France and England received some of the exiles, others went to settle in the Far East. Most wretched, perhaps, were those who landed on the coast of Africa and attempted by way of the desert to reach Fez, where there was a Jewish colony. They were beset by a horde of plundering tribesmen, who pillaged them of their belongings, treated them with the utmost cruelty and inhumanity, ravished their women under their very eyes, and left them stripped and utterly broken. Their sufferings had reached the limit of their endurance. The survivors sought baptism at the first Christian settlement they reached, and many of these returned to their native Spain, having thus qualified themselves for readmission. There were many otherwise who, similarly unable to endure the hardships which they met abroad, broke down at last, accepted baptism and returned, or else returned clamouring for the baptism that should enable them to dwell in peace in the land of their birth. For three years, says Bernaldez, there was a constant stream of returning Jews, who having abandoned all for their faith, had now abandoned their faith itself, and came back to make a fresh start. They were baptized in groups, all at once, by the sprinkling of hyssop over them.[246] Bernaldez himself baptized a hundred of them at Palacios, and from what he beheld, “I considered fulfilled,” he writes, “the prophecy of David--‘Covertentur ad vesperam et famen patiuntur ut canes et circundabunt civitatem.’” The priest of Palacios estimates at 36,000 the Jewish families that accepted banishment,[247] which would represent some 200,000 souls. But Salazar de Mendoza and Zurita set the total exiles at twice that number,[248] whilst Mariana carries it as high as 800,000.[249] More reliable perhaps than any of these is the estimate left by the Jewish writers, who say that in the year 5252 of the Creation 300,000 Jews left Spain, the land in which their forbears had dwelt for close upon 2,000 years.[250] These figures bring home to us the gravity of the step taken by the Sovereigns when they consented to the banishment of the Jews; and if anything had been wanting to make us appreciate the irresistible quality of Torquemada and of the fanaticism for which he stood, these figures would supply it. The proposed expulsion must fully have been discussed in council before the edict was promulgated;[251] and it must have been obvious that Spain could not fail to be left materially the poorer if some 40,000 industrious families were driven out. It is unthinkable that king or councillor should not have raised the question of the inexpediency, of the positive danger attaching to such a measure. Yet certain it is that neither councillor nor king could stand against the stern, uncompromising friar, in whom they saw the representative of a God that was not to be trifled with--a God whom their conceptions transformed into some vindictive pagan deity.