At Beni Hassan, in Egypt, there are some painted representations of men who are supposed to be the counterfeit presentment of Jews fresh from their own country, and therefore in undoubted Jewish costume. The men are variously attired: they are all sandalled. Some wear only short tunics, others a cloak over the tunic. This cloak or plaid, for it is of a striped and figured pattern, and is described as resembling the fine grass-woven cloth of the South Sea, is worn over the left shoulder and under the right arm, leaving the latter free for action. Other figures are clad in fringed shirts, or tunics of the same material as the plaid, reminding one of the command given unto Moses in the fifteenth chapter of Numbers: “Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribbon of blue.” And again, in Deuteronomy: “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself:” and it will be remembered that a formal observance of this command gave ground for censure, when the Jews were, at a later period, reproached because “all their works they do for to be seen of men; they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments.”
The garments in the paintings at Beni Hassan are of the very simplest construction. The Hebrew maker of them could hardly have committed the trifling mistake made by Andrew Fern, the weather-brained tailor of Cromarty, who used, says Hugh Miller, “to do very odd things, especially when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that Andrew fabricated for him his first jacket, and that though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes!” There are no pocket-holes visible in the Jewish garments.
The Jews soon learned to enlarge their fringes. In the Valley of Bab el Malook, near Thebes, Belzoni discovered a tomb in which is represented the triumph of Pharaoh Necho, after the victory over the Jews at Megiddo. The Jews, among the captives, look very much like Highlanders, with nothing on but kilts kept down about the knees by leaded bunches of ribbons,—a fashion not unknown to modern Ballerinas, who wear “very thin clothing, and but little of it.” The captives, however, have probably been stripped of their upper garments, which the conquerors may be supposed to have sold to the tailors of Misraim, whereupon to model new fashions for the modish dwellers by the purple Nile.
The Rabbins had some curious ideas touching the original form of Adam, and the peculiar dress made for him and Eve before the Fall. Bartolozzi, in his ‘Bibliotheca Rabbinica,’ notices the tradition that the father of mankind was originally furnished with a tail, but that it was cut off by his Maker, because he looked better without it. Another tradition asserts that, before the fall, Adam and Eve had a transparent covering, a robe of light, of which remnants are left to mankind in the nails of the hands and feet. Let me add, for the sake of those who are fond of adopting primeval colours, that the original hue of the father of man is said to have been a bottle-green. When Stulz furnished Mr. Haynes with his celebrated pea-green coat, the schneider only made him as closely resembling as he could to Eliezer the Tanaite, in his bright green gabardine. And Eliezer if a good patron to tailors, and a wearer of gay colours, was also one of the most learned of men. It is said of him, that if all the firmament were changed into parchment, and the entire ocean into ink, it would not suffice to write all that he knew; for he was the author, among other brief works, of three hundred volumes, solely upon the subject of sowing cucumbers. Perhaps Stulz wished to make the wooer of Miss Foote look as like a philosopher as possible, for Eliezer was not the only sage who walked the world in verdant suit. When Amelia Opie paid her visit to Godwin in Somers’ Town, the teacher of the peoples wore over a fiery crimson waistcoat a bottle-green coat, the colour of the original man, from whom Godwin of course very much doubted whether he really were descended.
The Jews, as rather given to luxury in dress, would have been excellent patrons of the tailors, but for Christian jealousy. In Spain and Portugal, the rich Hebrews were the unqualified delight of the most orthodox of tailors—who loved to dress even more than they did to burn them. But the ultra-pietism of the Queen Regent at Valladolid, in the year 1412,—a year when the prospects of the unfortunate descendants of Israel were particularly gloomy,—put a clog upon trade, without, in any degree, accelerating religion. The counsellor of the Queen was Brother Vincent Ferrer, the inveterate enemy of the Jewish nation. The two together fulminated a decree, in the name of the infant monarch, Don John, which in substance declared that the Jews should live apart, and exercise no trade or calling that was either respectable or profitable. The tailors of Castile would not have been much troubled at this decree, for their old customers had saved money enough to make the fortunes of the entire trade, had it not been for one of the concluding clauses, which did more injury to Christians than to Jews. By these clauses Jews were forbidden to wear cloaks, and were restricted to long robes, of poor materials, over their clothes. The Jewesses were ordered to wear common mantles reaching to their feet, and with hoods to be worn over the head. Disobedience to these clauses was to be visited by “the forfeiture of all the clothes they may have on, to their under garments.” An additional clause fixed against them the canon of a sumptuary law; and no tailor dared to supply to a Jew a suit, the cloth of which cost upwards of thirty maravedis. If the tailor offended against this decree, the Church admonished him, but the law scourged the Jew. The first time a Hebrew donned a suit worth more than the thirty maravedis, he forfeited the suit, and was sent home in his shirt. For a second offence, he forfeited his entire wardrobe; but Justice kept him warm by administering to him a hundred lashes, vigorously applied by the hand of an executioner, who imagined that the more blood he drew the better Heaven would be pleased. For a third indulgence in forbidden finery the Jew was mulcted of all he possessed; “but,” says the gracious Queen Regent, “it is my pleasure that, if the Jews choose, they may make coats and cloaks of the clothes which they now possess.” How lucky for Baron Rothschild that he is not compelled, like his predecessors, to carry his cast-off clothes to his tailor, and have one new coat made out of two old garments!
The Persian Jews were as ill-content at having their tailors’ bills regulated by the Government as were those of the Peninsula. When the Persian Caliphs, who would allow nobody to be well-dressed but the faithful, closed the colleges at Babylon, and expelled the professors, it is said that nobody wept for the latter so much as the handicraftsmen who used to adorn their outward persons. Of these expelled professors, a corsair captured at sea Rabbi Moses, his handsome wife, and their son, Rabbi Hanoch. On their way to Cordova, some Tarquinian-like overtures were made to the lady, who, walking up to her husband, inquired if those drowned at sea would be resuscitated at the resurrection? The Rabbi smiled, and answered with the text:—“The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I will bring again from the depths of the sea.” Thereupon the Hebrew Lucretia plunged into the waves, and her husband into a reverie, in which the calmly-pleasant abounded.
The Jews of Cordova redeemed the other captives, and the first visit of Rabbi père was to a tailor, of whom he ordered an outfit of sackcloth. The honest man was disgusted with his customer’s taste, and valued below cost-price a philosopher who declared that his logic was always more conclusive in sackcloth than in habits spun from finer webs. Attired in his new suit, he entered the Jewish college, where a learned dispute was being carried on with equal warmth and obtuseness. A few words from the mean stranger had an effect like the sun upon a fog, and the president quitting his chair, the man in sackcloth was voted into it by acclamation. The tailor, who had followed out of curiosity, ran to the captain of the corsair, and told him that his late captive was a rare man, of whose value he had been ignorant; and therewith the captain would fain have had the sale cancelled, but the Caliph of Cordova would not listen to such a proposition. Hanoch, the son of Moses, was even more fortunate than his sire, for he espoused a daughter of the House of Peliag. Hanoch displayed such liberality on the occurrence of this union, that for a long time the corporation of tailors, whom he especially benefited on this occasion, were accustomed to name one son in their respective families after so liberal a patron of the craft. The two Jewish households on that day were long celebrated at the hearths of those who made their dresses. The wedding feast was held at Zahara, near the city, and not less than seven hundred Israelites rode thither in costumes that would have dazzled the Incas. Ask a well-to-do Cordovese tailor as to the state of his vocation, and, if he has not now forgotten the once popular legend, he will answer, “It is almost as flourishing, Sir, as in the days of Hanoch, whom our predecessors cursed as a Jew, and blessed as a customer.” It was a neatly cut distinction, and fitted exactly.
Deformity of principle, as well as deformity of person, may sometimes be the mother of Fashion. Thus it is stated by an old French writer, that “the use of great purfles and slit coates was introduced by wanton women;” but he adds, with great unction, that the fashion of these lemans had been adopted by the princesses and ladies of England; and with them he trusts that it will long remain. The same author shows how a fair lady, by following the fashion thus lightly set, became the victim of Satan himself. It must be premised that the author’s daughters had been very desirous of indulging in furred garments, and purfles, and slashed coats; and as the father saved himself from a long bill at the dressmaker’s by telling the following story, I calculate upon the gratitude of all sires similarly beset, if the telling of it here, and by them to their respective young ladies, should be followed by the desired consequences,—which I do not at all anticipate.
A certain knight having lost his wife, and not being at all sure as to the locality in which her spirit rested, applied to a devout hermit, who picked up a living by revealing that sort of secret. In our own days, the Rev. Mr. Godfrey professes to get at the same mystery by dint of table-turning. Well; the reverend gentleman’s ancestor, the hermit, thought upon the question by going to sleep over it; and when he awoke, he informed the knight that he had been, in a vision, to the tribunal of souls, and that he had there learned all about the lady in question. He had seen St. Michael and Lucifer standing opposite each other, and between them a pair of scales, in one of which was placed the lady’s soul, with its select assortment of good deeds; and in the other, all her evil actions. A fiend, with all her garments and jewellery in his possession, was looking on. The beam of the balance had not yet made a movement, when the impetuous St. Michael was about generously to claim the soul thus weighed. Thereupon Lucifer urbanely remarked, that he would take the liberty of informing his once-esteemed friend of a fact probably unknown to him. “This woman,” said he, “had no less than ten gowns and as many coats; and you know as well as I do, my good Michael, that half the quantity would have sufficed for her requirements, and would not have been contrary to the law of God.”
St. Michael looked rather offended at its being supposed that he knew anything about women and their gear, and suggested that too much intercourse with both had been the ruin of his ex-colleague.