The modern State sounded once again a Jewish doom. With the birth of its fanatical will came persecution. The Jews’ internationalism was a subtle, psychologic poison. The servants of royal unity became aware of an enemy in their household--of an enemy in their blood. In 1391, Spain--the liberal theater of ideas whose like had not been known since Alexandria (for here argued men who believed, not in abstract gods, but in flaming Prophets and in Incarnations)--lurched to one modern way of progress. Massacre rose from Seville to Toledo. A century later, the Jews were ordered to give up either their faith or their home. They had been in Spain for centuries; their urban genius had helped build Spain’s cities. They had kindled a fire to warm the world and to illumine heaven. They were artisans in the body and in the mind of their land. They were ordered to die. For to leave the home of Spain or the home of Bible and Talmud was no mere uprooting. Probably not much more than a hundred thousand left. The moiety stayed and were lost in the great Catholic amalgam. Their organizations for action and for thought were reft from them. They had no halls or synagogues. They had no language. Worst of all, they had to abandon--those who stayed--the immemorial _forms_ of feeling which were Jewish and in which they were beginning to mold (witness Crescas and Leon Hebreo) a new Enlightenment, a new Naturalistic religion! An end ... not the first, not the last ... came to Jewish Wisdom. And while Europe whose spirit they had nourished rose in Renascence to the bloody dawn of our “liberal” age, the Jews sank down into the very night of mumbled ritual and superstition from which they had upraised their oppressors. As they pass from the stern city or are lost within its rigorous stones, the Jews give to it a color and a theme without which it would not be Toledo. By their acceptance of death, they have won life unceasing: and here in Toledo which once gave them death, they have bestowed a spirit which has not died.