I
"We must not wait longer, Rachel," said Manasseh in low, grave, but
unfaltering accents. "Midnight approaches."
Rachel checked her sobs and assumed an attitude of reverence as her
husband began to intone the benedictions, but her heart felt no
religious joy in the remembrance of how the God of her fathers had
saved them and their Temple from Hellenic pollution. It was torn by
anxiety as to the fate of her boy, her scholar son, unaccountably
absent for the first time from the household ceremonies of the Feast
of Dedication. What was he doing--outside the Ghetto gates--in that
great, dark, narrow-meshed city of Rome, defying the Papal law, and of
all nights in the year on that sinister night when, by a coincidence
of chronology, the Christian persecutor celebrated the birth of his
Saviour? Through misty eyes she saw her husband's face, stern and
rugged, yet made venerable by the flowing white of his locks and
beard, as with the supernumerary taper he prepared to light the wax
candles in the nine-branched candlestick of silver. He wore a long,
hooded mantle reaching to the feet, and showing where it fell back in
front a brown gaberdine clasped by a girdle. These sombre-colored
robes were second-hand, as the austere simplicity of the Pragmatic
required. The Jewish Council of Sixty did not permit its subjects to
ruffle it like the Romans of those days of purple pageantry. The young
bloods, forbidden by Christendom to style themselves signori, were
forbidden by Judea to vie with signori in luxury.
"Blessed art Thou, O Lord, our God," chanted the old man. "King of the
Universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy commandments, and commanded
us to kindle the light of Chanukah."
It was with a quavering voice that Rachel joined in the ancient hymn
that wound up the rite. "O Fortress, Rock of my salvation," the old
woman sang. "Unto Thee it is becoming to give praise; let my house of
prayer be restored, and I will there offer Thee thanksgivings; when
Thou shalt have prepared a slaughter of the blaspheming foe, I will
complete with song and psalm the dedication of the altar."
But her imagination was roving in the dim oil-lit streets of the
tenebrous city, striving for the clairvoyance of love. Arrest by the
_sbirri_ was certain; other dangers threatened. Brawls and bravos
abounded. True, this city of Rome was safer than many another for its
Jews, who, by a miracle, more undeniable than that which they were now
celebrating, had from the birth of Christ dwelt in the very heart of
Christendom, the Eternal People in the Eternal City. The Ghetto had
witnessed no such sights as Barcelona or Frankfort or Prague. The
bloody orgies of the Crusaders had raged far away from the Capital of
the Cross. In England, in France, in Germany, the Jew, that scapegoat
of the nations, had poisoned the wells and brought on the Black Death,
had pierced the host, killed children for their blood, blasphemed the
saints, and done all that the imagination of defalcating debtors could
suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps
it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy
one of steady degradation rather than of fitful massacre. Nevertheless
bloodshed was not unknown, and the song died on Rachel's lips, though
the sterner Manasseh still chanted on.
"The Grecians were gathered against me in the days of the Hasmoneans;
they broke down the walls of my towers and defiled all the oils; but
from one of the last remaining flasks a miracle was wrought for Thy
lily, Israel; and the men of understanding appointed these eight days
for songs and praises."
They were well-to-do people, and Rachel's dress betokened the limit of
the luxury allowed by the Pragmatic--a second-hand silk dress with a
pin at the throat set with only a single pearl, a bracelet on one arm,
a ring without a bezel on one finger, a single-stringed necklace round
her neck, her hair done in a cheap net.
She looked at the nine-branched candlestick, and a mystical sadness
filled her. Would she had nine scions of her house like Miriam's
mother, a true mother in Israel; but, lo! she had only one candle--one
little candle. A puff and it was gone, and life would be dark.
That Joseph was not in the Ghetto was certain. He would never have
caused her such anxiety wilfully, and, indeed, she and her husband and
Miriam had already run to all the likely places in the quarter, even
to those marshy alleys where every overflow of the Tiber left deposits
of malarious mud, where families harbored, ten in a house, where
stunted men and wrinkled women slouched through the streets, and a
sickly spawn of half-naked babies swarmed under the feet. They had had
trouble enough, but never such a trouble as this. Manasseh and Rachel,
with this queer offspring of theirs, this Joseph the Dreamer, as he
had been nicknamed, this handsome, reckless black-eyed son of theirs,
with his fine oval face, his delicate olive features; this young man,
who could not settle down to the restricted forms of commerce possible
in the Ghetto, who was to be Rabbi of the community one day, albeit
his brilliance was occasionally dazzling to the sober tutors upon whom
he flashed his sudden thought, which stirred up that which had better
been left asleep. Why was he not as other sons, why did he pace the
street with unobservant eyes, why did he weep over the profane Hebrew
of the Spanish love-singers as if their songs were _Selichoth_ or
Penitential Verses? Why did he not marry Miriam, as one could see the
girl wished? Why did he set at naught the custom of the Ghetto, in
silently refraining from so obvious a match between the children of
two old friends, equally well-to-do, and both possessing the _Jus
Gazzaga_ or leasehold of the houses in which they lived; tall, quaint
houses, separated only by an ancient building with a carved porch, and
standing at the end of the great Via Rua where it adjoined the narrow
little street, Delle Azzimelle, in which the Passover cakes were made.
Miriam's family, being large, had their house to themselves, but a
good deal of Manasseh's was let out; for room was more and more
precious in the Ghetto, which was a fixed space for an ever-expanding
population.