The close is tragic. Both Judith and Uriel perish at their own hands. But the tragedy did not end there. Mention has been made of Da Silva. If Uriel is the counterpart of the talmudic arch-heretic, Elisha ben Abuyah, then is Da Silva the reincarnation of Elisha’s contemporary Meir. Who has not wept over the heart friendship but mind estrangement of these two men? Da Silva stands in the same relation to Uriel. He hates the heresy, but loves the heretic. Uriel himself uses words which sum up the situation. “Love or Truth? What if the heart be wiser than the mind?” Spinoza (who was really fifteen years of age when Uriel died) flits across the scene as a little boy, strewing flowers and wondering why people wonder at his childish thoughts. Uriel bids him “Keep thy soul’s secret and so find peace.” This is perhaps the most tragic incident in the play, though the dramatist contrives to relieve the tension by the simple beauty of the Spinoza interlude. Still, however, the whole of the tragedy has not yet been told. For Hermann Jellinek has not yet been named. Indeed, _three_ remarkable Jellinek brothers now come on the scene. In 1847 two little works appeared on Gutzkow’s _Uriel_. The one (_Elischa ben Abuya_) was written by Adolf Jellinek, then the youthful preacher of Leipzig, afterwards the famous pulpit orator of Vienna. The other was _Uriel Acosta’s Leben und Lehre_, and its author was Hermann Jellinek (younger than Adolf by a couple of years). The booklet was inscribed to a third brother, Moritz. Now Hermann Jellinek was roused to a heated indignation by Gutzkow’s “fictions” about Uriel. Uriel was no lovelorn boy, but a middle-aged philosopher; he died not for loss of Judith, but as a martyr to truth. Hermann Jellinek in so many words sees his own prototype in Acosta; less than a year later he at all events shared his hero’s tragic end; but under more dignified circumstances. What the historical Uriel Acosta lacked, Hermann Jellinek possessed in over measure--the quality of determination. Hermann was a revolutionary, and took part in the Viennese rising of 1848, being twenty-six at the time. He does not seem to have actually resisted the troops, but he was court-martialled, and sentenced to death. His friends made every effort to save him, but he was relentless. Nothing could move him to present a conciliatory front to the authorities. In this at least he could be no Uriel! Recant? No! “Shoot me,” he cried, “but ideas cannot be shot.” They shot him, and his ideas may be found in two or three volumes, of which dusty copies occur in a few libraries. I have some of them on my table as I write. It is not easy to say which is the greater tragedy, Acosta’s or Jellinek’s; but for the moment at least let Jellinek have his way. For an hour we have resurrected, if not his ideas, at all events his name. GRACE AGUILAR’S “SPIRIT OF JUDAISM”