enquirers is deferred even to the end of the seventh century. The work abounds with the most extravagant, gross, and impious fables, but is in the highest repute among the Jews; who affirm the Scriptures, the Mishna, and the Gemara, to be equally of Divine authority; and manifest the proportionate estimation which they assign to these writings respectively, by comparing the first of them to water, the second to wine, the third to the choicest wine. Of the Babylonish Talmud, the very learned Rabbi Maimonides, who was born at Cordova in Spain, A. D. 1131, but resided principally in Egypt, rejecting the most profane and puerile parts, has given a valuable abridge

ment.

Throughout the sixth century the Jews in the dominions of Persia sustained an almost uninterrupted series of persecutions. Early in the seventh they were admitted into favour by Chosroes II.; who, as a recompense for the zeal with which they assisted him in his wars against the Emperor of Constantinople, gave them full liberty to glut their hatred of the Christians by the massacre of immense multitudes, and by the general destruction of churches during his invasion of Judæa; and delivered into their hands for certain slaughter not fewer, if the Greek accounts are to be credited, than ninety thousand persons surrendered to him, A.D. 614, with the city of Jerusalem. When Persia submitted to the victorious Saracens, under the Caliph Omar II., the Jews were subjected there, as in all other regions overwhelmed by the Mahometan arms, to the customary alternative of tribute or conversion. The events which during these two centuries befel them in Europe, and in the Asiatic and African parts of the Greek empire, were extremely distressing.

The shameful proceedings of the Emperor Justinian, who altered by an edict the time of the Jewish passover, deprived the Jews of the right of bequeathing property, and of other civil privileges, and in Africa turned their synagogues into churches, and suppressed the exercise of their religion, irritated them to madness. Hence arose two insurrections in Palestine, A. D. 530, and A. D. 555, accompanied with the customary massacres of Christians, and extinguished with dreadful slaughter of the insurgents. Hence also proceeded the strenuous assistance furnished to the Goths against Belisarius, the general of Justinian, especially at the siege of Naples. On the capture of that city the Jews were put to death with unrelenting severity. Under the Emperor Phocas, a third insurrection blazed forth, A.D. 602, at Antioch; and was characterised in the usual manner both in its commencement and in its close. In Italy, where the Jews were numerous, they were protected and treated with moderation and kindness by Pope Gregory the Great; who by his letters publicly expressed his abhorrence of the persecutions which they endured in France and in other countries. The Greek Emperor Heraclius was their decided enemy. Not contented with persecuting them, A. D. 628, within his own dominions, and utterly banishing them from Judæa; he induced the Spanish king Sizibut to expel from his realm all of them who refused to adopt the Christian faith. The effects produced by the violence of Sizibut and his successors were feigned conversions without number, followed by relapses into Judaism whenever the inmediate influence of terror was withdrawn. In this century, as well as in the preceding, similar violence had repeatedly been attended with similar consequences among the Jews in France.

During the eighth century and part of the ninth, the Jews who inhabited the regions under the dominions of the Caliphs bore their share of the common calamities of the times resulting from the civil wars among their masters; but had little that was peculiar in their sufferings. In some parts of that period, they saw their eminent Rabbies encouraged by Caliphs fond of learning, and their academies in the East in the most flourishing state. But after A.D. 840, their situation underwent a very serious change. Refusing to embrace the Koran, they were punished by heavy taxes and fines; and were prohibited from riding on horses, and subjected to other humiliating distinctions, which have been continued in a greater or a less degree to the present day, and have been imposed on their brethren in several parts of Christian Europe. In the mean time, they have been persecuted into dissimulation in the eighth century by the Greek emperor Leo, the Isaurian. From his successors in the succeeding age they endured little molestation. Of their state during these two centuries in Italy and Spain, nothing memorable seems to be known; except the destruction which numbers of the Jews in the latter country brought upon themselves by listening, A. D. 724, to the delusions of Serenus, who proclaimed himself their Messiah, and induced them to follow his standard towards Palestine. In France, the Jews appear to have enjoyed, on the whole, a considerable portion of liberty.

If Jewish accounts are entitled to confidence, learning flourished among the eastern Jews throughout the tenth century, and during the early part of the eleventh, with a lustre equalled neither in prior nor in succeeding ages. But the sunshine was only a prelude to an overwhelming tempest. The storm com«

menced in the dissensions of the leading Rabbies; and was completed by the fury of the Caliphs, who suppressed all the academies about A.D. 1039; and straining every nerve utterly to expel the Jews from their dominions, forced them to fly for refuge into the wilds of Arabia, and even into Spain and other kingdoms of the West. In Egypt, a province which had been detached by a revolt, at the conclusion of the ninth century, from the empire of the eastern Caliphs, the Jews had to sustain for a time the indignation of the Caliph Hakem, to whose novel dogmas and pretensions in religion they refused obedience. He was murdered near Cairo, A. D. 1026, by the command of his sister; but had previously closed the persecution. While the attention of the Mahometans and the Christians in Spain was occupied by mutual hatred and hostilities, the affairs of the Jews, now very numerous in that country, and patronised by the Saracens as allies against the common foe, gradually revived with little interruption, until nearly the middle of the eleventh century. At that period, the Moorish sovereign of Grenada, enraged at the presumptuous attempt of a Rabbi to convert the votaries of Mahomet, proceeded, after hanging the offender, to inflict on his countrymen the severest tokens of resentment. Soon afterwards, the Spanish Jews were exposed to extreme danger from the bigotry of the Christian King Ferdinand, who, being instigated by his wife to sanctify by their extirpation his projected enterprises against the Saracens, was at length deterred from his purpose by the remonstrances of his bishops, and the indignation of Alexander II., who occupied the Roman see. Alfonso, the successor of Ferdinand, excited by a different conduct the wrath of Pope Gregory. Eager to obtain the assistance of

the Jews against the encreasing power of the Moors, he bestowed on them various liberties and privileges, and even permitted a Jew to be in certain cases a judge over Christians: a privilege which the vehement pontiff, singling it out amid the objects of his abhorrence, termed the exaltation of the synagogue of Satan above the church of Christ. But all his upbraidings and censures were ineffectual. Peter, the grandson of Alfonso, was vainly solicited, A. D. 1096, to persecute them. But in several parts of Spain they were massacred by the lawless fury of the Crusaders. Of the state of the Jews in France during the tenth and eleventh centuries, few traces appear in the writings of the times. It was, however, by a Rabbi of that kingdom, and about the end, as is supposed, of the eleventh century, that the fictitious history ascribed to Josephus, which has deceived many learned Christians, and is still extolled by the generality of the Jews in opposition to the genuine and authentic work, was composed. The law which was enacted by Ladislaus, king of Hungary, about A. D. 1092, prohibiting the Jews to possess Christian slaves, and another of a similar nature promulgated afterwards by his son, afford a presumption in favour of their number and their wealth in that part of Europe. In Germany also, they were numerous and powerful; and erected synagogues in many of the principal cities. Shortlived and local persecutions they had occasionally to encounter; but were reinstated in their abodes and property by the Emperor Henry IV. The multitudes, however, which fell victims in different places to the rage of the armies marching through Germany towards the Holy Land, were great almost beyond computation; and in some instances are stated by Christian annalists even at a higher amount than by the Jewish