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rabbi's disciples ran over to Mordecai Joseph and struck him twice. The blood streamed from Mordecai Joseph's nose. Several young people jumped up and grabbed their belts. The cantor pounded on the stand, and commanded them not to interrupt the prayers, but he was ignored. Men wearing the large black phylacteries on their heads, and with the broad phylactery thongs wound around their arms, milled about, pushing one another. A tall, black-complexioned man, whose head almost reached the ceiling, began to waver like a tree in the wind, and cried: "Sacrilege! Blood in the study house! Woe!"
    "Benish is a heretic!" roared Mordecai Joseph. Holding on to his crutch he bent over and hopped forward with insane speed.
    "May he be torn from the earth... root and all!"
    Drops of blood shimmered on his fire-red beard; his low forehead, parchment-yellow, was furrowed. Reb Senderel of Zhilkov, an ancient foe of the rabbi, suddenly screamed: "Rabbi Benish cannot oppose the world! He has always been a man of little faith!"
    "Apostate!" someone shouted, it was hard to tell whether referring to the rabbi or his opponents.
    "Disrupter!"
    "Sinner that leadeth the multitude to sin!"
    "The world's aflame!" Mordecai Joseph kept pounding with his fists. "Benish, the dog, denies the Messiah!"
    "Sabbatai Zevi is a false Messiah!" a high, boyish voice cried out.
    Everyone looked around. It was Chanina, the charity scholar, a young divorced man and a stranger, who sat in Goray studying and lived off the community. He was one of Rabbi Benish's brilliant students--tall, overgrown, nearsighted, with a long, pale face and a chin sprouting with yellow hair. His coat was always unfastened, his vest open, showing a thin, hairy chest. Now he stood there, bent over his study stand, his near-blind eyes blinking, waiting with a silly smile for someone to come and argue with him, so that he could show how learned he was. Mordecai Joseph, who bore Chanina a grudge on account of the many folios of the Talmud he knew by heart and because he was always mixing in where he had no right, suddenly sprang at Chanina with that agility the lame display when they flare up and forget their defect.
    "You, too!" he screamed. "Take him, men!"
    Several young men ran over to Chanina, grabbed hold of his shirt and began to drag him off. Chanina opened his mouth, shouted, tried to tear himself loose from their grip, twisted his long neck back and forth, and flailed about him with his arms, like a drowning man. His coat was torn, his skull cap fell off. Two long, tousled earlocks dangled from his shaven scalp. He tried to defend himself, but the charity students were quick to hold his head, punching him with their weak hands as they helped carry him, as though they were kneading dough. Mordecai Joseph himself proudly helped carry Chanina by the legs, spitting into his face and pinching him viciously. Soon Chanina was lying on the table. They lifted his coat tail. Mordecai Joseph was the first to do the honors.
    "Let this be in place of me!" he cried, in the words of the Yom Kippur scapegoat ritual. He rolled up his sleeves, and gave Chanina so hard a blow that the unlucky youth burst all at once into tears, like a school boy, and whimpered.
    "Let this be instead of me!" Mordecai Joseph ex-claimed with a sigh and again struck Chanina.
    "Let this fowl go to his death!" someone cried responsively, and a hail of blows fell on the idle scholar. Chanina gave a hoarse cry and began to gasp.
    When they took him from the table, his face was blue and his mouth clenched. A boy immediately fetched a vessel of water and poured it over Chanina, drenching him from head to foot. The young man jerked spasmodically and remained full length on the ground. There was a terrified silence in the study house. The one woman who happened to be in the women's gallery pulled at the grate and sobbed. Mordecai Joseph limped back, beating the floor with his crutch, and his face behind the thicket of his beard was