to
bring over the Hebrews to his sect, but without much success, Benedict
closed the debate, pronounced the Jews vanquished, and gave them notice
of severer measures. The richer from interest, the poorer from bigotry,
and the priesthood from instinct, poured contempt even on proselytes,
whom they classified according to their supposed degrees of heterodoxy.
Some were called "converts," to note the newness of their Christianity;
others "confessed," to tell that they had confessed the falseness of
Judaism. Sometimes they were branded as "maranos," from the words _maran
atha_, which the priests, in their ignorance, took to mean "accursed."
The whole were spoken of as a generation of maranos, or, worst of all in
the imagination of a papist, "Jews." Goaded by the cowardly persecution,
the proselytes groaned after deliverance; a few even dared to renounce
the profession of a faith they never held, and many resumed the practice
of Jewish rites in private. This opened a new field to the zeal of the
inquisitors; but the labor of suppressing a revolt so widely spread, so
rapidly extending, and even infecting the Romish families with whom the
imperfect converts were united, was more than the inquisitors could
undertake without a more powerfully organized system of their own.

I believe that the fear of the Bible and the hatred of the Jews of Spain,
first imprinted in the page of history by the Council of Illiberis in the
beginning of the fourth century, was in course of time much aggravated by
the earnest love of the Spanish Jews for the original scriptures of the
Old Testament. It was not until the eleventh century that rabbinical
tradition gained much hold in the Jewish mind in Spain, but, from the
first, Christians had cursed Jews in sincere but blind zeal against
the descendants, as they thought, of those who crucified our Lord in
Jerusalem. Yet the Sephardim in Spain could have had no knowledge of the
Crucifixion until some weeks, at soonest, after it had taken place, and
perhaps never knew of the hostility of the Jews in Jerusalem against the
Saviour.

Until the dispersion of the Eastern colleges in the eleventh century,
no great rabbis came into Spain with pretension of authority to enforce
Talmudical traditions. When zealots of the sort did come, they found a
community of Hebrews far superior to the Jews of Palestine. No Assyrian
had bribed them to worship the gods of Nineveh. Their neighbors the
Carthaginians, so long as