ng--the Rabbi of Bale, in the black skull-cap of
sanctity, ascending the tribune amid the deafening applause of a
catholic Congress, expresses the fears of the faithful, lest in the
new Jewish State the religious Jew be under a ban; and when the
President gravely gives the assurance, amid enthusiasm as frantic,
that Judaism has nothing to fear--Judaism, the one cause and
consolation of the ages of isolation and martyrdom--does no sense of
the irony of history intrude upon his exalted mood?

THE PALESTINE PILGRIM

A vast, motley crowd of poor Jews and Jewesses swayed outside the
doors of the great Manchester synagogue, warmed against the winter
afternoon by their desperate squeezing and pushing. They stretched
from the broad-pillared portico down the steps and beyond the iron
railings, far into the street. The wooden benches of the sacred
building were already packed with a perspiring multitude, seated
indiscriminately, women with men, and even men in the women's gallery,
resentfully conscious--for the first time--of the grating. The hour of
the address had already struck, but the body of police strove in vain
to close the doors against the mighty human stream that pressed on and
on, frenzied with the fear of disappointment and the long wait.

A policeman, worming his way in by the caretaker's entrance, bore to
the hero of the afternoon the superintendent's message that unless he
delayed his speech till the bulk of the disappointed could be got
inside, a riot could not be staved off. And so the stream continued to
force itself slowly forward, flowing into every nook and gangway, till
it stood solid and immovable, heaped like the waters of the Red Sea.
And when at last the doors were bolted, and thousands of swarthy
faces, illumined faintly by clusters of pendent gas-globes, were
turned towards the tall pulpit where the speaker stood, dominant,
against the mystic background of the Ark-curtain, it seemed as if the
whole Ghetto of Manchester--the entire population of Strange-ways and
Redbank--had poured itself into this one synagogue in a great tidal
wave, moved by one of those strange celestial influences which have
throughout all history disturbed the torpor of the Jewries.

Of these poverty-stricken thousands, sucked hither by the fame of a
soldier rumored to represent a Messianic millionaire bent on the
restoration and redemption of Israel, Aaron the Pedlar was an
atom--ugly, wan, and stooping, with pious ea