When a violent and rapacious caliph, Ahmed Kader, ascended the throne, he cast a jealous look on the powers of his vassal sovereign, and, without pretext, he seized Scherira, the prince of the community, now a hundred years old, imprisoned him and his son Hai, and confiscated their wealth.  Hai escaped to resume his office and to transmit its honours and its dangers to Hezekiah, who was elected chief of the community, but after a reign of two years was arrested with all his family by order of the caliph Abdallah Kaim ben Marillah (A.D. 1036).  The schools were closed.  Many of the learned fled to Spain, where the revulsion under the Almohades had not yet taken place; all were dispersed.  Among the rest two of the sons of the unfortunate Prince of the Captivity effected their escape to Spain, while the last of the House of David who reigned over the Jews of the Dispersion in Babylonia perished on the scaffold.

The Jewish communities in Palestine suffered a slower but more complete dissolution.  Benjamin of Tudela in the compilation of his travels in the twelfth century gives a humiliating account of the few brethren who still clung, in dire poverty and meanness, to their native land.  In Tyre he found 400 Jews, mostly glass-blowers.  There were in Jerusalem only 200, almost all dyers of wool.  Ascalon contained 153 Jews; Tiberias, the seat of learning, and of the kingly patriarchate, but fifty.  In the Byzantine Empire the number of Jews had greatly diminished.

We pursue our dark progress to the West, where we find all orders gradually arrayed in fierce and implacable animosity against the race of Israel.  Every passion was in arms against them.  In that singular structure, the feudal system, which rose like a pyramid from the villeins, or slaves attached to the soil, to the monarch who crowned the edifice, the, Jews alone found no proper place.  In France and England they were the actual property of the king, and there was nowhere any tribunal to which they could appeal.

The Jew, often acquiring wealth in commerce, might become valuable property of some feudatory lord.  He was granted away, he was named in a marriage settlement, he was pawned, he was sold, he was stolen.  Even Churchmen of the highest rank did not disdain such lucrative property.  Louis, King of Provence, granted to the Archbishop of Aries all the possessions which his predecessors have held of former kings, including the Jews.  Philip the Fair bought of his brother, Charles of Valois, all the Jews of his dominions and lordships.

The Jew, making money as he knew how to do by trade and industry, was a valuable source of revenue, and was tolerated only as such, but he was a valuable possession.  Chivalry, the parent of so much good and evil, was a source of unmitigated wretchedness to the Jew—­for religious fanaticism and chivalry were inseparable, the knight of the Middle Ages being bound with his good sword to extirpate all the enemies of Christ and His Virgin Mother.