h they had
seen founded, and the changes of a thousand years, they themselves
inwardly unchanged and unchanging, while following many arts and many
trades besides money-lending, and they outlived persecution and did not
decay in prosperity. In their seven Roman synagogues they set up models
of the temple Titus had destroyed, and of the seven-branched candlestick
and of the holy vessels of Jerusalem which were preserved in the temple
of Peace as trophies of the Jews' subjection; they made candlesticks and
vessels of like shape for their synagogues, nursing their hatred,
praying for deliverance, and because those sacred things were kept in
Rome, it became a holy city for them, and they throve; and by and by
they oppressed their victors. Then came Domitian the Jew-hater, and
turned them out of their houses and laid heavy taxes upon them, and
forced them for a time to live in the caves and wild places and
catacombs of the Aventine, and they became dealers in spells
and amulets and love philtres, which they sold dear to the
ever-superstitious Romans, and Juvenal wrote scornful satires on them.
Presently they returned, under Trajan, to their old dwellings by the
Tiber. Thence they crept along the Cestian bridge to the island, and
from the island by the Fabrician bridge to the other shore, growing rich
again by degrees, and crowding their little houses upon the glorious
portico of Octavia, where Vespasian and Titus had met the Senate at dawn
on the day when they triumphed over the Jews and the fall of Jerusalem,
and the very place of the Jews' greatest humiliation became their
stronghold for ages.

Then all at once, in the twelfth century, they are the masters. The
Pierleoni hold Sant' Angelo, and close to their old quarters fortify the
Theatre of Marcellus, and a Pierleone is antipope in name, but a real
and ruling Pope in political fact, while Innocent the Second wanders
helplessly from town to town, and later, while Lewis the Seventh of
France leads the Second Crusade to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre, the
'Vicar of Christ' is an outcast before the race of those by whom Christ
was crucified. That was the highest point of the Jews' greatness in
Rome.

[Illustration: PIAZZA MONTANARA AND THE THEATRE OF MARCELLUS

From a print of the last century]

But it is noticeable that while the Hebrew race possesses in the very
highest degree the financial energy to handle and accumulate money, and
the tenacity to keep it for a lo