ws, who had been settled in vast numbers in Spain
since the reign of the Emperor Adrian; some authorities assert still
earlier.[A] They were, therefore, nearly the original colonists of the
country, and regarded it with almost as much attachment as they had
felt towards Judea. When persecution began to work, "90,000 Jews were
compelled to receive the sacrament of baptism," the bodies of the
more obstinate tortured, and their fortunes confiscated; and yet--a
remarkable instance of inconsistency--_they were not permitted to
leave Spain_; and this species of persecution continued from 600
downwards. Once or twice edicts of expulsion were issued, but speedily
recalled; the tyrants being unwilling to dismiss victims whom they
delighted to torture, or deprive themselves of industrious slaves over
whom they might exercise a lucrative oppression; and a statute was
enacted, "that the Jews who had been baptized should be _constrained_,
for the honor of the church, to persevere in the _external practice_
of a religion which they _inwardly_ disbelieved and detested."[B]

[Footnote A: Basnage asserts that the Jews were introduced into Spain
by the fleet of Soloman, and the arms of Nebuchadnezzar, and that
Hadrian transported _forty thousand_ families of the tribe of Judah,
and ten thousand of the tribe of Benjamin, etc.]

[Footnote B: "Gibbon's Decline and Fall," vol. 6, chap. xxxvii,
from which all the previous sentences in inverted commas have been
extracted.]

How, then, can compelled obedience to this statute be termed
hypocrisy? Persecution, privation, tyranny, may torture and destroy
the body, but they cannot force the mind to the adoption of, and
belief in tenets, from which the very treatment they commanded must
urge it to revolt. Of the 90,000 Jews forcibly baptized by order of
Sisebut, and constrained to the external profession of Catholicism,
not ten, in all probability, became actually Christians. And yet how
would it have availed them to relapse into the public profession of
the faith they so obeyed and loved in secret? To leave the country was
utterly impossible. It is easy to talk now of such proceedings being
their right course of acting, when every land is open to the departure
and entrance of every creed; but it was widely different then, and,
even if they could have quitted Spain, there was not a spot of ground,
in the whole European and Asiatic world, where persecution, extortion,
and banishment would not equa