IN the opening year of the fifteenth century two Jews established a bank in the city of Venice. The enterprise was a bold and novel one, and it was crowned with signal success. The Jews enjoyed more peace and security in the island city than almost anywhere else during the Dark Ages. They that go down to the sea in ships, and behold the works of the Lord and His wonders in the deep, are not the staff of which Dominics and Torquemadas are made. Fanaticism is a fungus that grows in vaults, secluded from the light and air of heaven; the winds that fill the sails of merchant ships, the salt spray that dashes in the faces of hardy marinera are adverse to its life.
Because the Jews of Venice were more kindly treated than their brethren elsewhere, it followed as a natural consequence that they were leas bigoted. It was rather with the indifference of curiosity than with shuddering horror that a son of the senior partner in the Jewish bank ventured one day into the cathedral, that he might admire the treasures gathered from the east, and west, and south to adorn the shrine of St. Mark.
It chanced that one of the great revival preachers of the Middle Ages, Fra Giacopo della Maria, then much celebrated for his eloquence and devotion, stood that day in the pulpit, and thundered mightily against the sins of Venice. Had he done no more, young Baruch might have gone away as he came; and the rather because his own life was so pure and sober that the fiery shafts of the preacher glanced aside from his armor of morality. But Fra Giacopo spoke of One who was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities ―of His sufferings, His patience, the guilty madness of those who slew Him, the atoning efficacy of His death. A conviction sank into the heart of the Jew that this was indeed the Messiah foretold by the prophets of his nation. He struggled against it, tried to put it aside, yet day by day “it did not pass, but grew.” At length he applied for further instruction, and for baptism. Some parts of his new faith, especially the adoration paid to the Virgin, to saints, and to images, jarred upon his feelings, and he never came to like them cordially; but he saw no alternative between his own creed and the Catholicism of the day, and he preferred the latter.
After this his outward circumstances prospered greatly. His conversion gained him the favor of the Christian community, while the storm it raised against him in the Jewish quarter died away gradually, and the sooner because his heart and hand were ever opera to his “poor brother.” His Jewish name of Baruch was softed into Benedetto, and under this appellation he became eventually the head of a prosperous bank of his own. He had all the virtues of the ideal merchant; his “word was his bond,” he was honest, frugal, enterprising, sagacious, and the wealth which he won wisely he expended most liberally. Was there a festa to be got up, a church to be repaired, a bridge to be built, or a family of orphans to be rescued from penury, his townsmen knew the capacious leathern purse that hung at Messer Benedetto’s girdle would be freely opened. Therefore all Venice rejoiced when he found a bride in a wealthy and respectable Christian family; and all Venice mourned with him, when, a few years afterward, his young wife was taken from him by an early death, leaving two little motherless boys.
Benedetto mourned his wife long and sincerely, and did not seek a second alliance. But after an interval of several years, it happened that a mercantile correspondent in Spain appealed to his well-known benevolence on behalf of the miserable survivors of one of those terrible bursts of local fanaticism from which the Jews so frequently suffered. A horrible tragedy, enacted, only too often, had just been rehearsed once again in Segovia. The Jews, a small but wealthy community, had been accused of the murder of a Christian child. Then followed plunder, imprisonment, torture, wholesale judicial murder. The Seville merchant wrote to Benedetto that only two children had escaped, and that even these helpless orphans were not safe in the Spains.
“Send them to me,” was the prompt reply, and Benedetto named a Venetian ship soon to leave Seville, in which they could make the voyage.
The term “children” admits of great latitude in its application; as Benedetto thought when he welcomed to his house a beautiful girl of seventeen, along with a sickly boy two or three years younger. His first idea was to give the young lady a dowry and to marry her suitably, but it seemed impossible to separate her from her brother, who was in much weakness and suffering, and to whom she ministered devotedly. Not seeing anything else to be done under the circumstances, he extended his hospitality to both; and eventually the sorrows of the young Jewess, combined with her rich Spanish beauty, cast a spell over him which he could not break. She became his second wife, and the mother of Raymond’s friend, Theodore.
Benedetto soon found that his youthful bride was no child “whose character was as wax to mold.” Material that once might have been plastic had been hardened in the furnace of affliction. A fanatical hatred to the Goim might be pardoned in a girl who had seen her father and two brothers perish at the stake. This hatred and a love equally passionate for her own race and religion seemed to fill her whole heart, scarcely leaving room for any other sentiment. To Benedetto himself she was reverent, obedient, grateful; that was all. But her child’s young soul was the vessel into which she hoped to pour her own fervid passions; and rather from this than from any softer reason she loved him intensely. She had a fair opportunity for this transfusion of herself; until near the close of his eleventh year the boy was her pupil and constant companion. Her husband had consented, though unwillingly, to bestow on him her father’s Jewish name of Jonathan, afterward transformed, a common process in those days, into its Greek equivalent (or what was nearest to an equivalent) Theodore. She determined to make her son, before all things, a Jew, and in this she was undoubtedly successful.
But whatever his nationality, little Theodore was no common child. From his earliest years he learned with extraordinary quickness, and yet this quickness was not his most remarkable characteristic. He evinced a passion for knowledge; but it was chiefly knowledge of a kind that seemed to his contemporaries useless or trifling. No one knew exactly what he wanted, or how to give it to him. When, for example, he questioned his mother about the heavenly bodies and their motions, she told him how the stars in their courses fought against Sisera. When he asked his father, he told him the uses of the Pole star, and how it guided merchant ships through the waste of waters. When he asked his teachers, they told him what the ancient Greek poets said about the stars. No one gave him the information he really sought, and consequently all left him unsatisfied and discontented.
After his mother’s death, he entreated his father to send him to travel, like the great Marco Polo, near whose house he used often to linger, and who was the only Venetian hero whose achievements he regarded with any enthusiasm. “I want to see strange countries,” said he, “strange beasts and birds, and trees, and what grows in the fields.”
Instead of embracing this stormy and adventurous life, he was condemned to the student’s desk to be put in training for the role of a youthful prodigy, a kind of Admirable Crichton. The forcing system was then in vogue, and hot-house plants were at a high premium. The scholarship of the day was not wide, but it was exact and ardent. The classics, which were every one’s passion, were pre-eminently attractive to youth; partly because the faculties which are usually strongest in youth, memory and fancy, were precisely those which they exercised, but still more because the youth was that of one particular generation, sharing, by a mysterious but well-known law, the impulses and inspirations of their æra.
Theodore’s abilities, which were universally acknowledged, were accordingly devoted to the study of Greek and Latin literature; and all Venice, which had sympathized with Benedetto when it became too evident that his eldest son was growing up a spendthrift and a profligate, congratulated him that his youngest was proving the genius of the family; for by this, time the banker’s three sons were distinguished by fines too definite for a moment’s mistake. There was already the man of pleasure and the man of business, and now there was to be the man of genius.
Benedetto himself was keen in his ambition for Theodore. Gaetano, his firstborn, had disappointed his hopes, though his career had been only too natural. In any age the son of a rich man readily becomes a man of pleasure; and the son of a rich man who is not noble readily becomes the associate of noblemen who are not rich, having wasted their substance with riotous living. The melancholy process by which a prodigal ruins his health, his character, and his estate, unhappily too easy in all great, cities, was particularly easy in Venice. The noble city was fast losing the devout, sober, and frugal character that marked her earlier and brighter days, and beginning her rapid descent into what she has been ever since ―the city of pleasure, of luxury, and of vice. She was now, as it seemed, at the culminating point of her glory and greatness, although under the surface the process of decay had already begun. “Iniquity was found in her.”
Antonio Benedetto’s devotion to the desk and the ledger equaled that of his brother Gaetano to the wine cup and the gaming table. From childhood Antonio had been a pattern boy, obedient, docile, assiduous. He had never given his father an hour’s serious uneasiness; yet it is to be doubted whether that father did not love the scapegrace Gaetano better than the steady Antonio, his partner and right hand in the bank; for Benedetto felt keenly, though he shrank from acknowledging, even to himself, that this “his son that served him” was not quite of his own spirit and temper. His thoughts were less high, his heart less large than his father’s. He was, if not too prudent, at least too calculating; he could opera his hand liberally upon just occasion shown, but he could not, like his father, give “as a king,” without reserve or afterthought; he was less the princely merchant and more the mere honest tradesman.
Thus Theodore became gradually the object of his father’s dearest hopes, as well as of the strong paternal love that has always characterized his race. He was not what is called an affectionate boy, but he was capable of strong attachments, and after his mother’s death the only being he loved was his father. Partly to please him, partly to satisfy his own ambition, he became, with no real love for ancient literature, which indeed he rather despised, a distinguished classical scholar. The contempt he felt for his studies rebounded upon those who shared them with him. He contracted a habit of sneering at his own successes, as if they were things of little value, and it passed too easily into sneering at those over whom he obtained them. On this account, and not for his Jewish birth, which in latitudinarian Venice would readily have been condoned, he was unpopular with his equals. The silent flattery of Raymond’s youthful admiration was all the more gratifying, and the accident of rendering him a service completed the attraction.
When Raymond, with shy pleasure, presented the volume of “Maimonides,” Theodore accepted it graciously, if without enthusiasm. He did not care much for the book, but he knew Raymond had few possessions except his princely birth; and his instincts were too fine to withhold from him the gratification for which he had made a real sacrifice― “the joy of doing kindnesses.” And when afterward the gift proved an unexpected treasure, as a sparkling stone given carelessly by a child’s hand might prove to be a diamond worth a king’s ransom, it seemed to Theodore, if not simply just, at least barely gracious, to acquaint Raymond with the fact.