I know a little old Jewish gentleman. Little indeed! Not larger than a Brownie, which he resembles. He has pale, grey, colorless eyes, so crossed they spend their time looking into each other. He has a huge, bristling, up-standing mustache, which looks as if it were futilely engaged in pulling his poor, hump-backed figure up to height, straightness.
After lunch he starts for a walk, wearing a tall hat, coquettishly tip-tilted over his nose. On one of his home-comings I met him. He told me he had been to the grave of his wife, that during the twenty years since her death he had seldom missed a day. He told me this in such dignified tone, and one withal sad, earnest, that his shriveled figure took on the importance, the size of a hero.
Who but member of the race, with indelible blood of centuries of persecution in its veins, would be capable of such devotion! To the Jew, family, home, mean more than to the Gentile. (But free, easy, get-rich-quick America is not good for him. It is breeding out, rapidly, the fine qualities of the race.) The Jew has been helpful, in various ways, to America. He has helped destroy provincialism. He makes for enlightened cosmopolitanism, because the cultivation of the world has touched the race-mind.
This old man regaled me with stories of youth spent in Austria, Bavaria. He was a beau, he declared, in old Bavarian days. But of all the women he saw, Viennese are the prettiest, most spirited. They have figures of sylphs. They are never twice alike.
In childhood, he explained, I lived in sight of Munich. A beautiful city! I remember when Mad Louis was King. He tried to make it another Athens, center of art. The dream was delusive. As delusive as the name he chose for his fairy palace, Wahnfried.
But he taught Germans music. He was patron of Wagner.
When summer comes to the plains, air is hot, dry, and I can not breathe comfortably, nor sleep, I dream of the air I used to smell in Bavaria, as it blew across snowy Alps, sweet with spruce, with fir. I like America! It has been good to my people. My old friend is like March weather; upon the surface snow, chill, while underneath, unseen, the warmth of spring.
Members of the old man’s race have stood at head of art, letters and every science. In the Middle Age, at dawn of the Renaissance, it was Jewish wanderers, traveling from country to country on multifarious business errands, whose linguistic nimbleness formed links between Greece and Rome, between Spaniard and Moor, between Occident and Orient. They had no little to do in dissemination of Greek culture, a culture which in its essence is antagonistic to them.
They were translators for the ancient world. They were numbered among scholars of mediæval days. It was they who helped unlock treasures of Moorish culture for the ungrateful Spaniard.