investigations. He
was a famous teacher at the Montpellier academy, which reminds me to
mention that Jews were prominently identified with the founding and the
success of the medical schools at Montpellier and Salerno, they, indeed,
being almost the only physicians in all parts of the known world.
Salerno, in turn, suggests Italy, where at that period translations were
made from Latin into Hebrew. Hillel ben Samuel, for instance, the same
who carried on a lively philosophic correspondence with another
distinguished Jew, Maestro Isaac Gayo, the pope's physician, translated
some of Thomas Aquinas's writings, Bruno di Lungoburgo's book on
surgery, and various other works, from Latin into Hebrew.

These successors of the great intellects of the golden age of
neo-Hebraic literature, thoroughly conversant with Arabic literature,
busied themselves with rendering accessible to literary Europe the
treasury of Indian and Greek fables. Their translations and compilations
have peculiar value in the history of literary development. During the
middle ages, when the memory of ancient literature had perished, they
were the means of preserving the romances, fairy tales, and fables that
have descended, by way of Spain and Arabia, from classical antiquity
and the many-hued Oriental world to our modern literatures. Between the
eleventh and the thirteenth century, the foundations were laid for our
narrative literature, demonstrating the importance of delight in fable
lore, stories of travel, and all sorts of narratives, for to it we owe
the creation of new and the transformation of old, literary forms.

In Germany at that time, a Jewish minnesinger and strolling minstrel,
Suesskind von Trimberg, went up and down the land, from castle to castle,
with the poets' guild; while Santob di Carrion, a Jewish troubadour,
ventured to impart counsel and moral lessons to the Castilian king Don
Pedro before his assembled people. A century later, another Jew, Samson
Pnie, of Strasburg, lent his assistance to the two German poets at work
upon the continuation of _Parzival_. The historians of German literature
have not laid sufficient stress upon the share of the Jews, heavily
oppressed and persecuted though they were, in the creation of national
epics and romances of chivalry from the thirteenth to the fifteenth
century. German Jews, being more than is generally recognized diligent
readers of the poets, were well acquainted with the drift of mediaeval
p