THE JEWS’ STREET.
No one dreads to occupy a room on the fourth floor of a European hotel, for the idea of fire never occurs to one. They seldom have fires, and when one occurs it is counted a misdemeanor on the part of the owner of the premises.
This all comes of solid and substantial buildings, to begin with. As a matter of course, a house costs something at the start, but when you get through you have a house for all time. The modern buildings in Frankfort will be standing and in good repair centuries hence. I wish I could live to verify this assertion, but I suppose I shall not.
Going on through the Kossmarkt, where there is a fine monument to Gutenberg, we came to the Zeil, a very beautiful street, and then, turning to the right, found ourselves in the celebrated Judengasse, or Jews’ street, one of the most dingy, wretched, forlorn quarters that can well be imagined.
The street is narrow, dirty, and squalid. The houses are high structures in the last stages of decay, many of them having great props to keep them from falling. The inmates of these apologies for houses are as dirty and squalid as the street itself. There are little pawn shops, dirty shops where old clothes are sold, an occasional tenement house, and very many liquor stores. It is the very acme of squalor and is in great contrast with the elegance of the Zeil, only a block or two away.
A dirty, squalid, beggarly-looking street is Judengasse, but who knows what wealth is hidden behind all this apparent poverty? The Jew of to-day is no less acute than the Jew of the fourteenth century. He has all the wisdom of his ancestors in money getting, with the added experience of time. He can no longer be hauled up by a mailed knight, and compelled to disgorge; but in the stead of the robber, by the strong hand, there is the tax-gatherer; and, in his passion for the accumulation of wealth and disinclination to part with it, the Frankfort Israelite hates the one as heartily as his ancestor did the other. The American Israelite lives as bravely and ostentatiously as any man, and even more so, but the habit in the old European cities is to conceal wealth, to live meanly, and to find enjoyment, not in the using of money but its accumulation.
This street has always been set apart for Jews, and down to the year 1806 it was closed every evening, and on Sundays and holidays, throughout the entire day, and no one of its inhabitants were allowed in any other part of the city, under heavy penalty. Until the time of the Prince Primate, in 1806, no Jew was ever allowed to enter the Römerberg, or market place in front of the town hall. It is said that while the persecutions of the Jews from the twelfth to the seventeenth century throughout the continent was merciless, it continued longer in Germany than any other country, coming down, in Frankfort, even to the present century.
Notwithstanding the abridgement of their rights, a great many of the Jews attained wealth and distinction. The house is still pointed out in Judengasse where the Rothschilds, the founders of the present great banking house, lived during those troublous times.
It is the same old story. The Jews, despised, persecuted and outraged in every way, bore everything patiently, waiting for the time for their revenge. And their revenge has come in every country. In the olden days, in all the countries of Europe, the Jew had no rights which any other nationality or blood was bound to respect. He was outside of the law. He was taxed at the caprice of every prince and power. He had no chance in any court where a Christian was opposed to him, and when they differed among themselves, it was made a pretext to rob him. The most absurd laws were made against them, and it really seemed as though the native rulers and their subjects laid awake nights to invent ways to oppress them.
All this has changed. With a power of endurance simply wonderful, they bowed their heads to their oppressors, and, as all oppressed people do, substituted cunning for brute strength, and trained minds for lusty thews and sinews. They won in the end.