And yet our fathers, who worshipped idols, killed the prophets, and cast the law behind their back, were punished only with a seventy-years' captivity, and then brought home again.
[4]Soon after his conversion Rabbi Samuel appears to have returned to Morocco, whence his surname, and there to have held a conference on religion with a learned Muslim, of which what purports to be his account, in MS., is to be found in the library of the Escurial.
[1] The famous epistle to Rabbi Isaac, אגרת, which was originally written in Arabic, and gives in twenty-seven chapters a refutation of Jewish objections to the Christian faith, was translated from the Hebrew into the Latin by the Dominican Alfonso de Buen Hombre (Alfonsus Bonihominis) in 1329, under the title, Tractatulus multum utilis ad convincendum Judæos de errore suo, quem habent de Messia adhuc venturo, et de observantia legis Mosaicæ ('A very useful treatise to convince the Jews of their error, which they have about the Messiah yet to come, and about the observance of the Mosaic law'), and often since, and has been inserted in the Bibliotheca Patrum, xviii, 1519; into Italian by G. F. Brunati (Trident.
1712); into German by W. Link (Altenburg, 1524), and inserted in Luther's works, v, 567–583; and often since; by E. Trautmann (Goslar, 1706); by F. G. Stieldorff (Trier, 1833); into English by Th.
[1] It has, however, been suggested that the Epistola Samuelis Maroccani was actually compiled much later, in the 15th century, as a piece of popular anti-Jewish writing.