Notes

1. This is a version of the common proverb “It takes three generations to make a gentleman.” The earliest version appears to have come into print in James Fenimore Cooper’s Pioneers (1823), although the expression predates the specific proverb. See Jennifer Speake, A Dictionary of Proverbs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Wolf also refers to the proverb in her article, “Social Life in American Cities: San Francisco” (September 1897), in the Delineator:

Farther east tradition has decreed that three generations from the hod are necessary to the making of a gentleman, and, by analogy, three generations from pick and shovel should do as much for the son of the Golden West—providing, of course, that his adventurous father was inconsiderate enough to be a mere child of nature, born, like Adam, without a grandfather worth mentioning. The generation of present importance is only half-way to the prescribed goal, but there are vigorous young men now in the field who have brought with them from foreign universities and Eastern association a flavor of manly distinction and culture which promises to bear good fruit. The making of a lady, it goes without saying, is beyond the province of calculation. And, leaving out of the question those off-shoots of some of the best families of the East and South who have grown up with the city, a glance at the fine lineaments and bearing of many of San Francisco’s lovely daughters goes to prove that femininity often attains by a bound of intuition what it takes three generations of the stronger sex to acquire. (343)

2. Kate speaks in Irish American dialect. The term “blarney” typifies representations of Irish speech. The term derives from a stone on the top side of Blarney Castle near Cork City in Ireland, which legendarily gives the person who kisses it “the gift of gab.” “Blarney” is used here to refer to flattering or cajoling speech. When Jean compliments the smells of Kate’s kitchen, the Irish cook jokingly accuses Jean of flattery.

3. Shivah (usually transliterated as shiva): the Hebrew word for “seven.” In Judaism, it refers to the seven days of mourning that follow a funeral. Joseph May sat on a footstool when his wife died because of a custom during shiva; the mourner sits on a low stool or box, rather than a regular chair, as a means of expressing grief.

4. In late nineteenth-century American usage, a “dude” denoted a dandy, or a man unduly concerned with fashion and appearance.

5. In this context, “Jewish” refers to the Yiddish language.

6. Chutspah ponim: Yiddish phrase meaning “bold face.” “Chutzpah,” usually translated into English as “nerve” or “shameless audacity,” often has a negative connotation; here, it is being used in a positive and affectionate sense.

7. From the Old French, “jargon” means “jabbering” or “unintelligible speech.” The term was imported from the French into German specifically as a pejorative designation for the Yiddish language.

8. Junge: German for “boy.”

9. The Sabbath lamp, or Judenstern, was a brass, star-shaped, hanging oil lamp, common in Germany and the Netherlands, on which the ceremonial Sabbath lights were kindled.

10. Decalogue: Ten Commandments.

11. In Yiddish, lachachlis ponim literally means “spiteful face.”

12. Ich weiss viel: German for “I know a lot.” Note that oysters and frogs are treyf (unkosher), forbidden according to traditional Jewish dietary laws.

13. Yitt: Jew.

14. Schtiegen: may be used here to mean “seriously” in Yiddish.

15. Picquet: a card game. Usually spelled “piquet,” the game originated in France and uses French terms.

16. Chevalier: a French term for a knight or chivalrous man.

17. Golgotha: the hill in Jerusalem where Christ was crucified.

18. The Verein Club, or the San Francisco Schuetzen Verein, was a men’s paramilitary and social organization founded in 1859 by German Jewish immigrants. The Concordia Club was a men’s social club founded in 1864 by German American Jews; Levi Strauss and other members of Temple Emanu-El belonged to the club.

19. Wolf appears to be using the term “Jacobian” to refer to the biblical story of the twins Jacob and Esau. In Genesis, Jacob convinces Esau, who was born first, to sell his birthright for a “mess of pottage.” Jacob later tricks their blind father into bestowing upon him the blessing of the firstborn son. In simplified terms, one might say that Jacob “steals” Esau’s birthright.

20. Table d’hôte (French): a complete meal of several courses offered at a fixed price.

21. Grande dame (French): a great lady.

22. In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, many hotels and summer resorts barred their doors to Jews. In 1877, this discriminatory practice provoked a nationwide controversy when banker Joseph Seligman and his family were denied entry to the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga, New York, by the hotel’s owner, Judge Henry Hilton.

23. Meshumad (or meshumed): Yiddish for “apostate.”

24. The Francis Scott Key monument was built in 1888 in Golden Gate Park to commemorate the man who wrote the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

25. In 1894, the California Midwinter International Exposition (or Midwinter Fair) was held in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. The “Museum” refers to the exposition’s fine arts building, which is now the de Young Museum, and the “Japanese village” refers to the ethnological exhibit on Japanese culture that later became the Japanese Tea Garden.

26. Shabos (usually Shabbos): Yiddish term for the Jewish Sabbath, or day of rest and worship. “Make Shabos” refers to preparing for the Sabbath, especially for the Sabbath meal. A band of crepe worn on a hat or a sleeve was a sign of mourning.

27. Lass mich gehen: German for “let me go.”

28. Moshelich (usually transliterated as mayselekh): Yiddish for “stories” or “tales.”

29. Ach Gott!: German for “Oh God!”

30. Palace Hotel: a luxury hotel that opened in San Francisco in 1875. The Philomath Club, the women’s club to which Wolf belonged, held its regular meetings at this hotel.

31. Nix: German for “nothing.”

32. Chérie: French for “dear.”

33. N’est-ce pas: French for “Isn’t it?”

34. Amour propre: French term meaning “self-respect.”

35. Fifth commandment: refers to the fifth of the Ten Commandments in the Jewish tradition, which states, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” “Choice of parents” is likely an allusion to Israel Zangwill’s story of the same name. See I. Zangwill, “The Choice of Parents,” Cosmopolitan 20, no. 2 (1895): 209–17. In talking with his friend, the main character of Zangwill’s story explains that he is writing for “posterity,” and by this term he means that his audience is the unborn. He confronts his incredulous friend, questioning why “retain such an inherent anachronism as compulsory birth, a disability which often cripples a man upon the very threshold of his career? . . . If you are to develop your individuality, it must be your own individuality that you develop, not an individuality thrust upon you by a couple of outsiders” (210).

36. Judith, a Jewish biblical heroine, known for beheading the Assyrian general Holofernes, was a popular subject in Western art.

37. Quién sabe?: Spanish for “who knows?”

38. The Omar Club may be a reference to the Omar Khayyam Club of London, which was founded in 1892 by admirers of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat; the Omar Khayyam Club of America was founded in 1900. For a history of the British club, see The Book of the Omar Khayyám Club, 1892–1910 (London, 1910).

39. This is a reference to Kate’s underlying anti-Semitism. In medieval European culture, Jews were represented as having the cloven foot of the devil.

40. The Thirteen Articles of faith, or the Shloshah Asar Ikkarim, recorded by Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (“Maimonides” or “The Rambam”), are a list of principles of the Jewish religion, as derived from the Torah.

41. The idea of eschewing religious dogma while retaining a belief in an Ineffable God was not unique to Jean but prevalent among religious reformers, including the leadership of Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco. According to the prevailing sentiment of the Reform movement at the time, Judaism was naturally progressing from biblical and postbiblical times toward contemporaneous Reform Judaism and beyond, leaving behind particularistic forms and dogmas and moving toward a universal ethical monotheism. For an explanation of radical Reform Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century that specifically focuses on the theology that Wolf would have encountered at Temple Emanu-El, see Marc Lee Raphael, “Rabbi Jacob Voorsanger of San Francisco on Jews and Judaism: The Implications of the Pittsburgh Platform,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 63, no. 2 (1973): 185–203.

42. 2 Samuel 14:25.

43. The Chronicle Building was San Francisco’s first skyscraper and housed the offices of the San Francisco Chronicle.

44. Lotta’s fountain, commissioned by actress Lotta Crabtree in 1875 as a gift to the city of San Francisco, was originally located at the intersection of 3rd, Market, and Kearny Streets. In 1974, it was relocated to the intersection of Market Street where Geary and Kearny streets connect.

45. As discussed in the introduction, Wolf’s family belonged to Temple Emanu-El, which was originally located on Sutter Street and was also known as “The Sutter Street Temple.”

46. Roentgen (or Röntgen) ray: a precursor to the X-ray, named for German scientist Wilhelm Röntgen, who discovered the rays around 1895.

47. A lundi: French for “see you Monday.”

48. Gott im himmel!: a Yiddish exclamation meaning “God in heaven!” (or “good heavens!”).

49. Poseur: a poser or fake, an affectation from the French.

50. Prince of Courtesy: possibly a reference to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “In the Garden at Swainston,” which reads, “Still in the house in his coffin the Prince of courtesy lay.” The phrase denotes someone of patrician family and emphasizes chivalric virtue.

51. The French Hospital was founded in 1851 as San Francisco’s first private hospital.

52. “The ass who preferred his thistle to gold”: a reference to Aesop’s fable “The Ass Eating Thistles.” The moral of the fable is that different people have different tastes or preferences. Wolf uses this same phrase in her novella “The Conflict,” published in the Smart Set in 1906.

53. “Take the cash and let the credit go”: a common proverb, famously used by Edward FitzGerald (1809–83) in The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: “Some for the Glories of This World; and some / Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come; / Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, / Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!”

54. Bonne bouche: French for “tasty bite.”

55. The superstition against seating thirteen people at a table relates to the thirteen people at the Last Supper.

56. The “Messianic hypothesis” likely refers to the belief that the messiah, or savior, will come to liberate and redeem the Jewish people.

57. Phil May (1864–1903) was a British artist who did illustrations for many British and Australian periodicals, including Punch magazine, where he became a regular contributor beginning in 1895. The January 1904 Magazine of Art published a tribute to May, recognizing that he “will always be remembered for his technical perfection, for his mastery in seeing and realizing his character, for the truth with which he fitted not only character but expression to his subjects, for the directness and richness of his humour and for the beauty of his work. . . . As to character, he has so far excelled nearly all other draughtsmen in rendering with remorseless truth every type of low-class Jew, and, moreover, wrote Hebrew so well, that it has often been surmised that he sprang from the race himself” (31, 35). However, based on a biography of Phil May by James Thorpe, this surmise does not appear to be accurate; see James Thorpe, The English Masters of Black-and-White: Phil May (London: Art and Technics, 1948). Wolf would have been acquainted with May’s work from his illustrations for Zangwill’s The King of Schnorrers (1894), if not from other sources.

58. Baden-Baden: a fashionable spa town in southwestern Germany, near the border with France. Tourists often visited for medicinal purposes since the hot springs were believed to cure a variety of ailments.

59. A reference to t’chiyat hameitim, Hebrew for “the resurrection of the dead,” a doctrine of Jewish theology. According to this doctrine, during the Messianic Age, the Temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem, where the Jewish people will gather from the far corners of the earth and the bodies of the dead will be brought back to life and reunited with their souls.

60. This phrase is from Deuteronomy 32:15: “But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked: thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness; then he forsook God which made him, and lightly esteemed the Rock of his salvation.”

61. Dreyfus: French Jewish military officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus was falsely accused and convicted of treason in 1894 and imprisoned in the French penal colony on Devil’s Island. The Dreyfus Affair is one of the most infamous historical cases of anti-Semitism.

62. Nebbich (or Nebbish): Yiddish for “poor thing” or “poor man,” often used to indicate an object of pity.

63. Coon song: a musical genre especially popular from the mid-1880s until the early 1900s. Composed by both white and black musicians, coon songs conveyed stereotypical images of African Americans using ragtime rhythms; the word “coon” was a common racial slur in the nineteenth-century United States. “Orpheum joke” refers to a vaudeville joke; the Orpheum Circuit was a chain of vaudeville theaters. Puck: a late nineteenth-century American magazine featuring political satire, cartoons, and other humor; as discussed in the introduction, Puck regularly printed anti-Semitic caricatures.

64. Edition de luxe (French): limited or rare edition. Chef-d’oeuvre (French): masterpiece.

65. “Is the game worth the candle?”: a relatively common expression asking whether the rewards are worth the effort to attain them. It originated as a translation of the French phrase le jeu n’en vaut la chandelle.

66. En masse (French): in a group. Tout-ensemble (French): an assemblage of details forming the whole.

67. Clo’ man: clothing seller. For more details regarding the social geography of San Francisco, see Decker, Fortunes and Failures, 196–230.

68. Puss-in-the-corner: a children’s game for five players, similar to musical chairs. The player nominated to be “puss” stands in the center, and each of the other players stands in a corner. The players in the corners attempt to exchange places as the puss attempts to gain a corner. The player left without a corner becomes the new puss.

69. Edward MacDowell (1860–1908): an American composer and pianist who wrote verses for many of his own musical compositions. In 1907, MacDowell’s wife, Marion Nevins MacDowell, founded the famous MacDowell artists’ colony at the site of the New Hampshire farm where he worked in the summers during the last decade of his life.

70. Sedar (usually transliterated as seder): a Jewish ritual meal held at the beginning of the Passover holiday. In Hebrew, “seder” means “order,” referring to the prescribed order of the service that accompanies the meal.

71. Joseph is referencing the game of piquet here.

72. Nix-nuts: German for “good for nothing.”

73. Daniel is referring to Jean’s charitable work with the settlement houses, part of the late nineteenth-century movement in which middle-class volunteers, usually women, provided educational, recreational, and social services to the urban poor. As part of the settlement house movement, the San Francisco Boys’ Club was “formed to help the growing boys who haunt the streets become useful citizens instead of roughs” (“Local News in Brief,” San Francisco Call, March 29, 1894, 7). See also Ann Marie Wilson, “‘Neutral Territory’: The Politics of Settlement Work in San Francisco, 1894–1906,” in California Women and Politics: From the Gold Rush to the Great Depression, ed. Robert W. Cherny, Mary Ann Irwin, and Ann Marie Wilson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 97–122.

74. The reference is to the Victorian writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881).

75. Bruited: rumored (English, of French etymology).

76. Lohengrin: an 1850 opera by Richard Wagner, a German composer and author of “Jewishness in Music” (1850), a controversial essay that attacked Jews for having a negative effect on German culture.

77. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856): a German-Jewish poet whose lyric poetry was often set to music by famous composers. Catulle Mendès (1841–1909): a descendant of Portuguese Jews who was born in France and became a poet, dramatist, and art critic. In his 1886 critical study, Richard Wagner, Mendès praised the German composer’s work.

78. Costermonger: a boisterous singsong, like that of a street seller.

79. Passover: a Jewish festival commemorating the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and their liberation from slavery. Participants in the meal will often recline on pillows as a symbol of freedom.

80. During the Passover seder, participants drink four cups of ceremonial wine over the course of the service.

81. Wolf is listing some of the items that appear on the seder plate, which is placed on the table during the meal. These items are symbolic, though interpretations vary. For example, during the holiday, Jews eat unleavened bread (called “matzah” or “matzo”) because the Israelites did not have the time to allow their bread to rise in their rush to leave Egypt. The bone of the paschal lamb (z’roa) represents the lamb that was sacrificed on the night the Jews left Egypt. The bitter herb (maror) is a reminder of the bitterness of slavery. Parsley is a symbol of springtime (which is when Passover takes place) and new beginnings; today, it is typically dipped in salt water rather than vinegar to represent the tears shed by the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt. The almonds and apples refer to the charoset (today, usually a mixture of apples, wine, and walnuts), which represents the mortar of the bricks made by the enslaved Israelites. Charoset derives from the Hebrew word for “clay.”

82. Wolf appears to be using the word “house-cap” to refer to the skullcap, or yarmulke, which Jewish men wear on their heads as a sign of respect for God.

83. Elijah: a biblical prophet who, it is said, would arrive on Earth to announce the coming of the Messiah. During the seder, a cup of wine is placed on the table and the door to the house is opened in order to welcome Elijah.

84. “The quaintly illustrated books”: a reference to the Passover Haggadah, the text used during the seder. Hallel: a prayer of thanksgiving recited during the Passover service.

85. “The paean on the Building of the Temple” refers to the song “Adir Hu” (“Mighty Is He”), which is sung toward the end of the seder to express the hope that God will rebuild the Holy Temple.

86. Earlier, Paul Stein uses the term “enforced specialization” to refer to the idea that, historically, Jews became financiers because they were often kept out of other professions due to anti-Semitism.

87. Tête-à-têtes (French): a face-to-face conversation between two people.

88. Wolf published a poem about love titled “Eschscholtzia (California Poppy)” in 1896 in the American Jewess.

89. Jean is referring to God as an abstraction in accord with the Reform Jewish understanding of the “God-idea.” When Philip references Sinai, he recalls to her a biblical tradition of an immanent and personal God. Jean responds with the assertion that Judaism has progressed over time and the Bible is a record of an earlier form of Judaism suited to its own time but not of the present moment. Jean’s position on the nature of God and the relationship of current Judaism to the biblical tradition aligns with the theological commitments laid out in the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform of the Reform movement.

90. A Scots phrase that translates to “days gone by,” “Auld Lang Syne” is also a popular folk song based on a poem by Robert Burns and is often sung at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

91. Jean is referring to the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions, the largest event among many other congresses at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The World Congress of Religions was the first formal gathering of representatives of Eastern and Western spiritual traditions. Several Reform rabbis spoke at the gathering. Jean may be referring to Dr. Emil Hirsch’s speech “Elements of Universal Religion” or Dr. G. Gotthiel’s “Syllabus of a Treatise on the Development of Religious Ideas in Judaism since Moses Mendelsohn.”

92. The first proclamation of the 1885 Pittsburgh Platform is that all religions express “the consciousness of the indwelling of God in man.”

93. Jean is likely referring to the Shemah, the daily prayer. It is the best-known prayer in Judaism, affirming faith in one God.

94. This echoes the classical Reform sentiment that Judaism hides within itself a treasure of ideas and sentiments—a kernel—that can only be reached by shucking the husk of forms and rituals to reach the essence of the religious ideas, freed of ceremony. See, for instance, the 1844 platform of the Berlin Association for the Reform of Judaism, found in W. Gunther Plaut, The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of Its European Origins (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015).

95. Malvolio: a character from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The term is used to refer to individuals who like to spoil other people’s fun.

96. This is an indication of the particularities of Reform Jewish custom in which the symbol of the holiday—unleavened bread—is present, even though the characters are not adhering to the law of eating only unleavened bread.

97. Matzos: unleavened bread.

98. Yuntoff (usually transliterated as yontif): Yiddish for holiday. Joseph and Daniel are wishing each other a “good holiday.”

99. Later renamed the San Francisco Art Institute, the Mark Hopkins Art Institute was San Francisco’s first art and cultural center.

100. Gott: God in Yiddish and German. “A vahre prince” likely means a real, or true, prince; in German, wahr means “true.”

101. Mammonism: a greedy devotion to accumulating wealth.

102. Hic jacet: Latin for “here lies,” a term used to refer to an epitaph.

103. From the Sheva Brachot (seven blessings), a component of the Jewish wedding ritual.

104. “Sisterhood” refers specifically to the organization of women at a synagogue. Schlemielich, an adjectival form of schlemiel, refers to an inept person in Yiddish and is usually used as an insult.

105. Überzwerich: Wolf is likely using the German word überzwerch, which means crosswise, or not as it should be.

106. “Home of Peace” refers to the Jewish cemetery in Colma, California, where members of Temple Emanu-El were buried. For a discussion of Wolf’s gravesite in Home of Peace, see Cantalupo’s preface to this edition.

107. Wie geht’s?: “How are you?” in German.

108. Much of modern San Francisco was built on land made up of sandhills.

109. Verrückt: “crazy” or “insane” in German.

110. “La Lisette de Béranger” (1843) was a popular French folk song written by Frédéric Bérat. In English, the lyrics that Jean sings read as follows:

If you only knew, children,

When I was a young girl,

How I was sweet—

I’m talking about a long time ago—

A fresh face, brilliant eyes,

A smile with white teeth,

So then, oh my children,

So then, oh my children,

A poor working girl, fifteen years old,

Oh! was I sweet.

111. “Madame la Marquise” (1868) is a French song by Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray based on lyrics by poet Alfred de Musset.

112. Chain: likely a reference to di goldene keyt, the “golden chain” of Jewish tradition, passing uninterrupted from one generation to the next. “Auto-da-fes” refers to the ritual of public penance of condemned heretics and apostates that took place after a heretic’s trial during the Spanish or Portuguese Inquisitions, involving a public procession and reading of their sentences. Artistic renderings usually depict torture and burning at the stake, and the term has become associated with this brutal form of punishment. “Yellow patch” refers to badges that Jews were required to wear in public to identify themselves in medieval Europe, beginning in the 1200s and lasting, in some areas, as late as the 1700s. The patch was a requirement in medieval England beginning with the 1274 Statute of Jewry.

113. St. Luke’s: an Episcopalian charitable hospital that opened in 1871 in San Francisco. It was later replaced by the Mission Bernal campus of California Pacific Medical Center.

114. Philip is referencing the custom of holding a Shiva minyan service in the home of the bereaved, a short prayer service that concludes with the recitation of the kaddish to honor the memory of the deceased (see note 119).

115. Friday night is the eve of the Jewish Sabbath.

116. The ark is the cabinet containing the Torah scrolls. The organ indicates that the temple is a Reform synagogue; Reform synagogues in Germany began using organs in the early 1800s, and the instrument continues to be an object of controversy in Judaism since its adoption symbolized an attempt to imitate Christian church music.

117. Shemah: daily prayer. The word “shemah” translates in Hebrew to “listen.”

118. Here Wolf indicates the Reform Jewish theology of an ultimate, millennial moment of universalism, in which all humanity would join together in “brotherhood of man and the Unity of God.” See W. Gunther Plaut, “Introduction,” in The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of Its European Origins, ed. W. Gunther Plaut (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, 1963).

119. Kadesh (usually spelled “Kaddish”): Translated as “holy” in Hebrew or “sanctification” in Aramaic (the language of this particular prayer), kaddish is the Jewish mourning prayer. According to Jewish law, a son is obligated to recite the kaddish three times daily in the eleven months following his father’s death.

120. The Stanford professor, who appears not to be Jewish, is discussing the humanitarian crisis in Cuba during the Cuban War of Independence (1895–98), which ultimately escalated to become the Spanish-American War.

121. Yahrzeit: the anniversary of someone’s death on which the bereaved (usually the children of the deceased) recite kaddish.

122. Paul is asking Daniel whether he is willing to ride (presumably a streetcar) on the Jewish Sabbath, an act that, at that moment in history, would be prohibited according to the dictates of Orthodox Judaism but was permissible among Reform Jews.

123. Paul is referencing the idea of progressive revelation, drawn from the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). This idea, which was embraced by Reformers, was that God did not reveal all of Torah at Mt. Sinai, but that through the use of God-given reason and interpretive abilities, revelation continues to happen as modern Jews study, interpret, reinterpret, and apply the words of the Torah in new contexts. The idea was popularized as Reform theology by Abraham Geiger, one of the founders of the Reform movement.

124. Pharisee: a member of an ancient Jewish sect who observed both the oral law of Moses as well as the written law of the Torah and believed in the afterlife.

125. According to many Reform leaders, the world was naturally progressing toward a universal religion of truth, and Jews had a specific, prophetic role in bringing about that universal moment because of their inheritance of revelation. They saw the future universal religion as a “developed and purified Judaism” and believed Jews as particularly important in this progress toward a universal idea. See Benny Kraut, “Unitarianism on the Reform Mind,” Proceedings of the World Congress of Jewish Studies, 1981, 91–98, and “Judaism Triumphant: Isaac Mayer Wise on Unitarianism and Liberal Christianity,” AJS Review 7, no. 8 (1982): 179–230; Annette M. Boeckler, “Monotheism, Mission, and Multiculturalism: Universalism Then and Now,” in All the World: Universalism, Particularism and the High Holy Days, ed. Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman (Nashville, TN: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2014), 30–39.

126. Daniel chides Paul for his belief that Jews are God’s Chosen People, which Daniel finds chauvinistic. Daniel, in contrast, believes that Jews are chosen only insofar as they have a prophetic role to play, not for any innate characteristic. Wolf’s characters are debating questions about Reform Jewish theology that were being debated in her time.

127. The phrase “existent Ideality” comes from Hegel’s definition of sentience in his 1847 Philosophy of Nature.

128. The quotation is Solomon Shechter’s paraphrasing of the Chasidic master the Ba’al Shem Tov. See Solomon Shechter, “The Chassidim,” in Studies in Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1896).

129. The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Asylum, founded in 1860, was located from 1869 until the 1970s in Berkeley, California.

130. Talmudist: someone who studies ancient rabbinic writings.

131. This is a reference to Heine’s quote, “Wherever a great mind expresses its thought, there is Golgotha.” Heinrich Heine, “Concerning the History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,” trans. Helen Mustard, in The Romantic School and Other Essays, ed. Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub (New York: Continuum, 1985), 170–76.

132. Raphael and Michelangelo are Italian Renaissance artists.

133. 1 Kings 2:19.

134. Wolf is describing the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. The event marked the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898.

135. Don: a Spanish honorific used to refer to men of the nobility. In the Spanish press, and especially in anti-American political cartoons, America was represented as a “Yankee pig” to indicate its imperial greed in trying to take away Spanish territories.

136. Presidio: A US Army post located in San Francisco.

137. Wolf is describing the Battle of Manila, the first major battle of the Spanish-American War, which occurred on May 1, 1898. The battle was a victory for the United States under the leadership of Admiral George Dewey.

138. The “island spoil of war” refers to the Philippines.

139. This is a reference to the biblical story of Samson. See Judges 16:29.

140. A fakir, or faqir, derived from faqr, is a Sufi Muslim ascetic who has taken vows of poverty and worship, renouncing all relations and possessions.

141. This refers to the Jewish daily blessing, “Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who has not made me a gentile.”

142. The City of Peking, Australia, and City of Sidney were troopships used during the Spanish-American War. These ships left San Francisco for Manila on May 25, 1898. As often is the case, Wolf includes historical events in her fiction.

143. In the late nineteenth century, Alcatraz was used as a military fort and prison; it later became a federal penitentiary. Fort Mason was a military base.

144. “Battle Hymn of the Republic”: a patriotic song whose words were written by Julia Ward Howe in 1861 to the music of “John Brown’s Body.” The lyrics were originally written in support of the Union and the abolitionist cause. “The mansion which lifts its terra-cotta beauty to the blue jewel above” is likely a reference to the Cliff House, which had a dramatic roof with turrets, dormers, spires at the time Wolf was writing. For a history of the Cliff House, see “Cliff House History,” National Park Service, nps.gov/goga/learn/historyculture/cliff-house.htm.