On the Trail of the Immigrant

by Edward Alfred Steiner

Worst of all is the element of uncertainty as to the interpretation and operation of the laws, which are now lax, now severe, but always means of extortion and a recognized avenue of income for numerous officials.

The greatest hardship suffered comes from the fact that in the villages, only those residents who were there prior to a certain date, are permitted to remain; while the vast majority is herded together in the city Ghettos, which offer but a scant living to the normal population.

The Jewish part of the city, the Ghetto, is invariably sunk in mud or dust, according as there is rain or sunshine, and is the picture of melancholia. Cadaverous men in long, black, greasy cloaks, countless children and women, who alone carry sunshine; for in the Jewish woman’s heart the hope of giving birth to the Messiah is not yet dead.

All of these people are narrow chested, with the melancholy eyes deep set; they have long bodies and short limbs with which they make ambling strides like the camel in the desert.

It is a haggling, bargaining, pushing, crowding, seething mass; ugly in its environment, hard for the stranger to love, cowed by fear, unmanned by persecution; a thing to jeer at, to ridicule, to plunder and to kill.

This is no apology for the Jew. He carries the faults and the sins of ages; not only his own, but those of his persecutors also. He is himself the keenest critic of racial faults, and once awakened to them hates them and his race most unmercifully. His people are greedy, greasy, and pushing, or doggedly humble; as might be expected of hunted human beings, who for 2,000 years have known no peace, wherever the cross overshadowed them. They could escape torment in a moment by having a few drops of holy water sprinkled over them, for baptism opens to all, the door of opportunity. Whatever else may have died, the ancient fire is not dead in them, and they prefer to suffer, to die, if need be, rather than to enter a so-called Christian church through the door of expediency. Sometimes that door has to be entered, but the Jews who enter it are still Jews, and often they suffer agonies of mind and of spirit, to which persecution might be preferable.

A friend of mine in Moscow, a manufacturer of tobacco, who had lived in that city for thirty years, received sudden notice to dispose of his business and leave the city. He was prosperous, his children were going to school, they knew no home but Moscow, and the town to which they were to go was in the crowded Jewish pale which he had left as a child.

He and his family were baptized, he became a full-fledged Russian, with all the rights of citizenship, and his business went on as usual.

Soon afterwards, however, he became depressed, the depression increasing each time that he had to take part in religious ceremonies which were hateful to him, and it was not long before he grew violently insane.

I have no doubt that as soon as the Jewish disabilities are removed, most of those who have entered the Greek Church will return to the faith of their fathers which they have never really left.