We enter on a period which may be described as the Golden Age of the modern Jews.  The religious persecutions of this race by the Mohammedans were confined within the borders of Arabia.  The Prophet was content with enforcing uniformity of worship within the sacred peninsula which gave him birth.  The holy cities of Medina and Mecca were not to be profaned by the unclean footstep of the unbeliever.  His immediate successors rose from stern fanatics to ambitious conquerors.  Whoever would submit to the dominion of the caliph might easily evade the recognition of the Prophet’s title.  The Jews had reason to rejoice in the change of masters.  An Islamite sovereign would not be more oppressive than a Byzantine on the throne of Constantinople or a Persian on the throne of Ctesiphon.  In every respect the Jew rose in the social scale under his Mohammedan rulers.  Provided he demeaned himself peaceably, and paid his tribute, he might go to the synagogue rather than to the mosque.

In the time of Omar, the second caliph, the coinage, already a trust of great importance, had been committed to the care of a Jew.  And the Jews acted as intermediate agents in the interworking of European civilisation, its knowledge, arts, and sciences, into the oriental mind, and in raising the barbarian conquerors from the chieftains of wild, marauding tribes into magnificent and enlightened sovereigns.  The caliph readily acknowledged as his vassal the Prince of the Captivity, who maintained his state as representative of the Jewish community.  And in the West, during the reigns of Pepin and Charlemagne, the treatment of Jews became much more liberal than before.  Their superior intelligence and education, in a period when nobles and kings, and even the clergy, could not always write their names, pointed them out for offices of trust.  They were the physicians, the ministers of finance, to monarchs.  They even became ambassadors.  The Golden Age of the Jews endured in increasing prosperity during the reign of Louis the Debonnaire, or the Pious, at whose court they were so powerful that their interest was solicited by the presents of kings.  In the reign of Charles the Bald, the Jews maintained their high estate, but dark signs of the approaching Age of Iron began to lower around.

IV.—­The Iron Age of Judaism

Our Iron Age commences in the East, where it witnessed the extinction of the Princes of the Captivity by the ignominious death of the last sovereign, the downfall of the schools, and the dispersion of the community, which from that period remained an abject and degraded part of the population.  During the ninth and tenth centuries the Caliphate fell into weakness and confusion, and split up into several kingdoms under conflicting sovereigns, and at the same time Judaism in the East was distracted by continual disputes between the Princes of the Captivity and the masters of the schools.  The tribunals of the civil and temporal powers of the Eastern Jewish community were in perpetual collision, so that this singular state was weakened internally by its own dissensions.