CHAPTER I

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[Illustration: "_Levi! A great cry of anguish rent the air._"

_Chapter VIII_]

The Wayfarers Library

THE GRANDCHILDREN OF THE GHETTO

by

ISRAEL ZANGWILL

J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd.

London

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

I. THE CHRISTMAS DINNER 3

II. RAPHAEL LEON 24

III. 'THE FLAG OF JUDAH' 45

IV. THE TROUBLES OF AN EDITOR 63

V. A WOMAN'S GROWTH 77

VI. COMEDY OR TRAGEDY? 88

VII. WHAT THE YEARS BROUGHT 112

VIII. THE ENDS OF A GENERATION 122

IX. THE 'FLAG' FLUTTERS 126

X. ESTHER DEFIES THE UNIVERSE 137

XI. GOING HOME 150

XII. A SHEAF OF SEQUELS 161

XIII. THE DEAD MONKEY AGAIN 185

XIV. SIDNEY SETTLES DOWN 192

XV. FROM SOUL TO SOUL 200

XVI. LOVE'S TEMPTATIONS 219

XVII. THE PRODIGAL SON 232

XVIII. HOPES AND DREAMS 239

GLOSSARY 249

GRANDCHILDREN OF THE GHETTO

CHAPTER I

THE CHRISTMAS DINNER

Daintily-embroidered napery, beautiful porcelain, Queen Anne silver,

exotic flowers, glittering glass, soft rosy light, creamy expanses of

shirt-front, elegant low-necked dresses--all the conventional

accompaniments of Occidental gastronomy.

It was not a large party. Mrs. Henry Goldsmith professed to collect

guests on artistic principles, as she did _bric-a-brac_, and with an

eye to general conversation. The elements of the social salad were

sufficiently incongruous to-night, yet all the ingredients were

Jewish.

For the history of the Grandchildren of the Ghetto, which is mainly a

history of the middle classes, is mainly a history of isolation. 'The

Upper Ten' is a literal phrase in Judah, whose aristocracy just about

suffices for a synagogue quorum. Great majestic luminaries, each with

its satellites, they swim serenely in the golden heavens. And the

middle classes look up in worship, and the lower classes in

supplication. 'The Upper Ten' have no spirit of exclusiveness; they

are willing to entertain royalty, rank, and the arts with a catholic

hospitality that is only Eastern in its magnificence, while some of

them remain Jews only for fear of being considered snobs by society.

But the middle-class Jew has been more jealous of his caste, and for

caste reasons. To exchange hospitalities with the Christian when you

cannot eat his dinners were to get the worst of the bargain; to invite

his sons to your house when they cannot marry your daughters were to

solicit awkward complications. In business, in civic affairs, in

politics, the Jew has mixed freely with his fellow-citizens; but

indiscriminate social relations only become possible through a

religious decadence which they in turn accelerate. A Christian in a

company of middle-class Jews is like a lion in a den of Daniels. They

show him deference and their prophetic side.

Mrs. Henry Goldsmith was of the upper middle classes, and her husband

was the financial representative of the Kensington Synagogue at the

United Council; but her swan-like neck was still bowed beneath the

yoke of North London, not to say provincial, Judaism. So to-night

there were none of those external indications of Christmas which are

so frequent at 'good' Jewish houses--no plum-pudding, snap-dragon,

mistletoe, not even a Christmas-tree. For Mrs. Henry Goldsmith did not

countenance these coquettings with Christianity. She would have told

you that the incidence of her dinner on Christmas Eve was merely an

accident, though a lucky accident, in so far as Christmas found Jews

perforce at leisure for social gatherings. What she was celebrating

was the Feast of Chanukah--of the re-dedication of the Temple after

the pollutions of Antiochus Epiphanes--and the memory of the national

hero, Judas Maccabaeus. Christmas crackers would have been incompatible

with the Chanukah candles which the housekeeper, Mary O'Reilly, forced

her master to light, and would have shocked that devout old dame. For

Mary O'Reilly, as good a soul as she was a Catholic, had lived all her

life with Jews, assisting while yet a girl in the kitchen of Henry

Goldsmith's father, who was a pattern of ancient piety and a prop of

the Great Synagogue. When the father died, Mary, with all the other

family belongings, passed into the hands of the son, who came up to

London from a provincial town, and, with a grateful recollection of

her motherliness, domiciled her in his own establishment. Mary knew

all the ritual laws and ceremonies far better than her new mistress,

who, although a native of the provincial town in which Mr. Henry

Goldsmith had established a thriving business, had received her

education at a Brussels boarding-school. Mary knew exactly how long to

keep the meat in salt, and the heinousness of frying steaks in butter.

She knew that the fire must not be poked on the Sabbath, nor the gas

lit or extinguished, and that her master must not smoke till three

stars appeared in the sky. She knew when the family must fast, and

when and how it must feast. She knew all the Hebrew and Jargon

expressions which her employers studiously boycotted, and she was the

only member of the household who used them habitually in her

intercourse with the other members. Too late the Henry Goldsmiths

awoke to the consciousness of her tyranny, which did not permit them

to be irreligious even in private. In the fierce light which beats

upon a provincial town with only one synagogue, they had been

compelled to conform outwardly with many galling restrictions, and

they had subconsciously looked forward to emancipation in the mighty

Metropolis. But Mary had such implicit faith in their piety, and was

so zealous in the practice of her own faith, that they had not the

courage to confess that they scarcely cared a pin about a good deal of

that for which she was so solicitous. They hesitated to admit that

they did not respect their religion (or what she thought was their

religion) as much as she did hers. It would have equally lowered them

in her eyes to admit that their religion was not so good as hers,

besides being disrespectful to the cherished memory of her ancient

master. At first they had deferred to Mary's Jewish prejudices out of

good-nature and carelessness, but every day strengthened her hold upon

them; every act of obedience to the ritual law was a tacit

acknowledgment of its sanctity, which made it more and more difficult

to disavow its obligation. The dread of shocking Mary came to dominate

their lives, and the fashionable house near Kensington Gardens was

still a veritable centre of true Jewish orthodoxy, with little to make

old Aaron Goldsmith turn in his grave.

It is probable, though, that Mrs. Henry Goldsmith would have kept a

_kosher_ table even if Mary had never been born. Many of their

acquaintances and relatives were of an orthodox turn. A _kosher_

dinner could be eaten even by the heterodox, whereas a _tripha_ dinner

choked off the orthodox. Thus it came about that even the Rabbinate

might safely stoke its spiritual fires at Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's.

Hence, too, the prevalent craving for a certain author's blood could

not be gratified at Mrs. Henry Goldsmith's Chanukah dinner. Besides,

nobody knew where to lay hands upon Edward Armitage, the author in

question, whose opprobrious production _Mordecai Josephs_, had

scandalised West-End Judaism.

'Why didn't he describe our circle?' asked the hostess, an angry fire

in her beautiful eyes. 'It would have at least corrected the picture.

As it is, the public will fancy that we are all daubed with the same

brush--that we have no thought in life beyond dress, money and

solo-whist.'

'He probably painted the life he knew,' said Sidney Graham, in

defence.

'Then I am sorry for him,' retorted Mrs. Goldsmith. 'It's a great pity

he had such detestable acquaintances. Of course, he has cut himself

off from the possibility of any better now.'

The wavering flush on her lovely face darkened with disinterested

indignation, and her beautiful bosom heaved with judicial grief.

'I should hope so,' put in Miss Cissy Levine sharply. She was a pale,

bent woman, with spectacles, who believed in the mission of Israel,

and wrote domestic novels to prove that she had no sense of humour.

'No one has a right to foul his own nest. Are there not plenty of

subjects for the Jew's pen without his attacking his own people? The

calumniator of his race should be ostracised from decent society.'

'As according to him there is none,' laughed Sidney Graham, 'I cannot

see where the punishment comes in.'

'Oh, he may say so in that book,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels, an

amiable, loose-thinking lady of florid complexion, who dabbled

exasperatingly in her husband's philanthropic concerns from a vague

idea that the wife of a committee-man is a committee-woman. 'But he

knows better.'

'Yes, indeed,' said Mr. Montagu Samuels. 'The rascal has only written

it to make money. He knows it's all exaggeration and distortion. But

anything spicy pays nowadays.'

'As a West Indian merchant, he ought to know,' murmured Sidney Graham

to his charming cousin, Adelaide Leon.

The girl's soft eyes twinkled as she surveyed the serious little City

magnate with his placid spouse. Montagu Samuels was narrow-minded and

narrow-chested, and managed to be pompous on a meagre allowance of

body. He was earnest and charitable (except in religious wrangles,

when he was earnest and uncharitable), and knew himself a pillar of

the community, an exemplar to the drones and sluggards who shirked

their share of public burdens and were callous to the dazzlement of

communal honours.

'Of course it was written for money, Monty,' his brother, Percy

Saville, the stockbroker, reminded him. 'What else do authors write

for? It's the way they earn their living.'

Strangers found difficulty in understanding the fraternal relation of

Percy Saville and Montagu Samuels, and did not readily grasp that

Percy Saville was an Anglican version of Pizer Samuels, more in tune

with the handsome, well-dressed personality it denoted. Montagu had

stuck loyally to his colours, but Pizer had drooped under the burden

of carrying his patronymic through the theatrical and artistic circles

he favoured after business hours. Of such is the brotherhood of

Israel.

'The whole book's written with gall,' went on Percy Saville

emphatically. 'I suppose the man couldn't get into good Jewish houses,

and he's revenged himself by slandering them.'

'Then he ought to have got into good Jewish houses,' said Sidney. 'The

man has talent, nobody can deny that, and if he couldn't get into good

Jewish society because he didn't have money enough, isn't that proof

enough his picture is true?'

'I don't deny that there are people among us who make money the one

Open Sesame to their houses,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith magnanimously.

'Deny it, indeed! Money is the Open Sesame to everything,' rejoined

Sidney Graham, delightedly scenting an opening for a screed. He liked

to talk bombshells, and did not often get pillars of the community to

shatter. 'Money manages the schools and the charities and the

synagogues, and indirectly controls the press. A small body of

persons--always the same--sits on all councils, on all boards! Why?

Because they pay the piper.'

'Well, sir, and is not that a good reason?' asked Montagu Samuels.

'The community is to be congratulated on having a few public-spirited

men left in days when there are wealthy German Jews in our midst who

not only disavow Judaism, but refuse to support its institutions. But,

Mr. Graham, I would join issue with you. The men you allude to are

elected, not because they are rich, but because they are good men of

business, and most of the work to be done is financial.'

'Exactly,' said Sidney Graham in sinister agreement. 'I have always

maintained that the United Synagogue could be run as a joint-stock

company for the sake of a dividend, and that there wouldn't be an atom

of difference in the discussions if the councillors were directors. I

do believe the pillars of the community figure the Millennium as a

time when every Jew shall have enough to eat, a place to worship in,

and a place to be buried in. Their State Church is simply a financial

system, to which the doctrines of Judaism happen to be tacked on. How

many of the councillors believe in their established religion? Why,

the very beadles of their synagogues are prone to surreptitious

shrimps and unobtrusive oysters! Then take that institution for

supplying _kosher_ meat. I am sure there are lots of its committee who

never inquire into the necrologies of their own chops and steaks, and

who regard kitchen Judaism as obsolete; but, all the same, they look

after the finances with almost fanatical zeal. Finance fascinates

them. Long after Judaism has ceased to exist, excellent gentlemen will

be found regulating its finances.'

There was that smile on the faces of the graver members of the party

which arises from reluctance to take a dangerous speaker seriously.

Sidney Graham was one of those favourites of society who are allowed

Touchstone's licence. He had just as little wish to reform, and just

as much wish to abuse, society as society has to be reformed and

abused. He was a dark, bright-eyed young artist with a silky

moustache. He had lived much in Paris, where he studied impressionism

and perfected his natural talent for causerie, and his inborn

preference for the hedonistic view of life. Fortunately he had plenty

of money, for he was a cousin of Raphael Leon on the mother's side,

and the remotest twigs of the Leon genealogical tree bear apples of

gold. His real name was Abrahams, which is a shade too Semitic. Sidney

was the black sheep of the family--good-natured to the core, and

artistic to the finger-tips, he was an avowed infidel in a world where

avowal is the unpardonable sin. He did not even pretend to fast on the

Day of Atonement. Still, Sidney Graham was a good deal talked of in

artistic circles, his name was often in the newspapers, and so more

orthodox people than Mrs. Henry Goldsmith were not averse to having

him at their table, though they would have shrunk from being seen at

his. Even Cousin Addie, who had a charming religious cast of mind,

liked to be with him, though she ascribed this to family piety--for

there is a wonderful solidarity about many Jewish families, the richer

members of which assemble loyally at one another's births, marriages,

funerals, and card-parties, often to the entire exclusion of

outsiders. An ordinary well-regulated family (so prolific is the

stream of life) will include in its bosom ample elements for every

occasion.

'Really, Mr. Graham, I think you are wrong about the _kosher_ meat,'

said Mr. Henry Goldsmith. 'Our statistics show no falling off in the

number of bullocks killed, while there is a rise of two per cent. in

the sheep slaughtered. No, Judaism is in a far more healthy condition

than pessimists imagine. So far from sacrificing our ancient faith, we

are learning to see how tuberculosis lurks in the lungs of unexamined

carcases and is communicated to the consumer. As for the members of

the _Shechitah_ Board not eating _Kosher_, look at me.'

The only person who looked at the host was the hostess. Her look was

one of approval--it could not be of aesthetic approval, like the look

Percy Saville devoted to herself, for her husband was a cadaverous

little man with prominent ears and teeth.

'And if Mr. Graham should ever join us on the Council of the United

Synagogue,' added Montagu Samuels, addressing the table generally, 'he

will discover that there is no communal problem with which we do not

loyally grapple.'

'No, thank you,' said Sidney with a shudder. 'When I visit Raphael, I

sometimes pick up a Jewish paper and amuse myself by reading the

debates of your public bodies. I understand most of your verbiage is

edited away,' he looked Montagu Samuels full in the face, with

audacious _naivete_; 'but there is enough left to show that our

monotonous group of public men consists of narrow-minded mediocrities.

The chief public work they appear to do, outside finance, is, when

public exams. fall on Sabbaths or holidays, getting special dates for

Jewish candidates, to whom these examinations are the avenues to

atheism. They never see the joke. How can they? Why, they take even

themselves seriously.'

'Oh, come!' said Miss Cissy Levine indignantly. 'You often see

"laughter" in the reports.'

'That must mean the speaker was laughing,' explained Sidney, 'for you

never see anything to make the audience laugh. I appeal to Mr. Montagu

Samuels.'

'It is useless discussing a subject with a man who admittedly speaks

without knowledge,' replied that gentleman with dignity.

'Well, how do you expect me to get the knowledge?' grumbled Sidney.

'You exclude the public from your gatherings--I suppose to prevent

them rubbing shoulders with the swells, the privilege of being snubbed

by whom is the reward of public service. Wonderfully practical idea

that--to utilise snobbery as a communal force! The United Synagogue

is founded on it. Your community coheres through it.'

'There you are scarcely fair,' said the hostess, with a charming smile

of reproof. 'Of course there are snobs amongst us, but is it not the

same in all sects?'

'Emphatically not,' said Sidney. 'If one of our swells sticks to a

shred of Judaism, people seem to think the God of Judah should be

thankful; and if he goes to synagogue once or twice a year, it is

regarded as a particular condescension to the Creator.'

'The mental attitude you caricature is not so snobbish as it seems,'

said Raphael Leon, breaking into the conversation for the first time.

'The temptations to the wealthy and the honoured to desert their

struggling brethren are manifold, and sad experience has made our race

accustomed to the loss of its brightest sons.'

'Thanks for the compliment, fair coz,' said Sidney, not without a

complacent cynical pleasure in the knowledge that Raphael spoke truly,

that he owed his own immunity from the obligations of the faith to his

artistic success, and that the outside world was disposed to accord

him a larger charter of morality on the same grounds. 'But if you can

only deny nasty facts by accounting for them, I dare say Mr.

Armitage's book will afford you ample opportunities for explanation.

Or have Jews the brazenness to assert it is all invention?'

'No; no one would do that,' said Percy Saville, who had just done it.

'Certainly, there is a good deal of truth in the sketch of the

ostentatious, over-dressed Johnsons, who, as everybody knows, are

meant for the Jonases.'

'Oh yes,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith. 'And it's quite evident that the

stockbroker who drops half his _h's_, and all his poor acquaintances,

and believes in one Lord, is no other than Joel Friedman.'

'And the house where people drive up in broughams for supper and

solo-whist after the theatre is the Davises', in Maida Vale,' said

Miss Cissy Levine.

'Yes, the book's true enough,' began Mrs. Montagu Samuels. She stopped

suddenly, catching her husband's eye, and the colour heightened on her

florid cheek. 'What I say is,' she concluded awkwardly, 'he ought to

have come among us, and shown the world a picture of the cultured

Jews.'

'Quite so, quite so!' said the hostess. Then, turning to the tall,

thoughtful-looking young man who had hitherto contributed but one

remark to the conversation, she said, half in sly malice, half to draw

him out: 'Now you, Mr. Leon, whose culture is certified by our leading

University, what do you think of this latest portrait of the Jew?'

'I don't know; I haven't read it,' replied Raphael apologetically.

'No more have I,' murmured the table generally.

'I wouldn't touch it with a pitchfork,' said Miss Cissy Levine.

'I think it's a shame they circulate it at the libraries,' said Mrs.

Montagu Samuels. 'I just glanced over it at Mrs. Hugh Marston's house.

It's vile. There are actually Jargon words in it. Such vulgarity!'

'Shameful!' murmured Percy Saville; 'Mr. Lazarus was telling me about

it. It's plain treachery and disloyalty, this putting of weapons into

the hands of our enemies. Of course we have our faults, but we should

be told of them privately or from the pulpit.'

'That would be just as efficacious,' said Sidney admiringly.

'More efficacious,' said Percy Saville unsuspiciously. 'A preacher

speaks with authority, but this penny-a-liner----'

'With truth?' queried Sidney.

Saville stopped, disgusted, and the hostess answered Sidney half

coaxingly.

'Oh, I am sure you can't think that. The book is so one-sided. Not a

word about our generosity, our hospitality, our domesticity--the

thousand and one good traits all the world allows us.'

'Of course not; since all the world allows them, it was unnecessary,'

said Sidney.

'I wonder the Chief Rabbi doesn't stop it,' said Mrs. Montagu

Samuels.

'My dear, how can he?' inquired her husband. 'He has no control over

the publishing trade.'

'He ought to talk to the man,' persisted Mrs. Samuels.

'But we don't even know who he is,' said Percy Saville; 'probably

"Edward Armitage" is only a _nom de plume_. You'd be surprised to

learn the real names of some of the literary celebrities I meet

about.'

'Oh, if he's a Jew you may be sure it isn't his real name,' laughed

Sidney. It was characteristic of him that he never spared a shot, even

when himself hurt by the kick of the gun. Percy coloured slightly,

unmollified by being in the same boat with the satirist.

'I have never seen the name in the subscription lists,' said the

hostess with ready tact.

'There is an Armitage who subscribes two guineas a year to the Board

of Guardians,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'But his Christian name is

George.'

'"Christian" name is distinctly good for "George,"' murmured Sidney.

'There was an Armitage who sent a cheque to the Russian Fund,' said

Mr. Henry Goldsmith; 'but that can't be an author: it was quite a

large cheque!'

'I am sure I have seen Armitage among the Births, Marriages, and

Deaths,' said Miss Cissy Levine.

'How well read they all are in the national literature!' Sidney

murmured to Addie.

Indeed, the sectarian advertisements served to knit the race together,

counteracting the unravelling induced by the fashionable dispersion of

Israel, and waxing the more important as the other links, the old

traditional jokes, bywords, ceremonies, card-games, prejudices, and

tunes, which are more important than laws and more cementatory than

ideals, were disappearing before the over-zealousness of a parvenu

refinement that had not yet attained to self-confidence. The

Anglo-Saxon stolidity of the West-End synagogue service, on week days

entirely given over to paid praying-men, was a typical expression of

the universal tendency to exchange the picturesque primitiveness of

the Orient for the sobrieties of fashionable civilisation. When

Jeshurun waxed fat, he did not always kick, but he yearned to

approximate as much as possible to John Bull without merging in him;

to sink himself and yet not be absorbed--not to be, and yet to be. The

attempt to realise the asymptote in human mathematics was not quite

successful, too near an approach to John Bull generally assimilating

Jeshurun away. For such is the nature of Jeshurun. Enfranchise him,

give him his own way, and you make a new man of him; persecute him,

and he is himself again.

'But if nobody has read the man's book,' Raphael Leon ventured to

interrupt at last, 'is it quite fair to assume his book isn't fit to

read?'

The shy dark little girl he had taken down to dinner darted an

appreciative glance at her neighbour. It was in accordance with

Raphael's usual anxiety to give the devil his due that he should be

unwilling to condemn even the writer of an anti-Semitic novel unheard.

But, then, it was an open secret in the family that Raphael was mad.

They did their best to hush it up, but among themselves they pitied

him behind his back. Even Sidney considered his cousin Raphael pushed

a dubious virtue too far, in treating people's very prejudices with

the deference due to earnest, reasoned opinions.

'But we know enough of the book to know we are badly treated,'

protested the hostess.

'We have always been badly treated in literature,' said Raphael. 'We

are made either angels or devils. On the one hand, Lessing and George

Eliot; on the other, the stock dramatist and novelist, with their

low-comedy villain.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Goldsmith doubtfully, for she could not quite think

Raphael had become infected by his cousin's propensity for paradox.

'Do you think George Eliot and Lessing didn't understand the Jewish

character?'

'They are the only writers who have ever understood it,' affirmed Miss

Cissy Levine emphatically.

A little scornful smile played for a second about the mouth of the

dark little girl.

'Stop a moment,' said Sidney. 'I've been so busy doing justice to this

delicious asparagus that I have allowed Raphael to imagine nobody

here has read _Mordecai Josephs_. I have, and I say there is more

actuality in it than in _Daniel Deronda_ and _Nathan der Weise_ put

together. It is a crude production, all the same; the writer's

artistic gift seems handicapped by a dead weight of moral platitudes

and high falutin, and even mysticism. He not only presents his

characters, but moralises over them--actually cares whether they are

good or bad, and has yearnings after the indefinable. It is all very

young. Instead of being satisfied that Judaea gives him characters that

are interesting, he actually laments their lack of culture. Still,

what he has done is good enough to make one hope his artistic instinct

will shake off his moral.'

'Oh, Sidney, what are you saying?' murmured Addie.

'It's all right, little girl. You don't understand Greek.'

'It's not Greek,' put in Raphael. 'In Greek art beauty of soul and

beauty of form are one. It's French you are talking, though the

ignorant ateliers where you picked it up flatter themselves it's

Greek.'

'It's Greek to Addie, anyhow,' laughed Sidney. 'But that's what makes

the anti-Semitic chapters so unsatisfactory.'

'We all felt their unsatisfactoriness, if we could not analyse it so

cleverly,' said the hostess.

'We all felt it,' said Mrs. Montagu Samuels.

'Yes, that's it,' said Sidney blandly. 'I could have forgiven the

rose-colour of the picture if it had been more artistically painted.'

'Rose-colour!' gasped Mrs. Henry Goldsmith.

Rose-colour indeed! Not even Sidney's authority could persuade the

table into that.

Poor rich Jews! The upper middle classes had every excuse for being

angry. They knew they were excellent persons, well educated and well

travelled, interested in charities (both Jewish and Christian),

people's concerts, district-visiting, new novels, magazines, reading

circles, operas, symphonies, politics, volunteer regiments, Show

Sunday and Corporation banquets; that they had sons at Rugby and

Oxford, and daughters who played and painted and sang, and homes that

were bright oases of optimism in a jaded society; that they were good

Liberals and Tories, supplementing their duties as Englishmen with a

solicitude for the best interests of Judaism; that they left no stone

unturned to emancipate themselves from the secular thraldom of

prejudice; and they felt it very hard that a little vulgar section

should always be chosen by their own novelists, and their efforts to

raise the tone of Jewish society passed by.

Sidney, whose conversation always had the air of aloofness from the

race, so that his own foibles often came under the lash of his

sarcasm, proceeded to justify his assertion of the rose-colour picture

in _Mordecai Josephs_. He denied that modern English Jews had any

religion whatever, claiming that their faith consisted of forms that

had to be kept up in public, but which they were too shrewd and cute

to believe in or to practise in private, though every one might

believe every one else did; that they looked upon due payment of their

synagogue bills as discharging all their obligations to Heaven; that

the preachers secretly despised the old formulas, and that the

Rabbinate declared its intention of dying for Judaism only as a way of

living by it; that the body politic was dead and rotten with

hypocrisy, though the augurs said it was alive and well. He admitted

that the same was true of Christianity. Raphael reminded him that a

number of Jews had drifted quite openly from the traditional teaching,

that thousands of well-ordered households found inspiration and

spiritual satisfaction in every form of it, and that hypocrisy was too

crude a word for the complex motives of those who obeyed it without

inner conviction.

'For instance,' said he, 'a gentleman said to me the other day--I was

much touched by the expression--"I believe with my father's heart."'

'It is a good epigram,' said Sidney, impressed. 'But what is to be

said of a rich community which recruits its clergy from the lowest

classes? The method of election by competitive performance--common as

it is, among poor Dissenters--emphasises the subjection of the

shepherd to his flock. You catch your ministers young--when they are

saturated with suppressed scepticism--and bribe them with small

salaries that seem affluence to the sons of poor immigrants. That the

ministry is not an honourable profession may be seen from the anxiety

of the minister to raise his children in the social scale by bringing

them up to some other line of business.'

'That is true,' said Raphael gravely. 'Our wealthy families must be

induced to devote a son each to the synagogue.'

'I wish they would,' said Sidney. 'At present every second man is a

lawyer. We ought to have more officers and doctors, too. I like those

old Jews who smote the Philistines hip and thigh--it is not good for a

race to run all to brain--I suppose, though, we had to develop cunning

to survive at all. There was an enlightened minister whose Friday

evenings I used to go to when a youth--delightful talk we had there,

too; you know whom I mean. Well, one of his sons is a solicitor, and

the other a stockbroker. The rich men he preached to helped to place

his sons. He was a charming man, but imagine him preaching to them the

truths in _Mordecai Josephs_, as Mr. Saville suggested.'

'_Our_ minister lets us have it hot enough, though,' said Mr. Henry

Goldsmith, with a guffaw.

His wife hastened to obliterate the unrefined expression.

'Mr. Strelitski is a wonderfully eloquent young man, so quiet and

reserved in society, but like an ancient prophet in the pulpit.'

'Yes, we were very lucky to get him,' said Mr. Henry Goldsmith.

The little dark girl shuddered.

'What is the matter?' asked Raphael softly.

'I don't know. I don't like the Rev. Joseph Strelitski. He is

eloquent, but his dogmatism irritates me. I don't believe he is

sincere. He doesn't like me either.'

'Oh, you're both wrong,' he said in concern.

'Strelitski is a draw, I admit,' said Mr. Montagu Samuels, who was the

President of a rival synagogue. 'But Rosenbaum is a good pull-down on

the other side, eh?'

Mr. Henry Goldsmith groaned. The second minister of the Kensington

synagogue was the scandal of the community. He wasn't expected to

preach, and he didn't practise.

'I've heard of that man,' said Sidney, laughing. 'He's a bit of a

gambler and a spendthrift, isn't he? Why do you keep him on?'

'He has a fine voice, you see,' said Mr. Goldsmith. 'That makes a

Rosenbaum faction at once. Then he has a wife and family; that makes

another.'

'Strelitski isn't married, is he?' asked Sidney.

'No,' said Mr. Goldsmith; 'not yet. The congregation expect him to,

though. I don't care to give him the hint myself, he is a little queer

sometimes.'

'He owes it to his position,' said Miss Cissy Levine.

'That is what we think,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, with the majestic

manner that suited her opulent beauty.

'I wish we had him in our synagogue,' said Raphael. 'Michaels is a

well-meaning, worthy man, but he is dreadfully dull.'

'Poor Raphael!' said Sidney. 'Why did you abolish the old style of

minister who had to slaughter the sheep? Now the minister reserves all

his powers of destruction for his own flock.'

'I have given him endless hints to preach only once a month,' said Mr.

Montagu Samuels dolefully. 'But every Saturday our hearts sink as we

see him walk to the pulpit.'

'You see, Addie, how a sense of duty makes a man criminal,' said

Sidney. 'Isn't Michaels the minister who defends orthodoxy in a way

that makes the orthodox rage over his unconscious heresies, while the

heterodox enjoy themselves by looking out for his historical and

grammatical blunders?'

'Poor man! he works hard,' said Raphael gently. 'Let him be.'

Over the dessert the conversation turned by way of the Rev.

Strelitski's marriage to the growing willingness of the younger

generation to marry out of Judaism. The table discerned in

intermarriage the beginning of the end.

'But why postpone the inevitable?' asked Sidney calmly. 'What is this

mania for keeping up an effeteism? Are we to cripple our lives for the

sake of a word? It's all romantic fudge, the idea of perpetual

isolation. You get into little cliques, and mistake narrow-mindedness

for fidelity to an ideal. I can live for months and forget there are

such beings as Jews in the world. I have floated down the Nile in a

_dahabiya_ while you were beating your breasts in the synagogue, and

the palm-trees and the pelicans knew nothing of your sacrosanct

chronological crisis, your annual epidemic of remorse.'

The table thrilled with horror, without, however, quite believing in

the speaker's wickedness. Addie looked troubled.

'A man and wife of different religions can never know true happiness,'

said the hostess.

'Granted,' retorted Sidney. 'But why shouldn't Jews without Judaism

marry Christians without Christianity? Must a Jew needs have a Jewess

to help him break the Law?'

'Intermarriage must not be tolerated,' said Raphael. 'It would hurt us

less if we had a country. Lacking that, we must preserve our human

boundaries.'

'You have good phrases sometimes,' admitted Sidney. 'But why must we

preserve any boundaries? Why must we exist at all as a separate

people?'

'To fulfil the mission of Israel,' said Mr. Montagu Samuels solemnly.

'Ah, what is that? That is one of the things nobody ever seems able to

tell me.'

'We are God's witnesses,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, snipping off for

herself a little bunch of hot-house grapes.

'False witnesses mostly, then,' said Sidney. 'A Christian friend of

mine, an artist, fell in love with a girl and courted her regularly at

her house for four years. Then he proposed; she told him to ask her

father, and he then learnt for the first time that the family was

Jewish, and his suit could not therefore be entertained. Could a

satirist have invented anything funnier? Whatever it was Jews have to

bear witness to, these people had been bearing witness to so

effectually that a constant visitor never heard a word of the evidence

during four years. And this family is not an exception; it is a type.

Abroad the English Jew keeps his Judaism in the background, at home in

the back kitchen. When he travels, his Judaism is not packed up among

his _impedimenta_. He never obtrudes his creed, and even his Jewish

newspaper is sent to him in a wrapper labelled something else. How's

that for witnesses? Mind you, I'm not blaming the men, being one of

'em. They may be the best fellows going, honourable, high-minded,

generous--why expect them to be martyrs more than other Englishmen?

Isn't life hard enough without inventing a new hardship? I declare

there's no narrower creature in the world than your idealist; he sets

up a moral standard which suits his own line of business, and rails at

men of the world for not conforming to it. God's witnesses, indeed! I

say nothing of those who are rather the devil's witnesses, but think

of the host of Jews like myself who, whether they marry Christians or

not, simply drop out, and whose absence of all religion escapes notice

in the medley of creeds. We no more give evidence than those old

Spanish Jews--Marannos they were called, weren't they?--who wore the

Christian mask for generations. Practically many of us are Marannos

still--I don't mean the Jews who are on the stage, and the press, and

all that, but the Jews who have gone on believing. One Day of

Atonement I amused myself by noting the pretexts on the shutters of

shops that were closed in the Strand. "Our annual holiday,"

"Stocktaking day," "Our annual beanfeast," "Closed for repairs."'

'Well, it's something if they keep the Fast at all,' said Mr. Henry

Goldsmith. 'It shows spirituality is not dead in them.'

'Spirituality!' sneered Sidney. 'Sheer superstition, rather. A dread

of thunderbolts. Besides, fasting is a sensuous _attraction_. But for

the fasting, the Day of Atonement would have long since died out for

these men. "Our annual beanfeast"! There's witnesses for you!'

'We cannot help it if we have false witnesses among us,' said Raphael

Leon quietly. 'Our mission is to spread the truth of the Torah till

the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover

the sea.'

'But we don't spread it.'

'We do. Christianity and Mohammedanism are offshoots of Judaism;

through them we have won the world from paganism, and taught it that

God is one with the moral law.'

'Then we are somewhat in the position of an ancient schoolmaster

lagging superfluous in the schoolroom, where his whilom pupils are

teaching.'

'By no means. Rather of one who stays on to protest against the false

additions of his whilom pupils.'

'But we don't protest.'

'Our mere existence, since the Dispersion, is a protest,' urged

Raphael. 'When the stress of persecution lightens, we may protest more

consciously. We cannot have been preserved in vain through so many

centuries of horrors, through the invasions of the Goths and Huns,

through the Crusades, through the Holy Roman Empire, through the times

of Torquemada. It is not for nothing that a handful of Jews loom so

large in the history of the world, that their past is bound up with

every noble human effort, every high ideal, every development of

science, literature, and art. The ancient faith that has united us so

long must not be lost just as it is on the very eve of surviving the

faiths that sprung from it, even as it has survived Egypt, Assyria,

Rome, Greece, and the Moors. If any of us fancy we have lost it, let

us keep together still. Who knows but that it will be born again in

us, if we are only patient? Race affinity is a potent force, why be in

a hurry to dissipate it? The Marannos you speak of were but maimed

heroes, yet one day the olden flame burst through the layers of three

generations of Christian profession and intermarriage, and a brilliant

company of illustrious Spaniards threw up their positions and sailed

away in voluntary exile to serve the God of Israel. We shall yet see

a spiritual revival even among our brilliant English Jews who have hid

their face from their own flesh.'

The dark little girl looked up into his face with ill-suppressed

wonder.

'Have you done preaching at me, Raphael?' inquired Sidney. 'If so,

pass me a banana.'

Raphael smiled sadly and obeyed.

'I'm afraid if I see much of Raphael I shall be converted to Judaism,'

said Sidney, peeling the banana. 'I had better take a hansom to the

Riviera at once. I intended to spend Christmas there; I never dreamt I

should be talking theology in London.'

'Oh, I think Christmas in London is best,' said the hostess

unguardedly.

'Oh, I don't know. Give me Brighton,' said the host.

'Well, yes, I suppose Brighton _is_ pleasanter,' said Mr. Montagu

Samuels.

'Oh, but so many Jews go there,' observed Percy Saville.

'Yes, that _is_ the drawback,' said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith. 'Do you

know, some years ago I discovered a delightful village in Devonshire,

and took the household there in the summer. The very next year when I

went down I found no less than two Jewish families temporarily located

there. Of course I have never gone there since.'

'Yes, it's wonderful how Jews scent out all the nicest places,' agreed

Mrs. Montagu Samuels. 'Five years ago you could escape them by not

going to Ramsgate; now even the Highlands are getting impossible.'

Thereupon the hostess rose and the ladies retired to the drawing-room,

leaving the gentlemen to discuss coffee, cigars, and the paradoxes of

Sidney, who, tired of religion, looked to dumb-show plays for the

salvation of dramatic literature.

There was a little milk-jug on the coffee-tray. It represented a

victory over Mary O'Reilly. The late Aaron Goldsmith never took milk

till six hours after meat, and it was with some trepidation that the

present Mr. Goldsmith ordered it to be sent up one evening after

dinner. He took an early opportunity of explaining apologetically to

Mary that some of his guests were not so pious as himself, and

hospitality demanded the concession.

Mr. Henry Goldsmith did not like his coffee black. His dinner-table

was hardly ever without a guest.