THE PROSELYTE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.
About fifty years ago a group of street-idlers and passers-by were standing at the corner of one of the narrow and old-fashioned streets near the old harbor of Marseilles, amusing themselves at the plight of a short, dark-complexioned man who stood in their midst, and who was evidently a foreigner and a stranger in the town. It was a typical early summer day in one of the busiest spots of the metropolis of southern France. The sun shone with a brilliance and a radiance characteristic of the region and the season, and was just a little too warm for comfort; and the streets were crowded with a motley throng partly composed of Frenchmen, among whom the natives of northern France and the provençals or inhabitants of the south could be easily distinguished from each other by their diversity of type, and partly by representatives of various races and nationalities varying in shade from the olive-skinned Spaniards, Italians, and Greeks to the coffee-brown Arabs and Moors from northern Africa, with here and there among the throng a negro of ebony blackness.
A GROUP OF STREET-IDLERS WERE AMUSING THEMSELVES AT THE PLIGHT OF A SHORT, DARK-COMPLEXIONED MAN WHO STOOD IN THEIR MIDST
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The great press upon the streets was due in part to the normal activity of the town; but more to the fact that three of the great sailing vessels which, in those ante-steam-navigation days managed the freight and passenger traffic between the Levantine ports, had that morning discharged their human cargoes at three of the principal wharves in the neighborhood, and the stream of released passengers was flowing through the adjacent streets before becoming commingled with the general human flood of the city. There were many strange figures among the new arrivals, but they all appeared fairly at home in their new surroundings. Some may have been in Marseilles on previous occasions, and others were met by relatives or friends who guided them to their respective destinations. Thus all were cared for in the strange city except one, and he the woe-begone individual whom we have seen standing at the street corner amidst the knot of street gamins and loiterers. They had fine sport with him, commenting on his outlandish appearance, and asking him all sorts of facetious questions in the vulgar argot they spoke; but he understood nothing, and only looked helplessly from one unsympathetic face to the other, saying only occasionally in a dazed sort of way, to the one or the other, in what seemed to them an unintelligible gibberish, the mystic words, “Yehudi Attah? Yehudi Attah?” Every such utterance would be greeted with a shout of laughter; that is to say, by all except one.
Benjamin Dalinsky, a Jewish peddler, whose cradle had stood on the banks of the Dnieper, but whom fate had carried to the land of the Gauls, and who found his subsistence as an itinerant merchant in the southern French metropolis, chanced to pass the spot where these scenes were being enacted, and paused a moment to ascertain the cause of the excitement. The stranger noticed the newcomer, and addressed to him the query he had so often fruitlessly repeated: “Yehudi Attah? Yehudi Attah?”
A thrill went through the whole body of Benjamin Dalinsky. He understood the mystic words. He heard in them an echo of the voices of his childhood, and of the spirit of his home, which he missed so sadly in this strange, un-Jewish France. He felt in them the yearning of a Jewish soul for the companionship of a brother in faith, in sympathy, and in affection. His soul went out in sudden attraction to this dark-hued stranger, whom he had never seen before; and in the same ancient tongue, the Hebrew, in which the stranger had made his inquiry, he answered: “Ani Yehudi bo immi achi.”
Great, overwhelming joy lit up the dark face of the stranger. With mingled love and deference he bowed low and kissed the hem of the coat of Dalinsky, who quickly drew him from the midst of the throng; and the wondering French idlers stepped aside as this strangely assorted pair, the fair-haired son of the North and the swarthy Oriental walked away together. Dalinsky’s lodgings were but a short distance away—he had a room with a Jewish couple who eked out their scanty earnings with the small amount he paid them and thither he quickly led the stranger. After he had given the latter an opportunity to wash himself and eat something, which he did ravenously after he had satisfied himself of its ritual purity, for on the ship he had tasted hardly anything of the food of the Gentiles, he asked the stranger what had brought him to this unknown country, whose language and manners were alike unfamiliar to him. In classic Hebrew, which he spoke with perfect fluency and with great animation and vivacity, the stranger told the following tale:
“I am a Jew; and it is the pride and glory of my life that I belong to the faith first proclaimed by Abraham, and whose sacred laws and ordinances I endeavor faithfully to fulfil; but I am not native-born in the household of Israel. I am only an adopted child therein, although, I trust, my love for the people which is now mine is none the less warm and true on that account. By origin I am a Greek. I was born on the beautiful island of Corfu, the pearl of the archipelago, where grow the finest and choicest Ethrogim, most suitable of all species for the solemn ceremonies of the Feast of Tabernacles; and the name upon which I was baptized was Dimitri Aristarchi. To-day I am known in Israel as Abraham Ger-Tsedek. The manner in which I came to seek entrance into the congregation of the Lord was most extraordinary; and my statement may seem to you but little worthy of credence, but I solemnly assure you it is true. It happened in this wise. My family was an old and distinguished one in the island; but my father, in consequence of ill success in various business ventures and a series of other misfortunes, lost all his wealth when I was a lad of about fifteen, and shortly afterward died. My poor mother, overwhelmed by the double loss of her dearly beloved husband and all her earthly possessions, did not survive her life partner long, but within a few short weeks followed him into the grave. I was thus thrown entirely upon my own resources; and as I was an only child, without either brother or sister, and had learnt no trade or profession, having been reared in the luxurious and careless fashion usual in my country in well-to-do families, my condition was indeed desperate. There was nothing left for me to do except to seek a position as a domestic servant, in which no special skill is required and in which industry and good-will may supply the place of training. It was a most humiliating necessity, which drew many tears from my eyes. I, the pampered child of wealth, must seek my daily bread as a menial! But there was no alternative; and as the saying is, ‘Necessity can neither be praised nor blamed.’
“It so happened that I found employment in the house of a Jewish physician, Moses Allatini by name. He was a man of considerable prominence, handsome and distinguished in appearance, extremely skilful in his profession, but learned as well in Hebraic lore. His wife, Esperanza by name, was radiantly beautiful, with the pensive, thoughtful beauty that marks so many of the daughters of Israel, and as kind-hearted and pious as she was beautiful. Their family consisted of seven children, all well-bred, polite, and lovable. At the time of my entrance into the household there was a baby, a sweet boy of two years, with curly black locks clustering around a face of alabaster whiteness, and eyes in whose liquid black depths an infinity of sentiment was revealed. As I was not good for much else, Raphael, for so the youngest was called, was assigned to my care, at which I greatly rejoiced, for I had fallen in love with the sweet child when first these eyes lighted upon his angelic countenance. I devoted myself to his care with the utmost zeal. I washed, bathed, and clothed him, took him out daily in the fresh air, gave him his meals, and tucked him in his little bed nightly when he closed his beautiful eyes in sleep. I learnt the little Hebrew prayers which Jewish children recite when they lie down to rest at night, or when they rise in the morning, and the benedictions which they pronounce on various occasions in order that I might dictate them to him, and that no one should come between me and my dearly beloved charge. Raphael reciprocated my attachment; no doubt because he perceived its sincerity and we grew inseparable. As he grew older our love for each other did not diminish; on the contrary, it increased and grew deeper and more intense. Next to his parents Raphael loved best his Dimitri; and as for me, I had no one else in the wide world for whom I need care, and I concentrated upon him all the intensity of love of a naturally warm and affectionate heart. I continued to have the exclusive charge of Raphael, participated in all his sports and games, and accompanied him whenever he went out. Indeed, he always insisted that I must be his companion, and refused to go anywhere unless I was with him. Our great love for each other became generally known and excited great interest, especially among the Hebrew inhabitants—the Greeks were not so well pleased—and the Allatini family were universally congratulated upon the possession of such a faithful and devoted servitor. When Raphael was four years old his parents began to take him to the synagogue on holidays and Sabbaths of special importance; and as he insisted upon my accompanying him, a request which excited great amusement among the family and the others who learned of it, I was one of the party on these occasions. Thus was I first introduced to the ancient Hebrew worship as it is conducted in the Jewish House of God. I was deeply impressed by the melodious chanting of the Hazan, in which the congregation joined harmoniously from time to time, and I listened with great interest to the learned and pious discourses of the venerable rabbi. But there was no thought in my mind at this time of allying myself to Israel; and as for the Allatinis and the other Hebrews, they never even dreamed of such a thing.