A vast, motley crowd of poor Jews and Jewesses swayed outside the
doors of the great Manchester synagogue, warmed against the winter
afternoon by their desperate squeezing and pushing. They stretched
from the broad-pillared portico down the steps and beyond the iron
railings, far into the street. The wooden benches of the sacred
building were already packed with a perspiring multitude, seated
indiscriminately, women with men, and even men in the women's gallery,
resentfully conscious--for the first time--of the grating. The hour of
the address had already struck, but the body of police strove in vain
to close the doors against the mighty human stream that pressed on and
on, frenzied with the fear of disappointment and the long wait.
A policeman, worming his way in by the caretaker's entrance, bore to
the hero of the afternoon the superintendent's message that unless he
delayed his speech till the bulk of the disappointed could be got
inside, a riot could not be staved off. And so the stream continued to
force itself slowly forward, flowing into every nook and gangway, till
it stood solid and immovable, heaped like the waters of the Red Sea.
And when at last the doors were bolted, and thousands of swarthy
faces, illumined faintly by clusters of pendent gas-globes, were
turned towards the tall pulpit where the speaker stood, dominant,
against the mystic background of the Ark-curtain, it seemed as if the
whole Ghetto of Manchester--the entire population of Strange-ways and
Redbank--had poured itself into this one synagogue in a great tidal
wave, moved by one of those strange celestial influences which have
throughout all history disturbed the torpor of the Jewries.
Of these poverty-stricken thousands, sucked hither by the fame of a
soldier rumored to represent a Messianic millionaire bent on the
restoration and redemption of Israel, Aaron the Pedlar was an
atom--ugly, wan, and stooping, with pious ear-locks, and a long, fusty
coat, little regarded even by those amid whom he surged and squeezed
for hours in patience. Aaron counted for less than nothing in a world
he helped to overcrowd, and of which he perceived very little. For,
although he did not fail to make a profit on his gilded goods, and
knew how to wheedle servants at side-doors, he was far behind his
fellows in that misapprehension of the human hurly-burly which makes
your ordinary Russian Jew a political oracle. Aaron's interest in
politics was limited to the wars of the Kings of Israel and the
misdeeds of Titus and Antiochus Epiphanes. To him the modern world was
composed of Jews and heathen; and society had two simple sections--the
rich and the poor.
"Don't you enjoy travelling?" one of the former section once asked him
affably. "Even if it's disagreeable in winter you must pass through a
good deal of beautiful scenery in summer."
"If I am on business," replied the pedlar, "how can I bother about the
beautiful?"
And, flustered though he was by the condescension of the great person,
his naïve counter-query expressed a truth. He lived, indeed, in a
strange dream-world, and had no eyes for the real except in the shape
of cheap trinkets. He was happier in the squalid streets of
Strange-ways, where strips of Hebrew patched the windows of
cook-shops, and where a synagogue was ever at hand, than when striding
across the purple moors under an open blue sky, or resting with his
pack by the side of purling brooks. Stupid his enemies would have
called him, only he was too unimportant to have enemies, the roughs
and the children who mocked his passage being actuated merely by
impersonal malice. To his friends--if the few who were aware of his
existence could be called friends--he was a _Schlemihl_ (a luckless
fool).
"A man who earns a pound a week live without a wife!" complained the
_Shadchan_ (marriage-broker) to a group of sympathetic cap-makers.
"I suppose he's such a _Schlemihl_ no father would ever look at him!"
said a father, with a bunch of black-eyed daughters.
"Oh, but he _was_ married in Russia," said another; "but just as he
sent his wife the money to come over, she died."
"And yet you call him a _Schlemihl_!" cried Moshelé, the cynic.
"Ah, but her family stuck to the money!" retorted the narrator, and
captured the laugh.
It was true. After three years of terrible struggle and privation,
Aaron had prepared an English home for his Yenta, but she slept
instead in a Russian grave. Perhaps if his friends had known how he
had thrown away the chance of sending for her earlier, they would have
been still more convinced that he was a born _Schlemihl_. For within
eighteen months of his landing in London docks, Aaron, through his
rapid mastery of English and ciphering at the evening classes for
Hebrew adults, had found a post as book-keeper to a clothes-store in
Ratcliff Highway. But he soon discovered that he was expected to fake
the invoices, especially when drunken sailors came to rig themselves
up in mufti.
"Well, we'll throw the scarf in," the genial salesman would concede
cheerily. "And the waistcoat? One-and-three--a good waistcoat, as
clean as new, and dirt cheap, so 'elp me."
But when Aaron made out the bill he was nudged to put the
one-and-three in the column for pounds and shillings respectively, and
even, if the buyer were sufficiently in funds and liquor, to set down
the date of the month in the same pecuniary partitions, and to add it
up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron,
although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of
goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took
him a year of nondescript occupations to amass a little stock of mock
jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more
profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy
learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of
the former or more of the latter than our itinerant idealist.
Such was one of the thousands of souls swarming that afternoon in the
synagogue, such was one despised unit of a congregation itself
accounted by the world a pitiable mass of superstitious poverty, and
now tossing with emotion in the dim spaces of the sacred building.
The Oriental imagination of the hearers magnified the simple soldierly
sentences of the orator, touched them with color and haloed them with
mystery, till, as the deep gasps and sobs of the audience struck back
like blows on the speaker's chest, the contagion of their passion
thrilled him to responsive emotion. And, seen through tears, arose for
him and them a picture of Israel again enthroned in Palestine, the
land flowing once more with milk and honey, rustling with corn and
vines planted by their own hands, and Zion--at peace with all the
world--the recognized arbitrator of the nations, making true the word
of the Prophet: "For from Zion shall go forth the Law, and the word of
God from Jerusalem."
To Aaron the vision came like a divine intoxication. He stamped his
feet, clapped, cried, shouted. He felt tears streaming down his cheeks
like the rivers that watered Paradise. What! This hope that had
haunted him from boyhood, wafting from the pages of the holy books,
was not then a shadowy splendor on the horizon's rim. It was a
solidity, within sight, almost within touch. He himself might hope to
sit in peace under his own fig-tree, no more the butt of the street
boys. And the vague vision, though in becoming definite it had been
transformed to earthliness, was none the less grand for that. He had
always dimly expected Messianic miracles, but in that magic afternoon
the plain words of the soldier unsealed his eyes, and suddenly he saw
clearly that just as, in Israel, every man was his own priest, needing
no mediator, so every man was his own Messiah.
And as he squeezed out of the synagogue, unconscious of the
chattering, jostling crowd, he saw himself in Zion, worshipping at the
Holy Temple, that rose spacious and splendid as the Manchester
Exchange. Yes; the Jews must return to Palestine, there must be a
great voluntary stream--great, if gradual. Slowly but surely the Jews
must win back their country; they must cease trafficking with the
heathen and return to the soil, sowing and reaping, so that the Feast
of the Ingathering might become a reality instead of a prayer-service.
Then should the atonement of Israel be accomplished, and the morning
stars sing together as at the first day.
As he walked home along the squalid steeps of Fernie Street and
Verdon Street, and gazed in at the uncurtained windows of the
one-story houses, a new sense of their sordidness, as contrasted with
that bright vision, was borne in upon him. Instead of large families
in one ragged room, encumbered with steamy washing, he saw great farms
and broad acres; and all that beauty of the face of earth, to which he
had been half blind, began to appeal to him now that it was mixed up
with religion. In this wise did Aaron become a politician and a
modern.
Passing through the poulterer's on his way to his room--the poulterer
and he divided the house between them, renting a room each--he paused
to talk with the group of women who were plucking the fowls, and told
them glad tidings of great fowl-rearing farms in Palestine. He sat
down on the bed, which occupied half the tiny shop, and became almost
eloquent upon the great colonization movement and the "Society of
Lovers of Zion," which had begun to ramify throughout the world.
"Yes; but if all Israel has farms, who will buy my fowls?" said the
poulterer's wife.
"You will not need to sell fowls," Aaron tried to explain.
The poulterer shook his head. "The whole congregation is gone mad," he
said. "For my part I believe that when the Holy One, blessed be He,
brings us back to Palestine, it will be without any trouble of our
own. As it is written, I will bear thee upon eagles' wings."
Aaron disputed this notion--which he had hitherto accepted as
axiomatic--with all the ardor of the convert. It was galling to find,
as he discussed the thing during the next few weeks, that many even of
those present at the speech read miracle into the designs of
Providence and the millionaire. But Aaron was able to get together a
little band of brother souls bent on emigrating together to
Palestine, there to sow the seeds of the Kingdom, literally as well as
metaphorically. This enthusiasm, however, did not wear well.
Gradually, as the memory of the magnetic meeting faded, the pilgrim
brotherhood disintegrated, till at last only its nucleus--Aaron--was
left in solitary determination.
"You have only yourself," pleaded the backsliders. "We have wife and
children."
"I have more than myself," retorted Aaron bitterly. "I have faith."
And, indeed, his faith in the vision was unshakable. Every man being
his own Messiah, he, at least, would not draw back from the
prospective plough to which he had put his hand. He had been saving up
for the great voyage and a little surplus wherewith to support him in
Palestine while looking about him. Once established in the Holy Land,
how forcibly he would preach by epistle to the men of little faith!
They would come out and join him. He--the despised Aaron--the least of
the House of Israel--would have played a part in the restoration of
his people.
"You will come back," said the poulterer sceptically, when his
fellow-tenant bade him good-bye; and parodying the sacred
aspiration--"Next year in Manchester," he cried, in genial mockery.
The fowl-plucking females laughed heartily, agitating the feathery
fluff in the air.
"Not so," said Aaron. "I cannot come back. I have sold the goodwill of
my round to Joseph Petowski, and have transferred to him all my
customers."
Some of the recreant brotherhood, remorsefully admiring, cheered him
up by appearing on the platform of the station to wish him God-speed.
"Next year in Jerusalem!" he prophesied for them, too, recouping
himself for the poulterer's profane scepticism.
He went overland to Marseilles, thence by ship to Asia Minor. It was
a terrible journey. Piety forebade him to eat or drink with the
heathen, or from their vessels. His portmanteau held a little store of
provisions and crockery, and dry bread was all he bought on the route.
Fleeced and bullied by touts and cabmen, he found himself at last on
board a cheap Mediterranean steamer which pitched and rolled through a
persistent spell of stormy weather. His berth was a snatched corner of
the bare deck, where heaps of earth's failures, of all races and
creeds and colors, grimily picturesque, slept in their clothes upon
such bedding as they had brought with them. There was a spawn of
babies, a litter of animals and fowls in coops, a swarm of human
bundles, scarcely distinguishable from bales except for a protruding
hand or foot. There were Bedouins, Armenians, Spaniards, a Turk with
several wives in an improvised tent, some Greek women, a party of
Syrians from Mount Lebanon. There were also several Jews of both
sexes. But Aaron did not scrape acquaintance with these at first--they
lay yards away, and he was half dead with sea-sickness and want of
food. He had counted on making tea in his own cup with his own little
kettle, but the cook would not trouble to supply him with hot water.
Only the great vision drawing hourly nearer and nearer sustained him.
It was the attempt of a half-crazy Egyptian Jewess to leap overboard
with her new-born child that brought him into relation with the other
Jewish passengers. He learnt her story: the everyday story of a woman
divorced in New York, after the fashion of its Ghetto, and sent back
with scarcely a penny to her native Cairo, while still lightheaded
after childbirth. He heard also the story of the buxom, kind-hearted
Jewess who now shadowed her protectingly; the no less everyday story
of the good-looking girl inveigled by a rascally Jew to a situation in
Marseilles. They contributed with the men, a Russian Jew from
Chicago, and a German from Brindisi, to give Aaron of Manchester a new
objective sense of the tragedy of wandering Israel, interminably
tossed betwixt persecution and poverty, perpetually tempted by both to
be false to themselves: the tragedy that was now--thank God!--to have
its end. Egyptians, Americans, Galicians, Englishmen, Russians,
Dutchmen, they had only one last migration before them--that which he,
Aaron, was now accomplishing. To his joy one of his new
acquaintances--the Russian--shared the dream of a Palestine flowing
once more with milk and honey and holy doctrine, was a member of a
"Lovers of Zion" society. He was a pasty-faced young man with gray
eyes and eyebrows and a reddish beard. He wore frowsy clothes, with an
old billy-cock and a dingy cotton shirt, but he combined all the lore
of the old-fashioned, hard-shell Jew with a living realization of what
his formulæ meant, and so the close of Aaron's voyage--till the
Russian landed at Alexandria--was softened and shortened by sitting
worshipfully at this idealist's feet, drinking in quotations from
Bachja's _Duties of the Heart_ or Saadja Gaon's _Book of the Faith_.
There was not wanting some one to play Sancho Panza, for the German
Jew, while binding his arm piously with phylacteries in the publicity
of the swarming deck, loved to pose as a man of common sense, free
from superstition.
"The only reason men go to Palestine," he maintained, "is because they
think, as the psalm says, the land forgives sin. And they believe,
too, that those bodies which are not burned in Palestine, when the
Messiah's last trump sounds, will have to roll under lands and seas to
get to Jerusalem. So they go to die there, so as to escape the
underground route. Besides, Maimonides says the Messianic period will
only last forty years. So perhaps they are afraid all the fun will be
over and the Leviathan eaten up before they arrive."
"Fools there are always in the world," replied the Russian, "and their
piety cannot give them brains. These literal folk are the sort who
imagine that the Temple expanded miraculously, because the Talmud says
howsoever great a multitude flocked to worship therein, there was
always room for them. Do you not see what a fine metaphor that is!
Even so the Third Temple will be of the Spirit, not of Fire, as these
literal materialists translate the prophecy. As the prophet Joel says,
'I will pour out my Spirit. Your old men shall dream dreams, your
young men shall see visions,' And this Spirit is working to-day. But
through our own souls. No Messiah will ever come from a split heaven.
If a Christian does anything wrong, it is the individual; if a Jew, it
is the nation. Why? Because we have no country, and hence are set
apart in all countries. But a country we must and shall have. The fact
that we still dream of our land shows that it is to be ours again.
Without a country we are dead. Without us the land is dead. It has
been waiting for us. Why has no other nation possessed it and
cultivated it?"
"Why? Why do the ducks go barefoot?" The German quoted the Yiddish
proverb with a sneer.
"The land waits for us," replied the young Russian fervidly, "so that
we may complete our mission. Jerusalem--whose very name means the
heritage of double Peace--must be the watch-tower of Peace on earth.
The nations shall be taught to compete neither with steel weapons nor
with gold, but with truth and purity. Every man shall be taught that
he exists for another man, else were men as the beasts. And thus at
last 'the knowledge of God shall cover the earth as the waters cover
the sea.'"
"If they would only remain covering the sea!" said the German
irreverently, as the spray of a wave swept over his mattress.
"Those who have lost this faith are no longer Jews," curtly replied
the Russian. "Without this hope the preservation of the Jewish race is
a superstition. Let the Jews be swallowed up in the nations--and me in
the sea. If I thought that Israel's hope was a lie I should jump
overboard."
The German shrugged his shoulders good-humoredly. "You and the
Egyptian woman are a pair."
At Alexandria, where some of the cargo and his Jewish
fellow-passengers were to be landed, Aaron was tantalized for days by
the quarantine, so that he must needs fret amid the musty odors long
after he had thought to tread the sacred streets of Jerusalem. But at
last he found himself making straight for the Holy Land; and one magic
day, the pilgrim, pallid and emaciated, gazed in pious joy upon the
gray line of rocks that changed gradually into terraces of red sloping
roofs overbrooded by a palm-tree. Jaffa! But a cruel, white sea still
rolled and roared betwixt him and these holy shores, guarded by the
rock of Andromeda and tumbling and leaping billows; and the ship lay
to outside the ancient harbor, while heavy boats rowed by stalwart
Arabs and Syrians, in red fez and girdle, clamored for the passengers.
Aaron was thrown unceremoniously over the ship's side at the favorable
moment when the boat leapt up to meet him; he fell into it, soused
with spray, but glowing at heart. As his boat pitched and tossed
along, a delicious smell of orange-blossom wafted from the
orange-groves, and seemed to the worn pilgrim a symbol of the marriage
betwixt him and Zion. The land of his fathers--there it lay at last,
and in a transport of happiness the wanderer had, for the first time
in his life, a sense of the restful dignity of an ancestral home. But
as the boat labored without apparent progress towards the channel
betwixt the black rocks, over which the spray flew skywards, a
foreboding tortured him that some ironic destiny would drown him in
sight of his goal. He prayed silently with shut eyes and his petition
changed to praise as the boat bumped the landing-stage and he opened
them on a motley Eastern crowd and the heaped barrels of a wharf.
Shouldering his portmenteau, which, despite his debilitated condition,
felt as light as the feathers at the poulterer's, he scrambled
ecstatically up some slippery steps on to the stone platform, and had
one foot on the soil of the Holy Land, when a Turkish official in a
shabby black uniform stopped him.
"Your passport," he said, in Arabic. Aaron could not understand.
Somebody interpreted.
"I have no passport," he answered, with a premonitory pang.
"Where are you going?"
"To live in Palestine."
"Where do you come from?"
"England," he replied triumphantly, feeling this was a mighty password
throughout the world.
"You are not an Englishman?"
"No-o," he faltered. "I have lived in England some--many years."
"Naturalized?"
"No," said Aaron, when he understood.
"What countryman are you?"
"Russian."
"And a Jew, of course?"
"Yes."
"No Russian Jews may enter Palestine."
Aaron was hustled back into the boat and restored safely to the
steamer.