is, a joke against what they have made out of the Jew.  This is true especially, for instance, of many points of religion and ritual.  Thus we cannot help feeling, for instance, that there is something a little grotesque about the Hebrew habit of putting on a top-hat as an act of worship.  It is vaguely mixed up with another line of humour, about another class of Jew, who wears a large number of hats; and who must not therefore be credited with an extreme or extravagant religious zeal, leading him to pile up a pagoda of hats towards heaven.  To Western eyes, in Western conditions, there really is something inevitably fantastic about this formality of the synagogue.  But we ought to remember that we have made the Western conditions which startle the Western eyes.  It seems odd to wear a modern top-hat as if it were a mitre or a biretta; it seems quainter still when the hat is worn even for the momentary purpose of saying grace before lunch.  It seems quaintest of all when, at some Jewish luncheon parties, a tray of hats is actually handed round, and each guest helps himself to a hat as a sort of hors d’oeuvre.  All this could easily be turned into a joke; but we ought to realise that the joke is against ourselves.  It is not merely we who make fun of it, but we who have made it funny.  For, after all, nobody can pretend that this particular type of head-dress is a part of that uncouth imagery “setting painting and sculpture at defiance” which Renan remarked in the tradition of Hebrew civilisation.  Nobody can say that a top-hat was among the strange symbolic utensils dedicated to the obscure service of the Ark; nobody can suppose that a top-hat descended from heaven among the wings and wheels of the flying visions of the Prophets.  For this wild vision the West is entirely responsible.  Europe has created the Tower of Giotto; but it has also created the topper.  We of the West must bear the burden, as best we may, both of the responsibility and of the hat.  It is solely the special type and shape of hat that makes the Hebrew ritual seem ridiculous.  Performed in the old original Hebrew fashion it is not ridiculous, but rather if anything sublime.  For the original fashion was an oriental fashion; and the Jews are orientals; and the mark of all such orientals is the wearing of long and loose draperies.  To throw those loose draperies over the head is decidedly a dignified and even poetic gesture.  One can imagine something like justice done to its majesty and mystery in one of the great dark drawings of William Blake.  It may be true, and personally I think it is true, that the Hebrew covering of the head signifies a certain stress on the fear of God, which is the beginning of wisdom, while the Christian uncovering of the head suggests rather the love of God that is the end of wisdom.  But this has nothing to do with the taste and dignity of the ceremony; and to do justice to these we must treat the Jew as an oriental; we must even dress him as an oriental.