ABSTRACT
THE Renaissance produced a violent transformation In the relative excellence of the Jewish and Christian systems of education in Europe. Before the revival of letters, the Jews were probably better educated than any other section of the European population. The average Jew could always read and write 1, which is more than can be said of the ordinary layman in the middle ages. But at the Renaissance, Christian education not only took a vast stride forwards, but a backward blow was administered at the J ~ws, except those who dwelt in Italy, which left them far in the rear· for some centuries. Moreover, the literary and religious upheavals which modernized the rest of Europe seem by a species of natural as well as deliberate reaction to have cast the Jews into their one real experience of medieval gloom. The Jewish middle ages began just when the medieval cloud vanished from Christian society.
