r 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