Children of the Ghetto Part 25

And the years went rolling on, and the children grew up and here and there a parent.

The elders of the synagogue were met in council.

"He is greater than a Prince," said the Shalotten _Shammos_.

"If all the Princes of the Earth were put in one scale," said Mr.

Belcovitch, "and our _Maggid_, Moses, in the other, he would outweigh them all. He is worth a hundred of the Chief Rabbi of England, who has been seen bareheaded."

"From Moses to Moses there has been none like Moses," said old Mendel Hyams, interrupting the Yiddish with a Hebrew quotation.

"Oh no," said the Shalotten _Shammos_, who was a great stickler for precision, being, as his nickname implied, a master of ceremonies. "I can't admit that. Look at my brother Nachmann."

There was a general laugh at the Shalotten _Shammos's_ bull; the proverb dealing only with Moseses.

"He has the true gift," observed _Froom_ Karlkammer, shaking the flames of his hair pensively. "For the letters of his name have the same numerical value as those of the great Moses da Leon."

_Froom_ Karlkammer was listened to with respect, for he was an honorary member of the committee, who paid for two seats in a larger congregation and only wors.h.i.+pped with the Sons of the Covenant on special occasions.

The Shalotten _Shammos_, however, was of contradictory temperament--a born dissentient, upheld by a steady consciousness of highly superior English, the drop of bitter in Belcovitch's presidential cup. He was a long thin man, who towered above the congregation, and was as tall as the bulk of them even when he was bowing his acknowledgments to his Maker.

"How do you make that out?" he asked Karlkammer. "Moses of course adds up the same as Moses--but while the other part of the _Maggid's_ name makes seventy-three, da Leon's makes ninety-one."

"Ah, that's because you're ignorant of _Gematriyah_," said little Karlkammer, looking up contemptuously at the cantankerous giant. "You reckon all the letters on the same system, and you omit to give yourself the license of deleting the ciphers."

In philology it is well known that all consonants are interchangeable and vowels don't count; in _Gematriyah_ any letter may count for anything, and the total may be summed up anyhow.

Karlkammer was one of the curiosities of the Ghetto. In a land of _froom_ men he was the _froomest_. He had the very genius of fanaticism.

On the Sabbath he spoke nothing but Hebrew whatever the inconvenience and however numerous the misunderstandings, and if he perchance paid a visit he would not perform the "work" of lifting the knocker. Of course he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.

One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted sc.r.a.p in mourning for the fall of Jerusalem. He walked through the streets to synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked three times at the door of G.o.d's house when he arrived. On the Day of Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his grave-clothes. On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M.

to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to give him bending s.p.a.ce that he hired two seats. On Tabernacles, not having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallest _Lulav_ of palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and meekest man in Israel--an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival.

He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead.

Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar.

Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary "Sons of the Covenant"

were mere heathens. He was a man of prodigious distorted mental activity. He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and, still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently on any subject outside religion. His letters to the press on specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved, incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth and death of every Rabbi mentioned.

No one had ever been known to follow one of these argumentations to the bitter end. They were written in good English modified by a few peculiar terms used in senses unsuspected by dictionary-makers; in a beautiful hand, with the t's uncrossed, but crowned with the side-stroke, so as to avoid the appearance of the symbol of Christianity, and with the dates expressed according to the Hebrew Calendar, for Karlkammer refused to recognize the chronology of the Christian. He made three copies of every letter, and each was exactly like the others in every word and every line. His bill for midnight oil must have been extraordinary, for he was a business man and had to earn his living by day. Kept within the limits of sanity by a religion without apocalyptic visions, he was saved from predicting the end of the world by mystic calculations, but he used them to prove everything else and fervently believed that endless meanings were deducible from the numerical value of Biblical words, that not a curl at the tail of a letter of any word in any sentence but had its supersubtle significance. The elaborate cipher with which Bacon is alleged to have written Shakspeare's plays was mere child's play compared with the infinite revelations which in Karlkammer's belief the Deity left latent in writing the Old Testament from Genesis to Malachi, and in inspiring the Talmud and the holier treasures of Hebrew literature. Nor were these ideas of his own origination. His was an eclectic philosophy and religionism, of which all the elements were discoverable in old Hebrew books: sc.r.a.ps of Alexandrian philosophy inextricably blent with Aristotelian, Platonic, mystic.

He kept up a copious correspondence with scholars in other countries and was universally esteemed and pitied.

"We haven't come to discuss the figures of the _Maggid's_ name, but of his salary." said Mr. Belcovitch, who prided himself on his capacity for conducting public business.

"I have examined the finances," said Karlkammer, "and I don't see how we can possibly put aside more for our preacher than the pound a week."

"But he is not satisfied," said Mr. Belcovitch.

"I don't see why he shouldn't be," said the Shalotten _Shammos_. "A pound a week is luxury for a single man."

The Sons of the Covenant did not know that the poor consumptive _Maggid_ sent half his salary to his sisters in Poland to enable them to buy back their husbands from military service; also they had vague unexpressed ideas that he was not mortal, that Heaven would look after his larder, that if the worst came to the worst he could fall back on Cabalah and engage himself with the mysteries of food-creation.

"I have a wife and family to keep on a pound a week," grumbled Greenberg the _Chazan_.

Besides being Reader, Greenberg blew the horn and killed cattle and circ.u.mcised male infants and educated children and discharged the functions of beadle and collector. He spent a great deal of his time in avoiding being drawn into the contending factions of the congregation and in steering equally between Belcovitch and the Shalotten _Shammos_.

The Sons only gave him fifty a year for all his trouble, but they eked it out by allowing him to be on the Committee, where on the question of a rise in the Reader's salary he was always an ineffective minority of one. His other grievance was that for the High Festivals the Sons temporarily engaged a finer voiced Reader and advertised him at raised prices to repay themselves out of the surplus congregation. Not only had Greenberg to play second fiddle on these grand occasions, but he had to iterate "Pom" as a sort of musical accompaniment in the pauses of his rival's vocalization.

"You can't compare yourself with the _Maggid_" the Shalotten _Shammos_ reminded him consolingly. "There are hundreds of you in the market.

There are several _morceaux_ of the service which you do not sing half so well as your predecessor; your horn-blowing cannot compete with Freedman's of the Fas.h.i.+on Street _Chevrah_, nor can you read the Law as quickly and accurately as Prochintski. I have told you over and over again you confound the air of the Pa.s.sover _Yigdal_ with the New Year ditto. And then your preliminary flourish to the Confession of Sin--it goes 'Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei, Ei'" (he mimicked Greenberg's melody) "whereas it should be 'Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi, Oi.'"

"Oh no," interrupted Belcovitch. "All the _Chazanim_ I've ever heard do it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"

"You are not ent.i.tled to speak on this subject, Belcovitch," said the Shalotten _Shammos_ warmly. "You are a Man-of-the-Earth. I have heard every great _Chazan_ in Europe."

"What was good enough for my father is good enough for me," retorted Belcovitch. "The _Shool_ he took me to at home had a beautiful _Chazan_, and he always sang it 'Ei, Ei, Ei.'"

"I don't care what you heard at home. In England every _Chazan_ sings 'Oi, Oi, Oi.'"

"We can't take our tune from England," said Karlkammer reprovingly.

"England is a polluted country by reason of the Reformers whom we were compelled to excommunicate."

"Do you mean to say that my father was an Epicurean?" asked Belcovitch indignantly. "The tune was as Greenberg sings it. That there are impious Jews who pray bareheaded and sit in the synagogue side by side with the women has nothing to do with it."

The Reformers did neither of these things, but the Ghetto to a man believed they did, and it would have been countenancing their blasphemies to pay a visit to their synagogues and see. It was an extraordinary example of a myth flouris.h.i.+ng in the teeth of the facts, and as such should be useful to historians sifting "the evidence of contemporary writers."

The dispute thickened; the synagogue hummed with "Eis" and "Ois" not in concord.

"Shah!" said the President at last. "Make an end, make an end!"

"You see he knows I'm right," murmured the Shalotten _Shammos_ to his circle.

"And if you are!" burst forth the impeached Greenberg, who had by this time thought of a retort. "And if I do sing the Pa.s.sover _Yigdal_ instead of the New Year, have I not reason, seeing I have _no bread in the house_? With my salary I have Pa.s.sover all the year round."

The _Chazan's_ sally made a good impression on his audience if not on his salary. It was felt that he had a just grievance, and the conversation was hastily s.h.i.+fted to the original topic.

"We mustn't forget the _Maggid_ draws crowds here every Sat.u.r.day and Sunday afternoon," said Mendel Hyams. "Suppose he goes over to a _Chevrah_ that will pay him more!"

"No, he won't do that," said another of the Committee. "He will remember that we brought him out of Poland."

"Yes, but we shan't have room for the audiences soon," said Belcovitch.

"There are so many outsiders turned away every time that I think we ought to let half the applicants enjoy the first two hours of the sermon and the other half the second two hours."

"No, no, that would be cruel," said Karlkammer. "He will have to give the Sunday sermons at least in a larger synagogue. My own _Shool_, the German, will be glad to give him facilities."

"But what if they want to take him altogether at a higher salary?" said Mendel.

"No, I'm on the Committee, I'll see to that," said Karlkammer rea.s.suringly.

"Then do you think we shall tell him we can't afford to give him more?"