The story is simple enough. Rafael, the son of an old Jewish merchant, has an intrigue with the Gentile maidservant, Rose. His father, Sachel, lives in an atmosphere of mistrust, hard dealing, thievery; a patriarch with all the immemorial wrongs of the ghetto upon his shoulders, and all the racial instinct to preserve property, family and religion from contact with “strange people.” He is blind, but in the night he has heard the lovers’ footsteps in the house. Rose has lied to him; Rafael, as usual, is neglecting his business for Gentile companions. So the play opens. After some bargaining over the dowry, a marriage is arranged for Rafael with the daughter of another merchant. The authority of the Rabbi is called in, but Rafael refuses. He is a freethinker; in the ghetto, but not of it. “Oh, these little rooms of yours, —these hot, stifling chambers of despair, where no gust of wind penetrates, where the green of the leaves grows yellow, where the breath chokes and the soul withers! No, let me speak, Rabbi Haeser! Now I am the priest; I, who am no Jew and no Christian, who feel God in the sunlight, in the summer fragrance, in the gleam of the water and the flowers upon my mother’s grave … I have pity for you, for your mean existence, for your ghettos and your little false gods—for the true God is yet to come, the God of the new community; the commonwealth without gods, without baseness, without slaves!”
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