Читать книгу Dreamers of the Ghetto - Israel Zangwill - Страница 33

But although by this isolation the Rabbis had practically cut out the heretic's tongue—for he knew no Dutch, nor, indeed, ever learned to hold converse with his Christian neighbors—yet there remained his pen, and in dread of the attack upon them which rumor declared him to be inditing behind the shuttered windows of his great lonely house, they instigated Samuel Da Silva, a physician equally skilled with the lancet and the quill, to anticipate him by a counterblast calculated to discredit the thunderer. He denied immortality, insinuated the horrified Da Silva, in his elegant Portuguese treatise, Tradado da Immortalide, probably basing his knowledge of Uriel's "bestial and injurious opinions" on the confused reports of the heretic's brother, but refraining from mentioning his forbidden name.

"False slanders!" cried Uriel in his reply—completed—since he had been anticipated—at his leisure; but he only confirmed the popular conception of his materialistic errors, seeming, indeed, of wavering mind on the subject of the future life. His thought had marched on: and whereas it had been his complaint to Joseph that Rabbinism laid no stress on immortality, further investigation of the Pentateuch had shown him that Moses himself had taken no account whatsoever of the conception, nor striven to bolster up the morality of to-day by the terrors of a posthumous to-morrow.

So Uriel stood self-condemned, and the Rabbis triumphed, superfluously justified in the eyes of their flock against this blaspheming materialist. Nay, Uriel should fall into the pit himself had digged. The elders of the congregation appealed to the magistrates; they translated with bated breath passages from the baleful book, Tradiçoens Phariseas conferidos con a Ley escrida. Uriel was summoned before the tribunal, condemned to pay three hundred guldens, imprisoned for eight days. The book was burnt.

No less destructive a flame burnt at the prisoner's heart, as, writhing on his dungeon pallet, biting his lips, digging his nails into his palms, he cursed these malignant perverters of pure Judaism, who had shamed him even before the Hollanders. He, the proud and fearless gentleman of Portugal, had been branded as a criminal by these fish-blooded Dutchmen. Never would he hold intercourse with his fellow-creatures again—never, never! Alone with God and his thoughts he would live and die.

And so for year after year, though he lingered in the city that held his dear ones, he abode in his cold marble-pillared house, save for his Moorish servant, having speech with man nor woman. Nor did he ever emerge, unless at hours when his childish persecutors were abed, so that in time they turned to fresher sport. But at night he would sometimes be met wandering by the dark canals, with eyes that kept the inward look of the sequestered student, seeming to see nothing of the sombre many-twinkling beauty of starlit waters, or the tender coloring of mist and haze, but full only of the melancholy of the gray marshes, and sometimes growing wet with bitter yearning for the sun and the orange-trees and the warmth of friendly faces. And sometimes in the cold dawn the early market-people met him riding madly in the environs, in the silk doublet of a Portuguese grandee, his sword clanking, and in his hand a silver-mounted pistol, with which he snapped off the twigs as he flew past. And when his beloved brother was married to the daughter of Manasseh, the millionaire and the president of the India Company—which in that wonderful year paid its shareholders a dividend of seventy-five in the hundred—some of the wedding-guests averred that they had caught a glimpse of Uriel's dark, yearning face amid the motley crowd assembled outside the synagogue to watch the arrival of Joseph Acosta and his beautiful bride; and there were those who said that Uriel's hands were raised as in blessing. And once on a moonless midnight, when the venerable Dona Acosta had passed away, the watchman in the Jews' cemetery, stealing from his turret at a suspicious noise, turned his lantern upon—no body-snatcher, but—O more nefarious spectacle!—the sobbing figure of Uriel Acosta across a new-dug grave, polluting the holy soil of the Beth-Chayim!