and in France by the Crusaders in 1236, on their appeal to him for protection. In 1246, the Jews of Germany appealed to the Pope, Innocent IV., against the ecclesiastical and secular princes who pillaged them on false charges. Innocent wrote, in 1247, ordering those who had wronged them to indemnify them for their losses. In 1417, the Jews of Constance came to meet Martin V., as their protector, on his coronation, with hymns and torches, and presented him with the Pentateuch, which he had the discourtesy to refuse, saying that they might have the Law, but they did not understand it. The claim made in the Toledoth Jeschu that the Papacy was a government in the interest of the Jews against the violence of the Christians, points to the thirteenth century as the date of the composition of this book, a century when the Jews suffered more from Christian brutality than at any other period, when their exasperation against everything Christian was wrought to its highest pitch, and when they found the Chair of Peter their only protection against extermination by the disciples of Christ. Some dim reference may be made to the anti‐pope of Jewish blood, Peter Leonis, who took the name of Anacletus II., and who survives in modern Jewish legend as the Pope Elchanan. Anacletus II. (A.D. 1130‐1138) maintained his authority in Rome against Innocent II., and from his refuge in the tower of St. Angelo, defied the Emperor Lothair, who had marched to Rome to install Innocent. Anacletus was accused of showing favour to the Jews, whose blood he inherited—his father was a Jewish usurer. When Christians shrank from robbing the churches of their silver and golden ornaments, required by Anacletus to pay his mercenaries and bribe the venal Romans, he is said to have entrusted the odious task to the Jews.