[9] Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 21, 33, et alibi.—Benjamin of Tudela's celebrated Itinerary, having been translated into the various languages of Europe, passed into sixteen editions before the middle of the last century. Ibid., tom. i. pp. 79, 80.
[10] The beautiful lament, which the royal psalmist has put into the mouths of his countrymen, when commanded to sing the songs of Sion in a strange land, cannot be applied to the Spanish Jews, who, far from hanging their harps upon the willows, poured forth their lays with a freedom and vivacity which may be thought to savor more of the modern troubadour than of the ancient Hebrew minstrel. Castro has collected, under Siglo XV., a few gleanings of such as, by their incorporation into a Christian Cancionero, escaped the fury of the Inquisition. Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 265-364.
[11] Castro has done for the Hebrew what Casiri a few years before did for the Arabic literature of Spain, by giving notices of such works as have survived the ravages of time and superstition. The first volume of his Biblioteca Española contains an analysis accompanied with extracts from more than seven hundred different works, with biographical sketches of their authors; the whole bearing most honorable testimony to the talent and various erudition of the Spanish Jews.
[12] Basnage, History of the Jews, book 7, chap. 5, 15, 16.—Castro, Biblioteca Española, tom. i. pp. 116, 265, 267.—Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. i. p. 906;—tom. ii. pp. 63, 147, 459.—Samuel Levi, treasurer of Peter the Cruel, who was sacrificed to the cupidity of his master, is reported by Mariana to have left behind him the incredible sum of 400,000 ducats to swell the royal coffers. Tom. ii. p. 82.
[13] Sir Walter Scott, with his usual discernment, has availed himself of these opposite traits in his portraits of Rebecca and Isaac in Ivanhoe, in which he seems to have contrasted the lights and shadows of the Jewish character. The humiliating state of the Jews, however, exhibited in this romance, affords no analogy to their social condition in Spain; as is evinced not merely by their wealth, which was also conspicuous in the English Jews, but by the high degree of civilization, and even political consequence, which, notwithstanding the occasional ebullitions of popular prejudice, they were permitted to reach there.
[14] Calumnies of this kind were current all over Europe. The English reader will call to mind the monkish fiction of the little Christian,
"Slain with cursed Jewes, as it is notable,"
singing most devoutly after his throat was cut from ear to ear, in Chaucer's Prioresse's Tale. See another instance in the old Scottish ballad of the "Jew's Daughter" in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient Poetry."
[15] Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 43.—Mariana, Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 186, 187.—In 1391, 5000 Jews were sacrificed to the popular fury, and, according to Mariana, no less than 10,000 perished from the same cause in Navarre about sixty years before. See tom. i. p. 912.
[16] According to Mariana, the restoration of sight to the blind, feet to the lame, even life to the dead, were miracles of ordinary occurrence with St. Vincent. (Hist. de España, tom. ii. pp. 229, 230.) The age of miracles had probably ceased by Isabella's time, or the Inquisition might have been spared. Nic. Antonio, in his notice of the life and labors of this Dominican, (Bibliotheca Vetus, tom. ii. pp. 205, 207,) states that he preached his inspired sermons in his vernacular Valencian dialect to audiences of French, English, and Italians, indiscriminately, who all understood him perfectly well; "a circumstance," says Dr. McCrie, in his valuable "History of the Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Spain," (Edinburgh, 1829.) "which, if it prove anything, proves that the hearers of St. Vincent possessed more miraculous powers than himself, and that they should have been canonized, rather than the preacher." P. 87, note.