This is a Chronicle of Dreamers, who have arisen in the Ghetto from
its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up in
our own day. Some have become historic in Jewry, others have
penetrated to the ken of the greater world and afforded models to
illustrious artists in letters, and but for the exigencies of my theme
and the faint hope of throwing some new light upon them, I should not
have ventured to treat them afresh; the rest are personally known to
me or are, like "Joseph the Dreamer," the artistic typification of
many souls through which the great Ghetto dream has passed. Artistic
truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence
of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more
vitally, than a scientific generalization unifies a chaos of
phenomena. Time and Space are only the conditions through which
spiritual facts straggle. Hence I have here and there permitted myself
liberties with these categories. Have I, for instance, misplaced the
moment of Spinoza's obscure love-episode--I have only followed his own
principle, to see things _sub specie æternitatis_, and even were his
latest Dutch editor correct in denying the episode altogether, I
should still hold it true as summarizing the emotions with which even
the philosopher must reckon. Of Heine I have attempted a sort of
composite conversation-photograph, blending, too, the real heroine of
the little episode with "La Mouche." His own words will be recognized
by all students of him--I can only hope the joins with mine are not
too obvious. My other sources, too, lie sometimes as plainly on the
surface, but I have often delved at less accessible quarries. For
instance, I owe the celestial vision of "The Master of the Name" to a
Hebrew original kindly shown me by my friend Dr. S. Schechter, Reader
in Talmudic at Cambridge, to whose luminous essay on the Chassidim, in
his _Studies in Judaism_, I have a further indebtedness. My account of
"Maimon the Fool" is based on his own (not always reliable)
autobiography, of which I have extracted the dramatic essence, though
in the supplementary part of the story I have had to antedate slightly
the publication of Mendelssohn's "Jerusalem" and the fame of Kant. In
fine, I have never hesitated to take as an historian or to focus and
interpret as an imaginative artist.
I have placed "A Child of the Ghetto" first, not only because the
Venetian Jewry first bore the name of Ghetto, but because this chapter
may be regarded as a prelude to all the others. Though the Dream pass
through Smyrna or Amsterdam, through Rome or Cairo, through Jerusalem
or the Carpathians, through London or Berlin or New York, almost all
the Dreamers had some such childhood, and it may serve to explain
them. It is the early environment from which they all more or less
emerged.
And there is a sense in which the stories all lead on to that which I
have placed last. The "Child of the Ghetto" may be considered "father
to the man" of "Chad Gadya" in that same city of the sea.
For this book is the story of a Dream that has not come true.