The time has gone by when we Jews
hid our heads. I am proud of what I am, and I will never be a Christian.
What can Simon Abeles have to do with me?"
"Little enough, now that you are awake."
"And when I was asleep, what then? She made me see him, perhaps?"
"She made you live his life. She made you suffer all that he suffered--"
"What?" cried Israel Kafka in a loud and angry tone.
"What I say," returned the other quietly.
"And you did not interfere? You did not stop her? No, of course, I
forgot that you are a Christian."
The Wanderer looked at him in surprise. It had not struck him that
Israel Kafka might be a man of the deepest religious convictions, a
Hebrew of the Hebrews, and that what he would resent most would be the
fact that in his sleep Unorna had made him play the part and suffer
the martyrdom of a convert to Christianity. This was exactly what took
place. He would have suffered anything at Unorna's hands, and without
complaint, even to bodily death, but his wrath rose furiously at the
thought that she had been playing with what he held most sacred, that
she had forced from his lips the denial of the faith of his people and
the confession of the Christian belief, perhaps the very words of the
hated Creed. The modern Hebrew of Western Europe might be indifferent in
such a case, as though he had spoken in the delirium of a fever, but the
Jew of the less civilised East is a different being, and in some ways
a stronger.
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