Law, our Torah. He opened a school
at Jabneh, you remember, and there he taught his scholars to be good
Jews, even though Jerusalem was destroyed." His eyes widened and again
he seemed to be looking far away. "Jerusalem was destroyed, even as
the city of my hope will be taken from me. But Rabbi ben Zakkai
escaped to Jabneh and continued the battle there!" He spoke almost in
a whisper and a strange light glowed in his face. "Have you been sent
to teach me the truth, David? Truly, 'out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings hast Thou ordained truth.'"

Mistress Seixas appeared at the doorway, a bright-faced young woman,
pretty in her Sabbath finery of gay silk mantle and flowered bonnet.
"I am all ready, Gershom," she told her husband as she came down the
path.

"And I am ready, too, Elkallah," he answered so gravely that David
felt he meant much more than the simple words implied.

David, as a boy who was not yet _Bar Mitzvah_, sat beside his
grandmother in the _Shearith Israel_ synagogue that bright September
morning, while the drums beat in the streets and the frightened
citizens buzzed excitedly in knots upon the street corners, this man
contending that the British would be defeated before they even crossed
the Sound, his neighbor declaring that on the morrow the redcoats
would surely be encamped in the city. Within the synagogue, the Jewish
citizens of New York continued to hold their Sabbath services. A
goodly assembly they were; Jews of proud blood from Spain and
Portugal, descendants of the early settlers in New Amsterdam, when the
city of New York was still in the hand of the Dutch; a sprinkling of
_Ashkenazim_, German and Polish Jews, who at that time were too few in
number to have a congregation of their own. There were many children
and young people there, pupils and graduates of the religious school
the congregation had founded almost fifty years before for the
teaching of Hebrew, modern languages and the common branches. While
among the men sat sturdy patriots, Samuel Judah, Hayem Levy, Jacob
Mosez and others whose names had appeared on the Non-importation
agreement in 1769, when they with their gentile neighbors had dared to
protest against the tyranny of Great Britain. Benjamin Seixas was
there, too, one of the first Jews to become an officer in the American
Army and several other Jewish soldiers in their uniforms of buff and
blue sat nearby; while directly before him, his alert face thrust
forward, sat