magnetic tremor that ran through the synagogue thrilled
the lonely girl to the core; once again her dead self woke, her dead
ancestors that would not be shaken off lived and moved in her. She was
sucked up into the great wave of passionate faith, and from her lips
came, in rapturous surrender to an overmastering impulse, the
half-hysterical protestation:

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One!"

And then in the brief instant while the congregation, with
ever-ascending rhapsody, blessed God till the climax came with the
sevenfold declaration, "the Lord, He is God," the whole history of her
strange, unhappy race flashed through her mind in a whirl of resistless
emotion. She was overwhelmed by the thought of its sons in every corner
of the earth proclaiming to the sombre twilight sky the belief for which
its generations had lived and died--the Jews of Russia sobbing it forth
in their pale of enclosure, the Jews of Morocco in their _mellah_, and
of South Africa in their tents by the diamond mines: the Jews of the
New World in great free cities, in Canadian backwoods, in South American
savannahs: the Australian Jews on the sheep-farms and the gold-fields
and in the mushroom cities; the Jews of Asia in their reeking quarters
begirt by barbarian populations. The shadow of a large mysterious
destiny seemed to hang over these poor superstitious zealots, whose
lives she knew so well in all their everyday prose, and to invest the
unconscious shunning sons of the Ghetto with something of tragic
grandeur. The gray dusk palpitated with floating shapes of prophets and
martyrs, scholars and sages and poets, full of a yearning love and pity,
lifting hands of benediction. By what great high-roads and queer by-ways
of history had they travelled hither, these wandering Jews, "sated with
contempt," these shrewd eager fanatics, these sensual ascetics, these
human paradoxes, adaptive to every environment, energizing in every
field of activity, omnipresent like sonic great natural force,
indestructible and almost inconvertible, surviving--with the incurable
optimism that overlay all their poetic sadness--Babylon and Carthage,
Greece and Rome; involuntarily financing the Crusades, outliving the
Inquisition, illusive of all baits, unshaken by all persecutions--at
once the greatest and meanest of races? Had the Jew come so far only to
break down at last, sinking in morasses of modern doubt, and
irresistibly dragging down with him t