Dreamers of the Ghetto. Israel Zangwill
And he smoothed her silver hair.
"Yea; I, too, have studied the Old Testament." And her eyes smiled through their tears. "'Wherever thou goest, I will go. Thy country shall be my country, and thy God my God.'"
He kissed her wet cheek.
Ere they separated in the gray dawn they had threshed out ways and means; how to realize their property with as little loss and as little observation as possible, and how secretly to ship for the Netherlands. The slightest imprudence might betray them to the Holy Office, and so Vidal was not told till 'twas absolutely essential.
The poor young man grew pale with fright.
"Wouldst drive me to Purgatory?" he asked.
"Nay, Judaism hath no Purgatory." Then seeing the consolation was somewhat confused, Gabriel added emphatically, to ease the distress of one he loved dearly, "There is no Purgatory."
Vidal looked more frightened than ever. "But the Church says—" he began.
"The Church says Purgatory is beneath the earth; but the world being round, there is no beneath, and, mayhap, men like ourselves do inhabit our Antipodes. And the Church holds with Aristotle that the heavens be incorruptible, and contemns Copernicus his theory; yet have I heard from Dom Diego de Balthasar, who hath the science of the University, that a young Italian, hight Galileo Galilei, hath just made a wondrous instrument which magnifies objects thirty-two times, and that therewith he hath discovered a new star. Also doth he declare the Milky Way to be but little stars; for the which the Holy Office is wroth with him, men say."
"But what have I to make with the Milky Way?" whimpered Vidal, his own face as milk.
Gabriel was somewhat taken aback. "'Tis the infallibility of the Pope that is shaken," he explained. "But in itself the Christian faith is more abhorrent to Reason than the Jewish. The things it teaches about God have more difficulties."
"What difficulties?" quoth Vidal. "I see no difficulties."
But in the end the younger brother, having all Gabriel's impressionability, and none of his strength to stand alone, consented to accompany the refugees.
During those surreptitious preparations for flight, Gabriel had to go about his semi-ecclesiastical duties and take part in Church ceremonies as heretofore. This so chafed him that he sometimes thought of proclaiming himself; but though he did not shrink from the thought of the stake, he shrank from the degradation of imprisonment, from the public humiliation, foreseeing the horror of him in the faces of all his old associates. And sometimes, indeed, it flashed upon him how dear were these friends of his youth, despite reason and religion; how like a cordial was the laughter in their eyes, the clasp of their hands, the well-worn jests of college and monastery, market-place and riding-school! How good it was, this common life, how sweet to sink into the general stream and be borne along effortless! Even as he knelt, in conscious hypocrisy, the emotion of all these worshippers sometimes swayed him in magnetic sympathy, and the crowds of holiday-makers in the streets, festively garbed, stirred him to yearning reconciliation. And now that he was to tear himself away, how dear was each familiar haunt—the woods and waters, the pleasant hills strewn with grazing cattle! How caressingly the blue sky bent over him, beseeching him to stay! And the town itself, how he loved its steep streets, the massive Moorish gates, the palaces, the monasteries, the whitewashed houses, the old-fashioned ones, quaint and windowless, and the newer with their protrusive balcony-windows—ay, and the very flavor of garlic and onion that pervaded everything; how oft he had sauntered in the Rua das Flores, watching the gold-workers! And as he moved about the old family home he had a new sense of its intimate appeal. Every beautiful panel and tile, every gracious curve of the great staircase, every statue in its niche, had a place, hitherto unacknowledged, in his heart, and called to him.
But greater than the call of all these was the call of Reason.
PART II
URIEL ACOSTA
VII
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