gossa, the bulk of the Spanish deeds relating to the Jews would be accessible. Much would remain to be gleaned from the municipal archives of towns like Lérida, Gerona, Tudela, Huesca, Avila, and elsewhere: but these can only come to light by chance, not research, which could rarely succeed in extricating the Jewish needles from the bundles of Spanish hay. I have not been able to append many documents of interest to my calendar; my aim was to obtain a list of documents rather than transcripts of the documents themselves. It was only by rigidly refraining from peeping at documents of interest as I came across them in the catalogues of the archives that I was enabled to make my lists so far as possible complete. Nor could I check or control in any way the entries of the archivists, which I have left in exactly the same form as regards spelling and punctuation as that in which I found them. This will account for the various ways in which proper names are spelt; these I have left as I found them, merely collecting together the various forms in the indexes at the end. To have attempted to check them by the documents at the time would have reduced my spoil to one tenth of its present extent, to have checked them by correspondence afterwards was beyond my power. I have not even attempted to alter some eccentricities of spelling which occurred in my authorities; the readers to whom I appeal will not be much disturbed by omissions of aspirates or confusions of g and j. If London printers have at times made this confusion worse confounded, they may possibly be forgiven on the score of the general accuracy with which they have reproduced my entries. I have added to the calendar of documents transcripts of a few which seemed to me, for various reasons, of special interest, a report on documents at Manresa which I was not myself able personally to visit, and a general discourse in Spanish on Jewish historiography in general and on Spanish Jewish history in particular, which I contributed to the Boletin of the Royal Academy of History of Madrid on being elected a corresponding member of that body. To make this book as useful as possible for students of Spanish Jewish history I have added a bibliography of the subject and a list of Spanish Jewish rabbis, with their dates and places of residence, more for the use of Spanish archivists in these various localities than for the experts in Jewish literature, who could doubtless supplement my list. Finally, I have drawn attention, in an introduction, which is intended to serve as a sort of Index Rerum, to the main points of interest in the documents I have unearthed. This is reproduced, practically unchanged, from the pages of the Jewish Quarterly Review, in which it first appeared. I have to thank you for permitting me to let it appear there, and the editors for allowing me to reproduce it here. During my stay in Spain I was received with much courtesy by various archivists, and by the small but capable band of Spanish students of history who are interested in our subject. In particular I have to mention among the first, Don S. Bofarul y Mascaro, the genial and erudite keeper of the Royal Records of Aragon at Barcelona, and, among the latter, Don Fidel Fita, who has himself done so much for Spanish Jewish history, and Don F. Fernandez y Gonzalez, his worthy coadjutor in the same field. Lastly, I was helped throughout my researches by the advice and encouragement of the late M. Isidore Loeb, who took the greatest possible interest in my researches, dealing, as they did, with a subject of which he was complete master. My regret is poignant that he did not live to see more than the first two or three sheets of this book, which owed so much to his encouragement. It is difficult to express adequately the loss which Jewish history in general, and Spanish Jewish history in particular, have sustained by M. Loeb's death. He alone among the younger men was equally master of Jewish literature and Spanish records. NOTE. THE seal on the title-page was first published in my Jews of Angevin England, 1892, p. 26. It was found in Scotland, and is now preserved in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries at Edinburgh. The inscription on the seal runs as follows: שלמה בר יצחק אלמעמם אללה וליה. * Except the name, this gives no sense in Hebrew. The late M. Loeb, with the aid of M. Joseph Derenbourg, of the Institute, discovered that the inscription was Arabic in Hebrew characters, and may be interpreted Solomon ben Esaac, who has donned the turban, I have conjectured that he was a Spanish Jew of Andalusia, who had been forced to adopt Islam ("don the turban ") after the persecutions of 1145, and then made his escape to England. His seal may, therefore, be appropriately prefixed to an English book dealing with Spanish-Jewish history. J. J. * The letters are represented by a single composite letter. |