Orient where they were woven, of superstitions grotesque as the
cathedral gargoyles of the Dark Ages in which they had birth. And
over all lie tenderly some streaks of celestial light shining from
the face of the great Lawgiver.

The folk who compose our pictures are children of the Ghetto; their
faults are bred of its hovering miasma of persecution, their
virtues straitened and intensified by the narrowness of its
horizon. And they who have won their way beyond its boundaries must
still play their parts in tragedies and comedies--tragedies of
spiritual struggle, comedies of material ambition--which are the
aftermath of its centuries of dominance, the sequel of that long
cruel night in Jewry which coincides with the Christian Era. If
they are not the Children, they are at least the Grandchildren of
the Ghetto.

The particular Ghetto that is the dark background upon which our
pictures will be cast, is of voluntary formation.

People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are
not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor
to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges.
The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of
their being. But a minority will pass, by units, into the larger, freer,
stranger life amid the execrations of an ever-dwindling majority. For
better or for worse, or for both, the Ghetto will be gradually
abandoned, till at last it becomes only a swarming place for the poor
and the ignorant, huddling together for social warmth. Such people are
their own Ghetto gates; when they migrate they carry them across the sea
to lands where they are not. Into the heart of East London there poured