Karlkammer was one of the curiosities of the Ghetto.  In a land of froom men he was the froomest.  He had the very genius of fanaticism.  On the Sabbath he spoke nothing but Hebrew whatever the inconvenience and however numerous the misunderstandings, and if he perchance paid a visit he would not perform the “work” of lifting the knocker.  Of course he had his handkerchief girt round his waist to save him from carrying it, but this compromise being general was not characteristic of Karlkammer any more than his habit of wearing two gigantic sets of phylacteries where average piety was content with one of moderate size.

One of the walls of his room had an unpapered and unpainted scrap in mourning for the fall of Jerusalem.  He walked through the streets to synagogue attired in his praying-shawl and phylacteries, and knocked three times at the door of God’s house when he arrived.  On the Day of Atonement he walked in his socks, though the heavens fell, wearing his grave-clothes.  On this day he remained standing in synagogue from 6 A.M. to 7 P.M. with his body bent at an angle of ninety degrees; it was to give him bending space that he hired two seats.  On Tabernacles, not having any ground whereon to erect a booth, by reason of living in an attic, he knocked a square hole in the ceiling, covered it with branches through which the free air of heaven played, and hung a quadrangle of sheets from roof to floor; he bore to synagogue the tallest Lulav of palm-branches that could be procured and quarrelled with a rival pietist for the last place in the floral procession, as being the lowliest and meekest man in Israel—­an ethical pedestal equally claimed by his rival.  He insisted on bearing a corner of the biers of all the righteous dead.  Almost every other day was a fast-day for Karlkammer, and he had a host of supplementary ceremonial observances which are not for the vulgar.  Compared with him Moses Ansell and the ordinary “Sons of the Covenant” were mere heathens.  He was a man of prodigious distorted mental activity.  He had read omnivorously amid the vast stores of Hebrew literature, was a great authority on Cabalah, understood astronomy, and, still more, astrology, was strong on finance, and could argue coherently on any subject outside religion.  His letters to the press on specifically Jewish subjects were the most hopeless, involved, incomprehensible and protracted puzzles ever penned, bristling with Hebrew quotations from the most varying, the most irrelevant and the most mutually incongruous sources and peppered with the dates of birth and death of every Rabbi mentioned.