that world every woman were a widow.  When he realised that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing veils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter.  He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be, a dull life, not only for the women but the men; and that a man might well want five wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them.  But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy, for the complete veiling of the Moslem women of Jerusalem, though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian woman of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more coquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo.  It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed; and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city.  Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions.  When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops that could not be opened, within a stone’s throw of the Sepulchre.  This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism or formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities.  There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem, especially those from the ghettoes of eastern Europe.  They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers.  Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman.  Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil; and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match.  But though they may be ugly, or even horrible, they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behind them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties, along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronze or purple velvet.  They often wear on their heads that odd turban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt.  And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture of a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent.  For Rembrandt the Rabbi was, in a special and double sense, a distinguished figure.  He was something distinct from the world of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin.  But Sargent had to treat his sitters as solid citizens of England or America; and consequently his pictures are direct provocations to a pogrom.  But the light that Rembrandt loved falls not irreverently on the strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven heads of the Jews of Jerusalem.  And I should be sorry for any pogrom that brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrow to the grave.