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Updated: May 28, 2025
Why, a Jew couldn't walk the streets of Berlin without being hooted and insulted, and my little ones used to ask, 'Father, is it wicked to be a Jew? I thank the Almighty that at the end of my days I have lived to see the Jewish question raised to a higher plane." "I should rather thank you," cried Maimon, with sceptical enthusiasm.
After the service, the venerable Zimri, opening a volume of the Talmud, and fortified by the opinions of all those illustrious and learned doctors, the heroes of his erudite conversations with the aged Maimon, expounded the law to the congregation of the people. 'It is written, said the Rabbi, "Thou shalt have none other God but me."
"Ah!" replied Maimon, "there are beautiful dreams and hopes " "Which will surely be fulfilled. Should you not wish to come again into the society of Mendelssohn?" Maimon was silent. Suddenly the dying man cried out, "Ay me! I have been a fool, the most foolish among the most foolish." The thought of Nathan the Wise was indeed as a fiery scourge.
Petersburg, and Moscow, the Jews were fast becoming Russified. Heretofore cooped up, choking each other in the Pale as in a Black Hole, they were now wild with an excessive desire for Russification. What Maimon said of a few, could now be applied to hundreds and thousands, they were "like starving persons suddenly treated to a delicious meal."
What a wit-combat it would be! How he would marshal his dialectic epigrams! If only Lapidoth could be there to hear! As the servant threw open the door for him, revealing a suite of beautiful rooms and a fine company of gentlefolks, men with powdered wigs and ladies with elegant toilettes, Maimon started back with a painful shock.
He had studied, he said, with a strange smile, the works of the Rabbi Moses bin Maimon, and was possessed of antidotes for each of the sixteen poisons; but there was one venom, outside the sixteen, the composition of which he knew, but to which there was no antidote.
Of a sudden this lynx-eyed bully espied a Hebrew Logic by Maimonides, annotated by Mendelssohn. "Yes! yes!" he shrieked; "that's the sort of books for me!" and, glaring threateningly at the philosopher, "Pack," he said. "Pack out of Berlin as quick as you can, if you don't wish to be led out with all the honors." Maimon was once more in desperate case.
Again, on p. 265, Maimon speaks of the Jewish fast that falls in August. George Eliot jots on the margin, "July? Fast of Ninth Ab." Throughout passages are pencilled, and at the end she gives an index to the parts that seem to have interested her particularly.
As Goldsmith came to London, so came Maimon to Berlin, "without friends, recommendation, money, or impudence."
Maimon made no word of protest, he was paralyzed. "What now, O Guide of the Perplexed?" he cried, stonily surveying his hapless manuscript. "O Moses, son of Maimon, thou by whom I have sworn so oft, canst thou help me now? See, my pockets are as empty as the heads of thy adversaries." He turned out his pockets, and lo! several silver pieces fell out and rolled merrily in the roadway.
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