The Christian Church, powerful since the fourth century, commenced to persecute the Jews.  This persecution has endured to this day in all Christian countries.  Usually the Jews were tolerated on account of their wealth and because they transacted all banking operations; but they were kept apart, not being permitted to hold any office.  In the majority of cities they were compelled to wear a special costume, to live in a special quarter,[44] gloomy, filthy, unhealthy, and sometimes at Easter time to send one of their number to suffer insult.  The people suspected them of poisoning fountains, of killing children, of profaning the consecrated host; often the people rose against them, massacred them, and pillaged their houses.  Judges under the least pretext had them imprisoned, tortured, and burned.  Sometimes the church tried to convert them by force; sometimes the government exiled them en masse from the country and confiscated their goods.  The Jews at last disappeared from France,[45] from Spain, England, and Italy.  In Portugal, Germany, and Poland, and in the Mohammedan lands they maintained themselves.  From these countries after the cessation of persecution they returned to the rest of Europe.

FOOTNOTES: 

[41] Exodus iii, 1-10.

[42] There is much uncertainty regarding the chronology of this period.—­ED.

[43] The Talmud is the accumulation of these commentaries.

[44] The Jewish Quarter at Rome was called the Ghetto.  This name has since been applied to all Jewish quarters.

[45] Except at Avignon, on the domains of the Pope, and in Alsace-Lorraine.

CHAPTER IX

GREECE AND THE GREEKS

=The Country.=—­Greece is a very little country (about 20,000 square miles), hardly larger than Switzerland; but it is a country of great variety, bristling with mountains, indented with gulfs—­a country originally constituted to influence mightily the character of the men who inhabited it.

A central chain, the Pindus, traverses Greece through the centre and covers it with its rocky system.  Toward the isthmus of Corinth it becomes lower; but the Peloponnesus, on the other side of the isthmus, is elevated about 2,000 feet above the sea level, like a citadel crowned with lofty chains, abrupt and snowy, which fall perpendicularly into the sea.  The islands themselves scattered along the coast are only submerged mountains whose summits rise above the surface of the sea.  In this diverse land there is little tillable ground, but almost everywhere bare rock.  The streams, like brooks, leave between their half-dried channel and the sterile rock of the mountain only a narrow strip of fertile soil.  In this beautiful country are found some forests, cypresses, laurels, palms, here and there vines scattered on the rocky hillsides; but there are no rich harvests and no green pasturages.  Such a country produces wiry mountaineers, active and sober.