In a little dark den behind a poultry store I was sketching some of the old men at study. One old fellow one hundred and four years old was explaining to a young fellow of sixty a passage in the Talmud about which the latter was in doubt. Both men were without coats. The younger man had left his push-cart at the door, entirely forgetting the perishable goods thereon and quite oblivious to the fact that hundreds of dirty children were surrounding his cart and fooling with his wares.
Other old men were in the school, and the background to their somber faces was the shop with its ghastly poultry suspended by the necks. One of the old Talmudic students would now and again leave his ponderous Bible to serve in the shop, returning, after wrapping a fowl in a newspaper, to the verse he had been propounding. There was absolutely nothing humorous in all this, but I would love to have had some of my non-Jewish friends see how little thought of money and business the real Jew has.
Sometimes when I have felt full of shame at the behavior in public places of men and women with Jewish faces but with no Judaism in their hearts, I have wished that the simple, studious lives of the old men of the East Side could be the standard by which our race is judged, and that the Talmudic saying so aptly put into verse by Rabbi Myers was better known:
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Issue of May 7, 1921.
“It can hardly be an accident that antagonism directed against the Jews is to be found pretty much everywhere in the world where Jews and non-Jews are associated. And as the Jews are the common element of the situation it would seem probable, on the face of it, that the cause will be found in them rather than in the widely varying groups which feel this antagonism.”