74 MORE POT-POURRI 



changes so much, and yet so much remains the same. 

 Who would have imagined that at the end of the 

 nineteenth century Jewish persecution would be the same 

 as in the Middle Ages ? If it were possible, would not 

 the gates of the Ghetto be shut in the same cruel and 

 unjust way as years ago ? Hatred of the Jews seems to 

 me the one real bond that unites France, Germany, and 

 Eussia. It is generally attributed to Disraeli, but I 

 believe it was Heine who first said : ' Every nation has 

 the kind of Jew it deserves.' 



I am told that in this Jewish cemetery at Frankfort 

 the surnames on the tombstones date back in many cases 

 three hundred years. The old graves have generally only 

 a first name (one cannot say Christian name) with a 

 locality mentioned ; as, for instance, ' Hannah of Ham- 

 burg.' The Jews seem to regard this cemetery as an even 

 truer record of their families than we consider our peerage. 

 The Judengasse has virtually disappeared. I never saw 

 it but once in my childhood, when I felt the same kind of 

 mixed awe and curiosity with which Goethe speaks of it. 

 There is a sketch of it in that never-to-be-forgotten 

 volume of our young days, ' The Foreign Tour of Messrs. 

 Brown, Jones, and Robinson,' by Dickie Doyle. His 

 drawing gives a somewhat spiteful version of it, but it 

 is a funny remembrance of this swept-away quarter. 

 Lewes says Goethe learnt much from the society of the 

 Jews in the strange, old, filthy, but deeply interesting 

 Judengasse. Like him, we have all pondered over ' the 

 sun standing still on Gideon and the moon in the valley 

 of Ajalon.' 



It was with a genuine thrill that I entered Goethe's 

 house, where he was born, where he lived, where he 

 played and eat and slept and loved Gretchen, and which 

 angry and disappointed at being described as the boy 

 he really was he left, with the indifference usual at that 



