"His beautiful, consecrated, peaceful, religious, home life, the life wherein the home is a synagogue and the synagogue is a home, this on the one hand and the strange world with its hard realities, with its stumbling-blocks and stunning blockheads, on the other, have created in the Jew a striking two-sidedness, a kind of duality and, if I may so call it, a sort of conciliation between the ideal and the real. This forms another trait by which you may tell him. Thus he is very practical, and still dreams, hopes for the restoration of Palestine, and loves his home and his country wherever he abides. He is an ardent Zionist and a good citizen at the same time. "Murder, or any other kind of talent, will out. Say rather that talent will out even if it must come in the shape of murder, so to speak. People capable of the highest good and noblest greatness are often cast down into the abyss of degradation by their loving neighbors, or other circumstances. People must live, you know, and therefore they often live a living death. Not permitted to live rightly and happily, they still must live somehow. The instinct of self-preservation preserves much evil, but life is life. Those who have talent and are not permitted to use it for the good of all, use it for their own temporal good, regardless of the consequences. The thought that I wish to leave here as we part with the Jew is: That they who walk in darkness find the ways that are dark. Over-praise is damning, and I want to be careful. The Jew has on the whole been far, far better than he has been permitted to be--and this, too, is one of the charges against him. He is a graduate of the school of sorrow, with the highest honors. "What is that story about the man who in his long quest after the ideal, at last found her in the woman who has suffered? "Well, here is the Jew, a being who has suffered." XV The Tragedy of Humor "Sometimes," said Keidansky, "it is grossly immoral to live up to your highest principle." And in reply to my half-uttered protest, he quickly continued: "No, no; I am not jesting. It's a sad business, this jesting about the human tragedy. For what is it but mocking each other's wounds, laughing at one another's infirmities in this great lazaretto, where we are all pitiful patients? What is it but scoffing at our sores, grinning at our gashes, deriding our diseases, laughing at our own weaknesses? No, I am not jesting," and the speaker eyed me strangely as he looked up from his manuscript on the little table in Machtell's café.