gesture of resolution.  “No, the Judaism of you English weighs upon my spirits.  It is so parochial.  Everything turns on finance; the United Synagogue keeps your community orthodox because it has the funds and owns the burying-grounds.  Truly a dismal allegory—­a creed whose strength lies in its cemeteries.  Money is the sole avenue to distinction and to authority; it has its coarse thumb over education, worship, society.  In my country—­even in your own Ghetto—­the Jews do not despise money, but at least piety and learning are the titles to position and honor.  Here the scholar is classed with the Schnorrer; if an artist or an author is admired, it is for his success.  You are right; it is oxen that carry your Ark of the Covenant—­fat oxen.  You admire them, Leon; you are an Englishman, and cannot stand outside it all.  But I am stifling under this weight of moneyed mediocrity, this regime of dull respectability.  I want the atmosphere of ideas and ideals.”

He tore at his high clerical collar as though suffocating literally.

Raphael was too moved to defend English Judaism.  Besides, he was used to these jeremiads now—­had he not often heard them from Sidney?  Had he not read them in Esther’s book?  Nor was it the first time he had listened to the Russian’s tirades, though he had lacked the key to the internal conflict that embittered them.

“But how will you live?” he asked, tacitly accepting the situation.  “You will not, I suppose, go over to the Reform Synagogue?”

“That fossil, so proud of its petty reforms half a century ago that it has stood still ever since to admire them!  It is a synagogue for snobs—­who never go there.”

Raphael smiled faintly.  It was obvious that Strelitski on the war-path did not pause to weigh his utterances.

“I am glad you are not going over, anyhow.  Your congregation would—­”

“Crucify me between two money-lenders?”

“Never mind.  But how will you live?"’

“How does Miss Ansell live?  I can always travel with cigars—­I know the line thoroughly.”  He smiled mournfully.  “But probably I shall go to America—­the idea has been floating in my mind for months.  There Judaism is grander, larger, nobler.  There is room for all parties.  The dead bones are not worshipped as relics.  Free thought has its vent-holes—­it is not repressed into hypocrisy as among us.  There is care for literature, for national ideals.  And one deals with millions, not petty thousands.  This English community, with its squabbles about rituals, its four Chief Rabbis all in love with one another, its stupid Sephardim, its narrow-minded Reformers, its fatuous self-importance, its invincible ignorance, is but an ant-hill, a negligible quantity in the future of the faith.  Westward the course of Judaism as of empire takes its way—­from the Euphrates and Tigris it emigrated to Cordova and Toledo, and the year that saw its expulsion from Spain was the