454 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
councils, had been the leader in restrictive legislation. The introduction of the Inquisition made the life of this people more and more severe, although primarily its pitiless regu lations had no application to them. Persecutions filled the land with ungenuine proselytes, the converses, and these became subject to the inquisitorial court.
The final blow given by Ferdinand and Isabella fell in 1492, the year of the discovery of the New World, in a part of which was to be put into practice religious toleration as it was never before practised on the earth. The edict expelled all unbaptized Jews from Spain. Religious motives were be hind it, and religious agents executed it. The immediate occasion was the panic aroused by the alleged crucifixion of the child of La Guard ia — el santo nino de la Gruardia — one of the most notorious cases of alleged child murder by the Jews.1 Lope de Vega and other Spanish writers have made the case famous in Spanish literature. Ferdinand, according to Llorente, moved by the appeals of a Jewish embassy and Spanish grandees, was about to modify his sentence, when Torquemada, hastening into the presence of the king and his consort, presented the crucifix, exclaiming, " Judas Iscariot sold Christ for thirty pieces of silver. Your majesties are about to sell him for three thousand ducats. Here he is, take him and sell him."
The number of Jews who emigrated from Spain, in the summer of 1492, is estimated at 170,000 to 400,000.2 They went to Italy, Morocco, and the East, and, invited by king Manuel, 100,000 passed into Portugal. But here their tarry ing was destined to be short. In 1495 an edict offered them the old alternative of baptism or death, and children under fourteen were taken forcibly from their parents, and the sacred Christian rite was administered to them. Ten years later two thousand of the alleged ungenuine converts were massacred in cold blood.
1 See Lea's elaborate account in Ed. Hist, of Spain, 437-468; also Graetz, VIII. 466-472. The child's body could not be found, but the Inquisitors easily accounted for this by the report that it had been carried to heaven on the third day after the murder. 2 Graetz, VIII. 349, puts it at 300,000.
§ 77. THE JEWS. 455
Such was the drama of sufferings through which the Jews were made to pass during the mediaeval period in Western Europe. As against this treatment, what efforts were made to win the Jews by appeals to the gospel ? But the question might well be asked whether any appeals could be expected to win them when such a spirit of persecution prevailed. How could love and such hostility go together ? The attempts to convince them were made chiefly through tracts and disputations. Anselm, while he did not direct his treatise on the atonement, cur deus homo, to the Jews, says, that his argument was sufficient to persuade both Jew and pagan. Grosseteste sought to show the fulfilment of the old law and to prove the divinity of Christ in his de cessatione legalium, written in 1231. l The most famous of these tracts was written by Peter the Venerable. In Migne's edition it fills more than one hundred and forty columns, and would make a modern book of more than three hundred pages of the ordi nary size. Its heading, little adapted to win the favor of the people to whom it was addressed, ran " A Tract against the Inveterate Hardness of the Jews" (inveteratam duritiem). The author proceeded to show from the Hebrew Scriptures the divinity of Christ, at the same time declaring that " to the blind even the light is as night and the sun as the shades of darkness."
Some idea can be gotten of the nature of some of Peter's arguments from one of the many Scripture texts adduced to prove that Christ is the Son of God, Isa. Ixvi. 9 : " Shall I bring to the birth, and not cause to bring forth? saith Je hovah. Shall I that caused to bring forth shut the womb ? saith thy God." " What could be more clear, O Jews," adds the author, " in proving the generation of the Son of God ? For if God begat, so far as He begat, He is necessarily Father, and the Son of God, so far as He is begotten, is necessarily
*For the use made of it by Sir John Eliot and John Selden, see Steven son, p. 104. Among other tracts on the Jewish question were those of Rupert of Deutz ; Dial, inter Christum et Judceum, Migne, 170, 559-610 ; Richard of St. Victor, de Emmanuele, Migne, 196, 601-666 ; Alanus ab Insulis, Contra Jud&os, Migne, 210, 400-422.