d specially to the
Jews in Europe during the Middle Ages, and was both the cause of their
prosperity and of their misfortune. Of their prosperity, because they
cleverly contrived to become possessors of all the coin; and of their
misfortune, because their usurious demands became so detrimental to the
public welfare, and were often exacted with such unscrupulous severity,
that people not unfrequently became exasperated, and acts of violence were
committed, which as often fell upon the innocent as upon the guilty. The
greater number of the acts of banishment were those for which no other
motive was assigned, or, at all events, no other pretext was made, than
the usury practised by these strangers in the provinces and in the towns
in which they were permitted to reside. When the Christians heard that
these rapacious guests had harshly pressed and entirely stripped certain
poor debtors, when they learned that the debtors, ruined by usury, were
still kept prisoners in the house of their pitiless creditors, general
indignation often manifested itself by personal attacks. This feeling was
frequently shared by the authorities themselves, who, instead of
dispensing equal justice to the strangers and to the citizens, according
to the spirit of the law, often decided with partiality, and even with
resentment, and in some cases abandoned the Jews to the fury of the
people.

The people's feelings of hatred against the sordid avarice of the Jews was
continually kept up by ballads which were sung, and legends which were
related, in the public streets of the cities and in the cottages of the
villages--ballads and legends in which usurers were depicted in hideous
colours (Fig. 366). The most celebrated of these popular compositions was
evidently that which must have furnished the idea to Shakespeare of the
_Merchant of Venice_, for in this old English drama mention is made of a
bargain struck between a Jew and a Christian, who borrows money of him, on
condition that, if he cannot refund it on a certain day, the lender shall
have the right of cutting a pound of flesh from his body. All the evil
which the people said and thought of the Jews during the Middle Ages seems
concentrated in the Shylock of the English poet.

The rate of interest for loans was, nevertheless, everywhere settled by
law, and at all times. This rate varied according to the scarcity of
gold, and was always high enough to give a very ample profit to the
lenders, altho