The English church has no zeal for souls. At the beginning of the last century the daughter of a rich Jew, by name Jacob Mendes de Breta, was at her own instance publicly baptized. The father ran into the church like a madman, charged the officiating clergyman to desist, and, when he perceived that this was in vain, cursed his child with the bitterest imprecations, and prayed to his God that the church might fall in, and crush all who were concerned in the ceremony. After this he utterly disowned her:—the law had made no provision for such cases, and the parish were obliged to support her; which, to their honour, they did in a manner suitable to her former situation in life. At their petition, however, a bill was enacted compelling the Jews to provide decently for their converted children. This much was done upon the emergency of the case, and nothing more. Not the slightest effort is made for their conversion, nor the slightest impediment opposed to the public celebration of ceremonies, which the Gospel has expressly abrogated. The Jews have nothing to complain of, except that they pay tithes to the clergy, and that they are liable to the trouble of parish offices—the law even allowing them to be made churchwardens. Any person may be excused from serving this office if he chooses to pay a fine amounting to about ten pieces of eight: it is not long since a parish in London nominated a Jew for the sake of getting this money; he, however, was determined to disappoint them by taking the situation;—the profanation was theirs, not his:—and accordingly the church affairs for the year were actually managed by this son of the Synagogue.
It may well be supposed that when Bonaparte was in Syria his movements were anxiously watched by the Jews. There was a great stir among them, and it is probable that if he had invited them by proclamation, and promised to give them Palestine, armies would have been raised to take and keep possession of that Holy Land, to which they look, individually and collectively, as their destined gathering place. Individually, I say, because it is taught by many Rabbis, that the children of Israel, wherever buried, can rise again at the coming of the Messiah, nowhere except in the Promised Land; and they, therefore, who are interred in any other part of the world, will have to make their way there through the caverns of the earth; a long and painful journey, the difficulty and fatigue of which are equivalent to purgatory. I know not whether this is believed by the English Rabbis; but that the English Jews attach as devout a reverence to the very soil of Jerusalem as we do to the Holy Sepulchre itself, is certain. One of the wealthiest among them, in late times, made a pilgrimage there; and brought back with him boxes full of the earth to line his grave. Unhappy people! whose error is the more inveterate because it is mingled with the noblest feelings, and whose obstinate hope and heroic perseverance we must condemn while we admire.
No particular dress is enjoined them by law, nor indeed is any such mark of distinction necessary: they are sufficiently distinguished by a cast of complexion and features, which, with leave of our neighbours,[16] I will call a Portugueze look.—Some of the lowest order let their beards grow, and wear a sort of black tunic with a girdle; the chief ostensible trade of this class is in old clothes, but they deal also in stolen goods, and not unfrequently in coining. A race of Hebrew lads who infest you in the streets with oranges and red slippers, or tempt school-boys to dip in a bag for gingerbread nuts, are the great agents in uttering base silver; when it is worn too bare to circulate any longer they buy it up at a low price, whiten the brass again, and again send it abroad. You meet Jew pedlars every where, travelling with boxes of haberdashery at their backs, cuckoo clocks, sealing-wax, quills, weather-glasses, green spectacles, clumsy figures in plaister of Paris, which you see over the chimney of an alehouse parlour in the country, or miserable prints of the king and queen, the four seasons, the cardinal virtues, the last naval victory, the prodigal son, and such like subjects, even the Nativity and the Crucifixion; but when they meet with a likely chapman, they produce others of the most obscene and mischievous kind. Any thing for money, in contempt of their own law us well as of the law of the country:—the pork-butchers are commonly Jews. All these low classes have a shibboleth of their own, as remarkable as their physiognomy; and in some parts of the city they are so numerous, that when I strayed into their precincts one day, and saw so many Hebrew inscriptions in the shop windows, and so many long beards in the streets, I began to fancy that I had discovered the ten tribes.
Some few of the wealthiest merchants are of this persuasion; you meet with none among the middle order of tradesmen, except sometimes a silversmith, or watchmaker; ordinary profits do not content them. Hence they are great stock-jobbers, and the business of stock-broking is very much in their hands. One of these Jew brokers was in a coffee-house during the time of the mutiny in the fleet, when tidings arrived that the sailors had seized Admiral Colpoys, and had actually hanged him. The news (which afterwards proved to be false) thunderstruck all present. If it were true, and so it was believed to be, all hopes of accommodation were at an end; the mutineers could only be supprest by force, and what force would be able to suppress them? While they were silent in such reflections, the Jew was calculating his own loss from the effect it would produce upon the funds, and he broke the silence by exclaiming, in Hebrew-English, My Gott! de stokes! articulated with a deep sigh, and accompanied with a shrug of shoulders, and an elevation of eyebrows, as emphatic as the exclamation.
England has been called the hell of horses, the purgatory of servants, and the paradise of women: it may be added that it is the heaven of the Jews,—alas, they have no other heaven to expect!
[15] This was publicly asserted at the time, but untruly.—Tr.
[16] This is not the only instance in which the author discovers a disposition to sneer at the Portugueze, with the same kind of illiberality in which the English too frequently indulge themselves against the Scotch.—Tr.
LETTER LXIV.
Infidelity.—Its Growth in England, and little Extent.—Pythagoreans.—Thomas Tryon.—Ritson.—Pagans.—A Cock sacrificed.—Thomas Taylor.