conclusion; and after seeing all persuasion and corruption exhausted to bring over the Hebrews to his sect, but without much success, Benedict closed the debate, pronounced the Jews vanquished, and gave them notice of severer measures.  The richer from interest, the poorer from bigotry, and the priesthood from instinct, poured contempt even on proselytes, whom they classified according to their supposed degrees of heterodoxy.  Some were called “converts,” to note the newness of their Christianity; others “confessed,” to tell that they had confessed the falseness of Judaism.  Sometimes they were branded as “maranos,” from the words maran atha, which the priests, in their ignorance, took to mean “accursed.”  The whole were spoken of as a generation of maranos, or, worst of all in the imagination of a papist, “Jews.”  Goaded by the cowardly persecution, the proselytes groaned after deliverance; a few even dared to renounce the profession of a faith they never held, and many resumed the practice of Jewish rites in private.  This opened a new field to the zeal of the inquisitors; but the labor of suppressing a revolt so widely spread, so rapidly extending, and even infecting the Romish families with whom the imperfect converts were united, was more than the inquisitors could undertake without a more powerfully organized system of their own.

I believe that the fear of the Bible and the hatred of the Jews of Spain, first imprinted in the page of history by the Council of Illiberis in the beginning of the fourth century, was in course of time much aggravated by the earnest love of the Spanish Jews for the original scriptures of the Old Testament.  It was not until the eleventh century that rabbinical tradition gained much hold in the Jewish mind in Spain, but, from the first, Christians had cursed Jews in sincere but blind zeal against the descendants, as they thought, of those who crucified our Lord in Jerusalem.  Yet the Sephardim in Spain could have had no knowledge of the Crucifixion until some weeks, at soonest, after it had taken place, and perhaps never knew of the hostility of the Jews in Jerusalem against the Saviour.

Until the dispersion of the Eastern colleges in the eleventh century, no great rabbis came into Spain with pretension of authority to enforce Talmudical traditions.  When zealots of the sort did come, they found a community of Hebrews far superior to the Jews of Palestine.  No Assyrian had bribed them to worship the gods of Nineveh.  Their neighbors the Carthaginians, so long as Carthage stood, had persisted in worshipping the Baal and the Ashtaroth that recreant Israelites in Samaria and Jews in Jerusalem worshipped for ages; but, while those gods had altars in Sidon and in Carthage, we do not hear of any altars being raised to them in “the captivity of Jerusalem, which was in Sepharad,” or Spain (Obadiah, 20); neither do we hear that those Jews betrayed any ambition to make a hedge to protect God’s law, instead of taking care to keep it.  But the first propagators of traditionism in Spain came from the East, on the breaking up of the great schools of Babylonia by the Persians.