With what emotion, as of a pilgrim reaching Palestine, Gabriel found
himself at last in the city where a synagogue stood in the eye of day!
The warmth at his heart annulled whatever of chill stole in at the
grayness of the canaled streets of the northern city after the color
and glow of Porto. His first care as soon as he was settled in the
great, marble-halled house which his mother's old friends and
relatives in the city had purchased on his behalf, was to betake
himself on the Sabbath with his mother and brother to the Portuguese
synagogue. Though his ignorance of his new creed was so great that he
doffed his hat on entering, nor knew how to don the praying-shawl lent
him by the beadle, and was rather disconcerted to find his mother
might not sit at his side, but must be relegated to a gallery behind a
grille, yet his attitude was too emotional to be critical. The
prayer-book interested him keenly, and though he strove to follow the
service, his conscious Hebrew could not at all keep pace with the
congregational speed, and he felt unreasonably shamed at his failures
to rise or bow. Vidal, who had as yet no Hebrew, interested himself in
picking out ancient denizens of Porto and communicating his
discoveries to his brother in a loud whisper, which excited Gabriel's
other neighbor to point out scions of the first Spanish families,
other members of which, at home, were props of Holy Church, bishops,
and even archbishops. A curious figure, this red-bearded,
gross-paunched neighbor, rocking automatically to and fro in his
_taleth_, but evidently far fainer to gossip than to pray.
Friars and nuns of almost every monastic order were, said he, here
regathered to Judaism. He himself, Isaac Pereira, who sat there safe
and snug, had been a Jesuit in Spain.
"I was sick of the pious make-believe, and itched to escape over here.
But the fools had let me sell indulgences, and I had a goodly stock on
hand, and trade was slack"--here he interrupted himself with a
fervent "Amen!" conceded to the service--"in Spain just then. It's no
use carrying 'em over to the Netherlands, thinks I; they're too clever
over there. I must get rid of 'em in some country free for Jews, and
yet containing Catholics. So what should I do but slip over from
Malaga to Barbary, where I sold off the remainder of my stock to some
Catholics living among the Moors. No sooner had I pocketed
the--Amen!--money than I declared myself a Jew. God of Abraham! The
faces those Gentiles pulled when they found what a bad bargain they
had made with Heaven! They appealed to the Cadi against what they
called the imposition. But"--and here an irrepressible chuckle mingled
with the roar of the praying multitude--"I claimed the privilege of a
free port to sell any description of goods, and the Cadi had to give
his ruling in accordance with the law."
In the exhilaration of his mood this sounded amusing to Gabriel, an
answering of fools according to their folly. But 'twas not long before
it recurred to him to add to his disgust and his disappointment with
his new brethren and his new faith. For after he had submitted
himself, with his brother, to circumcision, replaced his baptismal
name by the Hebrew Uriel, and Vidal's by Joseph, Latinizing at the
same time the family name to Acosta, he found himself confronted by a
host of minute ordinances far more galling than those of the Church.
Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing, working; not the
simplest action but was dogged and clogged by incredible imperatives.
Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and
abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had
entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codex of
six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the
barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with
infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life.
What! Was it for this Rabbinic manufacture that he had exchanged the
stately ceremonial of Catholicism? Had he thrown off mental fetters
but to replace them by bodily?
Was this the Golden Age that he had looked to find--the simple Mosaic
theocracy of reason and righteousness?
And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed
with such romantic glamour?--fat burghers, clucking comfortably under
the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously
housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas
alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped
even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this
bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling
their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto
of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the
refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, trapped,
betrayed!
His wrath gathered daily, finding vent in bitter speeches. If this was
what had become of the Mosaic Law and the Holy People, the sooner a
son of Israel spoke out the better for his race. Was it not an
inspiration from on high that had given him the name of Uriel--"fire
of God"? So, when his private thunders had procured him a summons
before the outraged Rabbinic court, he was in no wise to be awed by
the _Chacham_ and his Rabbis in their solemn robes.
"Pharisees!" he cried, and, despite his lost Christianity, all the
scorn of his early training clung to the word.
"Epicurean!" they retorted, with contempt more withering still.
"Nay, Epicurus have I never read, and what I know of his doctrine by
hearsay revolteth me. I am for God and Reason, and a pure Judaism."
"Even so talked Elisha Ben Abuya in Palestine of old," put in the
second Rabbi more mildly. "He with his Greek culture, who stalked from
Sinai to Olympus, and ended in Atheism."
"I know not of Elisha, but I marvel not that your teaching drove him
to Atheism."
"Said I not 'twas Atheism, not Judaism, thou talkedst? And an Atheist
in our ranks we may not harbor: our community is young in Amsterdam.
'Tis yet on sufferance, and these Dutchmen are easily moved to riot.
We have won our ground with labor. Traitor! wouldst thou cut the
dykes?"
"Traitor thou!" retorted Uriel. "Traitor to God and His holy Law."
"Hold thy peace!" thundered the _Chacham_, "or the ban shall be laid
upon thee."
"Hold my peace!" answered Uriel scornfully. "Nay, I expatriated myself
for freedom; I shall not hold my peace for the sake of the ban."
Nor did he. At home and abroad he exhausted himself in invective, in
exhortation.
"Be silent, Uriel," begged his aged mother, dreading a breach of the
happiness her soul had found at last in its old spiritual swathings.
"This Judaism thou deridest is the true, the pure Judaism, as I was
taught it in my girlhood. Let me go to my grave in peace."
"Be silent, Uriel," besought his brother Joseph. "If thou dost not
give over, old Manasseh and his cronies will bar me out from those
lucrative speculations in the Indies, wherein also I am investing thy
money for thee. They have already half a hundred privateers, and the
States-General wink at anything that will cripple Spain, so if we can
seize its silver fleet, or capture Portuguese possessions in South
America, we shall reap revenge on our enemies and big dividends. And
he hath a comely daughter, hath Manasseh, and methinks her eye is not
unkindly towards me. Give over, I beg of thee! This religion liketh me
much--no confession, no damnation, and 'tis the faith of our fathers."
"No damnation--ay, but no salvation either. They teach naught of
immortality; their creed is of the earth, earthy."
"Then why didst thou drag me from Portugal?" inquired Joseph angrily.
But Uriel--the fire of God--was not to be quenched; and so, not
without frequent warning, fell the fire of man. In a solemn conclave
in the black-robed synagogue, with awful symbolisms of extinguished
torches, the ban was laid upon Uriel Acosta, and henceforth no man,
woman, or child dared walk or talk with him. The very beggars refused
his alms, the street hawkers spat out as he passed by. His own mother
and brother, now completely under the sway of their new Jewish circle,
removed from the pollution of his presence, leaving him alone in the
great house with the black page. And this house was shunned as though
marked with the cross of the pestilence. The more high-spirited
Jew-boys would throw stones at its windows or rattle its doors, but it
was even keener sport to run after its tenant himself, on the rare
occasions when he appeared in the streets, to spit out like their
elders at the sight of him, to pelt him with mud, and to shout after
him, "Epicurean!" "Bastard!" "Sinner in Israel!"