The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

ECONOMIC CONDITIONS

The economic condition of the Jews in the large Eastern European Ghettos is, naturally, extremely bad. Huddled together, either in certain districts of large towns or in villages where they form the greater part of the population, they are compelled to live off and on each other. Crowded into certain walks of life by anti-Jewish legislation or anti-Jewish sentiment, few of them can gain more than sufficient to keep body and soul together. In Galicia it has been estimated that five thousand Jews perish every year from typhus-fever. The Jewish wax-miners in Boryslav, to take but one instance, were forced out of the mines and reduced to utter starvation, for no other reason but because they were Jews. The failure of the harvests in Southern Russia during the last few years has reduced the wage-earners in that part of the country to the position of dependants upon the charity of others; but the Jews who live there in such large numbers do not even benefit from the assistance sent by the government. Similar conditions prevail almost continually in the rest of the Russian pale and in Roumania. The standard of life has naturally been lowered among these people and their general morale has not come out of the trial unscathed.

Nor must it be forgotten that the violent dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people, such as has taken place among the Jews during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has naturally disturbed existing economic conditions, not only among the Jews themselves, but also among those into whose midst they came. These outcasts from Eastern Europe did not come to virgin soil as did the Pilgrim Fathers, but to cities and towns which were already filled with a proletariat engaged in the eager fight for life. The Jews of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, had their hands full with the proper care of the needy ones already in their midst.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Jews as a people are rich. The proletariat among them is proportionately much larger than it is among other people; and thus it came about that the Jewish quarters in all the large cities were already well filled when they were (almost at a moment’s notice) called upon to receive double or triple the number they already held. The actual number of the Jewish poor was thereby greatly increased; for many a family that had been wealthy or in easy circumstances in Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, had been reduced to want and been compelled to take its place among those who needed the help of their brethren. This help was freely and cheerfully given all the world over. Great sacrifices were made by the richer Jews to meet the pressing needs of the hour, and, with no help from the outside world, excepting the London Mansion House Fund in 1882, the thousands and tens of thousands of immigrants were cared for. The Jewish charitable organizations, the development of which has been during the latter half of the nineteenth century the brightest spot in Jewish communal life, rose to the demands of the occasion, and the more than princely munificence of Baron and Baroness Maurice de Hirsch, in regard to the Russian Jews, may justly be looked upon with pride.

New Ghettos, however, were formed in nearly all the cities to which these immigrants came; and this name for the habitat of the poorer Jews became again familiar, aided by the popularity which some modern novelists had given to it. In the Middle Ages and down to our own time the Jews had been forced by the state to live apart in such Ghettos; sometimes for their own protection, sometimes to preserve the outside world from contact with them. The modern Ghetto is a voluntary gathering of the Jews for the purpose of mutual help and from a feeling of reciprocal obligations. To the outside observer it presents an unsightly appearance; it is the abode of poor people, and its population is usually strange in dress, manners, and speech. The sweating system (which in one form or another is to be found in all these Ghettos) has been a dreadful incentive towards grinding the face of the poor; and the results of too great a hoarding are often quite apparent; so that the general morality of the Jews in these Ghettos has suffered in consequence. A people ignorant of the language of their new home are a prey to the evil-intended, who make use of their ignorance for their own commercial and political advancement. This has been notably seen in the city of New York, where a lax city government has permitted the vampires of society to fasten their fangs upon the Ghetto and to produce conditions which call for the active interference of all those forces which seek to stamp out crime and vice. But, on the other hand, to one who is acquainted with the inner life of the Ghetto the virtues which have hitherto characterized the Jews—industry and sobriety—are still to be found there; much more frequently than in those parts where the richer classes congregate, and whose wealth enables them to withdraw their doings from the public gaze. Its members are as industrious as bees in a hive; and though extremely litigatious, drunkenness is unknown and actual crime is comparatively rare.

In order to correct the abuses of the Ghetto, two things are absolutely necessary—the increase of the actual number of Jews there must be stopped, and the crowding into certain distinct fields of work must be brought to an end. A determined effort has already been made to force the new immigrants into less crowded parts of the land to which they come. In this country this is being done by the United Hebrew Charities, and notably by the B’nai B’rith. A distinct clannish feeling has, however, to be overcome, and a fear of venturing into an unknown country where the immigrant will be surrounded by people who do not understand his peculiar social and religious customs.

That the Jew has taken by preference to certain branches of trade and work is due to the fact that anti-Jewish legislation has for centuries closed many walks of life to him, and the guild organization excluded him rigorously from many spheres of activity. Then, too, his richly developed home life has induced a certain distaste for occupations which take the wage-earner out of his home and away from his family. That, however, these inherited instincts can easily be overcome is clearly seen whenever the occasion offers. Even in Amsterdam, where three-fourths of the diamond industry is in the hands of Jews, there are to be found Jewish cobblers, cigar-makers, plumbers, carpet-weavers, mattress-makers, watch-makers, etc. In the East End of London there are, it is true, ten thousand Jews who are engaged in the clothes-making trades, but the rest of the forty thousand Jewish wage-earners of this quarter are scattered over all possible branches of work—masonry, metal-working, textile industries, furniture-making, cap-making, and the like. The same is true of New York, where, although the number of Jews employed in the tailoring industries is disproportionately large, the following list of Hebrew unions shows how far afield the Jewish workman has gone: Cap-Makers, Cap-Blockers, Shirt-Makers, Mattress-Makers, Purse-Makers, Liberty Musical Union, Jewish Chorus Union, Jewellers’ Union, Tin-Smithers’ Union, Bill-Posters, Waiters’ Alliance, Architectural Ironworkers, Hebrew Typographical Union, Tobacco Cutters, Paper-Makers, Bookbinders. The same is relatively true of all other countries where Jews live in large numbers.

It is a popular misconception that the Jew has an innate distaste for agriculture. His continued commercial life, forced upon him for many centuries, has, it is true, disaccustomed the Jew to the life of a tiller of the soil. But the Jewish state was largely an agricultural one; the legislation of the Bible and the later Law Books was clearly intended for an agricultural people; and Jews have never shown an unwillingness to return again to the soil. In Southern Russia there are to-day 225 Jewish colonies with a population of 100,000. In Palestine there are now more than twenty colonies with a population of more than 5000, and similar agricultural colonies have been established at various times in the United States, Canada, and the Argentine Republic. In many cases, it is true, these colonies have not yet become self-supporting, but this has been due in a large measure to maladministration and to the peculiar conditions under which the colonies were founded.

It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent partisan of the existing state of affairs.