At this period it was in vain for the Jews to appeal to the Emperor. Frederick II. was excommunicated, and Germany in revolt, fanned by the Pope, against him. A new Emperor had been proposed at a meeting at Budweis to the electors of Austria, Bohemia and Bavaria, but the proposition had been rejected. Henry of Thuringia, however, set up by Innocent, and supported by the ecclesiastical princes of Germany, had been crowned at Hochem. A crusade was preached against the Emperor Frederick; Henry of Thuringia was defeated and died. The indefatigable Innocent, clinging to the cherished policy of the Papal See to ruin the unity of Germany by stirring up intestine strife, found another candidate in William of Holland. He was crowned at Aix‐la‐Chapelle, October 3, 1247. From this time till his death, four years after, the cause of Frederick declined. Frederick was mostly engaged in wars in Italy, and had not leisure, if he had the power, to attend to and right the wrongs of his Jewish vassals. It was at this period that I think we may conclude the Toledoth Jeschu of Wagenseil was written. Another consideration tends to confirm this view. The Wagenseil Toledoth Jeschu speaks of Elias rising up after the death of Simon Cephas, and denouncing him as having led the Christians away. Was there any Elias at the close of the thirteenth century who did thus preach against the Pope? There was. Elias of Cortona, second General of the Franciscan Order, the leader of a strong reactionary party opposed to the Spirituals or Caesarians, those who maintained the rule in all its rigour, had been deposed, then carried back into the Generalship by a recoil of the party wave, then appealed against to the Pope, deposed once more, and finally excommunicated. Elias joined the Emperor Frederick, the deadly foe of Innocent IV., and, sheltered under his wing, denounced the venality, the avarice, the extortion of the Papacy. As a close attendant on the German Emperor, his adviser, as one who encouraged him in his opposition to a Pope who protected the Jews, the German Jews must have heard of him. But the stone of excommunication firing at him struck him down, and he died in 1253, making a death‐bed reconciliation with Rome. But though it is thus possible to give an historical explanation of the curious circumstance that the Toledoth Jeschu ranges the Pope among the friends of Judaism and the enemies of Christianity, and provide for the identification of Elias with the fallen General of the Minorites,—the story points perhaps to a dim recollection of Simon Peter being at the head of the Judaizing Church at Jerusalem and Rome, which made common cause with the Jews, and of Paul, here designated Elias, in opposition to him. VII. The Second Toledoth Jeschu. We will now analyze and give extracts from the second anti‐evangel of the Jews, the TOLEDOTH JESCHU OF HULDRICH.(121)