ed
as dogs, and kept apart....

I came to Granada, and there I beheld the Jews reigning. They had
parcelled out the provinces and the capital between them:
everywhere one of these accursed ruled. They collected the taxes,
they made good cheer, they were sumptuously clad, while your
garments, O Moslems, were old and worn-out. All the secrets of
state were known to them; yet is it folly to put trust in traitors!
While believers ate the bread of poverty, they dined delicately in
the palace.... How can we thrive if we live in the shade and the
Jews dazzle us with the glory of their pride?[834]

In mediaeval France the chief cause for complaint against the Jews is
that of not working with their hands but of enriching themselves by
"excessive usury." In the fifteenth century the Strasbourg preacher
Geyler asks: "Are the Jews above the Christians? Why will they not work
with their hands?... practising usury is not working. It is exploiting
others whilst remaining idle."[835] Such quotations as these might be
multiplied _ad infinitum_.

To attribute the persecution of the Jews to Christianity is therefore
ludicrous. That in a less enlightened age the Church should have adopted
rigorous measures--although no more rigorous than their own laws
demanded--against those Jews who practised magic and witchcraft must
appear deplorable to the modern mind, but so must many other phases of
mediaeval life. Why then hark back perpetually to the past? If the Jews
were persecuted in a less enlightened age, so were many other sections
of the community. Catholics were persecuted, Protestants were
persecuted, men were placed in the stocks for minor offences, scolding
women were ducked in the village pond. But if all these cruelties of the
dark ages are to be remembered and perpetuated on the plan of a tribal
blood-feud, what peace can there be for the world? The disastrous
results of this tendency were seen in the Irish Intellectuals, nourished
from infancy on the story of Ireland's wrongs, who, instead of sanely
facing present problems, unhinged their minds by brooding on historic
grievances, thereby sealing their own doom and plunging their country
into ruin. So, too, the enraged Feminists, harking back to injustices
that had long ceased to exist, embittered their lives by proclaiming
themselves the eternal enemies of Man. Emerson, the prophet of sanity,
declared: "The only ballast I know is