We must exist alone.
To preserve that loneliness is the great end and essence of our law.
What have we to do with Bagdad, or its people, where every instant we
must witness some violation of our statutes? Can we pray with them?
Can we eat with them? Alike in the highest duties, and the lowest
occupations of existence, we cannot mingle. From the altar of our God to
our domestic boards, we are alike separated from them. Sire, you may be
King of Bagdad, but you cannot, at the same time, be a Jew.'
'I am what I am. I worship the Lord of Hosts. Perhaps, in His mercy, He
will accept the days of Nishapur and the Tigris as a compensation for
some slight relaxation in the ritual of the baker and the bath.'
'And mark my words: it was by the ritual of the baker and the bath that
Alroy rose, and without it he will fall. The genius of the people, which
he shared, raised him; and that genius has been formed by the law of
Moses. Based on that law, he might indeed have handed down an empire
to his long posterity; and now, though the tree of his fortunes seems
springing up by the water-side, fed by a thousand springs, and its
branches covered with dew, there is a gangrene in the sap, and to-morrow
he may shrink like a shrivelled gourd.
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