Well, God made an exception in the case of our Talmudist, and had bestowed a Venus on him, perhaps only in order to confirm the rule by means of this exception, and to make it appear less hard.  His wife was a woman who would have done honor to any king’s throne, or to the pedestal in any sculpture gallery.  Tall, and with a wonderful, voluptuous figure, she carried a strikingly beautiful head, surmounted by thick, black plaits, on her proud shoulders, while two large, dark eyes languished and glowed beneath her long lashes, and her beautiful hands looked as if they were carved out of ivory.

This beautiful woman, who seemed to have been designed by nature to rule, to see slaves at her feet, to provide occupation for the painter’s brush, the sculptor’s chisel and the poet’s pen, lived the life of a rare and beautiful flower, which is shut up in a hot house, for she sat the whole day long wrapped up in her costly fur jacket and looked down dreamily into the street.

She had no children; her husband, the philosopher, studied, and prayed, and studied again from early morning until late at night; his mistress was the Veiled Beauty, as the Talmudists call the Kabbalah.  She paid no attention to her house, for she was rich and everything went of its own accord, just like a clock, which has only to be wound up once a week; nobody came to see her, and she never went out of the house; she sat and dreamed and brooded and—­yawned.

* * * * *

One day when a terrible storm of thunder and lightning had spent all its fury over the town, and all windows had been opened in order to let the Messiah in, the Jewish Venus was sitting as usual in her comfortable easy chair, shivering in spite of her fur jacket, and was thinking, when suddenly she fixed her glowing eyes on the man who was sitting before the Talmud, swaying his body backwards and forwards, and said suddenly: 

“Just tell me, when will Messias, the Son of David, come?”

“He will come,” the philosopher replied, “when all the Jews have become either altogether virtuous or altogether vicious, says the Talmud.”

“Do you believe that all the Jews will ever become virtuous,” the Venus continued.

“How am I to believe that!”

“So Messias will come, when all the Jews have become vicious?”

The philosopher shrugged his shoulders and lost himself again in the labyrinth of the Talmud, out of which, so it is said, only one man returned unscathed, and the beautiful woman at the window again looked dreamily out onto the heavy rain, while her white fingers played unconsciously with the dark fur of her splendid jacket.

* * * * *

One day the Jewish philosopher had gone to a neighboring town, where an important question of ritual was to be decided.  Thanks to his learning, the question was settled sooner than he had expected, and instead of returning the next morning, as he had intended, he came back the same evening with a friend, who was no less learned than himself.  He got out of the carriage at his friend’s house, and went home on foot, and was not a little surprised when he saw his windows brilliantly illuminated, and found an officer’s servant comfortably smoking his pipe in front of his house.