repressible chuckle mingled
with the roar of the praying multitude--"I claimed the privilege of a
free port to sell any description of goods, and the Cadi had to give
his ruling in accordance with the law."

In the exhilaration of his mood this sounded amusing to Gabriel, an
answering of fools according to their folly. But 'twas not long before
it recurred to him to add to his disgust and his disappointment with
his new brethren and his new faith. For after he had submitted
himself, with his brother, to circumcision, replaced his baptismal
name by the Hebrew Uriel, and Vidal's by Joseph, Latinizing at the
same time the family name to Acosta, he found himself confronted by a
host of minute ordinances far more galling than those of the Church.
Eating, drinking, sleeping, dressing, washing, working; not the
simplest action but was dogged and clogged by incredible imperatives.

Astonishment gave place to dismay, and dismay to indignation and
abhorrence, as he realized into what a network of ceremonial he had
entangled himself. The Pentateuch itself, with its complex codex of
six hundred and thirteen precepts, formed, he discovered, but the
barest framework for a parasitic growth insinuating itself with
infinite ramifications into the most intimate recesses of life.

What! Was it for this Rabbinic manufacture that he had exchanged the
stately ceremonial of Catholicism? Had he thrown off mental fetters
but to replace them by bodily?

Was this the Golden Age that he had looked to find--the simple Mosaic
theocracy of reason and righteousness?

And the Jews themselves, were these the Chosen People he had clothed
with such romantic glamour?--fat burghers, clucking comfortably under
the wing of the Protestant States-General; merchants sumptuously
housed, vivifying Dutch trade in the Indies; their forms and dogmas
alone distinguishing them from the heathen Hollanders, whom they aped
even to the very patronage of painters; or, at the other end of this
bastard brotherhood of righteousness, sore-eyed wretches trundling
their flat carts of second-hand goods, or initiating a squalid ghetto
of diamond-cutting and cigar-making in oozy alleys and on the
refuse-laden borders of treeless canals. Oh! he was tricked, trapped,
betrayed!

His wrath gathered daily, finding vent in bitter speeches. If this was
what had become of the Mosaic Law and the Holy People, the sooner a
son of Israel spoke out the better for his race. Was it not an