bbis who need it most. But
centuries of crooked thinking have deadened them to the beauties of the
Bible: they have left it behind them as elementary, when they have not
themselves coated it with complexity. Subtle misinterpretation is
everything, a beautiful text, nothing. And then this corrupt idiom of
theirs--than which nothing more corrupts a nation--they have actually
invested this German jargon with sanctity, and I am a wolf in sheep's
clothing for putting good German in Hebrew letters. Even the French
Jews, Cerf Berr tells me, think bad German holy. To say nothing of
Austria."

"Wait, wait!" said an eager-eyed man; "the laws of the Emperor Joseph
will change all that--once the Jews of Vienna are forced to go to
school with the sciences, they will become an honored element of the
nation."

Mendelssohn shook a worldly-wise head. "Not so fast, my dear Wessely,
not so fast. Your Hebrew Ode to the Austrian Emperor was unimpeachable
as poetry, but, I fear, visionary as history. Who knows that this is
more than a temporary political move?"

"And we pious Jews," put in Dr. Herz, smiling, "you forget, Herr
Wessely, we are not so easily schooled. We have never forgiven our
Mendelssohn for saying our glorious religion had accumulated cobwebs.
It is the cobwebs we love, not the port."

"Yes, indeed," broke in Maimon, so interested that he forgot his own
jargon, to say nothing of his attire. "When I was in Poland, I crawled
nicely into mud, through pointing out that they ought not to turn to
the east in praying, because Jerusalem, which, in accordance with
Talmudic law, they turned to, couldn't lie due east of everywhere. In
point of fact we were north-west, so that they should have
turned"--his thumbs began to turn and his voice to take on the
Talmudic sing-song--"south-east. I told them it was easy in each city
to compute the exact turning, by corners and circles--"

"By spherical trigonometry, certainly," said Mendelssohn pleasantly.
Maimon, conscious of a correction, blushed and awoke to find himself
the centre of observation. His host made haste to add, "You remind me
of the odium I incurred by agreeing with the Duke of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin's edict, that we should not bury our dead before
the third day. And this in spite of my proofs from the Talmud! Dear,
dear, if the Rabbis were only as anxious to bury dead ideas as dead
bodies!" There was a general smile, but Maimon said boldly--

"I think you treat them far t