From Twilight to Dawn*
PROLOGUE: TWILIGHT
HUSH is on the fields; the nervous stream slackens; once again the soft solemn shadows longingly cast themselves o'er the earth; the birds touch the tree tops ere seeking their nests; the shimmer on the corn is dulled; the red broken wave of the sun's course sinks in a sombre purple cloud; a late songster whispers its night-song to a shaking twig.
Gentle peace reigns above and below. Nor day nor night are here, the one has gone; the heralds that proclaim the other approach, stealthily, with silver signs of peace. A few moments and these beauties will have dispersed—it is twilight, the subdued light in which the day gently fades into night.
In the twilight hour strange fantasies dance before the eyes; yesterday merges gradually into to-morrow, time is not—thought alone has life. Sometimes, at this hour, a spectral figure wanders through the noisy streets; a far-off voice rises; its utterances are above the jar that ever grates upon the ears; it is the sound of prayer issuing from Jewish lips.
In the twilight the shadows softly commingle: in these moments, when the gray growing atmosphere is still tinted with fire reflections, and the flickering flame shapes of romance fill the mind, turn we again to the Jew and the twilight hours of history. . . .
Morn, noon and day had been, for Israel, compassed in the sixteenth century. The spread of knowledge so dispersed the mists of ignorant bigotry that the sun gleamed even in the narrow quarters of the great European cities in which the remnant of Israel was cooped up. Frankfort-on-the-Main, good city of the Holy Roman Empire, had heard Pfeffercorn and Reuchlin dispute so loudly that it marvelled not that Erasmus had a word to say from distant England. Luther had risen, pedestaled upon the printing press: the convulsion attending this new birth shook the world, and a minor tremor was added by the imperial and international quarrels which surrounded that encyclopædic mystery, the Talmud.
The transformation effected a slight change in the fortunes of the Jews; they had become the teachers of the many eager students of the Holy Tongue; the long drawn out Reuchlin "incident" closed a victory for knowledge, and the outcast teachers of the would-be learned were treated with some show of tolerance. Hebrew had become a fashion, and the whim made the Jews less despised than heretofore.
Frankfort was a microcosm of the age, a city of patricians and plebians, of Catholic power and Lutheran influence, wherein for two centuries previous to this