cession of Peninsular
refugees from the Inquisition, their shelter beneath the lion's wing
negotiated through their fellow-Jew, Daniel Rodrigues, Consul of the
Republic in Dalmatia. His mind halted a moment on this Daniel
Rodrigues, an important skeleton. He thought of the endless shifts of
the Jews to evade the harsher prescriptions, their subtle, passive
refusal to live at Mestre, their final relegation to the Ghetto. What
well-springs of energy, seething in those paradoxical progenitors of
his, who united the calm of the East with the fever of the West; those
idealists dealing always with the practical, those lovers of ideas,
those princes of combination, mastering their environment because they
never dealt in ideas except as embodied in real concrete things.
Reality! Reality!

That was the note of Jewish genius, which had this affinity at least
with the Greek. And he, though to him his father's real world was a
shadow, had yet this instinctive hatred of the cloud-spinners, the
word-jugglers, his idealisms needed solid substance to play around.
Perhaps if he had been persecuted, or even poor, if his father had not
smoothed his passage to a not unprosperous career in letters, he might
have escaped this haunting sense of the emptiness and futility of
existence. He, too, would have found a joy in outwitting the Christian
persecutor, in piling ducat on ducat. Ay, even now he chuckled to
think how these _strazzaroli_--these forced vendors of second-hand
wares--had lived to purchase the faded purple wrappings of Venetian
glory.

He remembered reading in the results of an ancient census: Men, women,
children, monks, nuns--and Jews! Well, the Doges were done with,
Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jew--the Jew lived sumptuously
in the palaces of her proud nobles. He looked round the magnificent
long-stretching dining-room, with its rugs, oil-paintings, frescoed
ceiling, palms; remembered the ancient scutcheon over the stone
portal--a lion rampant with an angel volant--and thought of the old
Latin statute forbidding the Jews to keep schools of any kind in
Venice, or to teach anything in the city, under penalty of fifty
ducats' fine and six months' imprisonment. Well, the Jews had taught
the Venetians something after all--that the only abiding wealth is
human energy. All other nations had had their flowering time and had
faded out. But Israel went on with unabated strength and courage. It
was very wonderful. Nay, was it