Part 59 (2/2)

”Rose-color!” gasped Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, ”rose-color, indeed!” Not even Sidney's authority could persuade the table into that.

Poor rich Jews! The upper middle-cla.s.ses had every excuse for being angry. They knew they were excellent persons, well-educated and well-travelled, interested in charities (both Jewish and Christian), people's concerts, district-visiting, new novels, magazines, reading-circles, operas, symphonies, politics, volunteer regiments, Show-Sunday and Corporation banquets; that they had sons at Rugby and Oxford, and daughters who played and painted and sang, and homes that were bright oases of optimism in a jaded society; that they were good Liberals and Tories, supplementing their duties as Englishmen with a solicitude for the best interests of Judaism; that they left no stone unturned to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from the secular thraldom of prejudice; and they felt it very hard that a little vulgar section should always be chosen by their own novelists, and their efforts to raise the tone of Jewish society pa.s.sed by.

Sidney, whose conversation always had the air of aloofness from the race, so that his own foibles often came under the lash of his sarcasm, proceeded to justify his a.s.sertion of the rose-color picture in _Mordecai Josephs_. He denied that modern English Jews had any religion whatever; claiming that their faith consisted of forms that had to be kept up in public, but which they were too shrewd and cute to believe in or to practise in private, though every one might believe every one else did; that they looked upon due payment of their synagogue bills as discharging all their obligations to Heaven; that the preachers secretly despised the old formulas, and that the Rabbinate declared its intention of dying for Judaism only as a way of living by it; that the body politic was dead and rotten with hypocrisy, though the augurs said it was alive and well. He admitted that the same was true of Christianity. Raphael reminded him that a number of Jews had drifted quite openly from the traditional teaching, that thousands of well-ordered households found inspiration and spiritual satisfaction in every form of it, and that hypocrisy was too crude a word for the complex motives of those who obeyed it without inner conviction.

”For instance,” said he, ”a gentleman said to me the other day--I was much touched by the expression--'I believe with my father's heart.'”

”It is a good epigram,” said Sidney, impressed. ”But what is to be said of a rich community which recruits its clergy from the lower cla.s.ses?

The method of election by compet.i.tive performance, common as it is among poor Dissenters, emphasizes the subjection of the shepherd to his flock.

You catch your ministers young, when they are saturated with suppressed scepticism, and bribe them with small salaries that seem affluence to the sons of poor immigrants. That the ministry is not an honorable profession may be seen from the anxiety of the minister to raise his children in the social scale by bringing them up to some other line of business.”

”That is true,” said Raphael, gravely. ”Our wealthy families must be induced to devote a son each to the Synagogue.”

”I wish they would,” said Sidney. ”At present, every second man is a lawyer. We ought to have more officers and doctors, too. I like those old Jews who smote the Philistines hip and thigh; it is not good for a race to run all to brain: I suppose, though, we had to develop cunning to survive at all. There was an enlightened minister whose Friday evenings I used to go to when a youth--delightful talk we had there, too; you know whom I mean. Well, one of his sons is a solicitor, and the other a stockbroker. The rich men he preached to helped to place his sons. He was a charming man, but imagine him preaching to them the truths in _Mordecai Josephs_, as Mr. Saville suggested.”

”_Our_ minister lets us have it hot enough, though,” said Mr. Henry Goldsmith with a guffaw.

His wife hastened to obliterate the unrefined expression.

”Mr. Strelitski is a wonderfully eloquent young man, so quiet and reserved in society, but like an ancient prophet in the pulpit.”

”Yes, we were very lucky to get him,” said Mr. Henry Goldsmith.

The little dark girl shuddered.

”What is the matter?” asked Raphael softly.

”I don't know. I don't like the Rev. Joseph Strelitski. He is eloquent, but his dogmatism irritates me. I don't believe he is sincere. He doesn't like me, either.”

”Oh, you're both wrong,” he said in concern.

”Strelitski is a draw, I admit,” said Mr. Montagu Samuels, who was the President of a rival synagogue. ”But Rosenbaum is a good pull-down on the other side, eh?”

Mr. Henry Goldsmith groaned. The second minister of the Kensington synagogue was the scandal of the community. He wasn't expected to preach, and he didn't practise.

”I've heard of that man,” said Sidney laughing. ”He's a bit of a gambler and a spendthrift, isn't he? Why do you keep him on?”

”He has a fine voice, you see,” said Mr. Goldsmith. ”That makes a Rosenbaum faction at once. Then he has a wife and family. That makes another.”

”Strelitski isn't married, is he?” asked Sidney.

”No,” said Mr. Goldsmith, ”not yet. The congregation expects him to, though. I don't care to give him the hint myself; he is a little queer sometimes.”

”He owes it to his position,” said Miss Cissy Levine.

”That is what we think,” said Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, with the majestic manner that suited her opulent beauty.

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