iberal 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.

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
dissoluti