or Unitarians, many of whom consequently went over to the Collegiants.
After all, then, the decree of toleration embodied in the Union of Utrecht did not secure very much in the way of real toleration. Non-Calvinist Christians were allowed to live in the Netherlands without suffering in person or pro perty on account of their nonconformity. For those days even that was a great deal ; but the right of public worship was quite another matter. And if the Union of Utrecht did not secure real toleration for all Christian sects, much less did it guarantee anything to the Jews, who had not been contemplated in it at all, who had not even been formally admitted into the Netherlands, but whose presence had been more or less connived at. Even in 1619, when the Jewish question was definitely raised in the Netherlands, it was decided to allow each city to please itself whether it would permit Jews to live there or not. Their position was precarious indeed. They had to take care not to give offence to the religious susceptibilities of their neighbours. And their troubles commenced soon enough.
About the year 1618 there had arrived in Amsterdam a Marano refugee from Portugal whose name was Gabriel da Costa. Both he and his late father had held office in the Catholic Church, but seized by a sudden longing to return to the religion of his ancestors, Gabriel fled to Amsterdam, where he embraced Judaism and changed his name from Gabriel to Uriel. His ideas about Judaism had been derived chiefly from reading the Old Testament, and his contact with actual Rabbinic Judaism somewhat disappointed him. He thereupon commenced to speak contemptuously of the Jews as Pharisees, and aired his views very freely against the belief in the immortality of the soul, and the inspiration of the Bible. These views were, of course, as much opposed to Christianity as to Judaism. The Jewish physician, de Silva, as already stated, tried to controvert these heretical
