The indifference of the Jews to apostacy may seem incompatible with the instance I have quoted in a former chapter: age makes the difference. The Moors are not doctrinal: they possess blandishments. The Jews do not fear them as contending with age, but as seducing youth; and their instinct appears, alike in yielding in the one case, and resisting in the other. They are gainers in both, for in the one they would lose by apostacy, in the other by martyrdom. I have several times visited the wife of the renegade, and the mother of the Jewish boy. Speaking the Spanish of the sixteenth century as the Jews of Barbary do, she recalled the condition of the Jews in Spain, as the fate of her husband and child did something of the cause of their expulsion. The peninsula, which did not share in the frenzy of the Crusaders, remained a stranger to the religious fanaticism which resulted from them. At the time when the Jews were proscribed throughout the rest of Europe, they were, in Spain, the favourites of monarchs, princes, and rulers--they were possessors of land--they had most of the wealth and commerce of the different kingdoms in their hands, and appear to have been twice as numerous as their forefathers when they entered the Holy Land.[221] Then did the persecutions here assume a savage character unknown elsewhere. No cause has been assigned for the sudden and bitter spirit of persecution which, at so late a period, arose against them. It may have taken its rise in their being the fiscal agents for king, bishop, monastery, and proprietor. First assailed from social animosities, their manner of screening themselves (which was afforded in no other country) aroused the inextinguishable hatred of the Christians. That part of their history, suggested by circumstances before me, is their facility in receiving baptism, then, of course, relapsing; and there can be no doubt that many of these nominally conforming Christians, and their children and descendants, filled every grade of the priesthood, and occupied the episcopal thrones of Spain. Out of this again grew the Inquisition, the most artful instrument of despotic power, and which, in Europe, has been mistaken for a religious institution. Finding that conversions were worthless, the proof of apostacy was sought in the traces of blood. The processes of the Inquisition were afterwards imitated by Parliament in England, when, fabricating a church by-law, it framed articles to catch consciences, as it now does resolutions to catch votes. The two great events are the emancipation from bondage, and the conquest of a territory. Promises, rights, obligations, and commandments, are all understood with reference to these. The stranger within their gates was to obey the commandments. He partook of necessity in certain ceremonies: he might at his option be admitted to all, unless excepted, like the Philistines, Amalekites, &c., because of historical events. Hence the difference with Mussulmans and Christians,