ich the sun was brilliantly reflected. At that time
the houses in the Jewish quarter were still neat and new, and much lower
than they now are, since it was only later on that the Jews, as their
number greatly increased, while they could not enlarge their quarter,
built one story over another, squeezed themselves together like
sardines, and were thus stunted both in body and soul. That part of the
Jewish quarter which remained standing after the great fire, and which
is called the Old Lane, those high blackened houses, where a grinning,
sweaty race of people bargains and chaffers, is a horrible relic of the
Middle Ages. The older synagogue exists no more; it was less capacious
than the present one, which was built later, after the Nuremberg exiles
were taken into the community, and lay more to the north.

The Rabbi had no need to ask where it was. He recognized it from afar by
the buzz of many loud voices. In the court of the House of God he parted
from his wife, and after washing his hands at the fountain there, he
entered the lower part of the synagogue where the men pray, while Sara
ascended a flight of stairs and entered the place reserved for women.
The latter was a kind of gallery with three rows of seats painted a
reddish brown, whose backs were fitted with a hanging board, which held
the prayer-books, and which could be raised and lowered. Here the women
either sat gossiping or stood up in deep prayer. They often went and
peered with curiosity through the large grating on the eastern side,
through the thin, green lattice of which one could look down on the
lower floor of the synagogue. There, behind high praying-desks, stood
the men in their black cloaks, their pointed beards shooting out over
white ruffs, and their skull-capped heads more or less concealed by a
four-cornered scarf of white wool or silk, furnished with the prescribed
tassels, and in some instances also adorned with gold lace. The walls of
the synagogue were uniformly white-washed, and no ornament was to be
seen other than the gilded iron grating around the square stage, where
extracts from the Law were read, and the holy ark, a costly embossed
chest, apparently supported by marble columns with gorgeous capitals,
whose flower-and leaf-work shot up in beautiful profusion, and covered
with a curtain of purple velvet, on which a pious inscription was worked
in gold spangles, pearls, and many colored gems. Here hung the silver
memorial-lamp, and there