Sugarman did things in style and through the influence of a client the confirmation ceremony was celebrated in "Duke's Plaizer Shool." Ebenezer, who was tall and weak-eyed, with lank black hair, had a fine new black cloth suit and a beautiful silk praying-shawl with blue stripes, and a glittering watch-chain and a gold ring and a nice new Prayer-book with gilt edges, and all the boys under thirteen made up their minds to grow up and be responsible for their sins as quick as possible. Ebenezer walked up to the Reading Desk with a dauntless stride and intoned his Portion of the Law with no more tremor than was necessitated by the musical roulades, and then marched upstairs, as bold as brass, to his mother, who was sitting up in the gallery, and who gave him a loud smacking kiss that could be heard in the four corners of the synagogue, just as if she were a real lady.

 

Then there was the _Bar-mitzvah_ breakfast, at which Ebenezer delivered an English sermon and a speech, both openly written by the Shalotten _Shammos_, and everybody commended the boy's beautiful sentiments and the beautiful language in which they were couched. Mrs. Sugarman forgot all the trouble Ebenezer had given her in the face of his assurances of respect and affection and she wept copiously. Having only one eye she could not see what her Jonathan saw, and what was spoiling his enjoyment of Ebenezer's effusive gratitude to his dear parents for having trained him up in lofty principles.

 

It was chiefly male cronies who had been invited to breakfast, and the table had been decorated with biscuits and fruit and sweets not appertaining to the meal, but provided for the refreshment of the less-favored visitors--such as Mr. and Mrs. Hyams--who would be dropping in during the day. Now, nearly every one of the guests had brought a little boy with him, each of whom stood like a page behind his father's chair.

 

Before starting on their prandial fried fish, these trencher-men took from the dainties wherewith the ornamental plates were laden and gave thereof to their offspring. Now this was only right and proper, because it is the prerogative of children to "_nash_" on these occasions. But as the meal progressed, each father from time to time, while talking briskly to his neighbor, allowed his hand to stray mechanically into the plates and thence negligently backwards into the hand of his infant, who stuffed the treasure into his pockets. Sugarman fidgeted about uneasily; not one surreptitious seizure escaped him, and every one pricked him like a needle. Soon his soul grew punctured like a pin-cushion. The Shalotten _Shammos_ was among the worst offenders, and he covered his back-handed proceedings with a ceaseless flow of complimentary conversation.

 

"Excellent fish, Mrs. Sugarman," he said, dexterously slipping some almonds behind his chair.

 

"What?" said Mrs. Sugarman, who was hard of hearing.

 

"First-class plaice!" shouted the Shalotten _Shammos_, negligently conveying a bunch of raisins.

 

"So they ought to be," said Mrs. Sugarman in her thin tinkling accents, "they were all alive in the pan."

 

"Ah, did they twitter?" said Mr. Belcovitch, pricking up his ears.

 

"No," Bessie interposed. "What do you mean?"

 

"At home in my town," said Mr. Belcovitch impressively, "a fish made a noise in the pan one Friday."

 

"Well? and suppose?" said the Shalotten _Shammos_, passing a fig to the rear, "the oil frizzles."

 

"Nothing of the kind," said Belcovitch angrily, "A real living noise. The woman snatched it out of the pan and ran with it to the Rabbi. But he did not know what to do. Fortunately there was staying with him for the Sabbath a travelling Saint from the far city of Ridnik, a _Chasid_, very skilful in plagues and purifications, and able to make clean a creeping thing by a hundred and fifty reasons. He directed the woman to wrap the fish in a shroud and give it honorable burial as quickly as possible. The funeral took place the same afternoon and a lot of people went in solemn procession to the woman's back garden and buried it with all seemly rites, and the knife with which it had been cut was buried in the same grave, having been defiled by contact with the demon. One man said it should be burned, but that was absurd because the demon would be only too glad to find itself in its native element, but to prevent Satan from rebuking the woman any more its mouth was stopped with furnace ashes. There was no time to obtain Palestine earth, which would have completely crushed the demon."

 

"The woman must have committed some _Avirah_" said Karlkammer.

 

"A true story!" said the Shalotten _Shammos_, ironically. "That tale has been over Warsaw this twelvemonth."

 

"It occurred when I was a boy," affirmed Belcovitch indignantly. "I remember it quite well. Some people explained it favorably. Others were of opinion that the soul of the fishmonger had transmigrated into the fish, an opinion borne out by the death of the fishmonger a few days before. And the Rabbi is still alive to prove it--may his light continue to shine--though they write that he has lost his memory."

 

The Shalotten _Shammos_ sceptically passed a pear to his son. Old Gabriel Hamburg, the scholar, came compassionately to the raconteur's assistance.

 

"Rabbi Solomon Maimon," he said, "has left it on record that he witnessed a similar funeral in Posen."

 

"It was well she buried it," said Karlkammer. "It was an atonement for a child, and saved its life."

 

The Shalotten _Shammos_ laughed outright.

 

"Ah, laugh not," said Mrs. Belcovitch. "Or you might laugh with blood. It isn't for my own sins that I was born with ill-matched legs."

 

"I must laugh when I hear of God's fools burying fish anywhere but in their stomach," said the Shalotten _Shammos_, transporting a Brazil nut to the rear, where it was quickly annexed by Solomon Ansell, who had sneaked in uninvited and ousted the other boy from his coign of vantage.

 

The conversation was becoming heated; Breckeloff turned the topic.

 

"My sister has married a man who can't play cards," he said lugubriously.

 

"How lucky for her," answered several voices.

 

"No, it's just her black luck," he rejoined. "For he _will_ play."

 

There was a burst of laughter and then the company remembered that Breckeloff was a _Badchan_ or jester.

 

"Why, your sister's husband is a splendid player," said Sugarman with a flash of memory, and the company laughed afresh.

 

"Yes," said Breckeloff. "But he doesn't give me the chance of losing to him now, he's got such a stuck-up _Kotzon_. He belongs to Duke's Plaizer _Shool_ and comes there very late, and when you ask him his birthplace he forgets he was a _Pullack_ and says becomes from 'behind Berlin.'"

 

These strokes of true satire occasioned more merriment and were worth a biscuit to Solomon Ansell _vice_ the son of the Shalotten _Shammos_.

 

Among the inoffensive guests were old Gabriel Hamburg, the scholar, and young Joseph Strelitski, the student, who sat together. On the left of the somewhat seedy Strelitski pretty Bessie in blue silk presided over the coffee-pot. Nobody knew whence Bessie had stolen her good looks: probably some remote ancestress! Bessie was in every way the most agreeable member of the family, inheriting some of her father's brains, but wisely going for the rest of herself to that remote ancestress.

 

Gabriel Hamburg and Joseph Strelitski had both had relations with No. 1 Royal Street for some time, yet they had hardly exchanged a word and their meeting at this breakfast table found them as great strangers as though they had never seen each other. Strelitski came because he boarded with the Sugarmans, and Hamburg came because he sometimes consulted Jonathan Sugarman about a Talmudical passage. Sugarman was charged with the oral traditions of a chain of Rabbis, like an actor who knows all the "business" elaborated by his predecessors, and even a scientific scholar like Hamburg found him occasionally and fortuitously illuminating. Even so Karlkammer's red hair was a pillar of fire in the trackless wilderness of Hebrew literature. Gabriel Hamburg was a mighty savant who endured all things for the love of knowledge and the sake of six men in Europe who followed his work and profited by its results. Verily, fit audience though few. But such is the fate of great scholars whose readers are sown throughout the lands more sparsely than monarchs. One by one Hamburg grappled with the countless problems of Jewish literary history, settling dates and authors, disintegrating the Books of the Bible into their constituent parts, now inserting a gap of centuries between two halves of the same chapter, now flashing the light of new theories upon the development of Jewish theology. He lived at Royal Street and the British Museum, for he spent most of his time groping among the folios and manuscripts, and had no need for more than the little back bedroom, behind the Ansells, stuffed with mouldy books. Nobody (who was anybody) had heard of him in England, and he worked on, unencumbered by patronage or a full stomach. The Ghetto, itself, knew little of him, for there were but few with whom he found intercourse satisfying. He was not "orthodox" in belief though eminently so in practice--which is all the Ghetto demands--not from hypocrisy but from ancient prejudice. Scholarship had not shrivelled up his humanity, for he had a genial fund of humor and a gentle play of satire and loved his neighbors for their folly and narrowmindedness. Unlike Spinoza, too, he did not go out of his way to inform them of his heterodox views, content to comprehend the crowd rather than be misunderstood by it. He knew that the bigger soul includes the smaller and that the smaller can never circumscribe the bigger. Such money as was indispensable for the endowment of research he earned by copying texts and hunting out references for the numerous scholars and clergymen who infest the Museum and prevent the general reader from having elbow room. In person he was small and bent and snuffy. Superficially more intelligible, Joseph Strelitski was really a deeper mystery than Gabriel Hamburg. He was known to be a recent arrival on English soil, yet he spoke English fluently. He studied at Jews' College by day and was preparing for the examinations at the London University. None of the other students knew where he lived nor a bit of his past history. There was a vague idea afloat that he was an only child whose parents had been hounded to penury and death by Russian persecution, but who launched it nobody knew. His eyes wer............