THE SEVENTH-CENTURY KINGDOM 133church on various occasions. The penalties to be inflicted for the
infringement of these regulations were severe in the extreme. Thus
a Jew practising circumcision or following his dietary laws might re-
ceive one hundred lashes and be 'decalvated' -whether this means
scalping or just head-shaving is a matter of doubt. Possession of books
denying the truth of Christianity or the teaching of this to their
children was also punishable by a hundred lashes. There were in
addition monetary penalties, such as the fine of one hundred gold
solidi for using Jewish marriage customs. Most horrifYingly of all,
Jewish children over the age of ten became liable to receive the same
punishments as adults for breaches of the laws.
These new laws of Ervig must have been issued immediately after
his accession in 680, for they were formally confirmed by the bishops
assembled at XII Toledo in January 681. It is reasonable to believe
that much of the responsibility for the conceiving and drafting of this
set of laws must lie with the Church, and in particular with the new
bishop of Toledo, Julian (680-690), himself of Jewish descent. But
the king can hardly have been indifferent on this subject. Ervig was
the dedicatee of julian's On the Proof of the Sixth Age, a work written
to combat Jewish arguments, and the two men had been personal
friends prior to their elevations to monarchy and metropolitanate in
- If, as has sometimes been argued, Ervig was a tool of the Church,
he was a very willing one.so There is insufficient evidence to deter-
mine whether Reccesuinth, who was under considerable pressure from
the Church on other scores, acted against the Jews out of personal
conviction or in response to the demands of the episcopate, but in
the case of Ervig no such possibility of a conflict of motives existed.
In this, and perhaps in his patronage of the learned Bishop Julian, he
was something of another Sisebut.
From the reign of his successor Egica (687-702), a monarch whose
reputation is rather sinister, we have almost our last surviving secular
and ecclesiastical enactments, and with them further laws concerning
the Jews. In 693 Egica issued a decree, which was reiterated by the
bishops at XVI Toledo the same year, freeing all Jews who had con-
verted to Christianity and had followed its precepts without equivoca-
tion, from the taxes they owed as members of the Jewish community
to the royal fisc. It is interesting to note that previously converts had
laboured under the same burden of special taxation -when intro-
duced we do not know - as was imposed upon other Jews. Now,
however, the fiscal obligations of the latter were to be increased by