Nor was their influence simply industrial.

Through their connexion with the Jewish schools in Spain and the East they opened a way for the revival of physical sciences.

A Jewish medical school seems to have existed at Oxford; Roger Bacon himself studied under English rabbis.

But the general progress of civilization now drew little help from the Jew, while the coming of the Cahorsine and Italian bankers drove him from the field of commercial finance.

He fell back on the petty usury of loans to the poor, a trade necessarily accompanied with much of extortion and which roused into fiercer life the religious hatred against their race.