ABSTRACT
Hospitality was at first a luxury and subsequently a necessity in Jewish life. The Crusades mark the turning-point. Impoverishment followed in the wake of the warriors of the Cross, many Jewish communities were ruined, others reduced to beggary, and a good many schools were thus forcibly closed. Thus there grew up . among the Jews a class of travelling mendicants and a class of poor itinerant students, who wandered from place to place to sell their wares or to learn the Law. On their peregrinations these students suffered terrible privations, and of necessity lived entirely on fruits and vegetables. The entertainment of
IS8 Home Life. poor wayfarers became a necessary branch of communal organization, and the strain was met by distributing the guests among the various households of the town at which they broke their journeys fer awhile 1. This system, like all humane systems for the relief of the poor, increased the evil which it sought to mitigate, and was no doubt responsible for the creation of that troublesome feature of modern Jewish life, the professional mendicant traveller, who is less a tramp than a licensed blackmailer.
