fth and thirteenth centuries, a period more prolific of these great
men than even the preceding ages. But I cannot pass these later
centuries without mentioning the Alphonsine Tables, calculated for
Alphonso, the King of Castile, by Mascha, his Hebrew physician. The
irreligious tendency of the times is illustrated by the well-known
sarcasm uttered by that Spanish monarch respecting the imperfect
construction of the heavens, according to the Ptolemaic hypothesis. For
long, however, the Jews had been dabbling in free-thinking speculations.
Thus Aben Tybbon, above-mentioned, anticipating that branch of science
which has drawn upon itself, in later years, so much opprobrium, wrote a
work containing a discussion of the causes which prevent the waters of
the sea from encroaching on the land. Abba Mari, a Marseillese Jew,
translated the Almagest of Ptolemy and the Commentary of Averroes upon
it. The school of Salerno was still sending forth its doctors. In Rome,
Jewish physicians were very numerous, the popes themselves employing
them. Boniface VIII. had for his medical adviser Rabbi Isaac. At this
period Spain and France were full of learned Jews; and perhaps partly by
their exerting upon the higher classes with whom they came in contact
too much influence, for the physician of a Christian prince was very
often the rival of his confessor, and partly because the practice of
medicine, as they pursued it, interfered with the gains of the Church,
the clergy took alarm, and caused to be re-enacted or enforced the
ancient laws. The Council of Beziers, A.D. 1246, and the Council of
Alby, A.D. 1254, prohibited all Christians from resorting to the
services of an Israelitish physician. It would appear that these
enactments had either fallen into desuetude or had failed to be
enforced. The faculty of Paris, awakening at last to the danger of the
case, caused, A.D. 1301, a decree to be published prohibiting either man
or woman of the religion of Moses from practising medicine upon any
person of the Catholic religion. A similar course was also taken in
Spain. At this time the Jews were confessedly at the head of French
medicine. It was the appointment of one of their persuasion, Profatius,
as regent of the faculty of Montpellier A.D. 1300, which drew upon them
the wrath of the faculty of Paris. This learned man was a skilful
astronomer; he composed tables of the moon; of the longitudes of many
Asiatic and African towns; he determined the ob