The God of your fathers is waiting to embrace
you--and your father is at your feet, imploring you to follow the faith
of your father Abraham, the prophet Moses, and all the holy prophets who
are with God, and who look down on this moment of your soul’s
vacillation between the abominable idolatries of those who not only
adore the Son of the carpenter, but even impiously compel you to fall
down before the image of the woman his mother, and adore her by the
blasphemous name of Mother of God,--and the pure voice of those who call
on you to worship the God of your fathers, the God of ages, the eternal
God of heaven and earth, without son or mother, without child or
descendant, (as impiously presumed in their blasphemous creed), without
even worshipper, save those who, like me, sacrifice their hearts to him
in solitude, at the risk of those hearts being PIERCED BY THEIR OWN
CHILDREN.”

  (2) The Jews believe in two Messias, a suffering and a triumphant one,
  to reconcile the prophecies with their own expectations. “At these words, the young man, overcome by all he saw and heard, and
quite unprepared for this sudden transition from Catholicism to Judaism,
burst into tears. The father seized the moment, “My child, you are now
to profess yourself the slave of these idolaters, who are cursed in the
law of Moses, and by the commandment of God,--or to enrol yourself among
the faithful, whose rest shall be in the bosom of Abraham, and who,
reposing there, shall see the unbelieving crawling over the burning
ashes of hell, and supplicate you in vain for a drop of water, according
to the legends of their own prophet. And does not such a picture excite
your pride to deny them a drop?”--“I would not deny them a drop,” sobbed
the youth, “I would give them these tears.”--“Reserve them for your
father’s grave,” added the Jew, “for to the grave you have doomed me.--I
have lived, sparing, watching, temporizing, with these accursed
idolaters, for _you_. And now--and now you reject a God who is alone
able to save, and a father kneeling to implore you to accept that
salvation.”--“No, I do not,” said the bewildered youth.--“What, then, do
you determine?--I am at your feet to know your resolution. Behold, the
mysterious instruments of your initiation are ready. There is the
uncorrupted book of Moses, the prophet of God, as these idolaters
themselves confess. There are all the preparations for the year of
expiation--determine whether those rites shall now dedicate you to the
true God, or seize your father, (who has put his life into your hands),
and drag him by the throat into the prisons of the Inquisition. You
may--you can--_will you?_”

“In prostrate and tremulous agony, the father held up his locked hands
to his child. I seized the moment--despair had made me reckless. I
understood not a word of what was said, except the reference to the
Inquisition. I seized on that last word--I grasped, in my despair, at
the heart of father and child. I rushed from behind the curtain, and
exclaiming, “If he does not betray you to the Inquisition, _I will_.” I
fell at his feet. This mixture of defiance and prostration, my squalid
figure, my inquisitorial habit, and my bursting on this secret and
solemn interview, struck the Jew with a horror he vainly gasped to
express, till, rising from my knees, on which I had fallen from my
weakness, I added, “Yes, I will betray you to the Inquisition, unless
you instantly promise to shelter me from it.” The Jew glanced at my
dress, perceived his danger and mine, and, with a _physical_ presence of
mind unparalleled, except in a man under strong impressions of mental
excitation and personal danger, bustled about to remove every trace of
the expiatory sacrifice, and of my inquisitorial costume, in a moment. In the same breath he called aloud for _Rebekah_, to remove the vessels
from the table; bid _Antonio_ quit the apartment, and hastened to clothe
me in some dress that he had snatched from a wardrobe collected from
centuries; while he tore off my inquisitorial dress with a violence that
left me actually naked, and the habit in rags. “There was something at once fearful and ludicrous in the scene that
followed. Rebekah, an old Jewish woman, came at his call; but, seeing a
third person, retreated in terror, while her master, in his confusion,
called her in vain by her _Christian_ name of Maria. Obliged to remove
the table alone, he overthrew it, and broke the leg of the unfortunate
animal fastened to it, who, not to be without his share in the tumult,
uttered the most shrill and intolerable screams, while the Jew,
snatching up the sacrificial knife, repeated eagerly, “Statim mactat
gallum,” and put the wretched bird out of its pain; then, trembling at
this open avowal of his Judaism, he sat down amid the ruins of the
overthrown table, the fragments of the broken vessels, and the remains
of the martyred cock. He gazed at me with a look of stupified and
ludicrous inanity, and demanded in delirious tones, what “my lords the
Inquisitors had pleased to visit his humble but highly-honoured mansion
for?” I was scarce less deranged than he was; and, though we both spoke
the same language, and were forced by circumstances into the same
strange and desperate confidence with each other, we really needed, for
the first half-hour, a rational interpreter of our exclamations, starts
of fear, and bursts of disclosure. At last our mutual terror acted
honestly between us, and we understood each other. The end of the matter
was, that, in less than an hour, I felt myself clad in a comfortable
garment, seated at a table amply spread, watched over by my involuntary
host, and watching him in turn with red wolfish eyes, which glanced from
his board to his person, as if I could, at a moment’s hint of danger
from _his_ treachery, have changed my meal, and feasted on his
life-blood. No such danger occurred,--my host was more afraid of me than
I had reason to be of him, and for many causes. He was a Jew _innate_,
an impostor,--a wretch, who, drawing sustenance from the bosom of our
holy mother the church, had turned her nutriment to poison, and
attempted to infuse that poison into the lips of his son. I was but a
fugitive from the Inquisition,--a prisoner, who had a kind of
instinctive and very venial dislike to giving the Inquisitors the
trouble of lighting the faggots for _me_, which would be much better
employed in consuming the adherent to the law of Moses. In fact,
impartiality considered, there was every thing in my favour, and the Jew
just acted as if he felt so,--but all this I ascribed to his terrors of
the Inquisition. “That night I slept,--I know not how or where. I had wild dreams before
I slept, if I did sleep; and after,--such visions,--such _things_,
passed in dread and stern reality before me. I have often in my memory
searched for the traces of the first night I passed under the roof of
the Jew, but can find nothing,--nothing except a conviction of my utter
insanity.