Yesterday, when they passed through the town in their procession of penance, following their Grand Rabbi as he walked abreast of the Imam, that they might call on God to destroy the eggs of the locust, they had expected the heavens to open over their heads, and to feel the rain fall instantly.  The heavens had not opened, the rain had not fallen, the thick hot cake as of baked air had continued to hang and to palpitate in the sky, and the fierce sun had beaten down as before on the parched and scorching earth.  Seeing this, as their petitions ended, while the Muslims went back to their houses, disappointed but resigned, and muttering to themselves, “It is written,” they had returned to their synagogues, convinced that the plague was a judgment, and resolved, like the sailors of the ship going down to Tarshish, to cast lots and to know for whose cause the evil was upon them.

They were more than a hundred and twenty families, and had thought they were therefore entitled to elect a Synhedrin.  This was in defiance of ceremonial law, for they knew full well that the formation of a Synhedrin and the right to try a capital charge had long been forbidden.  But they were face to face with death, and hence the anachronism had been adopted, and they had fallen back on the custom of their fathers.  So three-and-twenty judges they had appointed, without usurers, or slave-dealers, or gamblers, or aged men or childless ones.

The judges had sat in session the same night, and their judgment had been unanimous.  The lot of Jonah had fallen on Israel.  He had sold himself to their masters and enemies, the Moors, against the hope and interest of his own people; he had driven some of the sons of his race and nation into exile in distant cities; he had brought others to the Kasbah, and yet others to death:  he was a man at open enmity with God, and God had given him, as a mark of His displeasure, a child who was cursed with devils, a daughter who had been born blind and dumb and deaf, and was still without sight and speech.

Could the hand of God’s anger be more plain if it were printed in fire upon the sky?  Israel was the evil one for whose sin they suffered this devastating plague.  The Lord was rebuking them for sparing him, even as He had rebuked Saul for sparing the king and cattle of the Amalekites.  Seventeen years and more he had been among them without being of them, never entering a synagogue, never observing a fast, never joining in a feast.  Not until their judgment went out against him would God’s anger be appeased.  Let them cut him off from the children of his race, and the blessed rain would fall from heaven, and the thirsty earth would drink it, and the eggs of the locust would be destroyed.  But let them put off any longer their rightful task and duty before God and before the people, and their evil time would soon come.  Within eight-and-twenty days the eggs would be hatched, and within eight-and-forty other days the young locust would have wings.