precepts, he thought little of its doctrines; but,
night and day, he revolved his schemes for its earthly restoration and
triumph.

At that time, the Moors in Spain were far more deadly persecutors of the
Jews than the Christians were. Amidst the Spanish cities on the
coast, that merchant tribe had formed commercial connections with
the Christians, sufficiently beneficial, both to individuals and to
communities, to obtain for them, not only toleration, but something of
personal friendship, wherever men bought and sold in the market-place.
And the gloomy fanaticism which afterwards stained the fame of the great
Ferdinand, and introduced the horrors of the Inquisition, had not yet
made it self more than fitfully visible. But the Moors had treated this
unhappy people with a wholesale and relentless barbarity. At Granada,
under the reign of the fierce father of Boabdil,--"that king with the
tiger heart,"--the Jews had been literally placed without the pale of
humanity; and even under the mild and contemplative Boabdil himself,
they had been plundered without mercy, and, if suspected of secreting
their treasures, massacred without scruple; the wants of the state
continued their unrelenting accusers,--their wealth, their inexpiable
crime.

It was in the midst of these barbarities that Almamen, for the first
time since the day when the death-shriek of his agonised father rang in
his ears, suddenly returned to Granada. He saw the unmitigated miseries
of his brethern, and he remembered and repeated his vow. His name
changed, his kindred dead, none remembered, in the mature Almamen, the
beardless child of Issachar, the Jew. He had long, indeed, deemed it
advisable to disguise his faith; and was known, throughout the African
kingdoms, but as the potent santon, or the wise magician.

This fame soon lifted him, in Granada, high in the councils of the
court. Admitted to the intimacy of Muley Hassan, with Boabdil, and the
queen mother, he had conspired against that monarch; and had lived,
at least, to avenge his father upon the royal murderer. He was no less
intimate with Boabdil; but steeled against fellowship or affection for
all men out of the pale of his faith, he saw in the confidence of the
king only the blindness of a victim.

Serpent as he was, he cared not through what mire of treachery and fraud
he trailed his baleful folds, so that, at last, he could spring upon
his prey. Nature had given him sagacity and strength. The