Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 39

"Me?" said Mendelssohn, with the unfeigned modesty of the man who, his every public utterance having been dragged out of him by external compulsion, retains his native shyness and is alone in ignorance of his own influence. "No, no, it is Montesquieu, it is Dohm, it is my dear Lessing. Poor fellow, the Christian bigots are at him now like a plague of stinging insects. I almost wish he hadn't written _Nathan der Weise_. I am glad to reflect I didn't instigate him, nay, that he had written a play in favor of the Jews ere we met."

"How did you come to know him?"

"I hardly remember. He was always fond of outcasts--a true artistic temperament, that preferred to consort with actors and soldiers rather than with the beer-swilling middle-cla.s.s of Berlin. Oh yes, I think we met over a game of chess. Then we wrote an essay on Pope together.

Dear Gotthold! What do I not owe him? My position in Berlin, my feeling for literature--for we Jews have all stifled our love for the beautiful and grown dead to poetry."

"Well, but what is a poet but a liar?"

"Ah, my dear Herr Maimon, you will grow out of that. I must lend you Homer. Intellectual speculation is not everything. For my part, I have never regretted withdrawing a portion of my love from the worthy matron, philosophy, in order to bestow it on her handmaid, _belles-lettres_. I am sorry to use a French word, but for once there's no better. You smile to see a Jew more German than the Germans."

"No, I smile to hear what sounds like French all round! I remember reading in your _Philosophical Conversations_ your appeal to the Germans not to exchange their own gold for the tinsel of their neighbors."

"Yes, but what can one do? It is a Berlin mania; and, you know, the King himself.... Our Jewish girls first caught it to converse with the young gallants who came a-borrowing of their fathers, but the influence of my dear daughters--there, the beautiful one is Dorothea, the eldest, and that other, who takes more after me, is Henrietta--their influence is doing much to counteract the wave of flippancy and materialism. But fancy any one still reading my _Philosophical Conversations_--my 'prentice work. I had no idea of printing it. I lent the ma.n.u.script to Lessing, observing jestingly that I, too, could write like Shaftesbury, the Englishman. And lo! the next time I met him he handed me the proofs. Dear Gotthold."

"Is it true that the King--?"

"Sent for me to Potsdam to scold me? You are thinking of another matter. That was in my young days." He smiled and lowered his voice.

"I ventured to hint in a review that His Majesty's French verses--I am glad by the way he has lived to write some against Voltaire--were not perfection. I thought I had wrapped up my meaning beyond royal comprehension. But a malicious courtier, the preacher Justi, denounced me as a Jew who had thrown aside all reverence for the most sacred person of His Majesty. I was summoned to Sans-Souci and--with a touch of _Rishus_ (malice)--on a Sat.u.r.day. I managed to be there without breaking my _Shabbos_ (Sabbath)."

"Then he does keep Sabbath!" thought Maimon, in amaze.

"But, as you may imagine, I was not as happy as a bear with honey.

However, I pleaded that he who makes verses plays at nine-pins, and he who plays at nine-pins, be he monarch or peasant, must be satisfied with the judgment of the boy who has charge of the bowls."

"And you are still alive!"

"To the annoyance of many people. I fancy His Majesty was ashamed to punish me before the French cynics of his court, and I know on good authority that it was because the Marquis D'Argens was astonished to learn that I could be driven out of Berlin at any moment by the police that the King made me a Schutz-Jude (protected Jew). So I owe something to the French after all. My friends had long been urging me to sue for protection, but I thought, as I still think, that one ought not to ask for any rights which the humblest Jew could not enjoy.

However, a king's gift horse one cannot look in the mouth. And now you are to become _my_ Schutz-Jude"--Maimon's heart beat gratefully--"and the question is, what do you propose to do in Berlin? What is the career that is to bring you a castle and a princess?"

"I wish to study medicine."

"Good. It is the one profession a Jew may enter here; though, you must know, however great a practice you may attain--even among the Christians--they will never publish your name in the medical list.

Still, we must be thankful for small mercies. In Frankfort the Jewish doctors are limited to four, in other towns to none. We must hand you over to Dr. Herz--there, that man who is laughing so, over one of his own good things, no doubt--that is Dr. Herz, and the beautiful creature is his wife, Henrietta, who is founding a Goethe salon. She and my daughters are inseparable--a Jewish trinity. And so, Herr Physician, I extend to you the envious congratulations of a book-keeper."

"But you are not a book-keeper!"

"Not now, but that was what I began as--or rather, what I drifted into, for I was Talmudical tutor in his family, when my dear Herr Bernhardt proposed it to me. And I am not sorry. For it left me plenty of time to learn Latin and Greek and mathematics, and finally landed me in a partnership. Still I have always been a race-horse burdened with a pack, alas! I don't mean my hump, but the factory still steals a good deal of my time and brains, and if I didn't rise at five--But you have made me quite egoistic--it is the resemblance of our young days that has touched the spring of memories. But come! let me introduce you to my wife and my son Abraham. Ah, see, poor Fromet is signalling to me. She is tired of being left to battle single-handed.

Would you not like to know M. de Mirabeau? Or let me introduce you to Wessely--he will talk to you in Hebrew. It is Wessely who does all the work for which I am praised--it is he who is elevating our Jewish brethren, with whom I have not the heart nor the courage to strive. Or there is Nicolai, the founder of 'The Library of the Fine Arts,' to which," he added with a sly smile, "I hope yet to see you contributing. Perhaps Fraulein Reimarus will convert you--that charming young lady there talking with her brother-in-law, who is a Danish state-councillor. She is the great friend of Lessing--as I live, there comes Lessing himself. I am sure he would like the pleasure of your acquaintance."

"Because he likes outcasts? No, no, not yet," and Maimon, whose mood had been growing dark again, shrank back, appalled by these great names. Yes, he was a dreamer and a fool, and Mendelssohn was a sage, indeed. In his bitterness he distrusted even his own Dissertation, his uncompromising logic, destructive of all theology. Perhaps Mendelssohn was right: perhaps he had really solved the Jewish problem. To be a Jew among Germans, and a German among Jews: to reconcile the old creed with Culture: to hold up one's head, and a.s.sert oneself as an honorable element in the nation--was not this catholic gathering a proof of the feasibility of such an ideal? Good sense! What true self-estimate as well as wit in the sage's famous retort to the swaggering German officer who asked him what commodity he dealt in.

"In that which you appear to need--good sense." Maimon roused himself to listen to the conversation. It changed to German under the impulse of the host, who from his umpire's chair controlled it with play of eye, head, or hand; and when appealed to, would usually show that both parties were fighting about words, not things. Maimon noted from his semi-obscure retreat that the talk grew more serious and connected, touched problems. He saw that for Mendelssohn as for himself nothing really existed but the great questions. Flippant interruptions the sage seemed to disregard, and if the topic dribbled out into irrelevancies he fell silent. Maimon studied the n.o.ble curve of his forehead, the decided nose, the prominent lips, in the light of Herr Lavater's theories. Lessing said little: he had the air of a broken man. The brilliant life of the culture-warrior was closing in gloom--wife, child, health, money, almost reputation, gone: the nemesis of genius.

At one point a lady strove to concentrate attention upon herself by accusing herself of faults of character. Even Maimon understood she was angling for compliments. But Mendelssohn gravely bade her mend her faults, and Maimon saw Lessing's hara.s.sed eyes light up for the first time with a gleam of humor. Then the poet, as if roused to recollection, pulled out a paper, "I almost forgot to give you back Kant's letter," he said. "You are indeed to be congratulated."

Mendelssohn blushed like a boy, and made a s.n.a.t.c.h at the letter, but Lessing jestingly insisted on reading it to the company.

"I consider that in your _Jerusalem_ you have succeeded in combining our religion with such a degree of freedom of conscience, as was never imagined possible, and of which no other faith can boast. You have at the same time so thoroughly and so clearly demonstrated the necessity of unlimited liberty of conscience, that ultimately our Church will also be led to reflect how it should remove from its midst everything that disturbs and oppresses conscience, which will finally unite all men in their view of the essential points of religion."

There was an approving murmur throughout the company. "Such a letter would compensate me for many more annoyances than my works have brought me," said Mendelssohn. "And to think," he added laughingly, "that I once beat Kant in a prize compet.i.tion. A proof of the power of lucid expression over profound thought. And that I owe to your stimulus, Lessing."

The poet made a grimace. "You accuse me of stimulating superficiality!"

There was a laugh.

"Nay, I meant you have torn away the thorns from the roses of philosophy! If Kant would only write like you--"

"He might understand himself," flashed the beautiful Henrietta Herz.

"And lose his disciples," added her husband. "That is really, Herr Mendelssohn, why we pious Jews are so angry with your German translation of the Bible--you make the Bible intelligible."

"Yes, they have done their best to distort it," sighed Mendelssohn.

"But the fury my translation arouses among the so-called wise men of the day, is the best proof of its necessity. When I first meditated producing a plain Bible in good German, I had only the needs of my own children at heart, then I allowed myself to be persuaded it might serve the mult.i.tude, now I see it is the Rabbis who need it most. But centuries of crooked thinking have deadened them to the beauties of the Bible: they have left it behind them as elementary, when they have not themselves coated it with complexity. Subtle misinterpretation is everything, a beautiful text, nothing. And then this corrupt idiom of theirs--than which nothing more corrupts a nation--they have actually invested this German jargon with sanct.i.ty, and I am a wolf in sheep's clothing for putting good German in Hebrew letters. Even the French Jews, Cerf Berr tells me, think bad German holy. To say nothing of Austria."

"Wait, wait!" said an eager-eyed man; "the laws of the Emperor Joseph will change all that--once the Jews of Vienna are forced to go to school with the sciences, they will become an honored element of the nation."

Mendelssohn shook a worldly-wise head. "Not so fast, my dear Wessely, not so fast. Your Hebrew Ode to the Austrian Emperor was unimpeachable as poetry, but, I fear, visionary as history. Who knows that this is more than a temporary political move?"

"And we pious Jews," put in Dr. Herz, smiling, "you forget, Herr Wessely, we are not so easily schooled. We have never forgiven our Mendelssohn for saying our glorious religion had acc.u.mulated cobwebs.

It is the cobwebs we love, not the port."

"Yes, indeed," broke in Maimon, so interested that he forgot his own jargon, to say nothing of his attire. "When I was in Poland, I crawled nicely into mud, through pointing out that they ought not to turn to the east in praying, because Jerusalem, which, in accordance with Talmudic law, they turned to, couldn't lie due east of everywhere. In point of fact we were north-west, so that they should have turned"--his thumbs began to turn and his voice to take on the Talmudic sing-song--"south-east. I told them it was easy in each city to compute the exact turning, by corners and circles--"

"By spherical trigonometry, certainly," said Mendelssohn pleasantly.

Maimon, conscious of a correction, blushed and awoke to find himself the centre of observation. His host made haste to add, "You remind me of the odium I incurred by agreeing with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin's edict, that we should not bury our dead before the third day. And this in spite of my proofs from the Talmud! Dear, dear, if the Rabbis were only as anxious to bury dead ideas as dead bodies!" There was a general smile, but Maimon said boldly--

"I think you treat them far too tolerantly."

"What, Herr Maimon," and Mendelssohn smiled the half-sad smile of the sage, who has seen the humors of the human spectacle and himself as part of it--"would you have me rebuke intolerance by intolerance? I will admit that when I was your age--and of an even hotter temper--I could have made a pretty persecutor. In those days I contributed to the mildest of sheets, 'The Moral Preacher,' we young blades called it. But because it didn't reek of religion, on every page the pious scented atheism. I could have whipped the dullards or cried with vexation. Now I see intolerance is a proof of earnestness as well as of stupidity. It is well that men should be alert against the least rough breath on the blossoms of faith they cherish. The only criticism that still has power to annoy me is that of the timid, who fear it is provoking persecution for a Jew to speak out. But for the rest, opposition is the test-furnace of new ideas. I do my part in the world, it is for others to do theirs. As soon as I had yielded my translation to friend Dubno, to be printed, I took my soul in my hands, raised my eyes to the mountains, and gave my back to the smiters. All the same I am sorry it is the Rabbi of Posen who is launching these old-fashioned thunders against the German Pentateuch of "Moses of Dessau," for both as a Talmudist and mathematician Hirsch Janow has my sincere respect. Not in vain is he styled 'the keen scholar,' and from all I hear he is a truly good man."

"A saint!" cried Maimon enthusiastically, again forgetting his shyness. His voice faltered as he drew a glowing panegyric of his whilom benefactor, and pictured him as about to die in the prime of life, worn out by vigils and penances. In a revulsion of feeling, fresh stirrings of doubt of the Mendelssohnian solution agitated his soul. Though he had but just now denounced the fanatics, he was conscious of a strange sympathy with this lovable ascetic who fasted every day, torturing equally his texts and himself, this hopeless mystic for whom there could be no bridge to modern thought; all the Polish Jew in him revolted irrationally against the new German rationalism. No, no; it must be all or nothing. Jewish Catholicism was not to be replaced by Jewish Protestantism. These pathetic zealots, clinging desperately to the past, had a deeper instinct, a truer prevision of the future, than this cultured philosopher.

"Yes, what you tell me of Hirsch Janow goes with all I have heard,"

said Mendelssohn calmly. "But I put my trust in time and the new generation. I will wager that the translation I drew up for my children will be read by his."

Maimon happened to be looking over Mendelssohn's shoulder at his charming daughters in their Parisian toilettes. He saw them exchange a curious glance that raised their eyebrows sceptically. With a flash of insight he caught their meaning. Mendelssohn seeking an epigram had stumbled into a dubious oracle.

"The translation I drew up for my children will be read by his."

By his, perhaps.

But by my own?

Maimon shivered with an apprehension of tragedy. Perhaps it was his Dissertation that Mendelssohn's children would read. He remembered suddenly that Mendelssohn had said no word to its crushing logic.

As he was taking his leave, he put the question point-blank. "What have you to say to my arguments?"

"You are not in the right road at present," said Mendelssohn, holding his hand amicably, "but the course of your inquiries must not be checked. Doubt, as Descartes rightly says, is the beginning of philosophical speculation."

He left the Polish philosopher on the threshold, agitated by a medley of feelings.