But for the charity which should be obligatory all round, and as easy of fulfilment by the poor as by the rich, the Talmud chooses the other synonym חסד (chesed), and coining from it the word Gemiluth-chesed, which may be rendered ‘the doing of kindness,’ it works out a supplementary and social system of charity—a system founded not on ‘rights,’ but on sympathy—dealing not in doles, but in deeds of friendship and of fellowship, and demanding a giving of oneself rather than of one’s stores. And greater than tzedakah, write the Rabbis, is Gemiluth-chesed, justifying their dictum, as is their wont, by a reference to Holy Writ. ‘Sow to yourselves in righteousness (tzedakah),’ says the prophet Hosea (Hos. x. 12); ‘reap in mercy (chesed)’; and, inasmuch as reaping is better than sowing, mercy must be better than righteousness. To ‘visit the sick,’ to promote peace in families apt to fall out, to ‘relieve all persons, Jews or non-Jews, in affliction’ (a comprehensive phrase), to ‘bury the dead,’ to ‘accompany the bride,’ are among those ‘kindnesses’ which take rank as religious duties, and one or two specimens may indicate the amount of careful detail which make these injunctions practical, and the fine motive which goes far towards spiritualising them.
Of the visiting of the sick, the Talmud speaks with a sort of awe. God’s spirit, it says, dwells in the chamber of suffering and death, and tendance therein is worship. Nursing was to be voluntary, and no charge to be made for drugs; and so deeply did the habit of helping the helpless in this true missionary spirit obtain among the Jews, that to this day, and more especially in provincial places, the last offices for the dead are rarely performed by hired hands. The ‘accompanying of the bride’ is Gemiluth-chesed in another form. To rejoice with one’s neighbour’s joys is no less a duty in this un-Rochefoucauld-like code than to grieve with his grief. A bride is to be greeted with songs and flowers, and pleasant speeches, and, if poor, to be provided with pretty ornaments and substantial gifts, but the pleasant speeches are in all cases, and before all things, obligatory. In the discursive detail, which is so strong a feature of these Talmudic rulings, it is asked: ‘But if the bride be old, or awkward, or positively plain, is she to be greeted in the usual formula as “fair bride—graceful bride”?’ ‘Yes,’ is the answer, for one is not bound to insist on uncomfortable facts, nor to be obtrusively truthful; to be agreeable is one of the minor virtues. Were there anything in the doctrine of metempsychosis, one would be almost tempted to believe that this ancient unnamed Rabbi was speaking over again in the person of one of our modern minor poets:
‘A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.’[30]
The charity of courtesy is everywhere insisted upon, and so strongly, that, on behalf of those sometimes ragged and unkempt Rabbis it might perhaps be urged that politeness, the politesse du cœur, was their Judaism en papillote. ‘Receive every one with pleasant looks,’ says one sage,[31] whose practice was, perhaps, not always quite up to his precepts; ‘where there is no reverence there is no wisdom,’ says another; and as the distinguishing mark of a ‘clown,’ a third instances that man—have we not all met him?—who rudely breaks in on another’s speech, and is more glib than accurate or respectful in his own.
And as postscript to the ‘law’ obtaining on these cheery social forms of ‘charity’ a tombstone may perhaps be permitted to add its curious crumbling bit of evidence. In the House of Life, as Jews name their burial-grounds, at Prague, there stood—perhaps stands still—a stone, erected to the memory, and recording the virtues, of a certain rich lady who died in 1628. Her benefactions, many and minute, are set forth at length, and amongst the rest, and before ‘she clothed the naked,’ comes the item, ‘she ran like a bird to weddings.’ Through the mists of those terrible stories, which make of Prague so miserable a memory to Jews, the record of this long-ago dead woman gleams like a rainbow. One seems to see the bright little figure, a trifle out of breath may be, the gay plumage perhaps just a shade ruffled—somehow one does not fancy her a very prim or tidy personage—running ‘like a bird to weddings.’ She seems, the dear sympathetic soul, in an odd, suggestive sort of way, to illustrate the charitable system of her race, and to show us that, despite all differences of time and place and circumstances, the one essential condition to any ‘charity’ that shall prove effectual remains unchanged; that the solution of the hard problem, which may be worked out in a hundred ways, is just sympathy, and is to be learnt, not in the ‘speaking from afar’ of rich to poor, but in the ‘laying of hands’ upon them. The close fellowship of this ancient primitive system is perhaps impossible in our more complex civilisation, but an approximation to it is an ideal worth striving after. More intimate, more everyday communion between West and East, more ‘Valentines’ at Hoxton are sorely needed. Concert-giving, class-teaching, ‘visiting,’ are all helps of a sort, but there are so many days in a poor man’s week, so many hours in his dull day. Sweetness and light, like other and more prosaic products of civilisation, need, it may be, to be ‘laid on’ in those miles of monotonous streets, long breaks in continuity being fatal to results.
MOSES MENDELSSOHN
‘I wish, it is true, to shame the opprobrious sentiments commonly entertained of a Jew, but it is by character and not by controversy that I would do it.’[32] So wrote the subject of this memoir more than a hundred years ago, and the sentence may well stand for the motto of his life; for much as Moses Mendelssohn achieved by his ability, much more did he by his conduct, and great as he was as a philosopher, far greater was he as a man. Starting with every possible disadvantage—prejudice, poverty, and deformity—he yet reached the goal of ‘honour, fame, and troops of friends’ by simple force of character; and thus he remains for all time an illustration of the happy optimistic theory that, even in this world, success, in the best sense of the word, does come to those who, also in the best sense of the word, deserve it.
The state of the Jews in Germany at the time of Mendelssohn’s birth was deplorable. No longer actively hunted, they had arrived, at the early part of the eighteenth century, at the comparatively desirable position of being passively shunned or contemptuously ignored, and, under these new conditions, they were narrowing fast to the narrow limits set them. The love of religion and of race was as strong as ever, but the love had grown sullen, and of that jealous, exclusive sort to which curse and anathema are akin. What then loomed largest on their narrow horizon was fear; and under that paralysing influence, progress or prominence of any kind became a distinct evil, to be repressed at almost any personal sacrifice. Safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith, lay, if anywhere, in the neglect of the outside world. And so the poor pariahs huddled in their close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a dialect of their own, half Jewish, half German, and as wholly degenerate from the grand old Hebrew as were they themselves from those to whom it had been a living tongue. Intellectual occupation was found in the study of the Law; interest and entertainment in the endless discussion of its more intricate passages; and excitement in the not infrequent excommunication of the weaker or bolder brethren who ventured to differ from the orthodox expounders. The culture of the Christian they hated, with a hate born half of fear for its possible effects, half of repulsion at its palpable evidences. The tree of knowledge seemed to them indeed, in pathetic perversion of the early legend, a veritable tree of evil, which should lose a second Eden to the wilful eaters thereof. Their Eden was degenerate too; but the ‘voice heard in the evening’ still sounded in their dulled and passionate ears, and, vibrating in the Ghetto instead of the grove, it seemed to bid them shun the forbidden fruit of Gentile growth.
In September 1729, under a very humble roof, in a very poor little street in Dessau, was born the weakly boy who was destined to work such wonderful changes in that weary state of things. Not much fit to hold the magician’s wand seemed those frail baby hands, and less and less likely altogether for the part, as the poor little body grew stunted and deformed through the stress of over-much study and of something less than enough of wholesome diet. There was no lack of affection in the mean little Jewish home, but the parents could only give their children of what they had, and of these scant possessions, mother-love and Talmudical lore were the staple. And so we read of the small five-year-old Moses being wrapped up by his mother in a large old shabby cloak, on early, bleak winter mornings, and then so carried by the father to the neighbouring ‘Talmud Torah’ school, where he was nourished with dry Hebrew roots by way of breakfast. Often, indeed, was the child fed on an even less satisfying diet, for long passages from Scripture, long lists of precepts, to be learnt by heart, on all sorts of subjects, was the approved method of instruction in these seminaries. An extensive, if somewhat parrot-like, acquaintance at an astonishingly early age with the Law and the Prophets, and the commentators on both, was the ordinary result of this form of education; and, naturally co-existent with it, was an equally astonishing and extensive ignorance of all more everyday subjects. Contentedly enough, however, the learned, illiterate peddling and hawking fathers left their little lads to this puzzling, sharpening, deadening sort of schooling. Frau Mendel and her husband may possibly have thought out the matter a little more fully, for she seems to have been a wise and prudent as well as a loving mother; and the father, we find, was quick to discern unusual talent in the sickly little son whom he carried so carefully to the daily lesson. He was himself a teacher, in a humble sort of way, and eked out his small fees by transcribing on parchment from the Pentateuch. Thus, the tone of the little household, if not refined, was at least not altogether sordid; and when, presently, the little Moses was promoted from the ordinary school to the higher class taught by the great scholar, Rabbi Frankel, the question even presented itself whether it might not be well, in this especial case, to abandon the patent, practical advantages pertaining to the favoured pursuit of peddling, and to let the boy give himself up to his beloved books, and, following in his master’s footsteps, become perhaps, in his turn, a poorly paid, much reverenced Rabbi.
It was a serious matter to decide. There was much to be said in favour of the higher path; but the market for Rabbis, as for hawkers, was somewhat overstocked, and the returns in the one instance were far quicker and surer, and needed no long unearning apprenticeship. The balance, on the whole, seemed scarcely to incline to the more dignified profession; but the boy was so terribly in earnest in his desire to learn, so desperately averse from the only other career, that his wishes, by degrees, turned the scale; and it did not take very long to convince the poor patient father that he must toil a little longer and a little later, in order that his son might be free from the hated necessity of hawking, and at liberty to pursue his unremunerative studies.