The Ghetto welcomed the Bride with proud song and humble feast, and sped her parting with optimistic symbolisms of fire and wine, of spice and light and shadow. All around their neighbors sought distraction in the blazing public-houses, and their tipsy bellowings resounded through the streets and mingled with the Hebrew hymns. Here and there the voice of a beaten woman rose on the air. But no Son of the Covenant was among the revellers or the wife-beaters; the Jews remained a chosen race, a peculiar people, faulty enough, but redeemed at least from the grosser vices, a little human islet won from the waters of animalism by the genius of ancient engineers. For while the genius of the Greek or the Roman, the Egyptian or the Phoenician, survives but in word and stone, the Hebrew word alone was made flesh.
CHAPTER XIX.
WITH THE STRIKERS.
"Ignorant donkey-heads!" cried Pinchas next Friday morning. "Him they make a Rabbi and give him the right of answering questions, and he know no more of Judaism," the patriotic poet paused to take a bite out of his ham-sandwich, "than a cow of Sunday. I lof his daughter and I tell him so and he tells me she lof another. But I haf held him up on the point of my pen to the contempt of posterity. I haf written an acrostic on him; it is terrible. Her vill I shoot."
"Ah, they are a bad lot, these Rabbis," said Simon Wolf, sipping his sherry. The conversation took place in English and the two men were seated in a small private room in a public-house, awaiting the advent of the Strike Committee.
"Dey are like de rest of de Community. I vash my hands of dem," said the poet, waving his cigar in a fiery crescent.
"I have long since washed my hands of them," said Simon Wolf, though the fact was not obvious. "We can trust neither our Rabbis nor our philanthropists. The Rabbis engrossed in the hypocritical endeavor to galvanize the corpse of Judaism into a vitality that shall last at least their own lifetime, have neither time nor thought for the great labor question. Our philanthropists do but scratch the surface. They give the working-man with their right hand what they have stolen from him with the left."
Simon Wolf was the great Jewish labor leader. Most of his cronies were rampant atheists, disgusted with the commercialism of the believers. They were clever young artisans from Russia and Poland with a smattering of education, a feverish receptiveness for all the iconoclastic ideas that were in the London air, a hatred of capitalism and strong social sympathies. They wrote vigorous jargon for the Friend of Labor and compassed the extreme proverbial limits of impiety by "eating pork on the Day of Atonement." This was done partly to vindicate their religious opinions whose correctness was demonstrated by the non-appearance of thunderbolts, partly to show that nothing one way or the other was to be expected from Providence or its professors.
"The only way for our poor brethren to be saved from their slavery," went on Simon Wolf, "is for them to combine against the sweaters and to let the West-End Jews go and hang themselves."
"Ah, dat is mine policee," said Pinchas, "dat was mine policee ven I founded de Holy Land League. Help yourselves and Pinchas vill help you. You muz combine, and den I vill be de Moses to lead you out of de land of bondage. Nein, I vill be more dan Moses, for he had not de gift of eloquence."