as not enough;
the vast realm of Knowledge, which he divined dimly, must lie in other
languages. But to learn any other language was pollution to a Jew, to
teach a Jew any other was pollution to a Christian.

In his facile comprehension of German and Latin books, he had long
since forgotten his first painful steps: now in his agony they
recurred to mock him. He had learnt these alien alphabets by observing
in some bulky Hebrew books that when the printers had used up the
letters of the Hebrew alphabet to mark their sheets, they started
other and foreign alphabets. How he had rejoiced to find that by help
of his Jewish jargon he could worry out the meaning of some torn
leaves of an old German book picked up by chance.

The picture of the innkeeper's hut, in which he had once been
family-tutor, flew up irrelevantly into his mind--he saw himself
expounding a tattered Pentateuch to a half-naked brood behind the
stove, in a smoky room full of peasants sitting on the floor guzzling
whisky, or pervaded by drunken Russian soldiery hacking the bedsteads
or throwing the glasses in the faces of the innkeeper and his wife.
Poor Polish Jews, cursed by poverty and tyranny! Who could be blamed
for consoling himself with liquor in such a home? Besides, when one
was paid only five thalers, one owed it to oneself not to refuse a
dram or so. And then there came up another one-room home in which a
youth with his eyes and hair had sat all night poring over Cabalistic
books, much to the inconvenience of the newly married Rabbi, who had
consented to teach him this secret doctrine. For this had been his
Cabalistic phase, when he dreamed of conjurations and spells and the
Mastership of the Name. A sardonic smile twitched the corners of his
lips, as he remembered how the poor Rabbi and his pretty wife, after
fruitless hints, had lent him the precious tomes to be rid of his
persistent all-night sittings, and the smile lingered an instant
longer as he recalled his own futile attempts to coerce the
supernatural, either by the incantations of the Cabalists or the
prayer-ecstasy he had learnt later from the Chassidim.

Yes, he had early discovered that all this Cabalistic mysticism was
only an attempt at a scientific explanation of existence, veiled in
fable and allegory. But the more reasonable he pronounced the Cabalah
to be, the more he had irritated the local Cabalists who refused to
have their "divine science" reduced to "reason." And so,
di