The Chasidim, a small sect, who are great fanatics, and believe in the grossest absurdities. Their chief pretends to have communication with the angels in heaven, whom he can call to his assistance whenever he thinks proper. They are great advocates of the doctrine of transmigration, which they try to prove from Job xxxiii. 29, 30; and they study the Sohar and other Cabalistic books more than the Talmud. They have great faith in charms; and whenever they wish to discover a secret they conjure the angels to appear before them. They also believe that every soul goes to heaven during the time that the body is at rest, and that it is there obliged to write down in the book all the sins committed, and that when morning comes God commands the soul to return to its body.

In this chapter I have endeavoured to lay before the reader the chief principles of Modern Judaism, and to show briefly how they are carried out by the Jews at the present day. God grant that soon the Jewish Church may exchange Talmudic intolerance and Rabbinic legends for the charity of the Bible and the doctrines of Christianity!

"Give them a perfect creed! . . .
Sure wisdom and pure light,

With lowly, loving fear;

The stedfast ever-looking eye,

The ever-listening ear.

Calm faith that grasps the word

Of Him who cannot lie:

That hears alone the Voice Divine.

Though crowds are standing by.

Truth which contains true rest,

In this sad age of strife;

The truth of Him who is the Truth,
And in whom truth is life."

CHAPTER II.

JEWS IN MOROCCO-A JEWISH MARRIAGE.

ROM the very time when the prophecy of Moses began to be fulfilled, that the Jew was to become "an astonishment, a proverb, and a byword among all nations, whither the Lord shall lead thee," to within the last hundred years, Jewish history has been one of bitter persecution and oppression. And yet how cruelly alike have been the sufferings inflicted upon the Jew by his various tyrannical masters! What a monotony there is in the record of his calamities,-calamities by which other nations would have been swept away, and yet the Jew remains! The existence of the race of Israel and the truth of the inspired Scriptures go hand in hand. Until men can tear out of human history every page brightened with Jewish glory and watered with Jewish tears, they never can shake the infallible authority

C

of the Word, or lessen the deep foundation of our historical Christianity. How faithfully has the prophecy been accomplished: "The Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other; and there thou shalt serve other gods; which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even wood and stone. And among these nations shalt thou find no ease, neither shall the sole of thy foot have rest; but the Lord shall give thee a trembling heart and failing of eyes and sorrow of mind."

Five hundred years before the Christian era his nation is carried captive into Babylon, his land left desolate, and the sacred vessels of his Temple seized by profane hands to adorn the pride and swell the drunken orgies of Babylon. Years later, and his sacred city of Jerusalem is given up to pillage and massacre under the Syrian Antiochus, the observances of the Jewish religion forbidden, and the Temple dedicated to Jupiter Olympus, whose statue is fixed in the holy place, with burnt offerings and sacrifices. Two hundred years roll on their course, and then occurs the first Roman victory, when a million and a half of Jews perish, and all the markets of the world are stocked with Jewish slaves, and their amphitheatres watered with Jewish blood. Then breaks out the rebellion under Bar-Kochba, when the plough is driven over the foundations of Jerusalem, and the Roman settlement established under a new name, as if to wipe the very name of Jerusalem from the record of existing cities. Countryless, despised, and rejected, exile now becomes the Hebrew's lot, as it has been his lot, more or less, since the time of the Babylonian captivity. But the world receives him not. He has been driven, over and over again, from every nation in Europe. He has been persecuted in Spain, massacred by the Crusaders on

their way to recover the Holy Sepulchre, banished from France, expelled, after more than a century and a half of resistance, from England, again expelled from France, then from the cities of the Electorates, and lastly from Spain. It was not till the eighteenth century was drawing to a close that he was admitted to the rights of citizenship. In 1782 he was tolerated in Austria; admitted as a citizen of France in 1791; as a citizen of Prussia in 1812; and as a citizen of Denmark in 1814. In England, his synagogue was placed under the protection of the law, on the same footing with Nonconformist places of worship, in 1846; and he was released from civil disabilities in 1858. But whilst nations the most advanced in civilisation have mitigated or removed their medieval severities against the Jew, those which are most behindhand remain his cruel persecutors.

The Mohammedans have always been the bitterest oppressors of the Hebrew race; and in Morocco, where fanaticism is unchecked by modern civilisation, we may see the old spirit of persecution in full force. The Moroqueen Jews are there placed on the same level as unclean animals, and only tolerated on account of their utility, for as they are the only persons engaged in the practice of arts and handicrafts, their expulsion would subject the general population to great loss. In the city of Morocco they occupy a district called El-Millah, and at sunset, every evening, have to return to its wretched streets, from which they may not venture forth till sunrise to repair to their shops. They dare not ride on horseback, or set foot on a burial ground of the Moslems; and when they approach a mosque or a chapel of a saint, they must take off their shoes and carry them in their hands till they have passed it. The Jewesses, under the slightest

pretext, are beaten in the open streets by a woman specially charged with that duty; they are forbidden, under penalty of death, to resist; and it is only by flight that they can escape these acts of violence. In fact, so bitter is the hatred felt towards the 300,000 Jews in Morocco, that the latter are in daily fear of their lives. The Moslems of Algiers regret not having killed all the Jews before the arrival of the French, and give, on every opportunity, expression to their sorrow by attempting a massacre. Before the Turckos embarked at Algiers for Italy, they thought they could not better secure Allah's favour than by taking so many Jewish lives; and on their return to Constantina, after a public dinner given to them by the municipality, they all exclaimed, “Let us now go and kill the Jews;" but, on both occasions, timely precautions prevented such a catastrophe.

And yet, in spite of all degradations, many of the Moroqueen Jews, like those of their race all over Europe, are among the political leaders of their land. Indeed, nothing shows more plainly the vitality of the Hebrews than that, by sheer force of intellect, they should have worked their way to the front, in defiance of obstacles which to other races would have been insurmountable. And from the earliest times, statesmanship has been their forte. The counsellor to the Saracen king of Granada was Samuel Levi, a Jewish Rabbi. The prime minister of Alphonso VIII. was a man named Joseph, a Jew. The ambassador from Charlemagne to Haroun Alraschchid was one Isaac, a Jew. The chief minister of Louis le Debonnaire was Zedekiah, a Jew. Don Isaac Abarbanel and Manasseh Ben Israel, world-wide politicians, in their day, were Jews; and glancing at the statesmen of modern timesat Mendizabel, in Spain; Assur, in Holland; Cremieux, Good