Very few persons, "called up" to the reading of the Law, escaped at the
cost they had intended, for one is easily led on by an insinuative
official incapable of taking low views of the donor's generosity and a
little deaf. The moment prior to the declaration of the amount was quite
exciting for the audience. On Sabbaths and festivals the authorities
could not write down these sums, for writing is work and work is
forbidden; even to write them in the book and volume of their brain
would have been to charge their memories with an illegitimate if not an
impossible burden. Parchment books on a peculiar system with holes in
the pages and laces to go through the holes solved the problem of
bookkeeping without pen and ink. It is possible that many of the
worshippers were tempted to give beyond their means for fear of losing
the esteem of the _Shammos_ or Beadle, a potent personage only next in
influence to the President whose overcoat he obsequiously removed on the
greater man's annual visit to the synagogue. The Beadle's eye was all
over the _Shool_ at once, and he could settle an altercation about seats
without missing a single response. His automatic amens resounded
magnificently through the synagogue, at once a stimulus and a rebuke. It
was probably as a concession to him that poor men, who were neither
seat-holders nor wearers of chimney-pot hats, were penned within an iron
enclosure near the door of the building and ranged on backless benches,
and it says much for the authority of the _Shammos_ that not even the
_Schnorrer_ contested it. Prayers were shouted rapidly by the
congregation, and elaborately sung by the _Chazan_. The minister was
_Vox et praeterea nihil_. He was the only musical instrument permitted,
and on him devolved the whole onus of making the service attractive. He
succeeded. He was helped by the sociability of the gathering--for the
Synagogue was virtually a Jewish Club, the focus of the sectarian life.