In France a prelate condemned the Jews because the “country people looked upon them as the only people of God,” whereupon “all joined in a carnival of persecution, and the history of the Jews became nothing else than a successive series of massacres.”  In Spain the Jews were treated more kindly by the Moors than by the Catholics.  At first their services were valued in the crafts and trades, “but the extravagance and consequent poverty of the nobles, as well as the increasing power of the priesthood, ultimately brought about a disastrous change.  The estates of the nobles and, it is also believed, those attached to the cathedrals and churches, were in many cases mortgaged to the Jews; hence it was not difficult for ‘conscience’ to get up a persecution when goaded to its ‘duty’ by the pressure of want and shame.  Gradually the Jews were deprived of the privilege of living where they pleased; their rights were diminished and their taxes augmented.”

To their lowest stage of misery, however, the Jews were reduced during one of the most holy enterprises which the papacy launched during the Middle Ages—­the Crusades.  “The crusading movement was inaugurated by a wholesale massacre and persecution first of the Jew, and afterwards of the Mussulman. . . .  Shut out from all opportunity for the development of their better qualities, the Jews were gradually reduced to a decline both in character and condition.  From a learned, influential, and powerful class of the community, we find them, after the inauguration of the Crusades, sinking into miserable outcasts; the common prey of clergy and nobles and burghers, and existing in a state worse than slavery itself.  The Christians deprived the Jews even of the right of holding real estate; and confined them to the narrower channels of traffic.  Their ambition being thus fixed upon one subject, they soon mastered all the degrading arts of accumulating gain; and prohibited from investing their gain in the purchase of land, they found n more profitable employment of it in lending it at usurious interest to the thoughtless and extravagant.”  In course of time the borrowers recouped their losses by inaugurating raids upon the Jews.  Jew-baiting, persecutions, expatriations of Jewish settlers, were of frequent occurrence.  Towards the end of the thirteenth century 16,000 Jews were expelled from England and their property confiscated.  In Germany “they had to pay all manner of iniquitous taxes—­body tax, capitation tax, trade taxes, coronation tax, and to present a multitude of gifts, to mollify the avarice or supply the necessities of emperor, princes, and barons.  It did not suffice, however, to save them from the loss of their property.  The populace and the lower clergy also must be, satisfied; they, too, had passions to gratify.  A wholesale slaughter of the ’enemies of Christianity’ was inaugurated.  Treves, Metz, Cologne, Mentz, Worms, Spires, Strassburg, and other cities were deluged with the blood of the