'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:
