The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam

by Sir Richard Francis Burton

Shakespeare may not have drawn Shylock from a real character, but his genius has embodied in the most lifelike form the Jew’s vengefulness and the causes that nourished it. How many cities of the world there are where he might hear these words: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”

Moreover, in the course of our reading, we Englishmen meet with nothing which points to the existence of cruel murders and similar horrors in any branch of the Hebrew race. Popular books like The British Jew (Rev. John Mills. London: Hurlston & Stoneman, 1854), for instance, are mostly written in the apologetic tone; they are advocates and missionaries, not describers. They enumerate the duties and ceremonies of the “strict, enlightened Israelite”—a powerful majority amongst the thirty-five to forty thousand that have colonized the British Islands—modified and transformed by the civilization of their surroundings. They studiously avoid that part of the subject which would be most interesting to the ethnologist, the various irregular practices of the people, because they would not “crowd their pages with the superstitions of the ignorant”; and they probably have not defined to themselves the darker shades which the religious teaching of later centuries has diffused over the Jewish mind, and which linger even among the most advanced of modern communities. The well-known volume of Dr. Alexander McCaul, The Old Paths; or, a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism with the Religion of Moses and the Prophets (London: Hubbard & Son, 1854), which has been translated into almost every European language, reveals but little, while professing to reveal much. It is written in a purely apologetic spirit; and as it attacked the Talmud, but spared the Jew, who, however, systematically destroys every copy, it has lost for the general reader all its significance. The celebrated article upon the Talmud first published in the Quarterly Review (October, 1867), and afterwards owned to by the late M. Emanuel Deutsch, who began by denying the authorship, greatly surprised the poco-curanti of Great Britain. It was a triumph of special pleading. It studiously ignored the fact that the Talmudic writers who flourished in the third and the sixth centuries of our era had evidently consulted the writings of the “School of Galilee,”[21] especially of the New Testament, apocryphal as well as canonical. It artfully opened to the admiring eye of ignorance a noble garden of time-honoured experience, a goodly parterre of racial and social piety and benevolence, a paradise of religious wisdom, from which a few transplanted shoots would suffice to enrich and adorn a wilderness of rugged and neglected fields. It concealed with equal skill the sinks and drains, the shallows and quagmires which everywhere underlie the fair and flowery surface; and it withdrew attention from the dark corners rank with poisonous weeds and overrun with trees bearing deadly fruit. Such art of manipulation would readily pick the Sermon on the Mount from the pages of the erotic poets of “the East,” perhaps the most materialistic and the most corrupt which the literature of the world has produced.

What then can the average Englishman, thus instructed, know about the Hebrew at home? how much of the Hebrew abroad, especially in Asia, in Africa, and even in Europe? How is he fully to comprehend the reason why the name of Jew is still a byword and a reproach? or why the scrupulous British official—the late Consul Brant, C.B., the historical Consul of Erzerum, who revived the trade of ancient Trebizond—who never allowed himself to use profane language, applied to Christians and Muslims the word “Jew” as the most insulting term that can be levelled at man?

The following article appeared in the Saturday Review[22] as a comment upon a “recent outbreak of Rumanian fanaticism against the Jews at Ismail,” and explains at once the isolation and the great material success of the children of Israel all the world over. I quote it in extenso as it shows the general opinion of educated Englishmen and the unreality and shallowness of the treatment which views the world through glasses of British home-make:

“There is no real difference between the Rumanian Jews and the Jews of Galicia or Bohemia; nor can they in their turn be separated from the Jews of Germany, of France, or of England. The dirty, greasy usurers of Rumania are the humble brethren of the financiers of London and Frankfort, and that the Jews are a great power in Europe is incontestable. What are, it may be asked, the secrets of their power? They are religion, the capacity for making money, and internal union. A ceremonial, and therefore an exclusive religion, a religion that binds together its members by rites that seem strange to the rest of the world, has a strong hold upon those who are within the fold. They are like the tenants of a beleaguered fort cut off from the rest of mankind, and obliged to protect themselves and help each other. But religion is not enough to raise a race into eminence. The Jews and the Parsees are eminent, not only because they circumcise their sons, or light fires on the tops of their houses, but because they make money. The money they have gives them consequence; but it is not only the money itself that does this; it is the qualities that go to making money which raise them—the patience, the good sense, the capacity for holding on when others are frightened, the daring to make a stroke when the risk is sufficient to appal. And the Jews are not only religious and rich; they are bound together by intimate ties. The inner world of Judaism is that of a democracy. The millionaire never dreams of despising, or failing to aid, his poorest and most degraded brother. The kindness of Jews for Jews is unfailing, spontaneous, and unaffected. The shabbiest hat-buyer or orange-seller of Houndsditch is as sure of having the means provided for him of keeping the sacred feast of the Passover as if he lived in a Piccadilly mansion. To the eyes of the Jews even the most degraded of Jews do not seem so degraded as they do in the eyes of the outer world. The poorest have perhaps possessions which redeem them in the eyes of their brethren; and many of the lowest, greasiest, and most unattractive Hebrews who walk about the streets in search of old clothes or skins are known by their co-religionists to be able to repeat by rote portions of the sacred volumes by the hour at a time. To all these permanent causes of Jewish eminence there must, however, be added one that has had only time to develop itself since extreme bigotry has died away, and since in Western Europe the Jews have been treated, first with contemptuous toleration, then with cold respect, and, finally, when they are very, very rich, with servile adoration.

“These people—so exclusive, so intensely national, so intimately linked together—have shown the most astonishing aptitude for identifying themselves with the several countries in which they have cast their fortunes. An English Jew is an Englishman, admires English habits and English education, makes an excellent magistrate, plays to perfection the part of a squire, and even exercises discreetly the power which, with its inexhaustible oddity, the English law gives him, while it denies it to the members of the largest Christian sect, and presents incumbents to livings so as to please the most fastidious bishops. The French Jews were stout friends of France during the war—served as volunteers in the defence of Paris, and opened their purses to the national wants, and their houses to the suffering French. The German Jews were as stout Germans in their turn; and in war, as in peace, they are always ready to show themselves Germans as well as Jews. It is the combination of the qualities of both nations that is now raising the foremost of the German Jews to their high rank in the world of wealth. In that world, to be a German is to be a trader whom it is very hard to rival, to be a Jew is to be an operator whom it is impossible to beat; but to be a German Jew is to be a prince and captain among the people.

“In this way the Jews have managed to overcome much of the antipathy which would naturally attach to men of an alien race and an alien religion. The English Jew is not seen to be standing aloof from England and Englishmen. But it is impossible there should not be some sort of social barrier between the Jew and the Christian. They cannot intermarry except for special political or other cogent reasons, and it necessarily chills the kindness and intimacy of family intercourse when all the young people know that friendship can never grow into anything else. In order to overcome this obstacle many wealthy Jews have chosen to abjure their religion and enrol their households in the Christian communion. But the more high-minded and high-spirited among them shrink from doing this, and accept, and even glory in, the position into which they were born. Fortunately for himself and for England, a kind friend determined the religion of Mr. Disraeli before he was old enough to judge for himself, and in his maturer years he has been able conscientiously to adopt what he terms the doctrines of the School of Galilee. If they are not decoyed into Christianity by their social aspirations, Jews are unassailable, for the most part, by the force of either persecution or argument; and although there are some conversions to be attributed to Christian reasoning or Christian gold, they are probably counterbalanced by the accessions to Judaism of Christian women who marry Jewish husbands. The Jews therefore lead, and must lead, on the whole a family life marked by something of reserve and isolation. But the disadvantages they have thus to endure are not without their compensative advantages. Their family life by being secluded has gained in warmth and dignity.[23] In very few families is there so much thoughtfulness, consideration, parental and fraternal affection, reverence for age, and care for the young as in Jewish families. The women too have been ennobled, not degraded, by being thrown on themselves and on their families for their sphere of thought and action. They are almost always thoroughly instructed in business, and capable of taking a part in great affairs; for it has been the custom of their race to consider the wife the helpmate—the sharer in every transaction that establishes the position or enhances the comfort of the family. Leisure, activity of mind, and the desire to hand on the torch of instruction from the women of one generation to those of another, inspire Jewesses with a zeal for education, a love of refinement, and a sympathy with art. Homes of the best type are of course to be taken as the standard when it is inquired what are the characteristics of a race as seen at its best; and European family life has few things equal to show to the family life of the highest type of Jews. Their isolation, again, makes most of the men liberal and free from the prejudices of class, just as their connexion with their dispersed brethren relieves them from the pressure of insular narrowness. But, as Mr. Bright remarks, religious bigotry is slow to die away altogether; and even in educated English society there are few Christians who do not think themselves entitled to approach a Jew with a sense of secret superiority. If a Jew is ostentatious or obtrudes his wealth, if his women are loaded with jewellery, if he talks the slang of the sporting world in order to show what a fine creature he is, society is as right to put him down as to put down any Christian like him. But the philanthropists who invited Mr. Bright to attend their meeting may be profitably invited to search their own hearts, and ask themselves whether they are quite free from that feeling that the best Jew is never the equal of the worst Christian, which is at the root of the Rumanian riots,[24] and which certainly is entirely out of keeping with the tenets and teaching of the School of Galilee.”

FOOTNOTES:

[14] Here out of sixty thousand souls the Jews number forty thousand, but to prevent taxation they have arranged with the Turkish authorities never to exceed eleven thousand five hundred. [Since this was written (1873) the whole population of Salonika has increased rapidly, and now (1897) numbers 150,000, of whom about 60,000 are Jews, 30,000 Turks, 30,000 Serbs, 15,000 Greeks, and 4,000 Zinzers.]