Читать книгу Dreamers of the Ghetto - Israel Zangwill - Страница 32

With what emotion, as of a pilgrim reaching Palestine, Gabriel found himself at last in the city where a synagogue stood in the eye of day! The warmth at his heart annulled whatever of chill stole in at the grayness of the canaled streets of the northern city after the color and glow of Porto. His first care as soon as he was settled in the great, marble-halled house which his mother's old friends and relatives in the city had purchased on his behalf, was to betake himself on the Sabbath with his mother and brother to the Portuguese synagogue. Though his ignorance of his new creed was so great that he doffed his hat on entering, nor knew how to don the praying-shawl lent him by the beadle, and was rather disconcerted to find his mother might not sit at his side, but must be relegated to a gallery behind a grille, yet his attitude was too emotional to be critical. The prayer-book interested him keenly, and though he strove to follow the service, his conscious Hebrew could not at all keep pace with the congregational speed, and he felt unreasonably shamed at his failures to rise or bow. Vidal, who had as yet no Hebrew, interested himself in picking out ancient denizens of Porto and communicating his discoveries to his brother in a loud whisper, which excited Gabriel's other neighbor to point out scions of the first Spanish families, other members of which, at home, were props of Holy Church, bishops, and even archbishops. A curious figure, this red-bearded, gross-paunched neighbor, rocking automatically to and fro in his taleth, but evidently far fainer to gossip than to pray.

Friars and nuns of almost every monastic order were, said he, here regathered to Judaism. He himself, Isaac Pereira, who sat there safe and snug, had been a Jesuit in Spain.

"I was sick of the pious make-believe, and itched to escape over here. But the fools had let me sell indulgences, and I had a goodly stock on hand, and trade was slack"—here he interrupted himself with a fervent "Amen!" conceded to the service—"in Spain just then. It's no use carrying 'em over to the Netherlands, thinks I; they're too clever over there. I must get rid of 'em in some country free for Jews, and yet containing Catholics. So what should I do but slip over from Malaga to Barbary, where I sold off the remainder of my stock to some Catholics living among the Moors. No sooner had I pocketed the—Amen!—money than I declared myself a Jew. God of Abraham! The faces those Gentiles pulled when they found what a bad bargain they had made with Heaven! They appealed to the Cadi against what they called the imposition. But"—and here an irrepressible chuckle mingled with the roar of the praying multitude—"I claimed the privilege of a free port to sell any description of goods, and the Cadi had to give his ruling in accordance with the law."

In the exhilaration of his mood this sounded amusing to Gabriel, an answering of fools according to their folly. But 'twas not long before it recurred to him to add to his disgust and his disappointment with his new brethren and his new faith. For after he had submitted himself, with his brother, to circumcision, replaced his baptismal name by the Hebrew Uriel, and Vidal's by Joseph, Latinizing at the same time the family name to Acosta, he found himself confronted by a host of minute ordinances far more galling than those of the Church. Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing, working; not the simplest action but was dogged and clogged by incredible imperatives.

Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codex of six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life.

What! Was it for this Rabbinic manufacture that he had exchanged the stately ceremonial of Catholicism? Had he thrown off mental fetters but to replace them by bodily?

Was this the Golden Age that he had looked to find—the simple Mosaic theocracy of reason and righteousness?

And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed with such romantic glamour?—fat burghers, clucking comfortably under the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, trapped, betrayed!

His wrath gathered daily, finding vent in bitter speeches. If this was what had become of the Mosaic Law and the Holy People, the sooner a son of Israel spoke out the better for his race. Was it not an inspiration from on high that had given him the name of Uriel—"fire of God"? So, when his private thunders had procured him a summons before the outraged Rabbinic court, he was in no wise to be awed by the Chacham and his Rabbis in their solemn robes.

"Pharisees!" he cried, and, despite his lost Christianity, all the scorn of his early training clung to the word.

"Epicurean!" they retorted, with contempt more withering still.

"Nay, Epicurus have I never read, and what I know of his doctrine by hearsay revolteth me. I am for God and Reason, and a pure Judaism."

"Even so talked Elisha Ben Abuya in Palestine of old," put in the second Rabbi more mildly. "He with his Greek culture, who stalked from Sinai to Olympus, and ended in Atheism."

"I know not of Elisha, but I marvel not that your teaching drove him to Atheism."

"Said I not 'twas Atheism, not Judaism, thou talkedst? And an Atheist in our ranks we may not harbor: our community is young in Amsterdam. 'Tis yet on sufferance, and these Dutchmen are easily moved to riot. We have won our ground with labor. Traitor! wouldst thou cut the dykes?"

"Traitor thou!" retorted Uriel. "Traitor to God and His holy Law."

"Hold thy peace!" thundered the Chacham, "or the ban shall be laid upon thee."

"Hold my peace!" answered Uriel scornfully. "Nay, I expatriated myself for freedom; I shall not hold my peace for the sake of the ban."

Nor did he. At home and abroad he exhausted himself in invective, in exhortation.

"Be silent, Uriel," begged his aged mother, dreading a breach of the happiness her soul had found at last in its old spiritual swathings. "This Judaism thou deridest is the true, the pure Judaism, as I was taught it in my girlhood. Let me go to my grave in peace."

"Be silent, Uriel," besought his brother Joseph. "If thou dost not give over, old Manasseh and his cronies will bar me out from those lucrative speculations in the Indies, wherein also I am investing thy money for thee. They have already half a hundred privateers, and the States-General wink at anything that will cripple Spain, so if we can seize its silver fleet, or capture Portuguese possessions in South America, we shall reap revenge on our enemies and big dividends. And he hath a comely daughter, hath Manasseh, and methinks her eye is not unkindly towards me. Give over, I beg of thee! This religion liketh me much—no confession, no damnation, and 'tis the faith of our fathers."

"No damnation—ay, but no salvation either. They teach naught of immortality; their creed is of the earth, earthy."

"Then why didst thou drag me from Portugal?" inquired Joseph angrily.

But Uriel—the fire of God—was not to be quenched; and so, not without frequent warning, fell the fire of man. In a solemn conclave in the black-robed synagogue, with awful symbolisms of extinguished torches, the ban was laid upon Uriel Acosta, and henceforth no man, woman, or child dared walk or talk with him. The very beggars refused his alms, the street hawkers spat out as he passed by. His own mother and brother, now completely under the sway of their new Jewish circle, removed from the pollution of his presence, leaving him alone in the great house with the black page. And this house was shunned as though marked with the cross of the pestilence. The more high-spirited Jew-boys would throw stones at its windows or rattle its doors, but it was even keener sport to run after its tenant himself, on the rare occasions when he appeared in the streets, to spit out like their elders at the sight of him, to pelt him with mud, and to shout after him, "Epicurean!" "Bastard!" "Sinner in Israel!"