Christians Here Visit The Jews Twice A
Year, At The Feast Of The Passover And Tabernacles.
In return, Jews
visit Christians on New Year's day.
This laudable practice promotes
social harmony between the Jews and Christians.
In the house of one of our Jewish friends (Mr. Levi's) I assisted at the
celebration of the evening of the Passover. There is nothing very
particular in this ceremony, except a great deal of reading. The
drinking of the four cups [37] of wine, and the eating of the bitter
herbs, emblems of the joys and the sorrows attending the deliverance
from Egyptian bondage, are the more difficult parts of the ceremony. The
children naturally feel most the disagreeableness of eating the bitter
herbs, and several times, as soon as they put them into their mouths,
they spat them out again under the table. The drinking of an excessive
quantity of wine, is also attended with not a little inconvenience, and
one would think Bacchus was the deity worshipped, and not the God of the
Jews and Christians. When will mankind learn that violation of the
physical economy of their nature can never be acceptable to the Great
Creator?
I do not say that European Israelites indulge so much in these excesses
as Barbary Jews, but I imagine that the germ of the debauch is found in
the Talmudical religion of both classes. But, since I should be very
sorry were a Jew to hold up to me the mummeries of Popery or of the
Greek Church, as the mirror of my own religion, I am not disposed to
animadvert upon the generally decorous worship of European Israelites.
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