Dreamers of the Ghetto

by Israel Zangwill

Of my own history I do not know that it is needful to tell very much. My grandfather came to Poland from Vienna, whence he had been expelled with all the Jews of the Arch-Duchy, to please the Jesuit-ridden Empress Margaret, who thus testified her gratitude to Heaven for her recovery from an accident that had befallen her at a court ball. I have heard the old man tell how trumpeters proclaimed in the streets the Emperor's edict, and how every petition proved as futile as the great gold cup and the silver jug and basin presented by the Jews to the Imperial couple as they came out of church, after the thanksgiving ceremony.

It was an ill star that guided my grandfather's feet towards Poland. The Jews of Poland had indeed once been paramount in Europe, but the Cossack massacres and the disruption of the kingdom had laid them low, and they spawned beggars who wandered through Europe, preaching and wheedling with equal hyper-subtlety. My father at any rate escaped mendicancy, for he managed to obtain a tiny farm in the north-east of Lithuania, though what with the exactions of the Prince of the estate, and the brutalities of the Russian regiments quartered in the neighborhood, his life was bitter as the waters of Marah. The room in which I was born constituted our whole hut, which was black as a charred log within and without, and never saw the sunlight save through rents in the paper which covered the crossed stripes of pine that formed the windows. In winter, when the stove heated the hovel to suffocation, and the wind and rain drove back the smoke through the hole in the roof that served for chimney, the air was almost as noxious to its human inhabitants as the smoke to the vermin in the half-washed garments that hung across poles. We sat at such times on the floor, not daring to sit higher, for fear of suffocation in the denser atmosphere hovering over us; and I can still feel the drip, drip, on my head, of the fat from the sausages that hung a-drying. In a corner of this living and sleeping room stood the bucket of clean water, and alongside it the slop-pail and the pail into which my father milked the cow. Poor old cow! She was quite like one of the family, and often lingered on in the room after being milked.

My mother kneaded bread with the best, and was as pious as she was deft, never omitting to throw the Sabbath dough in the fire. Not that her prowess as a cook had much opportunity, for our principal fare was corn-bread, mixed with bran and sour cabbage and red beets, which lay stored on the floor in tubs. Here we all lived together—my grandfather, my parents, my brother and sister; not so unhappy, especially on Sabbaths and festivals, when we ate fish cooked with butter in the evening, and meat at dinnertime, washed down with mead or spirits. We children—and indeed our elders—were not seldom kicked and cudgelled by the Russian soldiers, when they were in liquor, but we could be merry enough romping about ragged and unwashed, and our real life was lived in the Holy Land, with patriarchs, kings, and prophets, and we knew that we should return thither some day, and inherit Paradise.

Once, I remember, the Princess, the daughter of our Prince, being fatigued while out hunting, came to rest herself in our mean hut, with her ladies and her lackeys, all so beautiful and splendid, and glittering with gold and silver lace. I stared at the Princess with her lovely face and rich dress, as if my eyes would burst from their sockets. "O how beautiful!" I ejaculated at last, with a sob.

"Little fool!" whispered my father soothingly. "In the world to come the Princess will kindle the stove for us."

I was struck dumb with a medley of feelings. What! such happiness in store for us—for us, who were now buffeted about by drunken Cossacks! But then—the poor Princess! How she would soil her splendid dress, lighting our fire! My eyes filled with tears at the sight of her beautiful face, that seemed so unconscious of the shame waiting for it. I felt I would get up early, and do her task for her secretly. Now I have learnt from my Master the mysteries of the World-To-Come, and I thank the Name that there is a sphere in heaven for princesses who do no wrong.

My brother and I did not get nearer heaven by our transference to school, for the Cheder was a hut little larger than and certainly as smoky as our own, where a crowd of youngsters of all ages sat on hard benches or on the bare earth, according to the state of the upper atmosphere. The master, attired in a dirty blouse, sat unflinchingly on the table, so as to dominate the whole school-room, and between his knees he held a bowl, in which, with a gigantic pestle, he brayed tobacco into snuff. The only work he did many a day was to beat some child black and blue, and sometimes in a savage fit of rage he would half wring off a boy's ear, or almost gouge out an eye. The rest of the teaching was done by the ushers—each in his corner—who were no less vindictive, and would often confiscate to their own consumption the breakfasts and lunches we brought with us. What wonder if our only heaven was when the long day finished, or when Sabbath brought us a whole holiday, and new moon a half.

Of the teaching I acquired here, and later in the Beth-Hamidrash—for I was destined by my grandfather for a Rabbi—my heart is too heavy to speak. Who does not know the arid wilderness of ceremonial law, the barren hyper-subtleties of Talmudic debate, which in my country had then reached the extreme of human sharpness in dividing hairs; the dead sea fruit of learning, unquickened by living waters? And who will wonder if my soul turned in silent longing in search of green pastures, and panted for the water-brooks, and if my childish spirit found solace in the tales my grandfather told me in secret of Sabbataï Zevi, the Son of God? For my grandfather was at heart a Shab (Sabbatian). Though Sabbataï Zevi had turned Turk, the honest veteran was one of those invincibles who refused to abandon their belief in this once celebrated Messiah, and who afterwards transferred their allegiance to the successive Messiahs who reincarnated him, even as he had reincarnated King David. For the new Sabbatian doctrine of the Godhead, according to which the central figure of its Trinity found successive reincarnation in a divine man, had left the door open for a series of prophets who sprang up, now in Tripoli, now in Turkey, now in Hungary. I must do my grandfather the justice to say that his motives were purer than those of many of the sect, whose chief allurement was probably the mystical doctrine of free love, and the Adamite life: for the poor old man became more a debauchee of pain than of pleasure, inflicting upon himself all sorts of penances, to hasten the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. He denied himself food and sleep, rolled himself in snow, practised fumigations and conjurations and self-flagellations, so as to overthrow the legion of demons who, he said, barred the Messiah's advent. Sometimes he terrified me by addressing these evil spirits by their names, and attacking them in a frenzy of courage, smashing windows and stoves in his onslaught till he fell down in a torpor of exhaustion. And, though he was so advanced in years, my father could not deter him from joining in the great pilgrimage that, under Judah the Saint, set out for Palestine, to await the speedy redemption of Israel. Of this Judah the Saint, who boldly fanned the embers of the Sabbatian heresy into fierce flame, I have a vivid recollection, because, against all precedent, he mounted the gallery of the village synagogue to preach to the women. I remember that he was clad in white satin, and held under his arm a scroll of the law, whose bells jingled as he walked; but what will never fade from my recollection is the passion of his words, his wailing over our sins, his profuse tears. Lad as I was, I was wrought up to wish to join this pilgrimage, and it was with bitter tears of twofold regret that I saw my grandfather set out on that disastrous expedition, the leader of which died on the very day of its arrival in Jerusalem.

My own Sabbatian fervor did not grow cold for a long time, and it was nourished by my study of the Cabalah. But, although ere I lay down my pen I shall have to say something of the extraordinary resurgence of this heresy in my old age, and of the great suffering which it caused my beloved Master, the Baal Shem, yet Sabbatianism did not really play much part in my early life, because such severe measures were taken against it by the orthodox Rabbis that it seemed to be stamped out, and I myself, as I began to reflect upon it, found it inconceivable that a Jewish God should turn Turk: as well expect him to turn Christian. But indirectly this redoubtable movement entered largely into my life by way of the great Eibeschütz-Emden controversy. For it will not be stale in the memory of my readers that this lamentable controversy, which divided and embittered the Jews of all Europe, which stirred up Kings and Courts, originated in the accusation against the Chief Rabbi of the Three Communities that the amulets which he—the head of the orthodox tradition—wrote for women in childbirth, were tainted with the Sabbatian heresy. So bitter and widespread were the charges and counter-charges, that at one moment every Jewish community in Europe stood excommunicated by the Chief Rabbis of one side or the other—a ludicrous position, whereof the sole advantage was that it brought the Ban into contempt and disuse. It was not likely that a controversy so long-standing and so impassioned would fail to permeate Poland; and, indeed, among us the quarrel, introduced as it was by Baruch Yavan, who was agent to Bruhl, the Saxon Minister, raged in its most violent form. Every fair and place of gathering became a battle-field for the rival partisans. Bribery, paid spies, treachery, and violence—all the poisonous fruits of warfare—flourished, and the cloud of controversy seems to overhang all my early life.

Although I penetrated deeply into the Cabalah, I could never become a practical adept in the Mysteries. I thought at the time it was because I had not the stamina to carry out the severer penances, and was no true scion of my grandsire. I have still before me the gaunt, emaciated figure of the Saint, whom I found prostrate in our outhouse. I brought him to by unbuttoning his garment at the throat (thus discovering his hair shirt), but in vain did I hasten to bring him all sorts of refreshments. He let nothing pass his lips. I knew this man by repute. He had already performed the penance of Kana, which consisted in fasting daily for six years, and avoiding in his nightly breakfast whatever comes from a living being, be it flesh, fish, milk, or honey. He had likewise practised the penance of Wandering, never staying two days in the same place. I ran to fetch my father to force the poor man to eat, but when I returned the obstinate ascetic was gone. We followed his track, and found him lying dead on the road. We afterwards learnt that even his past penances had not pacified his conscience, and he wished to observe the penance of Weighing, which proportions specific punishments to particular sins. But, finding by careful calculation that his sins were too numerous to be thus atoned for, he had decided to starve himself to death. Although, as I say, I had not the strength for such asceticism, I admired it from afar. I pored over the Zohar and the Gates of Light and the Tree of Life (a work considered too holy to be printed), and I puzzled myself with the mysteries of the Ten Attributes, and the mystic symbolism of God's Beard, whereof every hair is a separate channel of Divine grace; and once I came to comical humiliation from my conceit that I had succeeded by force of incantations in becoming invisible. As this was in connection with my wife, who calmly continued looking at me and talking to me long after I thought I had disappeared, I am reminded to say something of this companion of my boyish years. For, alas! it was she that presently disappeared from my vision, being removed by God in her fifteenth year; so that I, who—being a first-born son, and allowed by the State to found a family—had been married to her by our fathers when I was nine and she was eight, had not much chance of offspring by her; and, indeed, it was in the bearing of our first child—a still-born boy—that she died, despite the old family amulet originally imported from Metz and made by Rabbi Eibeschütz. When, after her death, it was opened by a suspicious partisan of Emden, sure enough it contained a heretical inscription: "In the name of the God of Israel, who dwelleth in the adornment of His might, and in the name of His anointed Sabbataï Zevi, through whose wounds healing is come to us, I adjure all spirits and demons not to injure this woman." I need not say how this contributed to the heat of the controversy in our own little village; and I think, indeed, it destroyed my last tincture of Sabbatianism. Looking back now from the brink of the grave, I see how all is written in the book of fate: for had not my Peninah been taken from me, or had I accepted one of the many daughters that were offered me in her stead, I should not have been so free to set out on the pilgrimage to my dear Master, by whom my life has been enriched and sanctified beyond its utmost deserving.