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Updated: May 13, 2025
Was it not an inspiration from on high that had given him the name of Uriel "fire of God"? So, when his private thunders had procured him a summons before the outraged Rabbinic court, he was in no wise to be awed by the Chacham and his Rabbis in their solemn robes. "Pharisees!" he cried, and, despite his lost Christianity, all the scorn of his early training clung to the word.
At Salee, in Algeria, the Jews so openly displayed their conviction of their coming dominance that the Emir decreed a persecution of them. At Smyrna, on the other hand, a Chacham who protested to the Cadi against the vagaries of his brethren, was, by the power of their longer purse, shaved of his beard and condemned to the galleys.
The Chacham heard them from where he sat under the stars in his patio, and when at last the voice of Rebecca the prophetess came to him above the tumult, crying, "Woe to her that has married the enemy of her nation, and woe to him that gave her against the hope of his people! They shall taste death. He shall see them fall from his side and die," then the old man listened and trembled visibly.
Having heard the verdict of the doctor, Ali returned in hot haste and silenced both the bondwomen: "The Imam is a villain, and the Chacham is a thief." There was only one good man left in Tetuan, and that was his own Taleb, his schoolmaster, the same that had taught him the harp in the days of the Governor's marriage.
"Traitor to God and His holy Law." "Hold thy peace!" thundered the Chacham, "or the ban shall be laid upon thee." "Hold my peace!" answered Uriel scornfully. "Nay, I expatriated myself for freedom; I shall not hold my peace for the sake of the ban." Nor did he. At home and abroad he exhausted himself in invective, in exhortation.
Both were born in Islam, but Fatimah had secretly become a Jewess by persuasion of her mistress who was dead. She was, therefore, for sending for the Chacham. But Habeebah had remained a Muslim, and she was for calling the Imam. "The Imam is good, the Imam is holy; who so good and holy as the Imam?"
The Janissary immediately bethought him of Avram, the tinsmith, and accused him as his informant, and the Chacham, satisfied, paid the sum and departed. Avram disappeared nobody knew where. The Chacham said that death had taken him for his own as a punishment for stopping him while on a journey. The accomplice of the Janissary came a few days later for his share of the money.
That evening, as agreed, the Chacham came and handed the money to the captain of the Janissaries. Then taking another bag containing a second one hundred and ten thousand piasters, he said: "If you will tell me who informed you that we would pay so much money rather than have a funeral stopped, you can have this further sum."
The Chacham, who stood near the sexton, solemnly intoned from the seventy-eighth Psalm: "But He, being full of compassion, forgave their iniquity and destroyed them not: yea, many a time turned He his anger away and did not stir up all his wrath. For He remembered that they were but flesh: a wind that passeth away and cometh not again."
The next day, true enough, he beheld a funeral, and immediately went out and ordered it to stop. The Chacham protested, offering first small bribes, then larger and larger, till ultimately he promised to bring to the worthy captain one hundred and ten thousand piasters for allowing the funeral to proceed.
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