3500. Speaking of their business proceedings, I perceived that their life was not so much wrapped up in money as in business itself; for their riches did not consist in money laid up in coffers, nor in their merchandise itself, of which they think comparatively little, but in business itself, which was their end and their life. It was however common to them, at least to some of them, to have magnificent houses and suburban dwellings, where they lived luxuriously; but this was the case with a few only. I conversed with them [at length] on this business propensity, which was their life and soul, and their desire for possessing, by whatever art and management, what others possessed, even in any part of the world, and their thinking that everything must belong to them. Concerning the Jews, they said they hated them on account of their foreign traffic, but as to business, as they draw much money into their country by various secret methods unknown to them, they regard them with a degree of tolerance. But as they were unable to defraud them of anything, they had no dealings with them, though in point of fact they preferred them to all others, thinking that by their means they could attract the good of others to themselves.