CHARLES BEREZIN
269
The Jewish approach to stone is to melt it, to destroy its essential
nature, while the sculptor wants to realize the essential nature of the
stone by chipping away at
-it.
This view of sentimentality resembles
Pound's complaint against usury, that it destroys the essential nature
of money by creating money that does not represent work. Usury
violates the nature of money as a "certificate of work done within a
system."
Pound delineates the conspiratorial aspects of the Jews in· Canto
XXII:
And we went down to the synagogue,
All full of silver lamps
And the top gallery stacked with old benches;
And in came the levite and six little choir kids
And began yowling the ritual
As if it was crammed full of jokes,
And they went through a whole book of it;
And in came the elders and the scribes
About five or six and the rabbi
And he sat down, and grinned, and pulled out his snuff box,
And sniffed up a thumb-full, and grinned,
And called over a kid from the choir, and whispered,
And nodded toward one old buffer,
And the kid took him the snuff-box and he grinned,
And bowed his head, and sniffed up a thumb-full,
And the kid took the box back to the rabbi,
And he grinned, e faceva bisbiglio,
And the kid toted off the box to another bunch of old whiskers,
And he sniffed up his thumb-full
And so on till they'd each had his sniff
And then the rabbi looked at the stranger, and they
All grinned half a yard wider, and the rabbi
Whispered for about two minutes longer,
And the kid brought the box over to me,
And I grinned and sniffed up my thumb-full.
And then they got out the scrolls of the law
And had their little procession
And kissed the ends of the markers. (22/ 104-5)
The constant repetition of "And" at the beginnings of lines, although
one of Pound's standard devices, is meant here to resemble the intoning
of a liturgy. But the activity that the observer reports as ritualistic
consists of grinning, whispering and taking snuff. He says of the actual
ritual that the Jews treated it "as if it was crammed full of jokes."
It
seems to the observer that the Jews in this passage do not take seriously
the content of their texts. What they do take seriously is some kind of
secret that gives rise to all the whispering and grinning. The snuff-
