The gar asserts that two thousand of them were burned.* cupidity of their persecutors and king Ferdinand, not satisfied with the amount, considerable as it was, of the confiscated properties of the Jews, invented a new plan to increase it. They determined to institute legal proceedings against some converted Jews who had been very rich, and who, fortunately for themselves, were no longer living. As a matter of course they were found guilty, what had been their property was confiscated, and by this means the funds of the royal treasury were augmented.† Hernando del Pulgar says, "a large number of these deceased Judaizers were found, whose goods and hereditaments were taken and applied to the king's and queen's exchequer." The avarice of Ferdinand would not allow him to respect even the dead. He ordered their bodies to be disinterred and burned, and, at the same time, he despoiled the children and heirs of the deceased of the estates which they had honestly and legally inherited, and thus reduced them to extreme poverty. Ferdinand applied the proceeds of his confiscations to the conquest of other lands; but in so doing he impoverished his own. His perfidy brought its own punishment with it, and the nation was made to suffer for his misdeeds. The siege of Granada cost an enormous sum of money. In order to raise it the unconverted Jews who were reputed to be wealthy were applied to for heavy loans, to be repaid on the surrender of the city. As soon as Ferdinand and Isabella gained possession of Granada, which they did on the 2d of January, 1492, they found themselves under the obligation of paying their debts to their Jewish creditors, as they had pledged their royal word to do; but, owing to the exhausted state of their treasury, they were unable to fulfil their word. In this dilemma Ferdinand, on the 31st of March, 1492, issued a decree that all the Jews who dwelt in the vicinity of the Aljamas of his kingdom should turn Christians, within four months, or be banished from it. *Cronica de los Reyes Católicos, part ii., chap. 77. § Mariana, lib. xxv., cap. 18. + Ibid. + Ibid. Zurita, Historia del Rey Don Hernando el Católico, lib. i., cap. 6. As the Jews had no choice left but either to turn Christians, quit Spain, or die, they began to sell off all their goods; and as the time allowed them by Ferdinand was so short, they were obliged to part with their properties for very inadequate prices, and sell them for what the Christians chose to give for them; and, according to Bernaldez, "they would barter a house for a donkey, and a vineyard for a small piece of cloth or linen."* In July, 1492, the exodus began; 3,000 Jews quitted Spain by Benavente for Braganza, in Portugal; by Zamora, for Miranda, in Portugal, 30,000; by Ciudad Rodrigo, for El Villar, in Portugal, 35,000; by Aléantara, for Marbau, in Portugal, 15,000; by Badajoz, for Yelves, in Portugal, 10,000. So that by Castile alone, 93,000 Jews left Spain for Portugal; 2,000 went to Navarre; 300 families went to places across the seas; and 8,000 sailed for Cadiz. Spanish historians differ as to the total number of Jews who quitted Spain. Bernaldez puts it at 160,000 persons; Abarea says 160,000 families; Zurita says 400,000 persons; Mariana says 800,000!+ Thus Spain expelled from her bosom hundreds of thousands of her most intelligent citizens, and impoverished herself by so doing. It is said of sultan Bajazet, to whose dominions many of them fled, that when any one puffed off to him the wisdom of the king and queen of Spain, he was in the habit of exclaiming, "I do not understand the wisdom of the Spanish sovereigns; since, when they had such excellent slaves as these Jews, they banished them from their territories." It was the same policy which killed the goose for the sake of the golden egg. The Jews who fled suffered incredible hardships; but here we terminate our notice of their history. Henceforth those who remained in Spain kept themselves in seclusion and obscurity; but they privately corresponded with their brethren abroad, and amassed wealth, with which they secretly in * De Castor, p. 165. Zurita, Historia del Rey Don Hernando, lib. i., cap. 6. Mariana, lib. xxvi., cap. 1. Illescas, Historia Pontifical, seg'a parte, lib. vi, cap. 20. fluenced foreign potentates against their oppressors. Hebrew gold helped to thwart Philip II. in his designs on the Netherlands and England. The Spanish nobility pride themselves on the purity of their descent, the sangre azul, or blue blood, derived from the veins of their Gothic and Roman ancestors. Juan's father boast of being of this stock: "A true hidalgo, free from every stain Byron makes Don Of Moor or Hebrew blood, he traced his source Yet there is good reason to believe that this "blue blood" has been mixed more than once with that of the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael. The only wonder is that any Christian should esteem it a disgrace to trace his ancestry back to the stem from which the Saviour came, as to the flesh, and through which all the nations of the earth were to be blessed! But the Spaniards are a very odd people, and Spain is a very odd country. The pride of the upper classes is equalled by the ignorance of the lower. Mr. Clark, in his " Gazpacho; or, Summer Months in Spain," gives the following instance of it: "Speaking of the Jews, a skeptic present interposed with a doubt as to whether they really had tails or not. The majority held that it was unquestionable; but as one or two still questioned it, the dispute was referred to Señor Vazquez, a travelled man. He quietly decided the matter in the affirmative; 'for,' said he, when I was in London, I saw Baron Rothschild, who is a Jew of a very high caste, and he had a tail as long as my arm.' So the sceptics were silenced, and smoked the cigar of acquiescence."* * De Castro, p. 67, n. ART. VII.-1. Address to the Graduates of Manhattan College. By Hon. JOHN P. O'NEILL. With Remarks of HIS GRACE THE MOST REV. ARCHBISHOP. 2. Sketch of the History and Progress of the College of the Christian Brothers. St. Louis, August, 1872. 3. Address to the Graduating Class of Rock Hill College. By A. LEO KNOTT, Esq. June 27, 1872. 4. Address to the Graduates of La Salle College, at the Annual Commencement, June 20, 1872. By JOHN J. CURRAN, B. C. L. 5. Address to the Graduates of St. Mary's College, San Francisco, Cal., at the Ninth Annual Commencement, June 7, 1872. WHAT Our views of the colleges of the Christian Brothers. are is sufficiently known to our readers. The object of the present article, therefore, is not to give our own impressions of those institutions, but partly to give a synopsis of the impressions of others, and partly to afford those interested in the subject an opportunity of judging the tree by its fruit. We take these pains, most cheerfully, for several reasons, any of which would be satisfactory to every sincere, impartial friend of the great cause of education, let his religious or political creed be what it may. Those whose memory is at fault, will find some of those reasons stated incidently in another article in this number, under the head of "New Catechism for Young Ladies." But we think one reason is enough; it is this: we have never known any educators, lay or clerical, Protestant or Catholic, in Europe or America, who, in our opinion, have more fully illustrated by their zeal, fidelity, and unwearied assiduity as instructors, the exclamation of Cicero, "What nobler employment, or more advantageous to the state, than that of those who train, develop, and store with knowledge the minds of the rising gene ration!"* In our number for last March+ we reviewed a work by M. D'Arsac,t in which most interesting and affecting illustrations are given of the true Christian heroism of this teaching order. How well attested their heroic and humane conduct is, may be seen from the following extract from an editorial which we find in the New York World, of September 1, instant, as we commence this article: "We are not altogether certain that the City of Boston will be wholly pleased with the award made by the French Academy of 2,000 francs, given by the Bostonians as a prize for 'patriotic self-devotion.' Perhaps it will be news to many of our readers that Boston ever requested the French Academy to award this prize in her name. It appears that towards the end of the late Franco-German war, while Paris was besieged, the Bostonians-be it said to their credit-collected the sum of 800,000 francs for the relief of French distress, and despatched a cargo of provisions of that value. Before the cargo arrived in France the siege had ended and the struggle with the Commune had begun. The supplies were sold in England, and the amount realized was for the most part distributed in France. The surplus sum of 2,000 francs remained over-one does not very clearly see how or why--and this sum the Boston committee handed over to the French Academy with a request that it would award the money as a prize to the French citizen who had displayed during the war the most conspicuous' patriotic self-devotion.' Boston was once a Puritan city; it is still no doubt to a considerable extent a Protestant city; and it is perhaps with something of a shock that the descendants of him who cut out the Popish cross' from England's flag will learn that this prize has been awarded to the members of a Roman Catholic order— the Christian Brothers.' This is a teaching order, and although it took its rise in France, our own city and many other parts of the United States are familiar with the operations of its members. The award of the Academy was explained in an address delivered by the Duke of Noailles, father of the present French Minister at Washington, and it remains to be seen whether the Bostonians will approve of the reasons assigned by their exalted representative for this disposi * Quid enim munus reipublicæ affere majus, meliusve possumus, quam si docemus atque erudimus juventutem.—Divin, ii, 2. + No. xlviii. Les Frères des Ecoles Chrétiennes pendant la guèrre de 1870–71. |