children, at the celebration of their own passover.[1] With these foolish calumnies, the more probable charge of usury and extortion was industriously preferred against them, till at length, towards the close of the fourteenth century, the fanatical populace, stimulated in many instances by the no less fanatical clergy, and perhaps encouraged by the numerous class of debtors to the Jews, who found this a convenient mode of settling their accounts, made a fierce assault on this unfortunate people in Castile and Aragon, breaking into their houses, violating their most private sanctuaries, scattering their costly collections and furniture, and consigning the wretched proprietors to indiscriminate massacre, without regard to sex or age.[2]
In this crisis, the only remedy left to the Jews was a real or feigned conversion to Christianity. St. Vincent Ferrier, a Dominican of Valencia, performed such a quantity of miracles, in furtherance of this purpose, as might have excited the envy of any saint in the Calendar; and these, aided by his eloquence, are said to have changed the hearts of no less than thirty-five thousand of the
- ↑ 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, a.s it is notable,"
singing most devoutly after his throat was cut from ear to ear, 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."
- ↑ Bernaldez, Reyes Católicos, MS., cap. 43. — Mariana, Hist, de España, tom. ii. pp. 186, 187.—In 1391, 5,000 Jews were sacrificed to the popular fury, and according to Mariana, no less than 10,000 in perished from the same cause in Navarre about sixty years before, See tom. i. p. 912.
