black tea out of his own cup, with meat and fish and the good things of
life utterly banned by the traditional law, even if he were flush. It
meant carrying the red rag of an obnoxious personality through a land of
bulls. It meant passing months away from wife and children, in a
solitude only occasionally alleviated by a Sabbath spent in a synagogue
town. It meant putting up at low public houses and common lodging
houses, where rowdy disciples of the Prince of Peace often sent him
bleeding to bed, or shamelessly despoiled him of his merchandise, or
bullied and blustered him out of his fair price, knowing he dared not
resent. It meant being chaffed and gibed at in language of which he
only understood that it was cruel, though certain trite facetiae grew
intelligible to him by repetition. Thus once, when he had been
interrogated as to the locality of Moses when the light went out, he
replied in Yiddish that the light could not go out, for "it stands in
the verse, that round the head of Moses, our teacher, the great
law-giver, was a perpetual halo." An old German happened to be smoking
at the bar of the public house when the peddler gave his acute answer;
he laughed heartily, slapped the Jew on the back and translated the
repartee to the Convivial crew. For once intellect told, and the rough
drinkers, with a pang of shame, vied with one another in pressing bitter
beer upon the temperate Semite. But, as a rule, Moses Ansell drank the
cup of affliction instead of hospitality and bore his share to the full,
without the remotest intention of being heroic, in the long agony of his
race, doomed to be a byword and a mockery amongst the heathen.
Assuredly, to die for a religion is easier than to live for it. Yet
Moses never complained nor lost faith. To be spat upon was the very
condition of existence of the modern Jew, deprived of Palestine and his
Temple, a footsore mendicant, buffeted and reviled, yet the dearer to
the Lord God who had chosen him from the nations. Bullies might break
Moses's head in this world, but in the next he would sit on a gold chair