day was spent in the synagogue; and from the sunset of the previous day to the next sunset, no food or water was taken by any of the congregation. The prayers of the morning service (Shachrith) lasted six hours; those of the afternoon service (Musaph) till four o'clock; then came vespers (the Minchah); and last of all the great conclusion prayer (Nengilah), which was not finished till after sunset. I copy out one of the prayers which struck me as curious both from its wording and from the fact that the Jews whilst repeating the sins mentioned in the prayer smote vehemently their breasts at the name of every sin they uttered:

Our God! and the God of our fathers, may our prayers come before Thee, and conceal not Thyself from our supplications; for we are not so shameless of face, and perverse, as to declare in Thy presence, O Lord our God, and the God of our fathers, that we are righteous, and have done no sin; for verily we have sinned. We have trespassed; we have dealt treacherously; we have robbed; we have spoken slander; we have committed iniquity; we have done wickedness; we have acted presumptuously; we have committed violence; we have framed falsehood; we have devised evil counsels; we have uttered falsities; we have scorned; we have rebelled; we have blasphemed; we have been refractory; we have committed iniquity; we have transgressed; we have oppressed; we have been stiffnecked; we have acted wickedly; we have corrupted; we have committed abominations; we have erred; we have led others astray; and we have departed from Thy commandments and from Thy good institutions, and which hath not profited us. But Thou art just in all that is come upon us; for thou hast dealt truly, and we have done wickedly."

The concluding prayer finished, the ram's horn was blown as a signal that the duties of the day were over, and the ceremony closed. with the words: "Next year we shall be in Jerusalem." The Day of Atonement was now ended, the congregation having fasted from twenty-four to twenty-six hours, and having continued in the exercise of their prayers upwards of twelve hours without intermission. To me the ceremony was far from uninteresting, though not exactly of that interest which I had imagined to myself. The prayers, though at first tiresome from that sing-song manner which invariably characterises the reading of the Rabbis, were rendered soon effective by the solemn, wailing responses of the congregation, which were often uttered more in the form of a shout than of a petition. On the faces of all was an expression of deep gravity, and many were in tears. Through the lattice-work of the gallery I could see the women sobbing, and silently repeating their prayers-for Jewesses are not allowed to take any public part in the services of their Church. The men, wrapped in their ghost-like garments, grouped themselves about the synagogue, talking to each other during the interval of the prayers, or else sat down, away from their fellow-worshippers, with their heads bent low in meditation, and their arms folded on their breasts. appeared inexpressibly sad, and it was a strange sight to see the change that came over every face when the ram's horn was blown, announcing that the Fast was over,-a change which spoke of the greatest mental relief, as if a disagreeable duty had been performed, and all was now over for another year.

All

CHAPTER VIII

JEWS IN ROME-THE FEAST OF TABERNACLES,

To the traveller in Rome there

are few more sadly interesting spots than that squalid, densely-populated quarter of the town, lying along the banks of the Tiber, known by the name of the Ghetto. From the day when Titus carried his captives from Jerusalem to Rome, up to the present time, the lot of the Roman Jews has been a hard one. Surrounded and guarded in early ages by the imperial forces, like prisoners of war, and in modern times the victims of the bitter tyranny of a persecuting priesthood, its inhabitants wear in their faces an aspect of sadness and despondency. Their whole aspect gives them an appearance of a degeneracy, moral, spiritual, and physical, such as I have never witnessed in any of the other exiles of the Hebrew race; not even in those in the El-Millah of Tangiers, or the Talmudical city of Safet. And this degradation is not to be wondered at when we consider the social condition of the five thousand Jews at Rome. They are bound to live in the Ghetto; they

are excluded from employment under Government, from the cultivation of arts and sciences, and from the Universities. They are almost entirely engaged in commerce; but yet this branch of industry must be carried on only in the Ghetto, except on Wednesdays, when they are allowed to expose their wares in the Piazza Navona. They have to pay an annual sum to the Pope for the maintenance of the Church that persecutes them, and for the converts that forsake Judaism. From some of their former disgraceful hardships, however, they are now exempt. They are no longer compelled to hear sermons in the church of St. Angelo; to pay the expenses of the Carnival horse-races; to run races almost nude, and with a rope round their necks, from the tomb of Domitian to the Church of St. Marco, amid the shrieks and yells of the delighted bystanders; to wear a yellow hat, and their women a yellow veil, as a badge of Hebraism; nor to implore bareheaded and humbly kneeling, on the first Sunday of Carnival, the Conservators of the Roman Senate to permit them to reside in the Ghetto during the ensuing year, and to further their petition by a tribute. Nor is their quarter any longer shut up at night, for in 1848 the gates of the Ghetto were removed. And for these concessions the Jews have to thank the present Pope, Pio Nono, who is himself, so some report, the great grandson of one Mastai, a converted Jew, who married into the Ferretti family. But yet their condition is miserable in the extreme; and some of them told me, more than once, that the only hope that sustained them was, "We shall have Jerusalem again."

In one of their synagogues (the five synagogues in the Ghetto are under one roof) is written on the wall in large Hebrew characters, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my

right hand forget her cunning." Ah, yes; the Jew at Rome considers himself a foreigner, an exile from his father's home, and has his eye ever fixed towards the place from whence he was driven, looking forward to that blessed time when he shall return again with thanksgiving.*

As I walked along the unsavoury streets of the Ghetto; past the giant remains of the once splendid Theatre of Marcellus; past the Piazza del Pianto, fit name for the dwellingplace of the exiled children of Israel; past the Pescheria-the "Billingsgate" of Rome; past the little church of St. Angelo, where Jews were forced to listen to a sermon delivered once a week by a monk, upon the text of their perversity; past the Via Rua, the "Corso" of the Ghetto; past the plain-looking

* Since the above was written, the King of Italy has issued a Royal decree, by which all the citizens of the annexed Roman provinces are placed on the same footing as regards civil rights. Thus the cruel, remorseless system which for the last three hundred years has crushed the Roman Jew is now happily at an end; but time alone can remove the effects of the centuries of persecution he has had to undergo. A writer in the Daily News has only too good reason to make the following remarks:

'This mass of organised suffering and wrong, these iniquities perpetrated in the name of religion must long leave their traces on the Jewish community of Rome. But the first great step for the removal has, Heaven be praised, been taken. Let those persons who, in other countries, invoke the holiest names, the most sacred interests, in their attempt to re-establish the temporal authority of the Pope, let them think deeply and seriously on the responsibility which they assume, in even daring to propose for the approval of the civilised and Christian world the planting afresh a tree which has borne such fruits. Browning has in one of his finest poems represented the Jews of Rome on Holy Cross day-when they were subjected to a disgusting ceremony-sending up their appeal to the throne of Heaven, and praying that if in an hour of dread, madness, and blindness, their fathers rejected Him who came to save them, it might be accepted as some atonement by the children, that they had continued sternly to reject in Rome a system of cruelty and wrong which formed the foulest outrage on His name. The moral of the poet's verse may well at the present moment be held up to not a few Christian statesmen."