did not feel any scruple in parting with their most valued treasures, and giving them as pledges to the Jews for a loan of money when they were in need of it.  This plan of lending on pledge, or usury, belonged 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, although they too often required a very much higher rate.  In truth, the small security offered by those borrowing, and the arbitrary manner in which debts were at times cancelled, increased the risks of the lender and the normal difficulties of obtaining a loan.  We find everywhere, in all ancient legislations, a mass of rules on the rate of pecuniary interest to be allowed to the Jews.