"Do Wonder Rabbis live nowadays?" I asked.
A pinch of snuff Yarchi was taking fell from between his fingers. "Do they live!" he cried. "Yes—and off white bread, for poverty!"
"We have none in America. I only heard of one in Prague," I murmured apologetically, fearing the genus might be of the very elements of Judaism.
"Ah, yes, the high Rabbi Löw, his memory for a blessing," he said reverently. "But these new Wonder Rabbis can only work one miracle."
"What is that?" I asked.
"The greatest of all—making their worshippers support them like princes." And he laughed in admiration of his own humour.
"Then you are a heretic?" I said.
"Heretic!" Yarchi's black eyes exchanged their twinkle for a flash of resentment. "Nay; they are the heretics, breeding dissension in Israel. Did they not dance on the grave of the sainted Elijah Wilna?"
Tired of tossing the ball of conversation up and down, I left the window and joined the philosopher under his porch, where I elicted from him his version of the eighteenth-century movement of Chassidim, (the pious ones), which, in these days of English books on Judaism, will not be so new to American Jews as it was to me. These Shakers (or, as we should perhaps say nowadays, Salvationists), these protestants against cut-and-dried Judaism, who arose among the Carpathians under the inspiration of Besht (a word which Yarchi explained to me was made out of the initials of Baal Shem Tob—the Master of the Good Name), had, it seemed, pullulated into a thousand different sects, each named after the Wonder Rabbi whom it swore by, and in whose "exclusive divine right" (the phrase is Yarchi's) it believed.
"But we have the divinest chief," concluded Yarchi, grinning.