of Tuy, writing about 1230, these simple restraints were scarce enforced. The heretic Cathari of Leon, he tells us, were wont to circumcise themselves in order, under the guise of Jews, to propound heretical dogmas and dispute with Christians; what they dared not utter as heretics they could freely disseminate as Jews. The governors and judges of the cities listened approvingly to heresies put forth by Jews, who were their friends and familiars, and if any one, inflamed by pious zeal, angered these Jews, he was treated as if he had touched the apple of the eye of the ruler; they also taught other Jews to blaspheme Christ and thus the Catholic faith was perverted.[262]
This represents a laxity of toleration impossible in any other land at the period, yet the Spanish Jews were not wholly shielded from inroads of foreign fanaticism. Before the crusading spirit had been organized for the conquest of the Holy Land, ardent knights sometimes came to wage war with the Spanish Saracens, and their religious fervor was aggrieved by the freedom enjoyed by the Jews. About 1068, bands of these strangers treated them as they had been wont to do at home, slaying and plundering them without mercy. The Church of Spain was as yet uncontaminated by race hatred and the bishops interposed to save the victims. For this they were warmly praised by Alexander II, who denounced the crusaders as acting either from foolish ignorance or blind cupidity. Those whom they would slay, he said, were perhaps predestined by God to salvation; he cited Gregory I to the same effect and pointed out the difference between Jews and Saracens, the latter of whom make war on Christians and could justly be assailed.[263] Had the chair of St. Peter always been so worthily filled, infinite misery might have been averted and the history of Christendom been spared some of its most repulsive pages.
When the crusading spirit extended to Spain, it sometimes aroused similar tendencies. In 1108, Archbishop Bernardo of Toledo took the cross and religious exaltation was ardent. The disastrous rout of Ucles came and was popularly ascribed to the Jews in the Castilian army, arousing indignation which manifested itself in a massacre at Toledo and in the burning of synagogues. Alfonso VI vainly endeavored to detect and punish those responsible and his death, in 1109, was followed by similar outrages which remained unavenged.[264] This was a sporadic outburst which soon exhausted itself. A severer trial came from abroad, when, in 1210, the Legate Arnaud of Narbonne led his crusading hosts to the assistance of Alfonso IX. Although their zeal for the faith was exhausted by the capture of Calatrava and few of them remained to share in the crowning glories of Las Navas de Tolosa, their ardor was sufficient to prompt an onslaught on the unoffending Jews. The native nobles sought in vain to protect the victims, who were massacred without mercy, so that Abravanel declares this to have been one of the bloodiest persecutions that they had suffered and that more Jews fled from Spain than Moses led out of Egypt.[265]
CONDITION OF SPANISH JEWS
This had no permanent influence on the condition of the Spanish Hebrews. During the long reigns of San Fernando III and Alfonso X of Castile and of Jaime I of Aragon, covering the greater part of the thirteenth century, the services which they rendered to the monarchs were repaid with increasing favor and protection. After Jaime had conquered Minorca he took, in 1247, all Jews settling there under the royal safeguard and threatened a fine of a thousand gold pieces for wrong inflicted on any of them and, in 1250, he required that Jewish as well as Christian testimony must be furnished in all actions, civil or criminal, brought by Christians against Jews. So, when in 1306 Philippe le Bel expelled the Jews from France and those of Majorca feared the same fate, Jaime II reassured them by pledging the royal faith that they should remain forever in the land, with full security for person and property, a pledge confirmed, in 1311, by his son and successor Sancho.[266] In Castile, when San Fernando conquered Seville, in 1244, he gave to the Jews a large space in the city, and, in defiance of the canons, he allotted to them four Moorish mosques to be converted into synagogues, thus founding the aljama of Seville, destined to a history so deplorable. Alfonso X, during his whole reign, patronized Jewish men of learning, whom he employed in translating works of value from Arabic and Hebrew; he built for them an observatory in Seville, where were made the records embodied in the Alfonsine Tables; he permitted those of Toledo to erect the magnificent synagogue now known as Santa María la Blanca, and Jews fondly relate that the Hebrew school, which he transferred from Córdova to Toledo, numbered twelve thousand students.[267] He was prompt to maintain their privileges, and, when the Jews of Burgos complained that in mixed suits the alcaldes would grant appeals to him when the Christian suitor was defeated, while refusing them to defeated Jews, he at once put an end to the discrimination, a decree which Sancho IV enforced with a penalty of a hundred maravedís when, in 1295, the complaint was repeated.[268] Yet Alfonso, in his systematic code known as the Partidas, which was not confirmed by the Córtes until 1348, allowed himself to be influenced by the teachings of the Church and the maxims of the imperial jurisprudence. He accepted the doctrine of the canons that the Jew was merely suffered to live in captivity among Christians; he was forbidden to speak ill of the Christian faith, and any attempt at proselytism was punished with death and confiscation. The murder rite was alluded to as a rumor, but in case it was practised it was a capital offence and the culprits were to be tried before the king himself. Jews were ineligible to any office in which they could oppress Christians; they were forbidden to have Christian servants, and the purchase of a Christian slave involved the death punishment. They were not to associate with Christians in eating, drinking, and bathing and the amour of a Jew with a Christian woman incurred death. While Jewish physicians might prescribe for Christian patients, the medicine must be compounded by a Christian, and the wearing of the hateful distinctive badge was ordered under penalty of ten gold maravedís or of ten lashes. At the same time Christians were strictly forbidden to commit any wrong on the person or property of Jews or to interfere in any way with their religious observances, and no coercion was to be used to induce them to baptism, for Christ wishes only willing service.[269]
ATTEMPTS AT CONVERSION
This was prophetic of evil days in the future and the reign of Alfonso proved to be the culminating point of Jewish prosperity. The capital and commerce of the land were to a great extent in their hands; they managed its finances and collected its revenues. King, noble and prelate entrusted their affairs to Jews, whose influence consequently was felt everywhere. To precipitate them from this position to the servitude prescribed by the canons required a prolonged struggle and may be said to have taken its remote origin in an attempt at their conversion. In 1263 the Dominican Fray Pablo Christiá, a converted Jew, challenged the greatest rabbi of the day, Moseh aben Najman, to a disputation which was presided over by Jaime I in his Barcelona palace. Each champion of course boasted of victory; the king dismissed Nachmanides not only with honor but with the handsome reward of three hundred pieces of gold, but he ordered certain Jewish books to be burnt and blasphemous passages in the Talmud to be expunged.[270] He further issued a decree ordering all his faithful Jews to assemble and listen reverently to Fray Pablo whenever he desired to dispute with them, to furnish him with what books he desired, and to defray his expenses, which they could deduct from their tribute.[271] Two years later Fray Pablo challenged another prominent Hebrew, the Rabbi Ben-Astruch, chief of the synagogue of Gerona, who refused until he had the pledge of King Jaime, and of the great Dominican St. Ramon de Peñafort, that he should not be held accountable for what he might utter in debate, but when, at the request of the Bishop of Gerona, Ben-Astruch wrote out his argument, the frailes Pablo and Ramon accused him of blasphemy, for it was manifestly impossible that a Jew could defend his strict monotheism and Messianic belief without a course of reasoning that would appear blasphemous to susceptible theologians. The rabbi alleged the royal pledge; Jaime proposed that he should be banished for two years and his book be burnt, but this did not satisfy the Dominican frailes and he dismissed the matter, forbidding the prosecution of the rabbi except before himself. Appeal seems to have been made to Clement IV, who addressed King Jaime in wrathful mood, blaming him for the favor shown to Jews and ordering him to deprive them of office and to depress and trample on them; Ben-Astruch especially, he said, should be made an example without, however, mutilating or slaying him.[272] This explosion of papal indignation fell harmless, but the zeal of the Dominicans had been inflamed and in laboring for the conversion of the Jews they not unnaturally aroused antagonism toward those who refused to abandon their faith. So long before as 1242, Jaime had issued an edict, confirmed by Innocent IV in 1245, empowering the Mendicant friars to have
