en on
examination to have been twofold--financial and occult. Throughout the
Middle Ages it is as sorcerers and usurers that they incur the
reproaches of the Christian world, and it is still in the same role,
under the more modern terms of magicians and loan-mongers, that we
detect their presence behind the scenes of revolution from the
seventeenth century onward. Wherever money was to be made out of social
or political upheavals, wealthy Jews have been found to back the winning
side; and wherever the Christian races have turned against their own
institutions, Jewish Rabbis, philosophers, professors, and occultists
have lent them their support. It was not then necessarily that Jews
created these movements, but they knew how to make use of them for their
own ends.

It is thus that in the Great Rebellion we find them not amongst the
Ironsides of Cromwell or the members of his State Council, but
furnishing money and information to the insurgents, acting as army
contractors, loan-mongers, and super-spies--or to use the more
euphonious term of Mr. Lucien Wolf, as "political intelligencers" of
extraordinary efficiency. Thus Mr. Lucien Wolf, in referring to
Carvajal, "the great Jew of the Commonwealth," explains that "the wide
ramifications of his commercial transactions and his relations with
other Crypto-Jews all over the world placed him in an unrivalled
position to obtain news of the enemies of the Commonwealth."[457]

It is obvious that a "secret service" of this kind rendered the Jews a
formidable hidden power, the more so since their very existence was
frequently unknown to the rest of the population around them. This
precaution was necessary because Jews were not supposed to exist at that
date in England. In 1290 Edward I had expelled them all, and for three
and a half centuries they had remained in exile; the Crypto-Jews or
Marranos who had come over from Spain contrived, however, to remain in
the country by skilfully taking the colour of their surroundings. Mr.
Wolf goes on to observe that Jewish services were regularly held in the
secret Synagogue, but "in public Carvajal and his friends followed the
practice of the secret Jews in Spain and Portugal, passing as Roman
Catholics and regularly attending mass in the Spanish Ambassador's
chapel."[458] But when war between England and Spain rendered this
expedient inadvisable, the Marranos threw off the disguise of
Christianity and proclaimed themselves followers of the