"Peace be with you, Saul Aronson," he said in the jargon.
"The angel Dumah spare you, Simon Rabofsky," answered Aronson.
"I rejoice to see that you have not forgotten the holy salutations."
The twelve eyes sharpened their glances at Aronson and he knew the ordeal was come. They were six of the strictest in the congregation, from old Silberstein, who sat on the left of the ark and led the recitation of the eighteen psalms of a morning, to young Cohen, the Jewish butcher, a zealot of zealots, than whom none more devoutly beat his bosom in prayer or observed the allotted holy days.
"Brother Silberstein was just proposing that your place in the synagogue be disposed of. It is a pity to see a seat vacant, when so many must stand. But I bade him not be hasty, for perhaps you had been ill of late."
"Why play the innocent, Simon Rabofsky," broke in Cohen, "when you know as well as we that he has been consorting with the gentiles?"
"It is because I am loath to believe it," answered Rabofsky, in a sorrowful tone, as if rebuking Cohen. "I am loath to believe one of Isaac Aronson's household would turn away to bow before the idols of Babylon."
"Is it forbidden to search for wisdom?" said Aronson.
"You do not search for it in the book where it is found," said Rabofsky, laying his finger on the book before him. It was printed in Semitic characters, but the language was the jargon, for Rabofsky was no master of Hebrew and Aramaic, "the divine talmud, which our fathers have preserved through their hundred persecutions."
"But its wisdom is obscure," answered Aronson.