What Franzos describes is Jewish life pent up within the narrow limits of some Galician town. Religious dislikes, racial hatreds kindled a thousand years ago, have never been quenched. Though to-day in that town a Jew could not be murdered, because it would be against the law, the inclination to kill him, because he is a Jew, still exists. The simple fact, that every Jew had been taught to read and write, had quickened his brains. Through heredity he became, intellectually, superior to the illiterate peasant, or townsfolk, who hemmed him in. The mental phenomenon the Jew would present, under such conditions, would not be, after all, so peculiar. He had but two ends in life, to work and pray. Even his toil was restricted, for he could only engage in certain callings. His solace was his religion. He might pray to his Maker, but only in such set phrases as had been chosen for him. His God was by far too sublime for him, poor worm, to address in such homely words as might well up spontaneously from his own heart. A slave to tradition, bound down by rote, the Jew had been taught that the least divergence from a cut-and-dried ritual was heresy. Mental and physical isolation brought about arrested development. The only wonder about this all is, that the Jew in Eastern Europe, seeing a better chance for life beyond the pale of his religion, had not broken bounds, and, abjuring his creed, found outside of it an easier existence. Brushing aside that sentimentalism which so often obscures considerations of this character, the chances of security for an apostate Jew were not very certain. Travestied in the guise of a Christian, he never could have looked like one. Stamped on his features were all the marked characteristics of his Orientalism. Even his tongue would have played him false, for the rabbi had forbidden him the use of that language common to the state in which he lived. By some complications brought about by the Jews themselves in Eastern Europe, they are not always subjected to the same regulations as Christians. Religious laws made for their own government, which underpinned their social life, were rarely meddled with. In a primitive society, necessarily ignorant, any accredited head, according to the laws of sociology, must be a despotic one. A rabbi, then, in these unknown towns, wielded almost the power of life and death. That modern infliction of Boycotting has been borrowed directly from the Jews. For a trivial divergence from common custom the punishment was severe. In these Polish or Russian districts, thirty years ago, a Jew did not dare read a Christian book.