s
gold, and its gilding, the thin, dark men were together in their hats
and long coats, and the sealed books of Moses were borne before their
eyes and held up to the North and South and East and West, and all the
men together lifted up their arms and cried aloud to the God of their
fathers. But when the Sabbath was over, they went back to their rags and
their patched clothes and to their old iron and their junk and their
antiquities, and toiled on patiently again, looking for the coming of
the Messiah.

And there were astrologers and diviners and magicians and witches and
crystal-gazers among them to whom great ladies came on foot, thickly
veiled, and walking delicately amidst the rags, and men, too, who were
more ashamed of themselves, and slunk in at nightfall to ask the Jews
concerning the future--even in our time as in Juvenal's, and in
Juvenal's day as in Saul's of old. Nor did the papal laws against
witchcraft have force against Jews, since the object of the laws was to
save Christian souls from the hell which no Jew could escape save by
conversion. And the diviners and seers and astrologers of the Ghetto
were long in high esteem, and sometimes earned fortunes when they hit
the truth, and when the truth was pleasant in the realization.

They are gone now, with the Ghetto and all that belonged to it. The Jews
who lived there are either becoming absorbed in the population of Rome,
or have transferred themselves and their rags to other places, where
lodgings are cheap, but where they no longer enjoy the privilege of
irrevocable leases at rents fixed for all time. A part of them are
living between Santa Maria Maggiore and the Lateran, a part in
Trastevere, and they exercise their ancient industries in their new
homes, and have new synagogues instead of the old ones. But one can no
longer see them all together in one place. Little by little, too, the
old prejudices against them are disappearing, even among the poorer
Romans, whose hatred was most tenacious, and by and by, at no very
distant date, the Jews in Rome will cease to be an isolated and peculiar
people. Then, when they live as other men, amongst other folks, as in
many cities of the world, they will get the power in Rome, as they have
begun to get it already, and as they have it already in more than one
great capital. But a change has come over the Jewish race within the
last fifty years, greater than any that has affected their destinies
since Titus destroy