chool of health the Jews have never known.
For many centuries it would have been impossible for them to have
lived in peace as farmers or agricultural labourers among a Christian
peasantry, and if they ever possessed any aptitude or taste for
agricultural pursuits they have long since wholly lost it.

Their moral like their physical characteristics present strange
contrasts. No natural want of moral elevation or tenderness or grace
can be ascribed to the nation that has produced both the Old Testament
and the Gospels, and has most largely shaped and inspired the moral
life of the civilised world. In Christian times no race has maintained
its faith with a more devoted courage, and it has encountered and
survived persecutions before which the persecutions of other creeds
dwindle almost into insignificance. M. Leroy-Beaulieu quotes the
statement of the grand Rabbi Lehmann, that it is a clearly attested
fact that in two months of the year 1096 twelve thousand Jews, whose
names have been preserved, were massacred in the towns of the Rhine
alone, because they refused to accept a Christian baptism. The Spanish
Jews who perished by one of the most excruciating deaths rather than
forswear their faith may be numbered by thousands, and those who
preferred exile and spoliation to apostasy, by hundreds of thousands.
Even in our own sceptical and materialising age the conduct of the
Russian Jews under the recent savage persecution shows that the old
spirit is not extinct. In the face of the long and splendid roll of
Jewish heroism, it is idle to dwell on the fact that in each great
persecution some Jews have yielded to the fear of death and consented
to perform the rites of a faith which they inwardly abhorred, or on
the fact that a few Rabbis have under such circumstances justified
these feigned conversions.

Prolonged persecution, however, has had a profound influence on their
character, and its influence in some respects has been very
pernicious. Hatred naturally provokes hatred, and violent oppression
against which there is no redress is naturally encountered by
subterfuge and fraud. A race who were for centuries playing their part
in life against overwhelming obstacles learned to avail themselves of
every advantage. Adulation, servility, falsehood, and deception became
common among them. They became at once hard, wily, and rapacious, and
ready instruments in ignoble and oppressive callings. Shut out from
open paths and honoura