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position; his unscrupulous father being at the same time dragged down in the vortex of the wild speculations into which the son plunged in his years of unsuspected mental aberration.

A character and a story more carefully opposed in every particular to the character and the story of the altruistic Deronda could not well have been invented; but if the intention of the author was to supply a corrective to the false impressions that George Eliot's picture of improbable Hebrew perfection might produce, he overshot the mark. The cynical, conscienceless Fawleys, father and son, cannot be accepted as typical representatives of their race, save by those who are committed to anti-Semitic dislike too strongly to be capable of fair judgment. And the hand of the outsider is evident in the attempt to describe old Fawley's Judaic peculiarities; mispronunciation of the s after familiar Anglo-Jewish fashion alone stamps his diction with the brandmark of separatism, otherwise quite lacking to his personality, as to that of his son. Nevertheless, it can hardly be doubted that the cosmopolitan son of the New England master of romance has not written this anti-Semitic story without the prompting and inspiration of some actual experience or knowledge.

A far more damaging indictment was preferred against the Israelite ambitions of winning high place in English society, when the ill-fated Amy Levy, who knew her world as a Gentile cannot, put forth her "Reuben Sachs; a Sketch;" and drew a melancholy, but not too improbable, picture of the heartdespair that might be the portion of a sensitive, tender, deeply thinking and deeply feeling girl, fated to live amid the hard conditions of modern prosperous British Judaism, where materialism and mammon-worship are recognized frankly and held wise and necessary, and obedience to their requirements counted a serious duty; while religious faith and feeling, very dimly realized, are supposed to be all on the side of the imperative obligation to attain worldly success-a creed not unheard of in the

outside world, which, however, will not avow it as openly, or act on it as gen. uinely.

So far Amy Levy is at one with other critics of her people; but it is hers to show us imprisoned souls, cherishing other ideals than those of mere material achievement, and beating their wings vainly against the bars of the cage in which their elders live contented-or learning to accept, sadly, an unworthy submission to their captivity. Here are the nobleness of Israel and the sordidness of Jewish character and training again depicted; but is the picture wholly true?

Somehow there is a weird life-likeness about every member of that strange, half grotesque, half pathetic family group, which, overweighted with splendid array, we see gathered in drawingrooms, far too sumptuously decorated, around Reuben Sachs, the pride of his house, the young brilliant university man, rising barrister, and successful Parliamentary candidate; or wearing out with him in the synagogue, the long fasting hours of the Day of Atonement -an occasion not to be disregarded by the most pagan or sceptical of Jews. They are very much alive, those sadeyed elderly women, unsatisfied and heart-hungry amid the wealth and gorgeousness which they continue to esteem as the chief good of existence; those younger, richly costumed matrons and maids, widely diverse in character, but all, whether bitterly sceptical, or calmly practical, or simply womanly, pledged to the pursuit of fashion and fortune; that whitehaired, shrewd, prosperous grandfather, who, his fortune won, fills up the leisure hours of his life's evening with constant mechanical muttering of Hebrew prayers; those grandsons of his who conform, like him, to the exactions of the national religion, but in ways so diverse; some, ignorantly and unthinkingly: some, with irreverent mockery; some, who are afflicted with genius, with impatient disgust; and some, like Reuben Sachs himself, with practical philosophy, holding the Jewish religion in affection for the sake of the Jewish

race; but none, to the astonishment of the aristocratic Gentile convert, who comes among them full of ideas of "Daniel Deronda," with deep intelligent heart-conviction.

"I have always been touched," says one of the characters, referring to that famous book, "with the immense good faith with which George Eliot carried out that elaborate misconception of hers;" and another responds, in a "reasonable and pacific way," that "it is no good to pretend that our religion remains a vital force among the cultivated and thoughtful Jews of to-day."

The disappointing words have the ring of reality. Yes, these creatures are no mere wire-worked puppets, who, while made to act and express themselves in such melancholy fashion, work out the tragedy of the little story. The "sketch," however, remains a sketch only, and represents but a section of a vast society. We shall find modern Hebrew life and feeling in its totality, better reflected in the remarkable Jewish books of Zangwill.

It was a strange, complex world, full of thronging, stirring life, and embracing all but the highest and lowest extremes of social existence, that was revealed to a surprised and interested public when the "Children of the Ghetto" first appeared; the Ghetto therein described being the unwalled region of London lying in the vicinity of Petticoat Lane, and its inmates restricting themselves to its well-recognized limits from immemorial use and wont, not from any outward compulsion. But the writer does not content himself with depicting their sordid, yet eager and hopeful, life, nor with taking into his survey the ways and doings of those "Grandchildren of the Ghetto," compeers of the characters in "Reuben Sachs," who are willingly forgetful of the squalors of the East-end, except on the rare occasions when they appear amid them as almoners and benefactors; he bids us recognize the existence, among both the high and the lowly, of really elect Israelitish souls, capable of an ideal devotion to hopes much larger than the political indepen

dence of Judah, or the acquisition for it of a national centre in Palestine-those aims which, as far as can be discerned, would content the aspirations of a Daniel Deronda, but do not suffice for the rare enthusiasts pictured by Zangwill. He has shown these dreamers and idealists as being few indeed in number, but significant by their mere presence of a real life still warm in the heart of their race. "Though Israel has sunk low, like a tree once green and living, and has become petrified and blackened, there is stored-up sunlight in him." So, by the mouth of Joseph Strelitski, his one exponent of the idea that "the brotherhood of Israel will be the nucleus of the brotherhood of man," speaks Zangwill; and so far one may believe he is at one with his mouthpiece; for a real reverence, such as is not accorded to a dead, outworn thing, informs his pictures of the strange life of the London Ghetto, wound about with its close clinging network of mechanical pious formalities; and this feeling is not the less genuine because that life is painted as being either a constant struggle with poverty or an eager pursuit of what passes for wealth.

We are not intended to despise the tailor family, which we first surprise noisily celebrating a betrothal feast in the dark crowded rooms, where the click of the sewing-machine, worked by the buxom daughter, is so seldom still; nor the too sedulous student of the law, reduced to hawk lemons after total failure in every other occupation, who meekly stands in the uncleanly, bustling street, crying his wares, bought with charity-money, in the hope of earning a crust for his motherless children; nor that over-shrewd Shadchan, or professional match-maker, eager in the pursuit of his well-recognized calling, at whose "Bar-mitzvah party" we assist, with due admiration for its thrifty festivities, which honor the important day when the Shadchans' son attains his religious majority with his thirteenth year; nor the Shammos or beadle, glad to supplement his scanty salary with the small fees of a letter writer; nor any of that mixed multitude of "hawkers

and pedlars, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers and capmakers," mostly of alien birth, who elbow each other in the scramble for the bare means of life, and fill the thick air of the Ghetto with chatter in Yiddish, and quibbling on strange points of ceremonial righteousness. For intense is their faith in the value of the quaint observances which outsiders hold so trivial, solemn to them is the importance of the proper cadence to be given to the prayers in the synagogue, the proper gestures to accompany them; of the rightful killing of meat and cooking of food; of the often repeated prayers, and the very perfunctory ablutions with no relation to cleanliness; of the due celebrating of feasts under whatever difficulties of grim London surroundings. These, and a hundred other like performances are gone through under a solemn sense of binding duty which lends to the poor, common, coarse lives of the sons and daughters of affliction a dignity lacking to their wealthier, indifferent or sceptical compatriots-a dignity seen at its height in the gentlehearted bigot, "Reb" Shemuel, who, though full of tenderest pity for sorrow and need, destroys his daughter's hopes of happiness out of reverence for the mere letter of a misinterpreted lawand does so without losing the reader's sympathy.

But if our author renders honor to the rough, hard husk of ritual, which is the protecting envelope of a living seed, he shows us also how intolerable can be the pressure of the "yoke of bondage," and gives many instances of revolt on the part of the Children, as of the Grandchildren of the Ghetto-revolt that is due sometimes to the mere longing for lawless freedom, but sometimes also to the sincere passion for something more beautiful than traditional narrowness, and always then significant of a new stirring and surging of vital forces that may work for good. The intention to suggest far brighter possibilities than were contemplated by the sad-hearted writer of "Reuben Sachs" is accented by the leading part assigned in the "Children of the Ghetto" to a young

Jewess of genius, author of a novel"Mordecai Josephs"-as unfavorable in its strictures on Jewish materialistic vulgarity as the work of Amy Levy.

A daughter of the Ghetto, Esther Ansell has known the sharpest pinch of humiliating poverty, in days when she shared a garret-room with three generations of her family, and beguiled hungry hours with dreaming over a "little brown book"-a New Testament, obtained by barter from a schoolmatewhich fascinated her strangely, devout little Jew maiden as she was. Memories of that book are clinging to her thoughts in the far different surrounding into which she is lifted by the kindly caprice of a wealthy, childless patroness who, fancying the girl's cleverness, has adopted, educated and developed her into brilliant womanhood. But the unquestioning piety of childhood has been crushed out of Esther; hard experience, widened knowledge, and the new atmosphere of indifferentism and luxury, have made her sceptical. Familiar with both the squalor and the gorgeousness of her people's existence, she finds both equally repugnant; and it is a sort of æsthetic disgust that expresses itself in her crude, anonymous novel, which so displeases her patrons that she dare not avow the authorship. But a saving influence comes into her life with Raphael de Leon, one of Zang. will's idealists, the philanthropic, highly cultivated scion of a wealthy family, who aims to promote the regeneration of Israel by accepting the editorship of a new, strictly orthodox, Jewish paper, and whose impassioned belief in the Divine mission of his people surprises the girl pessimist.

Disillusion awaits Raphael, whose new task, undertaken from pure disinterested zeal, makes him acquainted with too much that is absurd, narrow, fantastic, self-interested, in his orthodox Jewish co-workers, and who has to resign his post under unfriendly pressure, after much difficult self-denying exertion; but his unpleasant experiences only work to the enlarging of his ideas, and his persistent patriot enthusiasm begins to tell on Esther An

sell, who slowly re-awakens to a sense of real but defeated grandeur in the race and religion she has criticised and scorned, even while she struggles fiercely against the tender deep attachment growing up between herself and Raphael. Wrath against her own false position seizes her; she breaks the ties that bind her to her luxurious home, and tries to lose herself anew in the unsavory mazes of the Ghetto, to which a mysterious attraction draws her, although her own kinsfolk have long left it for America; she longs for "the old impossible Judaism," though she calls it a forlorn hope; she plans to escape from Raphael by uniting herself anew to her distant family, for she fears to injure him, not being able to share his dream that Israel should yet develop into "a sacred phalanx, a nobler brotherhood," commissioned to exemplify to the world a mystic religion all unselfishnew Judaisms," says she "will never ness, righteousness, and love. "Your appeal like the old, with all its imperfections. They will never keep the race together through shine and shade as that did. They do but stow off the inevitable dissolution." And yet the dream has power on her imagination, despite the resistance of her intellect; it returns on her with overwhelming force when, on the eve of sailing for America, she obeys immemorial habit and betakes herself to the synagogue on the day of the Great White Fast. There, shut up among the women, she listens to the surging sounds of prayer that ascend from the men's chamber, with ever-growing emotion; she thrills to the mighty cry with which the whole congregation proclaims the Unity of Jehovah; "from her lips came in rapturous surrender to an overmastering impulse the half-hysterical protestation, 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one!" and the whole history of her strange, unhappy race flashed through her mind in a whirl of resistless emotion:

She was overwhelmed at the thought of its sons in every corner of the earth proclaiming to the sombre twilight sky the

...

belief for which its generations had lived and died. . . . The shadow of a large, mysterious destiny seemed to hang over these poor, superstitious zealots whose lives she knew so well (in their every-day prose.

What is the secret of that destiny? she asks herself, her soul floating between despair and hope; shall the Jew, having come so far, sink and be lost in "morasses of modern doubt"—or shall he outlast both Mohammedan and Christian? Can it be that he is designed to fulfil that noble dream of Raphael's, and, restored to the Fatherland, show forth what a nation should be?-or is it "a larger, wilder dream" that he is to realize, and shall a universal Judaism, grander, larger, nobler than the old, bless the world by its vast diffusion?

Torn by such questionings, faint with fasting and emotion, Esther Ansell comes forth from the synagogue, not as she went in; her spirit is no longer sternly shut against hope and happiness; and when we next see her, it is only a brief farewell that she is bidding to Raphael and the share of earthly blessedness he can give.

But we are left quite doubtful as to the solution of the painful riddle of Israel which commends itself to the heroine or her creator. It may be that of Strelitski, the Russian Jew, another character in the vivid novel, who, cruelly persecuted in his native land, escaped to England, and there endured a bondage, scarcely less cruel, as the minister of a fashionable synagogue, "the professional panegyrist," says he bitterly, "of the rich." Renouncing that position, and with it the outward form of orthodoxy, Strelitski turns his eyes to the great free world of America, where, says he, "the last great battle of Judaism will be fought out," with the result, as he hopes, that his race shall become "the link of federation among the nations," acting everywhere in the interests of peace; promoting true human interests; and gathering the peoples into a great spiritual Republic of the higher life.

A magnificent vision; but can it be anything more than a vision? We have no answer from our author, who does but show us Strelitski taking ship for the New World, in hopes to work towards realizing this ideal. Neither he, nor his fellow enthusiasts, seem to be aware that what they are dreaming of is, in truth, Christianity with the Christ left out, and rendered impossible by that omission. Yet references abound to the great Teacher and his doctrine, references often admiring, often tinged with a certain pride in his nationality; his words were frequent on the lips of the child Esther, his "almost limitless impress on history" is vaunted by Esther, the sceptical woman; hostility to him, personally, is carefully limited to Israelites ignorant of the outside worla. "Christianity is very beautiful in theory. . . . I should like to believe in Jesus," says Esther Ansell it scarcely needs that we point out how impossible such words would be to the Jewess as imagined by George Eliot. But, for all this apparent admiration, there is a steady refusal of heart-homage to the Divine human Redeemer, and we are not doubtfully bidden to seek the reason in the unfaithfulness of professing Christians to the laws of Christ's kingdom. Significant is the saying, "Scratch the Christian, and you will find the pagan, spoiled," put into the mouth of a mocking Jew, himself a pagan; and the bitter judgment does not lack support from other works of Zangwill: in that "Ghetto Tragedy," called the "Dairy of a Meshumad" (or apostate), in "Joseph the Dreamer," tragic tale of a Jewish convert to popery, the inhuman bigotry of Greek-Russian and Romanist fanatics, cruelly false to the Gospel of Love, is vehemently reprobated.

And yet, if we take Zangwill for a witness of the truth, there is a real element of hopefulness in the tendency to appropriate the ethical teaching of Christianity, evidenced in the theories of Raphael and Strelitski, and also in their actions; there is hope in the admiration and recognition, however imperfect, of the Christ of history, in the wist

ful yearning of one soul and another towards His spiritual law of love, though they deem it too lofty; hope in the healthy scorn expressed by Raphael da Leon for the "eviscerated Christianity" he found in vogue at Oxford, which, says he, might be summed up thus: "There is no God, but Jesus Christ is His Son." If these pictures of educated English Israelites and their ways of thought can at all be trusted, then is there a movement going on in the best Anglo-Jewish minds, strangely corresponding to the growing passion for rendering true obedience to the law of the Master, now visibly working among the best and purest of English Christian believers; and we might well recognize one mighty influence from above, drawing Jew and Christian together in spiritual aspiration, so powerfully, that they must at last coalesce, and the recognition by Israel of her disowned Lord begin. Such a day of God shall surely dawn, though its coming may have to tarry till Christendom at large becomes more Christ-like, till all nations shall understand that they war against themselves in afflicting Israel; and till there be, even among Englishspeaking peoples, a vast development of that sympathetic, intelligent toleration of Jew by Christian, which our hasty survey of our own imaginative literature has shown progressing among ourselves in such slow fluctuating fashion-yet progressing.

For very slowly advances the empire of Love; but the indications are sure, which certify us of its final triumph; and not the least convincing are those gathered from revelations of the inner life of enfranchised Israel.

IN KEDAR'S TENTS.1

BY HENRY SETON MERRIMAN, AUTHOR OF "THE SOWERS."

CHAPTER XXVII.

A NIGHT JOURNEY. "Let me but bear your love, I'll bear your cares."

At the cross-roads, on the northern side of the river, the two carriages 1 Copyright, 1897, by Henry Seton Merriman.

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