could see the large capital letters of the headlines, and slowly went round the assembly ironically offering them to the lads in uniform with their swords at their side, for they were of the cavalry.
Every one knows the French temper on such occasions—a complete silence which may at any moment be transformed into something very different. One sergeant after another politely waved him aside and passed him on. He went round the whole lot of them, gazing into their faces with his piercing eyes, wearing the whole time an ironical smile of insult, describing at intervals the nature of his goods, and when he had done that he went out unharmed.
It was an astonishing sight. I have seen many others as astonishing and as vivid, but for courage I have never seen it surpassed. Here was a man, old and feeble, the member of a very small minority which he knew to be hated, and particularly hated by the people whom he challenged. Because he held one of his own people to be injured, he took this tremendous risk and went through this self-imposed task with a sort of pleasure in that risk. You may call it insolence, offensiveness, what you will: but you cannot deny it the title of courage. It was courage of the very highest quality.
I repeat: you may see evidence of that sort of courage in Jewish action throughout the world and in every age. You have the beginning of it in the Siege of Jerusalem; to-morrow, if the fear which we now all entertain should unhappily prove well founded, we shall see it again upon the same scale.
Take avarice. When the Jew is accused of avarice by his enemies they are reading into him that vice in a form of which they know themselves capable, which they themselves practise, which they fully understand, but which he never practises in their fashion. The Jew is adventurous with his money. He is a speculator, a trader. He is also a man who thinks of it in