THE SONS OF THE COVENANT.
The "Sons of the Covenant" sent no representatives to the club balls,
wotting neither of waltzes nor of dress-coats, and preferring death to
the embrace of a strange dancing woman. They were the congregation of
which Mr. Belcovitch was President and their synagogue was the ground
floor of No. 1 Royal Street--two large rooms knocked into one, and the
rear partitioned off for the use of the bewigged, heavy-jawed women who
might not sit with the men lest they should fascinate their thoughts
away from things spiritual. Its furniture was bare benches, a raised
platform with a reading desk in the centre and a wooden curtained ark at
the end containing two parchment scrolls of the Law, each with a silver
pointer and silver bells and pomegranates. The scrolls were in
manuscript, for the printing-press has never yet sullied the sanctity of
the synagogue editions of the Pentateuch. The room was badly ventilated
and what little air there was was generally sucked up by a greedy
company of wax candles, big and little, struck in brass holders. The
back window gave on the yard and the contiguous cow-sheds, and "moos"
mingled with the impassioned supplications of the worshippers, who came
hither two and three times a day to batter the gates of heaven and to
listen to sermons more exegetical than ethical. They dropped in, mostly
in their work-a-day garments and grime, and rumbled and roared and
chorused prayers with a zeal that shook the window-panes, and there was
never lack of _minyan_--the congregational quorum of ten. In the West
End, synagogues are built to eke out the income of poor _minyan-men_ or
professional congregants; in the East End rooms are tricked up for
prayer. This synagogue was all of luxury many of its Sons could boast.
It was their _salon_ and their lecture-hall. It supplied them not only
with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their
public amusements. It was their home as well as the Almighty's, and on
occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him. It was a
place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is;
for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence,
not ease. They enjoyed themselves in this _Shool_ of theirs; they
shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they
clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least
happy when they were crying. There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of
them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the "Confession"
caught him unexpectedly.
"We have trespassed," he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put
the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.
They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history,
exegetics, Talmudical controversies, _menus_, recipes, priestly
prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested
hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and
egoistic aspirations of the highest order. It was a wonderful liturgy,
as grotesque as it was beautiful--like an old cathedral in all styles of
architecture, stored with shabby antiquities and side-shows and
overgrown with moss and lichen--a heterogeneous blend of historical
strata of all periods, in which gems of poetry and pathos and spiritual
fervor glittered and pitiful records of ancient persecution lay
petrified. And the method of praying these things was equally complex
and uncouth, equally the bond-slave of tradition; here a rising and
there a bow, now three steps backwards and now a beating of the breast,
this bit for the congregation and that for the minister, variants of a
page, a word, a syllable, even a vowel, ready for every possible
contingency. Their religious consciousness was largely a musical
box--the thrill of the ram's horn, the cadenza of psalmic phrase, the
jubilance of a festival "Amen" and the sobriety of a work-a-day "Amen,"
the Passover melodies and the Pentecost, the minor keys of Atonement and
the hilarious rhapsodies of Rejoicing, the plain chant of the Law and
the more ornate intonation of the Prophets--all this was known and
loved and was far more important than the meaning of it all or its
relation to their real lives; for page upon page was gabbled off at
rates that could not be excelled by automata. But if they did not always
know what they were saying they always meant it. If the service had been
more intelligible it would have been less emotional and edifying. There
was not a sentiment, however incomprehensible, for which they were not
ready to die or to damn.
"All Israel are brethren," and indeed there was a strange antique
clannishness about these "Sons of the Covenant" which in the modern
world, where the ends of the ages meet, is Socialism. They prayed for
one another while alive, visited one another's bedsides when sick,
buried one another when dead. No mercenary hands poured the yolks of
eggs over their dead faces and arrayed their corpses in their
praying-shawls. No hired masses were said for the sick or the troubled,
for the psalm-singing services of the "Sons of the Covenant" were always
available for petitioning the Heavens, even though their brother had
been arrested for buying stolen goods, and the service might be an
invitation to Providence to compound a felony. Little charities of their
own they had, too--a Sabbath Meal Society, and a Marriage Portion
Society to buy the sticks for poor couples--and when a pauper countryman
arrived from Poland, one of them boarded him and another lodged him and
a third taught him a trade. Strange exotics in a land of prose carrying
with them through the paven highways of London the odor of Continental
Ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their
glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient, where God was born! Hawkers
and peddlers, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers
and cap-makers--this was in sum their life. To pray much and to work
long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to
"drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives
(disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to
study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition
and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before
the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the
authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear
phylacteries and fringes, to keep the beard unshaven, and the corners of
the hair uncut, to know no work on Sabbath and no rest on week-day. It
was a series of recurrent landmarks, ritual and historical, of intimacy
with God so continuous that they were in danger of forgetting His
existence as of the air they breathed. They ate unleavened bread in
Passover and blessed the moon and counted the days of the _Omer_ till
Pentecost saw the synagogue dressed with flowers in celebration of an
Asiatic fruit harvest by a European people divorced from agriculture;
they passed to the terrors and triumphs of the New Year (with its
domestic symbolism of apple and honey and its procession to the river)
and the revelry of repentance on the Great White Fast, when they burned
long candles and whirled fowls round their heads and attired themselves
in grave-clothes and saw from their seats in synagogue the long fast-day
darken slowly into dusk, while God was sealing the decrees of life and
death; they passed to Tabernacles when they ran up rough booths in back
yards draped with their bed-sheets and covered with greenery, and bore
through the streets citrons in boxes and a waving combination of myrtle,
and palm and willow branches, wherewith they made a pleasant rustling in
the synagogue; and thence to the Rejoicing of the Law when they danced
and drank rum in the House of the Lord and scrambled sweets for the
little ones, and made a sevenfold circuit with the two scrolls,
supplemented by toy flags and children's candles stuck in hollow
carrots; and then on again to Dedication with its celebration of the
Maccabaean deliverance and the miracle of the unwaning oil in the
Temple, and to Purim with its masquerading and its execration of Haman's
name by the banging of little hammers; and so back to Passover. And with
these larger cycles, epicycles of minor fasts and feasts, multiplex, not
to be overlooked, from the fast of the ninth of Ab--fatal day for the
race--when they sat on the ground in shrouds, and wailed for the
destruction of Jerusalem, to the feast of the Great Hosannah when they
whipped away willow-leaves on the _Shool_ benches in symbolism of
forgiven sins, sitting up the whole of the night before in a long
paroxysm of prayer mitigated by coffee and cakes; from the period in
which nuts were prohibited to the period in which marriages were
commended.
And each day, too, had its cycles of religious duty, its comprehensive
and cumbrous ritual with accretions of commentary and tradition.
And every contingency of the individual life was equally provided for,
and the writings that regulated all this complex ritual are a marvellous
monument of the patience, piety and juristic genius of the race--and of
the persecution which threw it back upon its sole treasure, the Law.
Thus they lived and died, these Sons of the Covenant, half-automata,
sternly disciplined by voluntary and involuntary privation, hemmed and
mewed in by iron walls of form and poverty, joyfully ground under the
perpetual rotary wheel of ritualism, good-humored withal and casuistic
like all people whose religion stands much upon ceremony; inasmuch as a
ritual law comes to count one equally with a moral, and a man is not
half bad who does three-fourths of his duty.
And so the stuffy room with its guttering candles and its
Chameleon-colored ark-curtain was the pivot of their barren lives. Joy
came to bear to it the offering of its thanksgiving and to vow sixpenny
bits to the Lord, prosperity came in a high hat to chaffer for the holy
privileges, and grief came with rent garments to lament the beloved dead
and glorify the name of the Eternal.
The poorest life is to itself the universe and all that therein is, and
these humble products of a great and terrible past, strange fruits of a
motley-flowering secular tree whose roots are in Canaan and whose boughs
overshadow the earth, were all the happier for not knowing that the
fulness of life was not theirs.
And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and
there a parent.
* * * * *
The elders of the synagogue were met in council.
"He is greater than a Prince," said the Shalotten _Shammos_.
"If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale," said Mr.
Belcovitch, "and our _Maggid_, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh
them all. He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has
been seen bareheaded."
"From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses," said old Mendel
Hyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.
"Oh no," said the Shalotten _Shammos_, who was a great stickler for
precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies. "I
can't admit that. Look at my brother Nachmann."
There was a general laugh at the Shalotten _Shammos's_ bull; the proverb
dealing only with Moseses.
"He has the true gift," observed _Froom_ Karlkammer, shaking the flames
of his hair pensively. "For the letters of his name have the same
numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon."
_Froom_ Karlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary
member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation
and only worshipped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions.
The Shalotten _Shammos_, however, was of contradictory temperament--a
born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior
English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch's presidential cup. He was a
long thin man, who towered above the congregation, and was as tall as
the bulk of them even when he was bowing his acknowledgments to his
Maker.
"How do you make that out?" he asked Karlkammer. "Moses of course adds
up the same as Moses--but while the other part of the _Maggid's_ name
makes seventy-three, da Leon's makes ninety-one."
"Ah, that's because you're ignorant of _Gematriyah_," said little
Karlkammer, looking up contemptuously at the cantankerous giant. "You
reckon all the letters on the same system, and you omit to give yourself
the license of deleting the ciphers."
In philology it is well known that all consonants are interchangeable
and vowels don't count; in _Gematriyah_ any letter may count for
anything, and the total may be summed up anyhow.
Karlkammer was one of the curiosities of the Ghetto. In a land of
_froom_ men he was the _froomest_. He had the very genius of fanaticism.
On the Sabbath he spoke nothing but Hebrew whatever the inconvenience
and however numerous the misunderstandings, and if he perchance paid a
visit he would not perform the "work" of lifting the knocker. Of course
he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying
it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of
Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of
phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.
One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted scrap in
mourning for the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through the streets to
synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked
three times at the door of God's house when he arrived. On the Day of
Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his
grave-clothes. On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M.
to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to
give him bending space that he hired two seats. On Tabernacles, not
having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an
attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches
through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of
sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallest _Lulav_ of
palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist
for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and
meekest man in Israel--an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival.
He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead.
Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host
of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar.
Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary "Sons of the Covenant"
were mere heathens. He was a man of prodigious distorted mental
activity. He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew
literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and,
still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently
on any subject outside religion. His letters to the press on
specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved,
incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with
Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the
most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth
and death of every Rabbi mentioned.
No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the
bitter end. They were written in good English modified by a few peculiar
terms used in senses unsuspected by dictionary-makers; in a beautiful
hand, with the t's uncrossed, but crowned with the side-stroke, so as to
avoid the appearance of the symbol of Christianity, and with the dates
expressed according to the Hebrew Calendar, for Karlkammer refused to
recognize the chronology of the Christian. He made three copies of every
letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every
line. His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was
a business man and had to earn his living by day. Kept within the limits
of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from
predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them
to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings
were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a
curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its
supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is
alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play
compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the
Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi,
and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew
literature. Nor were these ideas of his own origination. His was an
eclectic philosophy and religionism, of which all the elements were
discoverable in old Hebrew books: scraps of Alexandrian philosophy
inextricably blent with Aristotelian, Platonic, mystic.
He kept up a copious correspondence with scholars in other countries and
was universally esteemed and pitied.
"We haven't come to discuss the figures of the _Maggid's_ name, but of
his salary." said Mr. Belcovitch, who prided himself on his capacity for
conducting public business.
"I have examined the finances," said Karlkammer, "and I don't see how
we can possibly put aside more for our preacher than the pound a week."
"But he is not satisfied," said Mr. Belcovitch.
"I don't see why he shouldn't be," said the Shalotten _Shammos_. "A
pound a week is luxury for a single man."
The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptive _Maggid_
sent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back
their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed
ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder,
that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and
engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.
"I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week," grumbled Greenberg
the _Chazan_.
Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and
circumcised male infants and educated children and discharged the
functions of beadle and collector. He spent a great deal of his time in
avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation
and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_.
The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked
it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of
a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of
one. His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons
temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised
prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation. Not only had
Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to
iterate "Pom" as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his
rival's vocalization.
"You can't compare yourself with the _Maggid_" the Shalotten _Shammos_
reminded him consolingly. "There are hundreds of you in the market.
There are several _morceaux_ of the service which you do not sing half
so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with
Freedman's of the Fashion Street _Chevrah_, nor can you read the Law as
quickly and accurately as Prochintski. I have told you over and over
again you confound the air of the Passover _Yigdal_ with the New Year
ditto. And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin--it
goes 'Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei'" (he mimicked Greenberg's melody)
"whereas it should be 'Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
"Oh no," interrupted Belcovitch. "All the _Chazanim_ I've ever heard do
it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
"You are not entitled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch," said the
Shalotten _Shammos_ warmly. "You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard
every great _Chazan_ in Europe."
"What was good enough for my father is good enough for me," retorted
Belcovitch. "The _Shool_ he took me to at home had a beautiful _Chazan_,
and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"
"I don't care what you heard at home. In England every _Chazan_ sings
'Oi, Oi, Oi.'"
"We can't take our tune from England," said Karlkammer reprovingly.
"England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were
compelled to excommunicate."
"Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?" asked Belcovitch
indignantly. "The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious
Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the
women has nothing to do with it."
The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man
believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their
blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an
extraordinary example of a myth flourishing in the teeth of the facts,
and as such should be useful to historians sifting "the evidence of
contemporary writers."
The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with "Eis" and "Ois" not in
concord.
"Shah!" said the President at last. "Make an end, make an end!"
"You see he knows I'm right," murmured the Shalotten _Shammos_ to his
circle.
"And if you are!" burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this
time thought of a retort. "And if I do sing the Passover _Yigdal_
instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have _no bread in
the house_? With my salary I have Passover all the year round."
The _Chazan's_ sally made a good impression on his audience if not on
his salary. It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the
conversation was hastily shifted to the original topic.
"We mustn't forget the _Maggid_ draws crowds here every Saturday and
Sunday afternoon," said Mendel Hyams. "Suppose he goes over to a
_Chevrah_ that will pay him more!"
"No, he won't do that," said another of the Committee. "He will remember
that we brought him out of Poland."
"Yes, but we shan't have room for the audiences soon," said Belcovitch.
"There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we
ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon
and the other half the second two hours."
"No, no, that would be cruel," said Karlkammer. "He will have to give
the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue. My own _Shool_, the
German, will be glad to give him facilities."
"But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary?" said
Mendel.
"No, I'm on the Committee, I'll see to that," said Karlkammer
reassuringly.
"Then do you think we shall tell him we can't afford to give him more?"
asked Belcovitch.
There was a murmur of assent with a fainter mingling of dissent. The
motion that the _Maggid's_ application be refused was put to the vote
and carried by a large majority.
It was the fate of the _Maggid_ to be the one subject on which
Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_ agreed. They agreed as to his
transcendent merits and they agreed as to the adequacy of his salary.
"But he's so weakly," protested Mendel Hyams, who was in the minority.
"He coughs blood."
"He ought to go to a sunny place for a week," said Belcovitch
compassionately.
"Yes, he must certainly have that," said Karlkammer. "Let us add as a
rider that although we cannot pay him more per week, he must have a
week's holiday in the country. The Shalotten _Shammos_ shall write the
letter to Rothschild."
Rothschild was a magic name in the Ghetto; it stood next to the
Almighty's as a redresser of grievances and a friend of the poor, and
the Shalotten _Shammos_ made a large part of his income by writing
letters to it. He charged twopence halfpenny per letter, for his English
vocabulary was larger than any other scribe's in the Ghetto, and his
words were as much longer than theirs as his body. He also filled up
printed application forms for Soup or Passover cakes, and had a most
artistic sense of the proportion of orphans permissible to widows and a
correct instinct for the plausible duration of sicknesses.
The Committee agreed _nem. con._ to the grant of a seaside holiday, and
the Shalotten _Shammos_ with a gratified feeling of importance waived
his twopence halfpenny. He drew up a letter forthwith, not of course in
the name of the Sons of the Covenant, but in the _Maggid's_ own.
He took the magniloquent sentences to the _Maggid_ for signature. He
found the _Maggid_ walking up and down Royal Street waiting for the
verdict. The _Maggid_ walked with a stoop that was almost a permanent
bow, so that his long black beard reached well towards his baggy knees.
His curved eagle nose was grown thinner, his long coat shinier, his look
more haggard, his corkscrew earlocks were more matted, and when he spoke
his voice was a tone more raucous. He wore his high hat--a tall cylinder
that reminded one of a weather-beaten turret.
The Shalotten _Shammos_ explained briefly what he had done.
"May thy strength increase!" said the _Maggid_ in the Hebrew formula of
gratitude.
"Nay, thine is more important," replied the Shalotten _Shammos_ with
hilarious heartiness, and he proceeded to read the letter as they walked
along together, giant and doubled-up wizard.
"But I haven't got a wife and six children," said the _Maggid_, for whom
one or two phrases stood out intelligible. "My wife is dead and I never
was blessed with a _Kaddish_."
"It sounds better so," said the Shalotten _Shammos_ authoritatively.
"Preachers are expected to have heavy families dependent upon them. It
would sound lies if I told the truth."
This was an argument after the _Maggid's_ own heart, but it did not
quite convince him.
"But they will send and make inquiries," he murmured.
"Then your family are in Poland; you send your money over there."
"That is true," said the _Maggid_ feebly. "But still it likes me not."
"You leave it to me," said the Shalotten _Shammos_ impressively. "A
shamefaced man cannot learn, and a passionate man cannot teach. So said
Hillel. When you are in the pulpit I listen to you; when I have my pen
in hand, do you listen to me. As the proverb says, if I were a Rabbi the
town would burn. But if you were a scribe the letter would burn. I don't
pretend to be a _Maggid_, don't you set up to be a letter writer."
"Well, but do you think it's honorable?"
"Hear, O Israel!" cried the Shalotten _Shammos_, spreading out his palms
impatiently. "Haven't I written letters for twenty years?"
The _Maggid_ was silenced. He walked on brooding. "And what is this
place, Burnmud, I ask to go to?" he inquired.
"Bournemouth," corrected the other. "It is a place on the South coast
where all the most aristocratic consumptives go."
"But it must be very dear," said the poor _Maggid_, affrighted.
"Dear? Of course it's dear," said the Shalotten _Shammos_ pompously.
"But shall we consider expense where your health is concerned?"
The _Maggid_ felt so grateful he was almost ashamed to ask whether he
could eat _kosher_ there, but the Shalotten _Shammos_, who had the air
of a tall encyclopaedia, set his soul at rest on all points.