scholar like Hamburg found him occasionally and fortuitously illuminating.  Even so Karlkammer’s red hair was a pillar of fire in the trackless wilderness of Hebrew literature.  Gabriel Hamburg was a mighty savant who endured all things for the love of knowledge and the sake of six men in Europe who followed his work and profited by its results.  Verily, fit audience though few.  But such is the fate of great scholars whose readers are sown throughout the lands more sparsely than monarchs.  One by one Hamburg grappled with the countless problems of Jewish literary history, settling dates and authors, disintegrating the Books of the Bible into their constituent parts, now inserting a gap of centuries between two halves of the same chapter, now flashing the light of new theories upon the development of Jewish theology.  He lived at Royal Street and the British Museum, for he spent most of his time groping among the folios and manuscripts, and had no need for more than the little back bedroom, behind the Ansells, stuffed with mouldy books.  Nobody (who was anybody) had heard of him in England, and he worked on, unencumbered by patronage or a full stomach.  The Ghetto, itself, knew little of him, for there were but few with whom he found intercourse satisfying.  He was not “orthodox” in belief though eminently so in practice—­which is all the Ghetto demands—­not from hypocrisy but from ancient prejudice.  Scholarship had not shrivelled up his humanity, for he had a genial fund of humor and a gentle play of satire and loved his neighbors for their folly and narrowmindedness.  Unlike Spinoza, too, he did not go out of his way to inform them of his heterodox views, content to comprehend the crowd rather than be misunderstood by it.  He knew that the bigger soul includes the smaller and that the smaller can never circumscribe the bigger.  Such money as was indispensable for the endowment of research he earned by copying texts and hunting out references for the numerous scholars and clergymen who infest the Museum and prevent the general reader from having elbow room.  In person he was small and bent and snuffy.  Superficially more intelligible, Joseph Strelitski was really a deeper mystery than Gabriel Hamburg.  He was known to be a recent arrival on English soil, yet he spoke English fluently.  He studied at Jews’ College by day and was preparing for the examinations at the London University.  None of the other students knew where he lived nor a bit of his past history.  There was a vague idea afloat that he was an only child whose parents had been hounded to penury and death by Russian persecution, but who launched it nobody knew.  His eyes were sad and earnest, a curl of raven hair fell forwards on his high brow; his clothing was shabby and darned in places by his own hand.  Beyond accepting the gift of education at the hands of dead men he would take no help.  On several distinct occasions, the magic name, Rothschild, was appealed to on his behalf by well-wishers, and through its avenue of almoners it responded with its eternal quenchless unquestioning generosity to students.  But Joseph Strelitski always quietly sent back these bounties.  He made enough to exist upon by touting for a cigar-firm in the evenings.  In the streets he walked with tight-pursed lips, dreaming no one knew what.