'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It flourishes.'
'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?'
He said there were seven.
'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews--'
'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the children. The servants are Christians.'
'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
THE JEWS IN THE HILLS
'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the following remarkable phrase--