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The Jewish Trinity
by
‘Almost as long a grace as the dinner!’ Tom Fuller murmured to him as he returned to the table. ‘Do the Jews say that after every meal?’
‘They’re supposed to,’ Barstein replied, a little jarred as he picked up a cigar.
‘No wonder they beat the Christians,’ observed the young Radical, who evidently took original views. ‘So much time for digestion would enable any race to survive in this age of quick lunches. In America, now they should rule the roast. Literally,’ he added, with a laugh.
‘It’s a beautiful grace,’ said Barstein rebukingly. ‘The glamour of Zion thrown over the prose of diet.’
‘You’re not a Jew?’ said Tom, with a sudden suspicion.
‘Yes, I am,’ the artist replied with a dignity that surprised himself.
‘I should never have taken you for one!’ said Tom ingenuously.
Despite himself, Barstein felt a thrill of satisfaction. ‘But why?’ he asked himself instantly. ‘To feel complimented at not being taken for a Jew–what does it mean? Is there a core of anti-Semitism in my nature? Has our race reached self-contempt?’
‘I beg your pardon,’ Tom went on. ‘I didn’t mean to be irreverent. I appreciate the picturesqueness of it all–hearing the very language of the Bible, and all that. And I do sympathize with your desire for Jewish Home Rule.’
‘My desire?’ murmured the artist, taken aback. Sir Asher here interrupted them by pressing his ’48 port upon both, and directing the artist’s attention in particular to the pictures that hung around the stately dining-room. There was a Gainsborough, a Reynolds, a Landseer. He drew Barstein round the walls.
‘I am very fond of the English school,’ he said. His cap was back in his coat-tail, and he had become again the bluff and burly Briton.
‘You don’t patronize the Italians at all?’ asked the artist.
‘No,’ said Sir Asher. He lowered his voice. ‘Between you and I,’ said he–it was his main fault of grammar–‘in Italian art one is never safe from the Madonna, not to mention her Son.’ It was a fresh reminder of the Palestinian patriarch. Sir Asher never discussed theology except with those who agreed with him. Nor did he ever, whether in private or in public, breathe an unfriendly word against his Christian fellow-citizens. All were sons of the same Father, as he would frequently say from the platform. But in his heart of hearts he cherished a contempt, softened by stupefaction, for the arithmetical incapacity of Trinitarians.
Christianity under any other aspect did not exist for him. It was a blunder impossible to a race with a genius for calculation. ‘How can three be one?’ he would demand witheringly of his cronies. The question was in his eye now as he summed up Italian art to the sculptor, and a faint smile twitching about his lips invited his fellow-Jew to share with him his feeling of spiritual and intellectual superiority to the poor blind Christians at his table, as well as to Christendom generally.
But the artist refused to come up on the pedestal. ‘Surely the Madonna was a very beautiful conception,’ he said.
Sir Asher looked startled. ‘Ah yes, you are an artist,’ he remembered. ‘You think only of the beautiful outside. But how can there be three-in-one or one-in-three?’
Barstein did not reply, and Sir Asher added in a low scornful tone: ‘Neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.’
III
A sudden commission recalled Barstein to town before he could even pay his after-dinner call. But the seed sown in his soul that evening was not to be stifled. This seed was nothing less than the idea of a national revival of his people. He hunted up his old prayer-books, and made many discoveries as his modern consciousness depolarized page upon page that had never in boyhood been anything to him but a series of syllables to be gabbled off as rapidly as possible, when their meaning was not still further overlaid by being sung slowly to a tune. ‘I might as well have turned a prayer-wheel,’ he said regretfully, as he perceived with what iron tenacity the race beaten down by the Roman Empire and by every power that had reigned since, had preserved its aspiration for its old territory. And this mystery of race and blood, this beauty of unforgetting aspiration, was all physically incarnate in Mabel Aaronsberg.