CHAPTER XVI.

HEINRICH HEINE.

In one of the old towns on the Rhine, I went to see a synagogue which tradition says was built before the Christian era. In Roman legions served certain Jews, who, stationed here on the frontier of Gaul, which had just been subdued, founded a temple of their faith. I felt that the low, blackened walls of time-defying masonry had, at any rate, an immense antiquity. The blocks of stone were beaten by the weather; the thresholds nearly worn through by the passing of feet; a deep hollow lay in a stone at the portal, where the multitude of generations had touched it with the finger in sacred observance. Within the low interior my Jewish guide told me a sorrowful legend, which was no doubt in part true, relating to a lamp burning with a double flame before the shrine. Once, in the old cruel days, that hatred might be excited against the Jews of the city, a dead child was secretly thrown by the Christians into the cellar of one of their faith. Straightway an accusation was brought by the contrivers of the trick; the child was found, and the innocent Hebrews accused of the murder. The authorities of the city threatened at once to throw the chief men of the congregation into a caldron of boiling oil if

the murderers were not produced. Time passed; the rabbi and elders were bound, and heard already, close at hand, the simmering of the preparing torture. Then appeared two strangers, who gave themselves into the hands of the magistrates, voluntarily accusing themselves of the crime. Into the caldrons they were at once thrown, from which, as they died, ascended two milk-white doves. Innocent, with a pious lie upon their lips, they sacrificed themselves to save others. To commemorate their deed, the lamp with the double flame had been kept forever burning within the low arch.

I walked one day through the Juden-gasse at Frankfort. The modern world is ashamed of the cruelty and prejudice of the past, and would like to hide from sight the things that bear witness to it. The low, strong wall however was still standing, within whose narrow confines the Jews were crowded, never safe from violence, or even death, if they were found outside at times not permitted. Many of the ancient houses still remained, the fronts discolored, channelled, towering up in mutilation and decay that were pathetic, as if they had partaken in the long suffering of their inmates, and were stained and furrowed by tears. From one of the battered houses came the family of Rothschild, to stand as the right-hand men of kings, and hold nations in their hands, exchanging the squalor of the Juden-gasse for palaces; but the old mother of the family would never leave the straitened home. She came to believe that the fortunes of her sons depended upon her remaining within the wall. She would go for a

day's visit to her sons in their splendid abodes, but at nightfall always returned, and in the Judengasse, at last, she died. The Jews of to-day seem to take pleasure in contrasting their present condition with their past misery. They have chosen to erect their stately synagogue among the old roofs, upon the foundations even of the wall with which the past tried to fence them off from all Christian contact.

In a certain sense, the most rationalistic thinker will admit that the Jews are "the chosen people of the Lord." For intense passionate force there is no people among the races of the earth so remarkable. In whatever direction the Jew sends his feeling, is it not right to say that he surpasses in earnestness all other men? If the passion be mean or wicked, to what depths will he not descend? Fagin and Shylock are our types of the extremity of unscrupulous malice. But if his hate is bitter, a force just as great, on the other hand, appears in his love. Be it child or parent, be it mistress, friend, or wealth, the Jew's love is the most intense of loves. If the yearning takes an upward direction, it becomes the purest and most earnest of religions, voicing itself in psalm and prophecy, becoming concrete at length in the Christ, the outshining of God Himself. The spiritual energy of the Jew manifests itself very strikingly in the tenacity with which he clings to his nationality. Eighteen hundred years have passed since the race, in its old home, was conquered and driven forth to the four winds. Since then what have they not suffered? Take the his

tory of any of the civilized nations, and no page will be found quite so tragic as the story of its treatment of the Jews. Robbery and exile, torture and death, not a woe that man can inflict upon his fellow-man has been spared them, and the agents of the cruelty have often felt that in exercising it they were only performing service to God. Men chivalrous and saintly have persecuted the Jews almost in proportion to their chivalry and sanctity. Richard Cœur de Lion taxes and massacres them without mercy; in the medieval cities the hands that were shaping the great cathedrals heap up faggots by wholesale for the Jew-burnings; Ferdinand and Isabella drive them forth by thousands; Luther turns from them with abhorrence. In the oppression to which the race has been subjected, nearly all forms of activity have been forbidden to it except money-getting, a narrow, sordid channel, but through that Jewish energy has rushed until, despised though the people were, they have had the world almost at their mercy. But beaten though their hands have been, their grip has hardly relaxed a particle upon the traditions and customs they value. Even in outward traits there has been little change. Abraham and Mordecai confront us today in the streets with the very features of their progenitors of the same names, as they stand fixed on the monuments of Nineveh. Whatever softening they may undergo through the influence of modern ideas, Jerusalem, to multitudes of them, is still their holy city; the babe must undergo circumcision; for themselves and the stranger within

their gates the unleavened bread must be prepared at the feast of the passover. Tenacity how marvellous! The world, with blow after blow of outrage and contumely, has not been able to hunt the life out of its grizzly Judean prey.

It is only yesterday, as it were, that a beginning was made of lifting the weight off the shoulders of the Jews. When Lessing selected a Jew to be the hero of his grandest play, the innovation was so unheard of as to mark his intrepidity more strongly perhaps than any act he ever performed. Even late in the eighteenth century Jews were massacred in Europe. Up to the time of the Napoleonic wars, in most countries they were a race of pariahs. They had scarcely any rights in the courts; on church holidays it was part of the regular celebration to hunt them through the streets and sack their houses; in some cities only twenty-five Jews were allowed to marry during a year, that the accursed race might not increase too fast. So late as 1830, the Jews in Hamburg were hunted with the old bitterness; even Solomon Heine, -the richest banker in Germany, the man upon whose shoulders the prosperity of the city to a large extent rested, who had given whole fortunes in the most catholic spirit for innumerable charities and public ends, with difficulty saved himself from outrage.

A story how long and how tragic! The Jew has paid back hate for hate, and scorn for scorn. I well remember going into the shop of a Jew in an ancient city, and, during our bargain, crossing his purpose in a way that aroused his anger. The flash in his dark eye was of the hereditary wrath bequeathed to