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No. 49. Vienna, 2 December 1904. — 24 Kislev 5665. 8th Year.

The Menorah.*)

By Benjamin Seff.

There was a man who had felt deep in his soul the distress of being a Jew. His outward circumstances were not unsatisfactory. He had a sufficient livelihood and a happy calling as well, for he was permitted to create that toward which his heart drew him. He was, namely, an artist. He had long ceased to concern himself with his Jewish origin and the faith of his fathers when the old hatred showed itself anew under a fashionable catchword. Like many others, our man too believed that the current would soon run its course. But things grew not better but ever worse, and the attacks pained him again and again, although they did not touch him directly; so that little by little his soul became one single bleeding wound. It now befell him that these inward and unspoken sufferings turned him toward their source, that is, toward his Judaism, and what he might perhaps never have been capable of in good days, because he was already so far removed from it, came to pass: he began to love it with a great fervour. Nor did he at once give himself a clear account of this strange affection, until at last it had grown so powerful that it rose out of dim feelings into a clear thought, which he then also uttered. It was the thought that there was but one way out of the Jewish distress, and that was the return home to Judaism.

When his best friends, who found themselves in a situation like his own, learned of this, they shook their heads over him and declared that he had become confused in his mind. For how could that be a way out which meant only the sharpening and deepening of the evil? He, however, thought that the moral distress was so keenly felt because the new Jews had lost that counterweight which our strong fathers possessed within them. People mocked behind his back, some even laughed openly in his face; yet he did not let himself be led astray by the foolish remarks of persons whose insight he had never before had occasion to value highly, and he bore the jests, ill-natured or good-natured, with composure. And since in other respects he did not behave unreasonably, they gradually let him indulge his whim, which some, to be sure, called by the harsher name of a fixed idea.

In his patient way, however, the man drew one consequence after another from the opinion he had once formed. There were a number of transitions in this which did not come easily to him, even though out of defiance he did not let it be seen. As a man and an artist of modern views he had nevertheless grown bound up with many un-Jewish habits, and had taken into himself something ineradicable from the cultures of the peoples through which his course of education had led him. How was this to be reconciled with his return to Judaism? From this there arose in him many a doubt as to the rightness of his guiding thought, his idée maîtresse, as the French thinker calls it. Perhaps the generation reared under the influence of other cultures was no longer capable of that homecoming which he had found to be the solution. But the next generation would surely be capable of it, if it were given its direction in good time. And so he took care that at least his children should come upon the right path. These he would bring up as Jews from the very beginning.

Formerly he had let pass without celebrating it the festival which through so many centuries has shed the radiance of little lights upon the wondrous apparition of the Maccabees. Now, however, he made use of the occasion to prepare for his children a beautiful memory for days to come. Attachment to the ancient nationhood was to be planted early in these young souls. A Menorah was procured, and when he held this nine-branched candlestick in his hand for the first time, a strange feeling came over him. In his father's house, too, the little lights had burned in a youth now long gone by, and there was something intimate and homely about it. The tradition did not seem frosty, not dead. It had come down thus through the ages, always one little light kindled from another. The antique form of the Menorah, too, set him musing. When had the primitive structure of this light-holder been created? The form had evidently once been taken from the tree

*) "Die Welt," Year I, No. 31 of 31 December 1897.