se carrying
with them through the paven highways of London the odor of Continental
Ghettos and bearing in their eyes through all the shrewdness of their
glances the eternal mysticism of the Orient, where God was born! Hawkers
and peddlers, tailors and cigar-makers, cobblers and furriers, glaziers
and cap-makers--this was in sum their life. To pray much and to work
long, to beg a little and to cheat a little, to eat not over-much and to
"drink" scarce at all, to beget annual children by chaste wives
(disallowed them half the year), and to rear them not over-well, to
study the Law and the Prophets and to reverence the Rabbinical tradition
and the chaos of commentaries expounding it, to abase themselves before
the "Life of Man" and Joseph Cam's "Prepared Table" as though the
authors had presided at the foundation of the earth, to wear
phylacteries and fringes, to keep the beard unshaven, and the corners of
the hair uncut, to know no work on Sabbath and no rest on week-day. It
was a series of recurrent landmarks, ritual and historical, of intimacy
with God so continuous that they were in danger of forgetting His
existence as of the air they breathed. They ate unleavened bread in
Passover and blessed the moon and counted the days of the _Omer_ till
Pentecost saw the synagogue dressed with flowers in celebration of an
Asiatic fruit harvest by a European people divorced from agriculture;
they passed to the terrors and triumphs of the New Year (with its
domestic symbolism of apple and honey and its procession to the river)
and the revelry of repentance on the Great White Fast, when they burned
long candles and whirled fowls round their heads and attired themselves
in grave-clothes and saw from their seats in synagogue the long fast-day
darken slowly into dusk, while God was sealing the decrees of life and
death; they passed to Tabernacles when they ran up rough booths in back
yards draped with their bed-sheets and covered with greenery, and bore
through the streets citrons in boxes and a waving combination of myrtle,
and palm and willow branches, wherewith they made a pleasant rustling in
the synagogue; and thence to the Rejoicing of the Law when they danced
and drank rum in the House of the Lord and scrambled sweets for the
little ones, and made a sevenfold circuit with the two scrolls,
supplemented by toy flags and children's candles stuck in hollow
carrots; and then on again to Dedication with its celebration of the
Maccabaea