Two men rivet our attention. The one is Chasdai ben Isaac, one of those awe-and-respect-commanding and love-and-confidence-inspiring appearances we meet with but rarely in life. His features present an embodiment of three distinct races. His high and square forehead, his deep-set eye, his aquiline nose, his prominent chin, indicative of profound wisdom, of capacities to command and of great will power; these bespeak the Palestinian Hebrew. The grace and comeliness of the figure bespeak the Moor. His tall, majestic form, full of life and vigor, bespeak the European Visigoth.
No less attractive is the person of Rabbi Moses Ben Chanoch. There is something strange and fascinating in his intelligent countenance. Some strange, sweet melancholy seems to hover about his eyes. The lines of his face fall into an expression of mild suffering, of endurance sweetened and sustained by holiness and resignation to God's will. He seems to be more deeply lost in meditation than any of the rest. Now and then his forehead wrinkles, and his lips quiver, as if in pain, and his teeth close, as if suppressing a cry of anguish.
Is the great and learned and pious Rabbi, revered wherever a Jewish heart beats, whether in Asia or in Africa or in Europe, through whom the light of Eastern learning, which, by the dispersion of the illustrious teachers, and by the final closing of the great schools, seemed to have been extinguished forever, suddenly rose again in the West in renewed and undiminished splendor, is he really lost in pious meditations? We have our suspicions, and may God pardon us if we suspect him wrongfully.
"There are moments when silence, prolonged and unbroken,
More expressive may be than all words ever spoken,
It is when the heart has an instinct of what
In the heart of another is passing."[11]
It may be, he recalls the day of his departure from Sura, in company with his young and beautiful wife, and his little son, and three other young and eminent rabbis, Rabbi Sahamaria ben Elchanan, Rabbi Chuschiel and Rabbi Nathan ben Isaac Kohen, for the purpose of raising funds for the academy at Sura, which was then in its last throes. He is recalling, perhaps, the harrowing scene when they were taken captive along the Italian coast by the Spanish-Moorish pirate, Admiral Ibn Rumachis. His quivering lips and wrinkled brow and his suppressed cry of anguish betray his thinking of the evil designs which the pirate admiral carried in his foul heart against his young and beautiful wife; how she, the pious and innocent, preferring death to infamy, had asked him, concealing the motive: whether there is resurrection for those who perish in the sea; and how he, unsuspecting, answered in the affirmative, basing it upon Psalm lxviii: 23. "The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashon, I will bring again from the depths of the sea," how she, no sooner had the answer been given, plunged into the sea, and the raging billows swallowed his young and beautiful wife, the mother of his young and only child.
Hence, his wrinkled brow and quivering lip and melancholy expression on the blessed Sabbath eve. No illuminated home awaits him. No wife that has cheerfully labored all day long to prepare for the festive reception of the Sabbath. No wife to greet him with her cheery smile, and with her wise and pure and holy converse to dispel the cares and worries of the week. No mother to press his child against her love-beating bosom and call him, too, "My own sweet child."
His thoughts continue in their wandering. He recalls the day when he was sold as slave to Cordova; how he was ransomed by the Jewish community, though his quality and learning were unknown; how he entered, one day, the school for Talmud studies, over which Rabbi Nathan, "Dayan" of the Jews of Cordova, presided; how he, ashamed of his costume of sackcloth, seated himself in a corner, at a respectful distance from the disciples; how he, aroused, at last, by the false decisions of the ignorant Rabbi Nathan, forgetting in his excitement his humble state, and his costume of sackcloth, ventured to correct, with becoming modesty, the decisions rendered; how all eyes had turned towards the poor slave; how, to draw forth his learning, Rabbi Nathan entered into a debate with him, in which he evinced such profound scholarship that Rabbi Nathan exclaimed with enthusiastic admiration.