r secret they may have kept their
learning, a portion of its tenets transpired, which was supposed to
inculcate the right to pillage and murder Christians; and it is to the
vague knowledge of these odious prescriptions of the Talmud that we must
attribute the readiness with which the most atrocious accusations against
the Jews were always welcomed.

Besides this, the public mind in those days of bigotry was naturally
filled with a deep antipathy against the Jewish deicides. When monks and
priests came annually in Holy week to relate from the pulpit to their
hearers the revolting details of the Passion, resentment was kindled in
the hearts of the Christians against the descendants of the judges and
executioners of the Saviour. And when, on going out of the churches,
excited by the sermons they had just heard, the faithful saw in pictures,
in the cemeteries, and elsewhere, representations of the mystery of the
death of our Saviour, in which the Jews played so odious a part, there was
scarcely a spectator who did not feel an increased hatred against the
condemned race. Hence it was that in many towns, even when the authorities
did not compel them to do so, the Israelites found it prudent to shut
themselves up in their own quarter, and even in their own houses, during
the whole of Passion week; for, in consequence of the public feeling
roused during those days of mourning and penance, a false rumour was quite
sufficient to give the people a pretext for offering violence to the Jews.

In fact, from the earliest days of Christianity, a certain number of
accusations were always being made, sometimes in one country, sometimes in
another, against the Israelites, which always ended in bringing down the
same misfortunes on their heads. The most common, and most easily credited
report, was that which attributed to them the murder of some Christian
child, said to be sacrificed in Passion week in token of their hatred of
Christ; and in the event of this terrible accusation being once uttered,
and maintained by popular opinion, it never failed to spread with
remarkable swiftness. In such cases, popular fury, not being on all
occasions satisfied with the tardiness of judicial forms, vented itself
upon the first Jews who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of their
enemies. As soon as the disturbance was heard the Jewish quarter was
closed; fathers and mothers barricaded themselves in with their children,
concealed whatever riches