I
Happy burghers of Berlin in their Sunday best trooped through the
Rosenthaler gate in the cool of the August evening for their customary
stroll in the environs: few escaped noticing the recumbent ragged
figure of a young man, with a long dirty beard, wailing and writhing
uncouthly just outside the gate: fewer inquired what ailed him.
He answered in a strange mixture of jargons, blurring his meaning
hopelessly with scraps of Hebrew, of Jewish-German, of Polish, of
Russian and mis-punctuating it with choking sobs and gasps. One good
soul after another turned away helpless. The stout roll of Hebrew
manuscript the swarthy, unkempt creature clutched in his hand grew
grimier with tears. The soldiers on guard surveyed him with
professional callousness.
Only the heart of the writhing wretch knew its own bitterness, only
those tear-blinded eyes saw the pitiful panorama of a penurious Jew's
struggle for Culture. For, nursed in a narrow creed, he had dreamt the
dream of Knowledge. To know--to know--was the passion that consumed
him: to understand the meaning of life and the causes of things.
He saw himself a child again in Poland, in days of comparative
affluence, clad in his little damask suit, shocking his father with a
question at the very first verse of the Bible, which they began to
read together when he was six years old, and which held many a box on
the ear in store for his ingenuous intellect. He remembered his early
efforts to imitate with chalk or charcoal the woodcuts of birds or
foliage happily discovered on the title-pages of dry-as-dust Hebrew
books; how he used to steal into the unoccupied, unfurnished
manor-house and copy the figures on the tapestries, standing in
midwinter, half-frozen, the paper in one hand, the pencil in the
other; and how, when these artistic enthusiasms were sternly if
admiringly checked by a father intent on siring a Rabbi, he relieved
the dreary dialectics of the Talmud--so tedious to a child
uninterested in divorce laws or the number of white hairs permissible
in a red cow--by surreptitious nocturnal perusal of a precious store
of Hebrew scientific and historical works discovered in an old
cupboard in his father's study. To this chamber, which had also served
as the bedroom in which the child slept with his grandmother, the
young man's thoughts returned with wistful bitterness, and at the
image of the innocent little figure poring over the musty volumes by
the flickering firelight in the silence of the night, the mass of rags
heaved yet more convulsively. How he had enjoyed putting on fresh wood
after his grandmother had gone to bed, and grappling with the
astronomical treatise, ignoring the grumblings of the poor old lady
who lay a-cold for want of him. Ah, the lonely little boy was, indeed,
in Heaven, treading the celestial circles--and by stealth, which made
it all the sweeter. But that armillary sphere he had so ably made for
himself out of twisted rods had undone him: his grandmother, terrified
by the child's interest in these mystic convolutions, had betrayed
the magical instrument to his father. Other episodes of the long
pursuit of Knowledge--not to be impeded even by flogging pedagogues,
diverted but slightly by marriage at the age of eleven,--crossed his
mind. What ineffable rapture the first reading of Maimonides had
excited, _The Guide of the Perplexed_ supplying the truly perplexed
youth with reasons for the Jewish fervor which informed him. How he
had reverenced the great mediæval thinker, regarding him as the ideal
of men, the most inspired of teachers. Had he not changed his own name
to Maimon to pattern himself after his Master, was not even now his
oath under temptation: "I swear by the reverence which I owe my great
teacher, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, not to do this act?"
But even Maimonides had not been able to allay his thirst. Maimonides
was an Aristotelian, and the youth would fain drink at the
fountain-head. He tramped a hundred and fifty miles to see an old
Hebrew book on the Peripatetic philosophy. But Hebrew was not enough;
the vast realm of Knowledge, which he divined dimly, must lie in other
languages. But to learn any other language was pollution to a Jew, to
teach a Jew any other was pollution to a Christian.
In his facile comprehension of German and Latin books, he had long
since forgotten his first painful steps: now in his agony they
recurred to mock him. He had learnt these alien alphabets by observing
in some bulky Hebrew books that when the printers had used up the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet to mark their sheets, they started
other and foreign alphabets. How he had rejoiced to find that by help
of his Jewish jargon he could worry out the meaning of some torn
leaves of an old German book picked up by chance.
The picture of the innkeeper's hut, in which he had once been
family-tutor, flew up irrelevantly into his mind--he saw himself
expounding a tattered Pentateuch to a half-naked brood behind the
stove, in a smoky room full of peasants sitting on the floor guzzling
whisky, or pervaded by drunken Russian soldiery hacking the bedsteads
or throwing the glasses in the faces of the innkeeper and his wife.
Poor Polish Jews, cursed by poverty and tyranny! Who could be blamed
for consoling himself with liquor in such a home? Besides, when one
was paid only five thalers, one owed it to oneself not to refuse a
dram or so. And then there came up another one-room home in which a
youth with his eyes and hair had sat all night poring over Cabalistic
books, much to the inconvenience of the newly married Rabbi, who had
consented to teach him this secret doctrine. For this had been his
Cabalistic phase, when he dreamed of conjurations and spells and the
Mastership of the Name. A sardonic smile twitched the corners of his
lips, as he remembered how the poor Rabbi and his pretty wife, after
fruitless hints, had lent him the precious tomes to be rid of his
persistent all-night sittings, and the smile lingered an instant
longer as he recalled his own futile attempts to coerce the
supernatural, either by the incantations of the Cabalists or the
prayer-ecstasy he had learnt later from the Chassidim.
Yes, he had early discovered that all this Cabalistic mysticism was
only an attempt at a scientific explanation of existence, veiled in
fable and allegory. But the more reasonable he pronounced the Cabalah
to be, the more he had irritated the local Cabalists who refused to
have their "divine science" reduced to "reason." And so,
disillusioned, he had rebounded to "human study," setting off on a
pilgrimage in the depth of winter to borrow out-of-date books on
optics and physics, and making more enemies by his obtrusive knowledge
of how dew came and how lightning. It was not till--on the strength
of a volume of Anatomical tables and a Medical dictionary--he
undertook cures, that he had discovered the depths of his own
ignorance, achieving only the cure of his own conceit. And it was then
that Germany had begun to loom before his vision--a great, wonderful
country where Truth dwelt, and Judaism was freer, grander. Yes, he
would go to Germany and study medicine and escape this asphyxiating
atmosphere.
His sobs, which had gradually subsided, revived at the thought of that
terrible journey. First, the passage to Königsberg, accorded him by a
pious merchant: then the voyage to Stettin, paid for by those young
Jewish students who, beginning by laughing at his ludicrous accent in
reading Herr Mendelssohn's _Phoedon_--the literary sensation of the
hour that had dumfoundered the Voltaireans--had been thunderstruck by
his instantaneous translation of it into elegant Hebrew, and had
unanimously advised him to make his way to Berlin. Ah, but what a
voyage! Contrary winds that protracted the journey to five weeks
instead of two, the only other passenger an old woman who comforted
herself by singing hymns, his own dialect and the Pomeranian German of
the crew mutually unintelligible, his bed some hard stuffed bags,
never anything warm to eat, and sea-sickness most of the time. And
then, when set down safely on shore, without a pfennig or even a sound
pocket to hold one, he had started to walk to Frankfort, oh, the
wretched feeling of hopelessness that had made him cast himself down
under a lime-tree in a passion of tears! Why had he resumed hope, why
had he struggled on his way to Berlin, since this fate awaited him,
this reception was to be meted him? To be refused admission as a rogue
and a vagabond, to be rejected of his fellow-Jews, to be hustled out
of his dream-city by the overseer of the Jewish gate-house!
Woe! Woe! Was this to be the end of his long aspiration? A week ago he
had been so happy. After parting with his last possession, an iron
spoon, for a glass of sour beer, he had come to a town where his
Rabbinical diploma--to achieve that had been child's play to
him--procured him the full honors of the position, despite his rags.
The first seat in the synagogue had been given the tramp, and the
wealthy president had invited him to his Sabbath dinner and placed him
between himself and his daughter, a pretty virgin of twelve,
beautifully dressed. Through his wine-glass the future had looked
rosy, and his learned eloquence glowed responsively, but he had not
been too drunk to miss the wry faces the girl began to make, nor to be
suddenly struck dumb with shame as he realised the cause. Lying on the
straw of inn-stables in garments one has not changed for seven weeks
does not commend even a Rabbi to a dainty maiden. The spell of good
luck was broken, and since then the learned tramp had known nothing
but humiliation and hunger.
The throb of elation at the sight of the gate of Berlin had been
speedily subdued by the discovery that he must bide in the poorhouse
the Jews had built there till the elders had examined him. And there
he had herded all day long with the sick and cripples and a lewd
rabble, till evening brought the elders and his doom--a point-blank
refusal to allow him to enter the city and study medicine.
Why? Why? What had they against him? He asked himself the question
between his paroxysms. And suddenly, in the very midst of explaining
his hard case to a new passer-by, the answer came to him and still
further confused his explanations. Yes, it must have been that wolf in
Rabbi's clothing he had talked to that morning in the poorhouse! the
red-bearded reverend who had lent so sympathetic an ear to the tale of
his life in Poland, his journey hither; so sympathetic an eye to his
commentary on the great Maimonides' _Guide of the Perplexed_. The vile
spy, the base informer! He had told the zealots of the town of the
new-comer's heretical mode of thinking. They had shut him out, as one
shuts out the plague.
So this was the free atmosphere, the grander Judaism he had yearned
for. The town which boasted of the far-famed Moses Mendelssohn, of the
paragon of wisdom and tolerance, was as petty as the Rabbi-ridden
villages whose dust he had shaken off. A fierce anger against the Jews
and this Mendelssohn shook him. This then was all he had gained by
leaving his wife and children that he might follow only after Truth!
Perhaps herein lay his punishment. But no! He was not to blame for
being saddled with a family. Marriage at eleven could by no stretch of
sophism be called a voluntary act. He recalled the long, sordid,
sensational matrimonial comedy of which he had been the victim; the
keen competition of the parents of daughters for the hand of so
renowned an infant prodigy, who could talk theology as crookedly as a
graybeard. His own boyish liking for Pessel, the rich rent-farmer's
daughter, had been rudely set aside when her sister fell down a cellar
and broke her leg. Solomon must marry the damaged daughter, the
rent-farmer had insisted to the learned boy's father, who had replied
as pertinaciously, "No, I want the straight-legged sister."
The poor young man writhed afresh at the thought of his father's
obstinacy. True, Rachael had a hobble in her leg, but as he had
discovered years later when a humble tutor in her family, she was an
amiable creature, and as her father had offered to make him joint heir
to his vast fortune, he would have been settled for life, wallowing in
luxury and learning. But no! his father was bent upon having Pessel,
and so he, Solomon, had been beggared by his father's fastidious
objection to a dislocated bone.
Alas, how misfortune had dogged him! There was that wealthy scholar of
Schmilowitz who fell in love with his fame, and proposed for him by
letter without ever having seen him. What a lofty epistle his father
had written in reply, a pastiche of Biblical verses and Talmudical
passages, the condition of consent neatly quoted from "The Song of
Solomon," "Thou, O Solomon, must have a thousand pieces of silver, and
those that keep the fruit thereof two hundred!" A dowry of a thousand
guldens for the boy, and two hundred for the father! The terms of the
Canticles had been accepted, his father had journeyed to Schmilowitz,
seen his daughter-in-law, and drawn up the marriage-contract. The two
hundred guldens for himself had been paid him on the nail, and he had
even insisted on having four hundred.
In vain, "Here is your letter," the scholar had protested, "you only
asked for two hundred."
"True," he had replied; "but that was only not to spoil the beautiful
quotation."
How joyously he had returned home with the four hundred guldens for
himself, the wedding-presents for his little Solomon--a cap of black
velvet trimmed with gold lace, a Bible bound in green velvet with
silver clasps, and the like.
The heart-broken tramp saw the innocent boy that had once been he,
furtively strutting about in his velvet cap, rehearsing the
theological disputation he was to hold at the wedding-table, and
sniffing the cakes and preserves his mother was preparing for the
feast, what time the mail was bringing the news of the sudden death of
the bride from small-pox.
At the moment he had sorrowed as little for his unseen bride as his
father, who, having made four hundred guldens by his son in an
honorable way, might now hope to make another four hundred. "The cap
and the silver-clasped Bible are already mine," the child had told
himself, "and a bride will also not be long wanting, while my
wedding-disputation can serve me again." The mother alone had been
inconsolable, cakes and preserves being of a perishable nature,
especially when there is no place to hide them from the secret attacks
of a disappointed bridegroom. Only now did poor Maimon realize how his
life had again missed ease! For he had fallen at last into the hands of
the widow of Nesvig, with a public-house in the outskirts and an only
daughter. Merely moderately prosperous but inordinately ambitious, she
had dared to dream of this famous wonder-child for her Sarah. Refusal
daunted her not, nor did she cease her campaign till, after trying
every species of trick and manoeuvre and misrepresentation, every
weapon of law and illegality, she had carried home the reluctant
bridegroom. By what unscrupulous warfare she had wrested him from his
last chance of wealth, flourishing a prior marriage-contract in the
face of the rich merchant who unluckily staying the night in her inn,
had proudly shown her the document which betrothed his daughter to the
renowned Solomon! The boy's mother dying at this juncture, the widow
had not shrunk from obtaining from the law-courts an attachment on the
dead body, by which its interment was interdicted till the termination
of the suit. In vain the rich merchant had kidnapped the bridegroom in
his carriage at dead of night, the boy was pursued and recaptured, to
lead a life of constant quarrel with his mother-in-law, and exchange
flying crockery at meal-times; to take refuge in distant tutorships,
and in the course of years, after begetting several children, to drift
further and further, and finally disappear beyond the frontier.
Poor Sarah! He thought of her now with softness. A likeable wench
enough, active and sensible, if with something of her mother's
pertinacity. No doubt she was still the widow's right hand in the
public-house. Ah, how handsome she had looked that day when the
drunken Prince Radziwil, in his mad freak at the inn, had set
approving eyes upon her: "Really a pretty young woman! Only she ought
to get a white chemise." A formula at which the soberer gentlemen of
his train had given her the hint to clear out of the way.
Now in his despair, the baffled Pilgrim of Knowledge turned yearningly
to her image, wept weakly at the leagues that separated him from all
who cared for him. How was David growing up--his curly-haired
first-born; child of his fourteenth year? He must be nearly ten by
now, and in a few years he would be confirmed and become "A Son of the
Commandment." A wave of his own early religious fervor came over him,
bringing with it a faint flavor of festival dishes and far-away echoes
of synagogue tunes. Fool, fool, not to be content with the Truth that
contented his fathers, not to rest in the bosom of the wife God had
given him. Even his mother-in-law was suffused with softer tints
through the mist of tears. She at least appreciated him, had fought
tooth and nail for him, while these gross Berliners--! He clenched his
fists in fury: the full force of the injustice came home to him
afresh; his palms burnt, his brow was racked with shooting pains. His
mind wandered off again to Prince Radziwil and to that day in the
public-house. He saw this capricious ruler marching to visit, with all
the pomp of war, a village not four miles from his residence; first
his battalions of infantry, artillery and cavalry, then his body-guard
of volunteers from the poor nobility, then his kitchen-wagons, then
his bands of music, then his royal coach in which he snored, overcome
by Hungarian wine, lastly his train of lackeys. Then he saw his Serene
Highness thrown on his mother-in-law's dirty bed, booted and spurred;
for his gentlemen, as they passed the inn, had thought it best to give
his slumbers a more comfortable posture. Here, surrounded by valets,
pages, and negroes, he had snored on all night, while the indomitable
widow cooked her meals and chopped her wood in the very room as usual.
And here, in a sooty public-house, with broken windows, and rafters
supported by undressed tree-stems, on a bed swarming with insects--the
prince had awoke, and, naught perturbed, when the thing was explained,
had bidden his menials prepare a banquet on the spot.
Poor Maimon's parched mouth watered now as he thought of that mad
bacchanal banquet of choice wines and dishes, to which princes and
lords had sat down on the dirty benches of the public-house. Goblets
were drained in competition to the sound of cannon, and the judges who
awarded the prize to the Prince, were presented by him with estates
comprising hundreds of peasants. Maimon began to shout in imitation of
the cannon, in imagination he ran amuck in a synagogue, as he had seen
the prince do, smashing and wrecking everything, tearing the Holy
Scrolls from the Ark and trampling upon them. Yes, they deserved it,
the cowardly bigots. Down with the law, to hell with the Rabbis.
A-a-a-h! He would grind the phylacteries under his heel--thus. And
thus! And--
The soldiers perceiving he was in a violent fever, summoned the Jewish
overseer, who carried him back into the poorhouse.