ocracy just about
suffices for a synagogue quorum. Great majestic luminaries, each with
its satellites, they swim serenely in the golden heavens. And the
middle-classes look up in worship and the lower-classes in supplication.
"The Upper Ten" have no spirit of exclusiveness; they are willing to
entertain royalty, rank and the arts with a catholic hospitality that is
only Eastern in its magnificence, while some of them only remain Jews
for fear of being considered snobs by society. But the middle-class Jew
has been more jealous of his caste, and for caste reasons. To exchange
hospitalities with the Christian when you cannot eat his dinners were to
get the worse of the bargain; to invite his sons to your house when they
cannot marry your daughters were to solicit awkward complications. In
business, in civic affairs, in politics, the Jew has mixed freely with
his fellow-citizens, but indiscriminate social relations only become
possible through a religious decadence, which they in turn accelerate.
A Christian in a company of middle-class Jews is like a lion in a den of
Daniels. They show him deference and their prophetic side.

Mrs. Henry Goldsmith was of the upper middle-classes, and her husband
was the financial representative of the Kensington Synagogue at the
United Council, but her swan-like neck was still bowed beneath the yoke
of North London, not to say provincial, Judaism. So to-night there were
none of those external indications of Christmas which are so frequent at
"good" Jewish houses; no plum-pudding, snapdragon, mistletoe, not even a
Christmas tree. For Mrs. Henry Goldsmith did not countenance these
coquettings with Christianity. She would have told you that the
incidence of her dinner on Christmas Eve was merely an accident, though
a lucky accident, in so far as Christmas found Jews perforce at leisure
for social gatherings. What she was celebrating was the feast of
Chanukah--of the re-dedication of the Temple after the pollutions of
Antiochus Epiphanes--and the memory of the national hero, Judas
Maccabaeus. Christmas crackers would have been incompatible with the
Chanukah candles which the housekeeper, Mary O'Reilly, forced her master
to light, and would have shocked that devout old dame. For Mary
O'Reilly, as good a soul as she was a Catholic, had lived all her life
with Jews, assisting while yet a girl in the kitchen of Henry
Goldsmith's father, who was a pattern of ancient piety and a prop of the
Great Sy