These very _kinder_, again, attained considerable importance among their school-fellows by refusing to pronounce the guttural "ch" of the Hebrew otherwise than as an English "k." "Summons me, indeed," laughed back Mrs.Isaacs.

"A fat lot I'd care for that.

You'd jolly soon expose your character to the magistrate.
Everybody knows what _you_ are." "Your mother!" retorted Mrs.Jacobs mechanically; the elliptical method of expression being greatly in vogue for conversation of a loud character.

Quick as lightning came the parrying stroke.
"Yah! And what was your father, I should like to know ?" Mrs.Isaacs had no sooner made this inquiry than she became conscious of an environment of suppressed laughter; Mrs.Jacobs awoke to the situation a second later, and the two women stood suddenly dumbfounded, petrified, with arms akimbo, staring at each other.
The wise, if apocryphal, Ecclesiasticus, sagely and pithily remarked, many centuries before modern civilization was invented: Jest not with a rude man lest thy ancestors be disgraced.

To this day the oriental methods of insult have survived in the Ghetto.