But this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I was bound
to hear Mass, and this woman hurrying along to the next village proved
that I was not too late.
So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, and went into the
church, which was very full, and came down out of it (the Mass was low
and short - they are a Christian people) through an avenue of small
trees and large branches set up in front of the houses to welcome the
procession that was to be held near noon. At the foot of the street
was an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there another man - I
take him to have been a shopkeeper - I determined to talk politics, and
began as follows:
'Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?'
'It is not my town,' he said, 'but there is anti-Semitism. It
flourishes.'
'Why then?' I asked. 'How many Jews have you in your town?'
He said there were seven.
'But,' said I, 'seven families of Jews - '
'There are not seven families,' he interrupted; 'there are seven Jews
all told. There are but two families, and I am reckoning in the
children. The servants are Christians.'
'Why,' said I, 'that is only just and proper, that the Jewish families
from beyond the frontier should have local Christian people to wait on
them and do their bidding. But what I was going to say was that so
very few Jews seem to me an insufficient fuel to fire the
anti-Semites. How does their opinion flourish?'
'In this way,' he answered. 'The Jews, you see, ridicule our young men
for holding such superstitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus
brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit the justice of the
ridicule, but nourish a hatred secretly for those who have exposed
their folly. Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the Jews.'
When he had given me this singular analysis of that part of the
politics of the mountains, he added, after a short silence, the
following remarkable phrase -
'For my part I am a liberal, and would have each go his own way: the
Catholic to his Mass, the Jew to his Sacrifice.'
I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went musing up the valley
road, pondering upon what it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this
remote borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine what it
was, though I have had a great many Jews among my friends.
I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, at the sources of
the river Moselle and the base of the great mountain the Ballon
d'Alsace, which closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane.
