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THE HEBREW TALISMAN.

REPRINTED VERBATIM FROM A COPY OF A RARE PAMPHLET,
DATED CIRCA 1836,

WITH AN INTRODUCTION

BY

RICHARD HARTE

London:

Published by the T.P.S., 7, Duke Street, Adelphi
	
1888
--------------------------------------	
INTRODUCTION.

The present number of the T.P.S. pamphlets, a reprint of a curious and very 
rare work, may not appear to some readers to have a very direct bearing on 
theosophical teachings. Those who have got beyond the A B C of Theosophy, 
however, will find in this issue a good deal of material for serious 
thought. It deals with one of the most puzzling and deeply interesting 
problems which the past has left for solution to the future the destiny of 
the Jewish race, and the fate of the Holy Land. The plot of the work (if 
that expression be allowed) is based upon two ideas, which taken singly are 
so well known as to be almost tiresome; namely, the ancient belief of the 
Jews, based upon prophecy and national pride, that eventually they will 
recover posession of Judea, and gather together once more at Jerusalem, 
after their long exile from the land of their ancestors a belief only less 
intense than the longing for its realization. The other idea is that 
contained in the legend of the Wandering Jew firmly believed in by all 
Christendom from the apostolic ages until but recently, still half-believed 
by millions, and to which the doctrine of reincarnation, especially 
immediate reincarnation for a specific purpose, lends, if not plausibility, 
at least a new intellectual interest. These two ingredients of the plot 
when put together enter, as it were, into chemical combination, for they 
give rise to an idea which differs in its characteristics from both of the 
components. As a punishment for a thoughtless word spoken by a foolish and 
ignorant mortal even to a god (in disguise at the time), the eternal and 
miserable activity of the Wandering Jew is a purposeless piece of unworthy 
revenge, as little credible in this more humane and enlightened age as the 
miracle required to consummate it. As a practical settlement of the Jewish 
question, the return of the Hebrew nation, or even a considerable part of 
the Jews, to Syria seems patently absurd. All travellers describe the Holy 
Land as barren and poor in the extreme, a land which, if it ever flowed 
with "milk and honey," has for centuries been believed to have withered 
under the terrible curse of an angry God. Could anyone but a child imagine 
for one instant that so thoroughly practical a people as the Jews, a race, 
moreover, pre-eminently fond of the luxuries of life, would voluntarily 
abandon the various countries which for centuries have been their homes, 
abandon their hereditary occupations, abandon civilization, and undertake 
the frightful labour of reclaiming a rocky and arid district, a labour from 
which even back-woods pioneers inured to hardship would shrink--and all for 
a religio-sentimental idea?

But put these two incredible notions together, and all is changed. What if 
it be the mission of the so-called Wandering Jew to preserve in the Hebrew 
mind the recollection of the former glories of the race, and to keep alive 
the longing once more to revive them? The moment that idea finds entry to 
the mind, the legend ceases to be childish, and the longing is no longer 
unaccountable. The two things explain each other, and taken together they 
raise the Jewish question to a level far above that occupied by the 
superstitions of the ignorant, or the calculations of individual 
self-interest. To the Jew himself it is no less than the finger of Jehovah 
that becomes manifest from this larger point of view. Through all the 
centuries, as they believe, He has been disciplining and preparing them for 
their final triumph. Already the despised outcasts of a thousand years ago 
are the masters of kings and republics alike. There are a score of Jews 
to-day each one of whom is a greater power in the world than an army of a 
hundred thousand men. Were they to combine they could purchase Palestine 
ten times over, and then keep a million of Christian workmen joyfully 
slaving at starvation wages for twenty years in doing the work of making 
the country once more a garden while they stood by to superintend. Perhaps 
the Jews are right. It may be that the finger of Jehovah is guiding their 
destinies in the direction of Jerusalem. We know that to be worshipped 
there, and by them alone, was once His greatest glory. Far be. it from 
theosophists to deny that such may still be the case, and if it so be, 
then, for the Jews themselves, all that need be done to complete his 
purposes will be accomplished. To the theosophist, however, Jerusalem, even 
Judea, is not the whole of this earth, nor this earth the whole Universe. 
And a higher guidance than that by human will in the case of the Jews, does 
not imply a monopoly of divine solicitude for one little tribe of people, 
nor a monopoly of power and wisdom for the celestial being who has chosen 
them for his special favour. If it be true that the affairs of the Jewish 
race are under higher guidance, then logic and justice require us to 
believe that a similar guidance is vouchsafed to all mankind, and to the 
inhabitants of the myriad worlds that roll in space. Is it so? Is there 
being enacted before our eyes a tremendous drama of creation, in which 
individual men are as microscopic animalculi? Does it get rid of the idea 
of a directing power to call "spontaneous development" what our ancestors, 
equally ignorant, called Divine Providence? Who is to ask these questions? 
And of whom can they be asked? Will the Christian listen for their answer 
from the mouth of a Jew? Will a theosophist seek it from a theologian? Will 
those who know go to school to those who invent fables?

Above, behind, inside of every material thing there is a great, an eternal, 
incomprehensible, sustaining power absolute and impersonal, the Divine 
Spirit. Far lower in the scale of existence there are powers, personal and 
non-eternal, creatures who had a beginning and will have an end. Men call 
these lower fashioning powers collectively a personal God; not only 
jumbling them together, but confounding them with the unknowable Absolute. 
Is one of these minor powers, the Jehovah of the ancient Hebrews, now 
pulling the wires that attach his people to him, and turning their steps 
towards the "promised land"once more? It is said that wealthy Jewish 
bankers have at this moment actual legal right of possession to Palestine, 
holding it in mortgage from the Sultan. It is said that Jewish statesmen 
have arranged for the completion and ratification of the transfer of the 
property to the mortgagees, upon the fulfilment of certain diplomatic 
conditions which events are rapidly bringing about. At the present moment a 
large part of Palestine, and nearly the whole of Jerusalem, is said to be 
owned by Jews. What does it all mean?

The T.P.S., in republishing this little work, disclaims all political 
purpose, as needs hardly to be said. It contains some bitter sayings 
concerning people long since dead, and events now almost "ancient history," 
all of which the T.P.S. would gladly have omitted in the reprint, had it 
not been that to do so would have spoiled the consecutiveness of the 
argument or narrative therein contained.

> From internal evidence the Hebrew Talisman was written about 1836. No one 
ever discovered who the writer was. The edition was soon exhausted, and 
till now has never been reprinted.
------------------------------------
THE HEBREW TALISMAN.

IT has been lately asserted that so much had been said and sung about the 
Wandering Jew that nothing further could be made of the subject by any 
writer, however highly gifted with the quality of invention. Insolent 
Gentiles! Learn to be more humble in thought and less peremptory in 
assertion: I am the Wandering Jew. I am that doomed one of whom so many 
have written ; and I have smiled in very scorn at the description given of 
me, and of my mode of being, by personages who are nearly as ignorant of 
all that relates to me as are those stolid worthies who pronounce me to be 
a nonentity; and my perpetuated misery a fable and a figment.

I am spoken of as being an undying exception to all human rule; yet has my 
body died and been consigned to the loathsome vault and the sleek damp worm 
upwards of two score times since that awful day when the veil of the temple 
was rent in twain, when the earth groaned and was convulsed in her agony of 
sympathy with the dying one ; and when He, turning his effulgent orbs in 
anger upon me exclaimed, "Tarry thou until I come!" Undying! I have been 
wept over in most of the nations which exist, and in many which have long 
ceased to be ; I have been the victim of the rack and of the block; I have 
pined in the terrible dungeon of the Inquisition which shuts out hope and 
which echoes to no sound save the moan of the miserable captive or 
execration of the brutal gaoler; my body has blazed in the Auto da Fe of 
Spain and Portugal, where hecatombs of my miserable long suffering race, 
the youth, the maiden, the matron, the elder, have been immolated; living, 
burning, sacrifices, offered on the altars of Christian meekness. Undying! 
Take but a brief portion of my long and awful history, and put an end to 
the senseless figments of lively imaginations ; to the absurd belief that 
the mortal portion of man can outlast the rock, and what is frail can 
remain for long centuries unbroken, or what is destructible remain undestroyed.
. . . . . . 
. . . . .

Years, long, agonised years, have flown, yet it seems but as yesterday! 
God! how happy, how haughty in gladness, was I then. My house, overlooking 
the sea and shaded on the land side by groves of oranges and myrtles, was 
on an eminence at the extremity of one of the most delightful of the 
Grecian Isles. Though I was fully twenty years, in the world's estimation, 
what knew the world of my age? older than my beloved Zoe, I was dear to her 
as the gushing fountain to the Pilgrim of Zahara. Our daughter, fairest 
among even the sunny-eyed daughters of Greece, and our son, the noblest boy 
that ever gave fair promise of heroic manhood, were even as a proverb for 
beauty, as we ourselves were for prosperity and concord. Happy days! Too 
happy, by far, to be the permanent lot of him who had mocked at the prophet 
of Calvary, and who has seen empires smitten down, and wept his own 
repeated ruin in the ruin of successive nations. We sat one evening in 
luxurious ease, exchanging glances of mingled love and pride, as our 
beautiful children abandoned themselves to their innocent mirth and 
displayed some new grace in every new attitude. Of a sudden the air felt 
leaden in its oppressiveness, a dire consciousness rushed upon my mind, and 
I once more became aware of my terrible identity. I gasped for breath, and 
vainly attemped to give utterance to my agony; the metempsychosis of the 
ancients, fabulous to them, [was no longer a fable; and I, who in outward 
appearance and corporeal members was a merchant of Greece, the husband of a 
loving wife and the father of beloved children, was once more aroused to 
the maddening truth, that in soul I was the accursed one of Judea; the 
survivor of many ages! the unpitied mourner of innumerable relatives--the 
dead of divers nations! This fatal, this abhorred, consciousness comes upon 
my soul in the fortieth year of whatsoever body it inhabits; and to this 
consciousness some terrible calamity certainly and speedily succeeds.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As I stood with dilated nostrils, glazed eyes, and stricken limbs, my Zoe 
started suddenly from the anxious and endearing posture she had assumed on 
witnessing the horrible change which had come over me, and, shrieking, "The 
Osmanlie!" rushed towards our children. A struggle a piercing shriek, the 
wild war-cry of the bloody brood of Mahomet; and I was childless and 
wifeless! How I reached the sea side I know not; but I did reach it and was 
speedily on board a vessel of my own, and bounding over the blue waters. 
Days and nights passed by, the good ship cleft her way through the heaving 
waters; but no pang for wife or child, no thought for my present 
preservation or future course once crossed my mind. A dry and burning agony 
oppressed my brain; and but one thought was existent there-my horrible my 
accursed identity; and when my lips gave utterance to my thoughts their 
sole accents were "Tarry thou until I come!"

At length this one horror made way for the accumulated reminiscences of 
eighteen hundred years of misery! Aye, that, that is the surpassing curse 
of my tremendous doom! No sooner have my forty years of un-tortured 
existence passed away, no sooner do I awaken to a consciousness of what I 
am, than I am goaded to despair by distinct and harrowing remembrance of 
all that I have been, done, and suffered. All who loved me and are lost to 
me rise up again to my mental view; and the moral evils of long centuries 
are superadded to the tremendous curse which extends my spiritual evil to 
the crack of doom.

The good ship bounded on, and the very excess of my misery aroused me to an 
activity of which I had previously been incapable. Of maritime affairs, I 
had, in this one of my many lives, had abundant experience; and as the 
horizon gave tokens of an approaching tempest, I took the helm, and the 
command of the vessel. If I had not already felt aware that my bodily 
existence was about to undergo another change, a phenomenon which I now 
observed would have persuaded me of that fact. Our ship defied alike the 
wind and the waves, and swept rapidly through the latter in the face of the 
former! I then knew that I was approaching my death place; that I was 
speeding towards land which should afford me another grave, and my spirit, 
my doomed spirit! another body. Oh, that terrible chill, that paralysis of 
the heart, that numbing yet agonising sinking of the soul, which precede 
the mortal pang! All, all were with me and upon me; yet I gazed in pity 
upon my devoted crew who, poor fools! were pitting their manhood and their 
skill against inexorable fate. They knew not, alas! that to be attached to 
me was to die; to be bound up with my lot but another phrase for miserably 
perishing.

Seamen by nature, you insular people are familiar, at least by description, 
with every phase of ocean's rage and ocean's convulsion. No new description 
of ship-wreck is necessary to you. Let it suffice then to say that I saw my 
shipmates, without an exception, swallowed up by the howling waters, and 
was myself dashed upon the coast which we had long been approaching, and 
which I had long recognized as the once barbarous land in which, when a 
Roman centurion, I had combated the fierce and savage inhabitants; and 
which I had more recently visited as a merchant, and marvelled at for its 
wealth, its luxuries, and its civilization. Need I name your England.

The valour and the wisdom of their ancestors, had encircled her brows with 
the diadem of empire and had placed within her hands the Sceptre of 
maritime dominion, and clasp'd around her waist the golden girdle of the 
world. She had become the mart of nations, and her ships covered the waters 
of the globe, and her immense metropolis was the emporium of the earth.

The last fell pang was over, and my spirit once more freed from mortality, 
to seek another mortal residence. Impelled by the resistless but unseen 
hand which scourges me, my disembodied spirit glided onward till it reached 
a small but beautiful cottage, and there at an open casement, it paused; 
and stood dim, shadowy, and invisible to mortal eye, though silvered and 
shining in the full calm beams of the moon. In the room sat a young and 
beautiful woman gazing in agony which could not weep, upon the pale and 
waxen visage of her dead boy her beautiful, her only one. Anon came the 
felt, though unspoken, fiat; and my spirit entered the lifeless body. The 
infant's feeble cry, and the mother's shriek of frantic joy announced the 
reanimation of the mourned one. The father and the domestics rushed in, and 
the wonderful event is talked of to this hour in the beautiful village 
of ...

I have already shown that during the first forty years of each bodily 
existence, I am unconscious of aught that distinguishes me from the rest of 
my race. I have but lately been roused from my ignorance: the curse of 
consciousness came over me ere I wept above the grave of her who had wept 
her child's death, and knelt in gratitude for his recovery. I am once more 
alone in the world, and once more aware that I am the accursed one of Judea.

Reader you have seen me though you know it not. A single night has bleached 
my hair, I wear the haggard features of three score, and as my mean person, 
and worn yet intelligent features are contrasted, as I pass through the 
populous streets of your new Babel, with my sordid garments and my anxious 
and almost ferocious looks, the passengers turn and gaze upon me in wonder, 
as to my pursuits, my circumstances, and my character.

I am aged; but I cannot again die until my mission be complete. Hitherto, 
in all my bodily lives I have silently suffered; and in all my bodily 
deaths I have

" Died, like the wolf, in silence."

But the tune has at length come when the cause and the object of my 
marvellous and doomed existence must be made known; that the pride of the 
Gentiles may be abated, and that the scattered people of Israel may know 
that they verily shall be a kingdom mighty, to save and to destroy, and 
that they shall see the advent of their Messias, and the utter confusion 
and abasement of the insolent and false followers of the Nazarine!

"Tarry!" Aye, I have indeed tarried; and I must tarry yet a little while 
ere the mighty spell can be utterly broken, anti the Lion of Judah 
triumphant over the nations. In what nation have I not lived and suffered? 
In what nation have I not exerted a mighty, though unseen, power, in 
producing that gradual rise of my scattered and erring, but still sacred 
and peculiar, people, which will so shortly terminate in the rebuilding of 
the Temple of Jerusalem in the subjection of the Kings of the Gentiles to 
the sway of the long tried, long suffering, and at length restored, people 
of the Most High? The false powers will at length be smitten down by the 
true; and the temporal triumph of God's chosen people illustrated and 
consummated by the veritable advent of the veritable Messias. "Tarry!" 
Tyrant! I have tarried; I have wielded the power of the thousand powers 
which may not resist the word of authority spoken by him who has looked 
unmoved and unrebuked upon the glories of the Shechinah, who has lifted the 
veil of the temple, penetrated into the holy of holies, and learned the 
words of power engraven upon the signet of the master of all wisdom, and of 
all demons, good and evil the marvellous, the glorious Solomon.

Ill taught, as are the myriads who put their vain trust in the prophet who 
died on Calvary, and led away as they are by a thousand vain conceits and 
cunningly devised fables, even they have some faint understanding of the 
wisdom of the great Solomon, whose name be reverenced! Selah! But they 
have only a glimmering of light; they can see only an atom of the vast 
whole of his wisdom and his might; it is needful therefore that they should 
learn from me what their false philosophy would never teach them, what 
their false faith shall vainly forbid them to believe. They must believe 
the truth, for it shall chastise them; the word is spoken, Judah shall 
rejoice over their confusion, yea, Israel shall be very glad.

Though the bigoted and vain Nazarenes know that the great Solomon builded 
to the Most High a temple of exceeding beauty and exceeding costliness, 
marvellous to think of, though they know that his wisdom filled the nations 
of the earth with wonder, and caused King Hiram and the Queen of Sheba to 
look upon him with much reverence; though they know that in wealth, as in 
wisdom, Solomon was pre-eminent among the mighty ones of the earth, 
insomuch that none other prince than he could have builded that temple, 
which he dedicated to the worship of the one only God; yet, so 
narrow-minded and grovelling are these Nazarenes, that they divine not, 
neither will they confess, that the wealth and power of the great Solomon 
were but the natural consequence of that ineffable wisdom which was 
bestowed upon him when his soul, in a night dream, replied wisely and 
worthily to the question that was vouchsafed to him from above.

Nay, so infatuated are they, so surrounded by the outermost gloom of a more 
than Cimmerian darkness, that they they! in the petty pride of the ten 
thousand contradictions which they call philosophy, take upon themselves to 
deny the interference of the supernal powers in the progress of mundane 
affairs; though a single glance at their own version of the history of the 
wise son of David would, one would suppose, suffice to show them that only 
by the aid of those powers, subjected to his unspeakable wisdom, could 
Solomon have amassed and expended the treasures which upreared the temple. 
> From the cedar that is on Lebanon to the hyssop that groweth upon the 
wall, Solomon knew the nature and the properties of every thing that 
springeth up from the pregnant earth; and, divinely taught and divinely 
authorised, he had elixirs potent for all purposes, and words of might 
which the demons hear in their far abodes, and which, hearing, they must obey.

As an instance of the unbelieving and deceitful nature of the scribes who 
from the day of Calvary even to the present hour have laboured in their 
vocation to hoodwink the worldly and fat-hearted generations, and to keep 
them unaware of the powers of that magic which, partially revealed to 
Moses, was entirely unveiled to the steadfast and eagle glance of Solomon, 
I may demand, who among the multitudinous sects of the Nazarene has any 
knowledge of that wondrous and invaluable root, BAARA? That wondrous root 
which could only be drawn from its parent earth, on being sprinkled with 
human blood, unless at the expense of the instant death of the animal 
compelled to draw it? I venture affirm that not one, save Fabricius, has 
ever alluded to this wondrous root, except in what the Christians as 
ignorantly as insolently term "Talmudical fables." And yet it is perfectly 
true that it is the quality of this root, as is averred by sundry writers 
of our despised and persecuted race, to cast out evil demons from people 
possessed; and, though it is never known to more than one person of our 
race, a preparation of this root, aided by the words of might en-raven upon 
the signet of Solomon, is potent excedingly in tasking the hidden powers, 
and in discovering the most hidden things.

Poor fools! these Gentiles! Bid by magic divinely taught and divinely 
authorised, how deem they that Moses, that mighty chieftain in Israel, 
foiled the Egyptian Magii at their own weapons, and vexed the land of Egypt 
with many plagues, even until the peculiar people of God made a glorious 
Exodus from the land of bondage? Do they deem that by any other means than 
magic, so taught, and so authorised, Joshua the son of Nun could have made 
the sun stand still upon Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon?

Touching the root Baara, even the secular learning of the false worshipping 
people who call themselves Christians, might teach them that its power in 
the casting out of devils, was well known to our fathers, and demonstrated 
even to those appointed scourges of Judah, the heathen Romans, whose names 
be Anathema, Anathema Maranatha. For the priest Eleazer did cast out by its 
means the demon which had possessed a certain man; and that the bloody and 
sagacious Vespasian who was there present when this merciful deed was done, 
might be convinced that the demon did indeed depart, though the exceeding 
tenuity of spiritual existences will not allow them to be visible to other 
eyes, than those from which occult science has removed the scales the 
venerable Eleazer commanded that a vessel should be placed at a 
considerable distance from the person possessed, the which vessel, in 
obedience to the commands of Eleazer, the demon, in departing did forcibly 
throw down and empty.

But my proper task will not allow me to bestow further time upon the crude 
notions or the blind and fanatical bigotry of the detested Nazarenes. The 
all but omnipotent signet of Solomon was deposited by that greatest of 
earthly princes in the Temple of Jerusalem; and in the Holy of Holies, 
entered only by the great High Priest, reposed that gem of price and power 
unspeakable.

When the temple was plundered by the heathen, and when our people were 
despitefully treated and led into captivity for their sins the vessels of 
silver and the vessels of gold were grasped by the unholy hands of the 
conquering soldiery Nebuchadonozor and Cyrus bore away the wealth of 
Jerusalem; but not the signet, which was from the beginning destined to 
work out the salvation of Judah when her sins should be fully expiated, and 
her people once more an acceptable people in the sight of the Lord.

But though the dim light of tradition caused every successive high priest 
carefully to guard against the discovery of the precious treasure, even the 
high priest knew not all the wonders of that treasure. It was reserved for 
me, the doomed, the mysterious, the ever-changing in body, the 
unchangeable, the everlasting in spirit, to learn, even while hosts 
barbaric pressed towards the Holy of Holies, the saving wealth that rested 
therein. And thus it happened. In the seventieth year after the death of 
him whom the Nazarenes call Messias, and on the seventeenth day of the 
month called Panemus, in the Syro-Macedonian tongue, but in the Hebrew 
Jamuz, the dread enemy of our nation, the Roman Titus had so far reduced 
the doomed defenders of the Holy City, that the daily sacrifice could no 
longer be offered; and then knew all those in whom the only true religion 
had produced the spirit of prophecy that the temple would indeed fall.

I need not recount the horrors of the succeeding days of the siege; or is 
it not written in the book of the apostate Josephus how the temple was 
polluted by the blood of our people, shed by each other as well as by the 
Romans? How that famine was abroad glaring with fierce eyes, and made 
horribly visible in gaunt and spectral forms? How that a mother maddened by 
famine slew her child, yea, her first-born and her only one, and banguetted 
in horrible eagerness upon his roasted body? Alas! the apostate Jew and 
divers writers among the Nazarenes, have dilated but too truly and too 
sufficiently upon the awful scenes that passed in every street, aye, in 
every house in the devoted city of the living God. Let me then hasten to 
that concluding scene, which gave the Holy of Holies to the flames; but at 
the same time gave to me that Talisman, which, eighteen hundred years 
later, was to rebuild the city and the temples, and prepare the people of 
God for the dominion of the whole earth, and for the advent of the 
veritable Messias. Selah! Let it be done. It is about to be done.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . .
Urged by I know not what divine fury, I had descended from the Upper City, 
where I had been gazing upon the flaming sword, which illuminated the 
heavens, even at mid-day. I passed unscathed through the outer court of the 
temple, now polluted by the bodies of the dying and the dead, and slippery 
with much blood. Scarcely had I made my way beyond the partition wall, 
which had been erected for the separation of the Jews from the unbelieving 
Gentiles; when, from one of the many apartments that were on the north side 
of the holy house, a lurid pillar of fire suddenly shot upward, and in an 
instant ten thousand fiery tongues darted from it in every direction, and a 
cry of horror and alarm arose from ten thousand combatants within and 
around the temple. To cleave to the earth the destroying Roman, who was in 
the very act of leaping into the inner court, after snatching from its 
blaze the torch with which he had now fired the holy house, was but the 
work of an instant; that done, I pressed forward up the acclivity which led 
to the altar of Burnt Offering, where the High Priest, who had succeeded 
the fugitives, Joseph and Jesus, was surrounded by combatants, and in an 
evident agony of anxiety to make his way into the Holy of Holies. With a 
loud cry I threw myself forward into the throng and the strife ; but though 
I was swift, I was too tardy to save the venerable man, who, at the very 
moment that I gained his side, was transfixed by a Roman dart. I raised him 
and bore him towards the Sanctuary, but though life was fast gushing forth 
from his ghastly wound, he was a Jewish priest still-true to his God, his 
faith, and his office. "Pollute not the holy place! Forbear, set me down 
here," he exclaimed; and in a niche, which was as yet unthreatened by the 
devouring element, I set him down, and raised his drooping head, and wiped 
the big damps of death rom his lofty brow, all tenderly, as would a nursing 
mother support and tend a dying child.

His breathing came shorter and shorter, and his limbs became rigid; but the 
agonies of death had no power over the energies of religion; and he did not 
expire till he had commanded me to penetrate the Holy of Holies, and to 
snatch thence and from the very centre of the ark, the Talisman of our 
people, even the signet of the wise Solomon the Shemama-phorah.

Not even the behest of the high priest would have caused any other Jew to 
enter that mysterious and most sacred place. But I! what had I, the 
wanderer, to fear?

I passed the brazen pillars, Joachim and Booz, and I reached the golden 
cherubim, ten cubits in height, whose outspread wings, reaching from the 
southern wall to the northern wall of the Holy of Holies, had hitherto 
concealed for ages its sacred mysteries from unpermitted eyes.

I paused, but for a moment; the golden gates were passed, the cherubim no 
longer hid the ark from my gaze; and, God! by what a galaxy of glories was 
I dazzled! The floor and the walls were of fine gold, glittering with the 
splendour of ten thousand fires, and reflecting back the many coloured and 
living lights that flashed from Onyx and from Sapphire; from Chrysolite and 
from Amethyst; and from every precious stone from every part of the earth. 
Having drawn aside with resolute hand the embroidered veil of purple and 
scarlet, behold! I stood within the Holy of Holies; and there over against 
the eastern end I beheld an altar of solid and unornamented gold. Upon 
either side of the altar was a hollow candlestick of gold, adorned with 
lilies and pomgranates of gems and fretted gold. But upon the table! Even I 
shook in every fibre with much awe, as I looked upon the ark of shittim 
wood, which in Hebrew is called Eton. It was five spans long by three in 
height and breadth; and was strongly ornamented with plates of fine gold, 
and on the top were two cherubims of the like precious material. In that 
lay the palladium of our people-the seal of Solomon; and I I! was to 
stretch forth my hand and seize it!

The lid of the ark yielded to my mere touch, and mine eyes fell upon the 
precious signet. It consisted of a single cincture of massive gold, set 
with a single gem; but such a gem. Well might the fiends, well might the 
powers of earth and hell shrink from the steadfast gaze of its possessor, 
and busy themselves in doing his behest. In the centre of the gem was 
engraven the ineffable name of God, and around it in mingled radiance 
Diamond, of Sapphire, of Ruby, and Emerald, the seeming of ten thousand 
eyes gleamed with divine ardour to which the lurid lightnings of the 
stormiest heaven are but as a meteor that dances upon the morass. I stood 
as one fascinated, terrified, petrified; I would fain have stretched out my 
hand, but my arm was paralyzed; I would have cried aloud, but my tongue 
clove to the root of my mouth. As I stood thus entranced a shout in the 
outer portion of the temple announced the arrival of Titus and his 
followers. In a few moments the Holy of Holies, the Ark, the very Seal of 
Solomon, would be bared to the gaze of the profane, violated by the hands 
of the foeman and the robber. I stretched forth my hand and grasped the 
signet; a report as of ten thousand thunders shook the whole fabric around 
me, and I felt myself seized by a giant hand, whose grasp deprived me of my 
senses at the very moment that I saw the majestic though somewhat corpulent 
form of Titus within the hitherto sacred place. How long I remained 
entranced I know not. When I at length awakened to a sense of my situation, 
I was far, far away from the bloodshed and tumult, from the trampling of 
the victors, and the passionate but unheeded entreaties of the dying and 
the captive. The moon, the pale-visaged Astarte of the Phoenicians, was 
high in heaven, shedding around a flood of silvery light such as she can 
never bestow upon this land of cloud and fog. I lay beneath a majestic 
palm, and close beside me gushed a fountain, making a delightful music in 
the otherwise unbroken silence of the night. It was by slow degrees that 
all the scenes through which I had so recently passed became clearly and 
completely recalled to my memory; and, oh God! with what horror did I not 
thrill when I discovered that the signet of Solomon was no longer in my 
possession!

I should have raved, Heaven pardon me, I believe I should have blasphemed; 
but before I could give utterance to my agony, there arose beside me a low, 
sweet, musical, but withal, most solemn and majestic voice and the mighty 
change that had come over my spirit and freed it from the dull and 
inapprehensive obtuseness of mere mortality, enabled me to know that that 
voice came from no created mortal. I knew that the voice was a voice from 
above, and my heart leaped with an exceeding gladness, for I heard much 
mercy, and was blessed with a most wondrous mission, and with a trust which 
they who sit upon the blood-stained thrones of the perverted earth might 
envy with a power to which they must speedily bow down in humility and in 
dread.

It was revealed to me that though the curse of him of Nazareth must for a 
time have power, and though, until the regeneration of our people should be 
at hand, his power should go on increasing among the nations, the curse his 
hate and tyranny has laid upon me should be converted into a saving mercy 
to Israel, a pillar of light to guide and guard the wanderers of Judah. 
Words of might were graven upon my soul, even the words of the signet of 
Solomon which all Genii must obey, and I was sent forth to live the bodily 
life and die the bodily death in divers places; but with ever one task, one 
trust to teach the trampled Jew to become very mighty in despoiling his 
oppressors, very cunning in availing himself of their hearts' leprosy 
avarice. Ages upon ages have rolled by; where populous cities and the 
palaces of kings once stood, the bat and the owl and all obscene and 
grovelling reptiles are now the sole lords, the sole tenants; and where I 
have battled with the gaunt wolf, and disputed with the bear his forest 
haunt, hundreds of thousands of human beings dwell in cities of strength 
and splendour; the many wearing out their lives in squalor and in toil, 
that has little recompense and no cessation, the few looking down in 
insolent and unsparing scorn upon those who starve, that the tyrant and the 
cheat may fare sumptuously every day. All nations have been in turn the 
scene of my exertions; all ranks, all pursuits, have in turn been made 
subservient to the Holy and Appointed end; Jerusalem, Oh beloved Jerusalem, 
I have toiled to uprear thee in power and in great splendour! The appointed 
hour is at hand; and then HE cometh, at whose benignant and resistless word 
the curse of my foe, the fell curse that was pronounced upon me on Calvary, 
shall be removed, and my spirit shall have rest.

Whether leading the war galley of Venice to the discomfiture and slaughter 
of the Paynims, or pursuing the business of a merchant in Spain, with the 
terrors of the Inquisition ever before me, if discovered in my secret 
practice of the sacred faith of my forefathers; whether passing my youth in 
the sweet tranquility of an Alpine valley, or amid the roar of waters and 
the crash of battle; whether in one age wielding the sword and the lance of 
the condottieri in the cause now of one and now of the other of the 
venomous little republics of Italy, or in another aiding the revolt of 
Massaniello at Naples, or catering to the amusements of Louis XIV. at 
Paris; in all times, in all characters, in all places, from the instant 
that my spirit, in each new body has been called anew to self-knowledge, by 
the sweet low whisper oh! how full of hope to the Wanderer! "Tarry thou 
until I come," all my energies have been devoted to the performance of my task.

The bigotry of a whole people, and the cupidity of their tyrant could 
easily degrade the Jew in social condition; debar him from this or that 
privilege, condemn him to this or that bunthen, and brand him with an 
outward and visible token of his debasement; but the Jew could always amass 
wealth, preserve wealth, and by his wealth, he, the trampled slave, could 
always mock the sufferings and sway the fate of the haughtiest and 
bloodiest of his oppressors. Aye! the Talismanic power has ever been at 
work; in every land hath its influence at some time been felt, in every 
land have I at some time made one of my people a mighty man, in the 
despoiling of the princes and the people who believe in the prophet of 
Nazareth.

Jehovah! how have I scorned the enemies of thy people, when I have seen 
them waiting with pallid cheek and downcast eyes for the fiat of the 
enriched Jew to consign them to instant and utter beggary, or to aid them 
to struggle on a little longer in the hope of gain to themselves, but in 
reality only to swell his gains and add to the righteous usury which shall 
raise up thy peculiar people, and make glorious the towers of Zion.

Alas! how easier far it is to give the Talisman by which riches can be 
commanded, than it is to inspire a human heart with that intense love of 
the antique abiding place of our race, which alone can justify me in 
bestowing the potency and the splendour of riches! How often have I not had 
to lament the backsliding, and the degenerate self-love of my chosen 
instruments? With what disgust have I not taken from them their abused 
trust; with what scorn have I not seen them reduced to despair and 
self-destruction, by the deprivation of that which I bestowed on them, not 
for their own petty purposes, but that Israel might be redeemed from her 
debasement.

Ask who enabled Neckar for a time to support the boundless extravagance of 
the Court of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette, and history, the jest book of 
wise men and the oracle of fools, will tell you that it was his genius. I 
can tell another tale! It was I, it was the talismanic power which I gave 
him for a brief breathing space, to inspire his friends with admiration and 
his enemies with envy. I withdrew that power, and there arose that scene of 
bloodshed and confiscation which was especially necessary to enable my 
people to spoil all the nations of Europe, even as our forefathers by 
divine commandment did spoil their Egyptian task-masters. Verily the Jews 
have had their revenge! From the revolution of France sprang bloody and 
expensive wars; from those wars sprang royal indigence and national 
extremity, which raised up that Christian Moloch of loan jobbery and public 
debts wherein the present race battens on the spoils and devours the labour 
of its offspring; and now, now was the time when the Jewish people might 
banquet in the halls of princes, where once their very presence would have 
been deemed pollution. Now was the time when the aggrandisement of my 
people could not without sin be neglected. England became the resort of 
thousands of our oppressed people; and if England insulted and spat upon 
them in theory, it at least supplied them with wealth boundless and with 
dupes innumerable. A chieftain of our people became as necessary, then, in 
England, as formerly in Venice, in Genoa, in Antwerp, in Bruges, or more 
recently in Paris. From the death of Louis XVI. to the consulship of 
Napoleon Buonaparte, I rarely conferred the visible talisman, for however 
brief a space of time, upon any one; it was necessary that all my people 
should be up and doing, that each should be amassing his portion; there was 
a harvest too large for any single reaper; and leaving to themselves the 
native wit of the Jew and the native propensity of the Gentile to overshoot 
his mark, by indulging his own bad passions, I looked calmly on, seeing in 
every bloody battlefield the precursor of a new loan in every new loan the 
most perfect of human inventions for the transfer of the wealth of the 
Gentile to the strong boxes of the Jew.

The result fully justified my reliance on the self-destroying talents of 
the Nazarenes; the Jews of England amply avenged the Norman atrocities of 
the older day; and what the Norman took from the Saxons by the stroke of 
the battle-axe and the broad sword, the Jews now took from the at once 
insolent and ignorant descendants of those Normans by the stroke of that 
far mightier weapon the pen.

The first of my people whom I pitched upon to wield the Talismanic 
influence in England was one whose name will in an instant be recognized by 
all the votaries and high priests of Mammon, whether Jew or Christian. I 
allude to Solomon Salvador. I found him a comparatively poor man; I made 
him in a brief space the marvel of all who knew him. The wildest 
speculation he could undertake was sure to prosper; and the magnates of the 
nation sought his advice when troubled with the common and very painful 
disease of Impecuniosity.

This success was as brief as it was brilliant. The fool! did he suppose 
that power was entrusted to him, that wealth was placed within his reach 
for the bidding, merely that he should call a mountainous mass of brick and 
mortar after his name, fill it with luxuries from every quarter of the 
globe, and then spread the banquet and illuminate the saloon to welcome the 
high-born fool and the high-born harlot, and make glad their hearts with 
wine and music, while the towers of Jerusalem lay in ruin, and the remnant 
of our people sat cowering beneath the insolent trampling of the the men of 
blood? Fool, thrice foolish! I deprived him of the talismanic power, and 
his wealth melted away from him fast as the snow melts beneath the ardent 
beams of the sun. His familiar friends saw that he waxed poor, and in the 
short-sighted wisdom of this world they attributed his downfall to 
imprudent speculation, to extravagant expenditure, to anything and 
everything except the true cause; and he died poor, neglected, forgotten.

Possessed of the words of power which the genii must obey, and using those 
words of power for the great end to which I am ordained, I can convert any 
thing into a talisman omnipotent in the accumulation of wealth for its 
possessor. The merest trinket, the commonest article of either use or 
ornament, under the influence of these resistless words, becomes in the 
hands of its possessor, a weapon mighty as the sceptre of Nisroch.

After I had withdrawn the talisman from Salvador, I cast my eyes about 
among the young men of Israel, seeking one upon whom I might confer the 
power which my degenerate protege had proved himself unworthy to be 
possessed of. Alas! to find one in all respects worthy of so high and so 
holy a trust was no light task. Ability, indeed, I found in great abundance 
among my people: but one was prone to the use of wine, another looked all 
too fondly on the blue eyes and fair tresses of the daughters of the 
Gentiles, even of the men whom we call the English; one wasted his time in 
the light and profane buffooneries of the theatre; while another, though 
innocent of all these things, though clever, industrious, and frugal, even 
to parsimony, was wedded to his own base interests, and incapable of 
casting a thought upon the degradation of his ancient race, or upon the 
ruin of the city of the temple of God even Jerusalem.

It chanced that as I on a day took my stand on that grandest of all the 
money marts of the world, the Exchange of London, my attention was 
attracted by the saddened yet intelligent aspect of one whom I knew at a 
glance to be one of our ancient and fallen people, who in the midst of all 
their degradations cannot lose that peculiar physiognomy which 
distinguishes them from all other races, and in the very perpetuation of 
which the Nazarenes, had not God hardened their hearts and deadened their 
understandings, would see a proof, among many, that the Jewish nation is 
not wholly cast off, but will, in the good and appointed time, be gathered 
together from all parts, and reinstated in the sovereignty of Palestine.

Drawing nigh to the person of whom I had thus taken notice, I overheard 
some few words he interchanged with an acquaintance; and those few words 
led me to believe that I had at length found the very man I wanted, for he 
spoke Hebrew with the purity and energy of a high priest of the tine when 
the temple was in its pride of place, and ministered in by the very flower 
of our people. Moreover, though his aspect lead but so lately been saddened 
and downcast, his eyes now glowed, his mien was erect, his gestures were 
energetic, and above all, in deciding my opinion in his favour, he cursed 
the Nazarenes both deeply and bitterly, and vowed to avenge his wrong upon 
them hereafter. What was that wrong? Faugh! What had I to do with the 
individual wrongs of any one? He hated the Christians, and burned to injure 
them; that was all I cared for; and I vigilantly watched him until, the 
Exchange closing for the day, he retired to a neighbouring tavern to dine.

What a guttling and guzzling set of swine your mere worldling's are! A 
tavern in the good City of London is neither more nor less than a 
compendious system of damnation; where gluttony and strong wines make 
sinners of all sorts and size on the six days of the week; their temples, 
which they call churches, being hermetically sealed to the Nazarenes on 
every day save the seventh. Gluttony, strong drink, and the sinful thoughts 
and unclean deeds which they inspire, have the six days prayer and 
repentance only one! Ah! this is surely a people whom it is especially 
lawful and praiseworthy to lay under contribution, that the temple may be 
rebuilt, and that our ancient faith may extend through the whole earth and 
purify it.

Much as I abhor the devouring and the wassail, which make men to resemble 
the unclean swine rather than the chief creation and most wonderful 
masterpiece of God, I sat patiently in this scene of ecstatic and egregious 
devouring until I found an opportunity to hold converse with the young man 
upon whom I had fixed my attention. What passed between us it needs not now 
to particularize; suffice it to say, that on the very next day he netted a 
hundred thousand pounds, two Christian speculators slew themselves in 
despair, and ten times that number of the smaller fry took their leave of 
the Exchange with a very sincere resolution to return to it no more.

For a time my new protege was all that I could desire; but with wealth came 
luxury, and with luxury come an indifference to the grand object for which 
I had raised him up from comparative penury; and made him sought, 
flattered, followed, all but worshipped by the great herd of those who 
traffic in gain for the sake and for the love of things worldly and perishable.

It was in vain that I urged him, ever and anon, to busy himself for the 
restoration and the triumph of his long-suffering and widely dispersed 
people. Pomp and luxury, flattery and ease, had done their work, and he too 
was destined to experience that what the Lord giveth, that also tile Lord 
can take away. Charitable he was, but it was in the wise of the blind 
Gentiles; looking with dull dead eyes upon the great wrongs and great 
afflictions of the multitude, and frittering away time, and feeling, and 
hard gold, upon the petty relief of the petty miseries of individuals.

Charitable! why Jew and Gentile, the free man and the bond slave, of this 
most anomalous metropolis of this most anomalous nation, upon the face of 
God's beautiful, but wrong fraught earth, would shout in contradiction, 
were I to deny the charity of the great Abraham Goldsmid!

Aye, let the Nazarene dogs lift their hands and eyes in ignorant wonder; 
the great Goldsmid was my very and mere instrument; I raised him because I 
deemed him worthy. I found him incompetent to the vast and sacred duty I 
designed him for, and I dashed him down even as we cast aside the gourd 
when we no longer require a drinking cup. Who among the elder frequenters 
of the great temple of mammon, which is called the Exchange, does not 
remember the golden box with which the hand of Goldsmid was perpetually 
occupied in his busiest and most important moments? It was his talisman.

The words of power had been pronounced above it; with it he could encounter 
a world and be triumphant; without he was as the stripling David, without 
God, would have been to the giant champion of Philistia. I had warned him 
again and again; I had menanced, I had entreated, but in vain: I found him 
incorrigible in his neglect of the cause of our people and our God; and 
even while he was wassailing at his luxurious villa in the neighbourhood of 
Morden, the words of power went forth from my lips, and his talisman had 
departed from him for ever. Large rewards were vainly offered for what all 
but himself supposed to be a mere toy, a mere thing of effeminate luxury; 
but those rewards were offered in vain. He appeared upon the Exchange 
without his palladium; bargained-lost-and saw absolute ruin looking at him 
with steadfast and unpitying eyes. Ten days he bore this, AND THEN BLEW HIS 
BRAINS OUT! None can be false to our cause and prosper.

The progress of that most marvellous of modern characters Napoleon 
Buonaparte soon diverted my thoughts from the vexations caused by the folly 
and consequent ruin of my deceased protege; and hastily leaving England, I 
arrived at Frankfort just as that city was invested and occupied by the 
French troops.

I have seen so many towns taken by storm, and, when taken, delivered up to 
all that the utmost license and cruelty of the most licentious and cruel 
troops could inflict, that the fate of Frankfort seemed by comparison, to 
be a mild one. And yet even there I saw enough to make the blood of an 
ordinary man boil with indignation, or curdle with horror.

With all the politeness of the French as individuals, large bodies of them 
are usually among the most ferocious of all assemblages. They seem to 
resemble those chemical substances which, though separately quite harmless, 
cannot be brought into contact without producing disaster and destruction 
to every one and every thing in their vicinity. In their revolution I have 
seen individuals in one hour comporting themselves towards the helpless 
with all the courage of antique chivalry, and with all the touching 
delicacy and tenderness of modern politeness; and I have seen those 
self-same individuals in the next hour hideous with blood, and roaring with 
stentorian lungs for more victims. Separately good, they no sooner became 
part of a multitude than the mania of fierceness fell upon their souls, and 
they became even as the fiends in unsparing cruelty.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

What is true of the French people is no less true of the French soldiery, 
who certainly have never shown en masse any of that forbearance which few 
indeed among them would fail to show as individuals. And if at Frankfort 
murder, and the other disgusting violence which the conquered sometimes 
have to endure from the homicidal hirelings, who make a glory and an honour 
of their most feculent and debased trade in blood; if these were not among 
the sins to be charged upon the soldiery of France, they amply made up for 
any inconvenience they experienced from balking their lust and love of 
bloodshed. It is impossible to conceive anything more complete than the 
plunder of the unhappy people of Frankfort. Every thing that was portable 
was carried off; every marauding soldier had his two or three watches ; 
diamonds glittered on the dirty fingers, or still dirtier linen of those 
ruffians; family plate, consecrated by a thousand tender reminiscences, was 
melted openly in the streets, and transferred in unsightly lumps to the 
knapsacks of its new owners. The skill of man was in vain employed to 
conceal the spoil, the tears and supplications of women were in vain 
employed to move the spoilers to moderation in their marauding.

The people of Frankfort were a conquered people, the brave French soldiers 
were conquerors; and though glory, no doubt, is a very fine thing, your 
thorough soldier enjoys it not a jot the less for being accompanied by a 
goodly proportion of plunder.

The few people who succeeded in saving some trifling amount of money, were, 
for the time, scarcely better off than those who were plundered to the very 
last thaler. For your heroes have prodigious appetites and the vast 
consumption of food of every description by the French troops, the terror 
which kept the country people from bringing their produce into the city, 
and the blessed propensity of all dealers and shopmen, in all times and 
countries, to raise their prices in the exact ratio of the wretchedness and 
suffering of their fellow creatures, speedily reduced five out of every six 
families in Frankfort to absolute want. In saying this, I speak of those 
ranks of people to whom, previously, want had been utterly unknown, save as 
a thing which (as their individual disposition chanced to be) they pitied 
and relieved, or despised and insulted in the persons of their inferiors. 
Want being thus introduced to homes, where previously it had been unseen 
and unfelt, it needs no elaborate argument to show that where want had 
always existed, absolute famine now made its appearance. All trade, save in 
articles of food, was at a standstill ; and at the very moment when the 
poor were thus cut off from earning the poor pittance to which they had 
been accustomed, every article of food was tripled, and many articles 
quadrupled in price.

Fearful, oh! very fearful, were the scenes which I witnessed during the 
brief stay of the marauding Gauls in Frankfort. Jew as I am, and detesting, 
as I do detest, the followers of the Nazarene, with a most holy and fervent 
detestation, even I pitied the unhappy wretches, and relieved their 
miseries in more instances than I can now look back upon with anything 
short of the most sovereign contempt for my temporary compassion.

But if I, on some few occasions, tarried by the wayside to relieve some of 
the more extreme cases of privation and suffering, among the Nazarenes, I 
was neither forgetful of my proper mission, nor weary in forwarding the 
great work.

It is well known to all the world that Frankfort has long been the abiding 
place of not a few of the people of my race; and there are few European 
cities in which the blessing has more manifestly been bestowed upon their 
industry and talents. Among the wealthiest of the inhabitants of Frankfort, 
were certain Jews; I need not add that they were also among the first who 
were laid under contribution by the unprincipled and avaricious invaders. 
Finding vast stores of wealth in the possession of some Jews, the French 
positively, though somewhat illogically, concluded that to be very wealthy 
was an inseparable consequence of being a Jew, and the whole of our people, 
even down to those who obtained their daily bread by the lowest toils, and 
the utmost possible difficulty, were harassed by domiciliary visits 
questioned by the officers insulted, and sometimes even beaten by the men; 
and, finally, enjoined severally to provide the most preposterous sums of 
money by a certain given day.

Avoiding, as far as possible, attracting the attention of the tyrants, I 
passed from house to house, leaving no very large sum of money at any one 
house at any one time; but taking especial care that however the followers 
of the Nazarene, because born in different countries, and speaking 
different tongues, might inflict upon each other the awful agonies 
attendant upon absolute want of food, no Israelite should lack wherewith to 
feed himself and his wife, and the little ones that were with them, and the 
man servant, and the maid servant, and the stranger that was within his gates.

What mattered it that the thaler should be reduced to a tenth part of its 
value by the abundance of money suddenly brought into circulation by the 
French marauders, and that the price of every article of food should be 
multiplied by twenty? Even then should my people be exempt from absolute 
famine, for could I not command gold? Yea, should the city at length become 
absolutely destitute of food, had I not the talisman? Had I not the 
ineffable words? Could I not buy the whole evil race, from the false 
prophet even to the lowest among the evil genii? Could I not task them in 
the midnight incantation, and, lo! would not plenty make the hearts of my 
people glad at sunrise?

So I went from house to house; and while I gave present aid, I spoke words 
of comfort and encouragement as to the future; and thus from day to to day 
I visited the houses of the Jews that were in Frankfort. But my motive was 
not merely the desire to afford them temporal aid; contrariwise, while 
alleviating the temporal sufferings of my people, I was, day by scanning 
the young men with an intelligent and vigilant eye; for where, if not among 
the shamefully plundered and trampled Hebrews of Frankfort, might I hope to 
find a zealous hater of the Nazarenes, a man exceedingly desirous of 
working their degradation and destruction? All men are in some sort the 
creatures and the victims of their own bad passions, even patriotism 
itself; yea, even religious zeal, to the very verge of ferocious bigotry, 
can be called into a fiery and active existence by personal wrong, and the 
personal hate which that infallibly engenders.

An Englishman may read with horror and with detestation the bloodstained 
records of the bloody and relentless Inquisition of old Spain; but faint, 
indeed, are his horror and detestation compared to those that tear the 
heart and madden the brain of him who has seen and borne the Inquisition's 
unimaginable tortures. It is only the wrong which man himself endures that 
he can thoroughly appreciate ; and here, even while want and sorrow were at 
work, and famine itself but barely kept at arm's length here it was that I 
might most hopefully seek for a champion to avenge the wrongs of Israel. I 
sought carefully, and I did not seek in vain ; a case soon came to my 
knowledge which abundantly contained all the elements requisite for my purpose.

Among the number of Israelitish families to which my gold and my sympathy 
gave me a ready admission and a very glad welcome, there was one to which I 
was especially attached, both for its own sake and for the sake of 
associations of eighteen centuries duration. I speak of the family of 
Solomon De Milheim. If ever modern countenance bore the stamp and impress 
of our patriarchs of the old time assuredly it was the countenance of the 
old man, De Milheim ; if ever the beauty of the manly youth of Jerusalem, 
when Jerusalem was happy, was exactly represented in the rising age, it was 
represented by his sons; and in his daughters the sunnyeyed and ebon-haired 
maidens of ancient Judah seemed once more to adorn and glorify the earth 
with their bright presence.

But it was not from such general resemblance that I became so peculiarly 
attached to this family. Alas! no; I was drawn thitherward by a most 
melancholy pleasure; for in the elder daughter of De Milheim I gazed upon 
the very counterpart of my adored and most lovely Leah, of the stag-eyed 
wife of my young bosom, whose pure spirit fled the sinful and hard world on 
the very day on which he, the avenging one of Nazareth, doomed me to long 
ages of agony and of travail.

It was during one of my visits to the family of De Milheim that I heard of 
a worthy instrument for upholding and forwarding of my sacred and high 
cause; and I forthwith departed in quest of him, and speedily reached his 
abode.

Without, it was dingy, and uninviting as the abodes of even the wealthiest 
of our persecuted, and therefore politic, people are wont to be ; and when 
I crossed the now unprotected threshold, all within was dismantled and 
disordered, as formerly it had been sumptuous and tasteful.

Unquestioned and unseen I passed through the various apartments, when on a 
sudden, just as I had reached the little sanctum of the now solitary tenant 
of the once crowded house, I heard the clash of arms in the hall beneath; 
and I had but just time to pronounce the words of great power, which render 
me invisible to mortal ken, when a French officer passed within a foot of 
the spot upon which I stood, and threw open the door of the little study 
with the insolent violence of irresponsible and unprincipled power. As he 
entered I glided in, and he shut the door as violently as he had opened it.

Seated at an antique writing table was the unhappy master of this desolated 
house. His eyes were red as with much weeping, and his cheeks were pale and 
haggard, as with much sorrow and long vigils.

The rude and sudden advent of the Nazarene man of blood and tyranny did not 
seem to alarm him; it simply and utterly stupefied him. His limbs were 
stiffened, and his eyes fixed and leaden; and thus he sat, until aroused to 
consciousness by the martial and haughty tones of the stranger, commanding 
him to give gold. This demand effectually recalled the scattered senses of 
the unhappy man.

"God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob!" he exclaimed, as, kneeling, he lifted 
up his trembling hands to the east, "how long, O God! how long? Have they 
not desolated thy servant's hearth, carried away his young men captive, and 
spoiled him even to the last thaler? Have they not stricken him with many 
stripes, and cursed him with many curses? How long, O Lord, how long shall 
the unbeliever triumph, and thy people be a jest and a bye word, Samsons 
shorn of their hair, and blind, but without the strength to draw down upon 
these new Philistines the roofs of their palaces, and crush them in the 
hour of their tyranny and their scorn?"

"Jew!" said the Nazarene warrior, and the whole fabric shook as he strode 
across the apartment, "Jew! I am not here to listen to your lying 
adjurations, I want gold, I will have gold; or, look you, not content with 
making you as bald and as blind as Samson; by the mother of God, I'll make 
you as dead as that stalwart worthy!

"Now, as my soul liveth," replied the Hebrew, "I am spoiled to the last 
thaler, yea, for this whole day have my lips not tasted of bread, from my 
sheer and very poverty."

"Bah!" cried the Nazarene, "what be these? Sacre! why they're fine gold and 
weigh a French pound to a sous!" and so saying, he laid violent hand upon 
the teraphim, even the images which the heathen of the old day would have 
termed Lares. In the extremity of his grief, and in the delusive hope that 
the Nazarene plunderers had paid him their last visit the unhappy young man 
of Israel had drawn the teraphim from their secure hiding place, and, lo! 
the hand of the spoiler was upon them, and the soul of the young man was 
bowed down, stricken to the very earth with this consummation of the 
calamity of his house. It was in vain that the pitiless plunderer 
blasphemed, and all in vain that he threatened many tortures, and even 
death; for the young man spoke truly in that he was verily and, indeed 
despoiled of all that remained to him on earth, save the clothes he wore 
and the dismantled house which he inhabited.

Wearied at length with his unprofitable violence, and perhaps, for a 
desultory life of war and rapine makes the eye very skilful in discovering 
between truth and falsehood, convinced by the excess of the young man's 
agony, that the words which he spake were indeed the words of truth, the 
Nazarene cursing with many and deep curses, yet looking with no unpleased 
eyes upon the golden teraphim which he bore away, departed, and the young 
man found himself once more alone, and in the solitude of his sorrow he 
poured forth his unavailing lamentations and cursed the Nazarenes, and 
prayed in fervent tones that he might have power to crush them, and vowed 
by the ineffable name of Jehovah to lose no opportunity of despoiling their 
wealth, and trampling down, yea, utterly bruising, their black and 
unsparing, as unbelieving hearts.

That was a glad moment to me. I would suffer over again the most bitter 
misery of the most bitter of any of my many lives to enjoy but once in each 
day one such rapturous, such exulting moment. Here was a servant fit for 
the great master here a champion fit for the great cause. His wrongs, his 
agony, his fervour, his utter and hopeless poverty; aye, his own passions 
and his own circumstances would make him a faithful and very zealous foeman 
to the Nazarene of whatever nation. Here was, at length, the man, the long 
hoped, the long sought, who should build up the the temple of the Lord, and 
make Israel and Judah feared and obeyed in all the quarters of the earth.

As the young man prayed to the God of Abraham, and cursed the despoiling 
and tyrannous followers of the Nazarene, I observed that he kept his eyes 
constantly fixed upon the niche from which the man of blood had recently 
drawn the teraphim. Placing myself, therefore, while still invisible, 
immediately between him and that spot, I spake in my soul the words of 
power, and to! on the instant I stood visible before him, tall in stature 
as Saul when he was singled forth from the young men, but pallid as a 
corpse, and with hoary hair and beard contrasting with ghastly effect the 
supernatural glare of great black eyes that shot forth lurid fires upon 
which no mortal could look and not tremble.

The sudden appearance of such a figure, clad in the flowing robes of the 
far East, and seeming to spring up from the bowels of the earth, might well 
appal even the most courageous, and the young man fell down before me, and 
exclaimed, "As my Lord liveth, his servant is despoiled, yea, utterly 
undone; as my soul liveth, I have not a coin; yea, even the bonds of 
parchment which bound many Nazarenes in the power of thy servant, behold, 
they also are stolen gone for ever gone!"

And, as he thus spake, he wrung his hands, and the big drops of 
perspiration burst forth from his agonized countenance. I raised him from 
the earth, and spake to him many comfortable words. He proposed to fly from 
the wretched city, but I forbade him; he spake in hopelessness and I 
commanded him to hope; he spake in doubt and I compelled him to believe. I 
spake the words of power, and the talisman was once more committed to a man 
of my persecuted race.

It chanced that there lay on the table before him a ring holding the keys 
of his rifled drawers; and having spoken the words of power, and adjured 
the demons by the ineffable name, I gave to that ring the influence and the 
might of the signet of the wise Solomon. Having done this, I commanded the 
young man to name some wish for instant accomplishment; and ere he had 
thrice, according to my instructions, whirled round the ring upon his 
forefinger, steps were heard as of one heavily laden, and I had scarcely 
become again invisible, when a man carefully disguised, and bearing a large 
and very heavy bag, laboured slowly and painfully into the room.

"Donner and Blitzen," said the new comer, as he threw down, with a, mighty 
crash as of much gold, the bag he had so sorely travailed under, "I would 
scarcely play porter again to save my thalers! Time presses, the villains 
are on the search once more wherever they deem that they have left a coin 
or a coin's worth. You, I know, are for the present safe, for they are sure 
you are not worth their time. I know your honesty; and to your biding, 
until better times come, I commit all the cash I have within fifty leagues, 
save so much as will prevent the fellows from cutting my throat in sheer 
disappointment." And having thus spoken, while wiping the big drops from 
his forehead, he waved his hand and took his departure. The young man 
opened the bag, counted the several packets it contained and found the very 
sum for which he had wished aloud while making his first essay of the power 
of his talisman.

Men of the accursed and plundering race! Ye, whose estates were within a 
brief space to have been within his grasp; ye whose equipages and whose 
liveried lacquies I so lately saw following to his premature grave the man 
of Israel whom I thus enabled to war upon ye in your most Vulnerable 
quarter, accursed and detested Nazarenes the young Israelite, to whom I 
thus committed the Talisman, and who thus early and thus fully experienced 
its mighty power, he who for years despoiled you of the gold which you make 
to yourselves, even as a god-that man whom ye fawned upon, even while you 
hated him, and knew that he despised you--that man was NATHAN MEYER ROTHSCHILD!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . . .

Thus the man Nathan waxed wealthy, more wealthy than any who had gone 
before him, his riches astonished the gentiles, and very justly they said, 
such amazing wealth could not be amassed by one man, in so short a time by 
any human agency, they were right, it was the agency of the talisman, 
directed for a high and holy purpose, to redeem the holy land from the 
pollution of the infidel, and to raise thy fallen towers, O Zion, from the 
dust.

Carefully concealing the treasure thus entrusted to him, by burying it 
beneath a tree in his little garden, while the murderous and plundering 
French vexed the city with their presence, and using it subsequently for a 
brief space, with the certain and rapid success ensured to him by the 
talisman, the young man Rothschild waxed wealthy; and when he had restored 
the treasure to the prince who had reposed trust in him, he came by my 
direction, to this paradise of loan-contracting and speculating fools, and 
became the leviathan of the money markets of Europe. Thus Nathan became the 
loan contractor, the jobber, the money lender to the gentile kings.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . . .
Leaving him to amass wealth, and devoutly praying that he might prove more 
worthy of the talisman than those who had before held it, I once again made 
my way to France, for there, too, I had most important work to do in 
forwarding the great cause.

Superior in other respects to all the men of his time, the Emperor 
Napoleon, so often favoured with what verily seemed to be a fated and 
inevitable good fortune, was much prone to belief in auguries and tokens, 
in predictions, and in the whole paraphernalia of the imperfect notions of 
fatality formed by the Nazarenes of an elder day, and still universally 
held by the bloody and brutal brood of Mahomet, whose name be anathema!

He held up to the admiration of the French people the phantom of military 
glory; he played upon their imaginations by the splendours of his 
intellectual despotism; he displayed the fire of genius and the cool 
collected judgment of a statesman; and with him seems to repose the secret 
of governing the restless Gauls.

Availing myself of this, I caused it to be made known, as if by accident; 
that in the Bois de Boulogne, a man of red skin and horribly huge bulk and 
tall stature, dressed in the garb of the wandering children of the Arabian 
deserts, was at times met with by benighted travellers on that road; and 
that to all whom he met he spake strange words of truth, both in narrating 
all that they had experienced, and predicting that which was about to come 
to pass.

The curiosity of the Emperor was excited, and, leaving his capital 
privately and by night, he repaired to the part of the wood which had been 
indicated to him, armed, indeed to the teeth, for he was sagacious as the 
hill fox, but unattended, for he was brave as the Nem‘an lion.

That was a fatal interview for him. I found him of this world, worldly; 
crafty, bold, a lover to intensity of his own nation, a still more intense 
lover of his own power. and his own fame; all this was well; but so far 
from deeming the despised and long suffering Jews worthy to build their 
holy temple and re-establish their antique kingdom, that he, the Nazarene 
by birth, the infidel by election and in belief, he, HE! panted to possess 
and to colonise our Palestine! I discerned that and he was doomed. From 
that hour he was as virtually lost as was Belshazzar, the King of Chaldea, 
when the mystic writing gleamed forth, from the walls of the house of 
wassail and of revelry.

I poured forth into his astonished ear the most secret thoughts of his past 
life; I ministered to his pride, his ambition, his own impious confidence 
in his own power, and trust in his own fortune. I became his nightly 
visitant and his nightly counsellor. The result of my counsels was the 
march of four hundred thousand of the very flower of the French to attack 
the Scythian barbarians. Borodino was won; Moscow taken by the Gaul and 
burned by the patriotism or passion of Rostopschin; the retreat commenced, 
and God is great! fatigue, famine, and winter, the winter of the North! did 
all the rest of the business. Napoleon had accomplished his destiny. 
Rothschild was right speedily to make that ruin utter and inevitable not to 
be repaired.

Though the ruin of Napoleon was decided, and inevitable from the very 
moment of his determining upon his mad, and thrice madly-timed expedition 
to Russia, it was by no means expected, or even deemed possible by his 
supporters, i.e., by nine of every ten of the adult men of France. His 
marvellous escape amid the hellish fire at the bridge of Lodi; his still 
more marvellous escape from Egypt, when he sailed through a fog which 
seemed as if made on purpose to hide him from his fierce and eager foemen 
of England; these and a thousand other seemingly fated occurrences of good 
fortune, and, to set aside all the REAL benefits which he conferred upon 
France, a tithe of which might have upheld the throne of even that honest 
bigot, Charles X. his bombastic but felicitous eloquence, and the 
consummate tact with which he contrived to confirm the French in the notion 
which they were only too ready to indulge that every Frenchman was a 
partner in the glory of Napoleon made that most adroit as well as profound 
man the very Mohomet of France. The followers of the fierce and politic 
impostor of Araby did not more implicitly and entirely believe in the 
validity and sanctity of that impostor's pretensions than did the mass of 
the French people in the certainty, the FATED inevitability, of Napoleon's 
ultimate success. And, accordingly, the indescribable horrors and waste of 
blood and treasure at Moscow did not deprive him of their affections; nay, 
even the treaty of Fontainebleau, which consigned the Emperor to the petty 
island of Elba, and restored the incapable and gourmand Bourbon to the 
throne of France, could not abate one jot of heart or hope in the true 
Buonapartists of France. "He'll return with the violet," was the phrase; 
and the phrase gave vigour to old men, and increased hope and anticipative 
exultation to the young men.

He came, and the throne of France bid fair to be his until his death; by 
whom was his hope blasted? By the talents of Blucher and Wellington? By the 
boasted discipline of the Prussians? By the sheer, brute, dogged, 
unyielding bull-dogism of the soldiery of England? By the treachery of 
Grouchy (to whom the Aid-de-Camp never delivered the Emperor's order?) By 
the genius of the allied generals? By the strength of the allied troops? 
Not to any one or the other of these did the first warrior and statesman of 
modern times owe his ruin: but simply Nathan Meyer Rothschild armed with 
the talisman!

The British minister was driven almost to distraction for money; the first 
houses in London refused to aid him with a shilling. They were doubtful of 
the success of the allied powers; and the very doubt was within a little of 
being, like many other auguries, the cause of its own completion, and its 
own justification. Without money from England, not a small portion of the 
troops which fought upon the blood-stained plains of Waterloo would have 
been unable to reach that scene of strife and carnage, in time to take part 
in the sanguinary business of the three days. This would have been 
something in favour of the Emperor. But even this was the smallest part of 
what England's want of money would have achieved in favour of "Le Petit 
Corporale;" but for the English minister obtaining gold, THE Generals and 
the Senators of France would have gone Unbribed: THEY WERE bribed, (to the 
honour of the frequently shallow and flash, but always honest, Benjamin 
Constant, I must admit that he, and he alone, of all the Chamber of 
Deputies, refused and scorned the proffered gold); and Napoleon fell a 
victim to their cupidity. Where did the English minister obtain the means 
of bribing the constituted authorities of France, and of thus destroying a 
man, who, but for that bribery, would, to all human seeming, have beaten 
the armed hosts of his crowned foemen? There was but one man on earth who 
both COULD and would provide the millions of golden pounds, required for 
the instant purposes of the English minister. That man was ROTHSCHILD. By 
my instructions he let the Minister have the hard gold; he had my 
instructions at the same time to do so, only on one condition. Alas! that 
he should suppose that a half obedience would satisfy me! As if the 
wanderer of Jerusalem could know any medium; as if anything could satisfy 
ME but the full and zealous performance of the Jew's part in the 
re-establishment of Judah's kingdom the rebuilding of thy Towers, oh, 
Jerusalem!

That most elaborate of bad jokes, history, will, no doubt, say that the jew 
Rothschild lent the Nazarene elder called Lord Liverpool, the sum necessary 
to crush Napoleon Buonaparte, in consideration of some such Judean motive 
as twenty-five per cent. interest. The writers of history, in that case, 
will, as usual, lie; the readers of it will, as is also usual, be very 
egregiously and very deservedly deceived. Rothschild was commanded to lend 
the money on terms very different indeed from exorbitant interest. 
Nazarenes! those terms were said is a few words! The restoration of Judea 
to our ancient race; the guarantee of England for the independence of the 
kingdom of Judea. Ruin stared the English minister in the face if he 
refused! but he hesitated; Rothschild knew that the minister had already 
been refused by Barings, Reid and Irving, and all the other chief 
capitalists, and, therefore, with an expressive sneer advised him to try 
them. The sneer struck home and the minister went to the council. In twelve 
hours the millions were in the possession of the minister, and a secret 
agreement, guaranteed by the sign manual of royalty, was in the possession 
of Rothschild, for the restoration of Judea in twenty-one years from the 
day on which Napoleon should be finally driven from France. This very year 
my task should have been completed; would have been completed; but he, 
Rothschild, who for six-and-twenty years had proved himself even as one of 
the elders in Israel for wisdom and faithfulness, he, he, at the twelfth 
hour, proved false, deferred my hope yet once more, and compelled me, all 
reluctant as I was, to consign him to inevitable ruin of fortune, or to 
instant exile and speedy death. Though he originally obeyed my behest au 
pied de la lettre, his long round of success (unchecked save once when I 
reproved his presumption with the loss of a hundred thousand pounds in a 
single day's business in Spanish Stock, and then restored his lost talisman 
in such wise as to lead him to suppose he had merely mislaid it), and his 
profound ignorance of my having the power of, at any instant, recalling the 
talisman, made him more and more purse proud-more and more utterly and 
incurably devoted to the art of deluding the Nazarenes, not as a means to a 
high and hallowed end, but as a source of fortune and power to himself, 
that it was rather with grief than surprise that I recently heard from his 
own lips that he had basely sold the agreement for the restoration of Judea 
for the promise of a petty English Emancipation Bill for our people, and a 
petty English peerage for himself. This delectable job, this high-minded 
bargain, was to be completed in the ensuing years by which time the 
purse-proud, haughty renegade reckoned upon being worth £5,ooo,ooo of 
money. He was already worth above four; his talisman disappeared, and I 
took care he should know that it had disappeared for ever.

He never ventured upon the Exchange again, or the scribe who wrote his will 
should hate been saved much trouble and time.

Did I give him the talisman, to enable him like Sampson Gideon to intrude 
his family and found a Peerage among the Normans? or to stifle his 
conscience with the weight of riches? or to flatter it with ostentatious 
charities? No Israelite can put his hand to the plough of this great work, 
look back and live!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . . . .

He returned to Germany and was stricken with disease at Frankfort, his 
recovery precluded, by his dread lest my resentment should involve his 
remaining property. He died within the walls of that very city which had 
witnessed his dawning fortunes.

For have I not in a nightdream seen Elias? and have I not been commanded to 
make a new talisman and to bear it to one shown to me and named to me by 
Elias? and has not this instrument, thus immediately appointed by heaven 
already made essay of the power of the talisman, and should not the vast 
fortune of Rothschild have swelled the already numerous triumphs of 
Israel's new and heaven appointed champion? Yea, verily.

Accursed Nazarenes! The issue is now no longer uncertain; even as the stars 
in their course fought against Sisera, even so henceforth, even until the 
restoration of Palestine, shall the course of seemingly human events fight 
against and weaken all Nazarene nations, and greatly strengthen and 
aggrandize my people. In the luxurious and inviting east, in the barbarous 
and revolting north ; among the degenerate dwellers in Italy; among the 
senseless bigotry of Spain and Portugal ; in every land and among every 
people the Jewish cause shall be unconsciously but potently forwarded; the 
cause of the Nazarene as unconsciously but as potently beaten backward. 
Selah, Selah, let it be; Jehovah! THOU hast said it SHALL be.

FINIS.
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