It supplied them not only with their religion but their art and letters, their politics and their public amusements.

It was their home as well as the Almighty's, and on occasion they were familiar and even a little vulgar with Him.

It was a place in which they could sit in their slippers, metaphorically that is; for though they frequently did so literally, it was by way of reverence, not ease.

They enjoyed themselves in this _Shool_ of theirs; they shouted and skipped and shook and sang, they wailed and moaned; they clenched their fists and thumped their breasts and they were not least happy when they were crying.

There is an apocryphal anecdote of one of them being in the act of taking a pinch of snuff when the "Confession" caught him unexpectedly.
"We have trespassed," he wailed mechanically, as he spasmodically put the snuff in his bosom and beat his nose with his clenched fist.
They prayed metaphysics, acrostics, angelology, Cabalah, history, exegetics, Talmudical controversies, _menus_, recipes, priestly prescriptions, the canonical books, psalms, love-poems, an undigested hotch-potch of exalted and questionable sentiments, of communal and egoistic aspirations of the highest order.