But, by the way, are our own times much better? As I write these lines (October 1893) I hear that a Bill has been brought into the German Diet, asking that the Talmud should be submitted to a Commission (which _en passant_, has been sitting in unbroken session in that country since the days of Pfefferkorn in the fifteenth century) with the purpose of examining its contents, while in the Vatican the very pupils of Loyola are offering every convenience and comfort to the student who should care to devote his time to Rabbinic literature. Does not the work of a great number of our poets, historians, theologians, and so‐called seers in this blessed century of ours, in many respects prove but a strained effort to destroy the few humanitarian principles which were established a few generations ago, as well as to deify every brutal warrior who was successful in his day? Again, is the national idea so much sublimer, so much grander, than that of a universal religion, that we would willingly permit the former to employ the means which have been denied to the latter as inhuman and barbarous? Every age has its own idolatry, and the eternal wandering Jew will always be the chosen victim of the Moloch in fashion. Let us, however, return to the synagogue, which withstood many a cruelty, both ancient and modern. The place where the synagogue stands is near the Ghetto, now called Piazza di Scuola. It is, besides a few other communal houses, the only building left there,—all those narrow, dirty, and typhoid‐breeding streets which formed the old Ghetto having been demolished by a sage and humane government, which by this action wiped out the last stain from its history. There, on this vast blank is the synagogue, a comparatively small, insignificant building, laden with heavy age and looking down on her children whom she has been nursing, consoling, and protecting for centuries, but who, now grown old, have forsaken her and scattered to all the ends of the city. Of all her former acquaintances there appears to be left only father Tiber, who would seem to be murmuring to her many an old tale of the times before she was called into existence. And if he listened to the special prayers recited within her walls by the deputies of the Jewish communities, when preparing themselves to go to the court of the Pope, the Tiber heard many a sigh and cry, wrung out from the heart of a Jewish captive who, preferring death to slavery even under the masters of the world, found his last repose in its waters. But insignificant as this synagogue appears, she proved the spiritual bulwark against all the attacks of the time, and you admire her brave resistance all the more when you look at that multitude of churches and cloisters in the closest vicinity of the Ghetto, impressing you as so many intrenchments, all directing their missiles and weapons against this humble, defenceless building, threatening it with death and destruction.