“America,” cry two little voices; and then one adds, “Because there are slaves, sir.” “And France,” says a third; “and we have seen the emperor in the picture-shops.”
As I listen to them, I cannot help wishing that many of our little Christians were taught to be as independent and self-respecting in their dealings with the grown-up people who come to look at them. One would fancy that servility was a sacred institution, we cling to it so fondly. We seem to expect an absurd amount of respect from our inferiors; we are ready to pay back just as much to those above us in station: and hence I think, notwithstanding all the kindness of heart, all the well-meant and well-spent exertion we see in the world, there is often too great an inequality between those who teach and those who would learn, those who give and those whose harder part it is to receive.
We were quite sorry at last when the doctor made a little bow, and said, “Good morning, young ladies,” quite politely, to his pupils. It was too late to stop and talk to the little boys down below, but we went for a minute into an inner room out of the large boys’ schoolroom, and there we found half-a-dozen little men, with their hats on their heads, sitting on their benches, reading the Psalms in Hebrew; and so we stood, for this minute before we came away, listening to David’s words spoken in David’s tongue, and ringing rather sadly in the boys’ touching childish voice.
But this is not by any means the principal school which the Jews have established in London. Deep in the heart of the City—beyond St. Paul’s—beyond the Cattle Market, with its countless pens—beyond Finsbury Square, and the narrow Barbican, travelling on through a dirty, close, thickly peopled region, you come to Bell Lane, in Spitalfields. And here you may step in at a door and suddenly find yourself in a wonderful country, in the midst of an unknown people, in a great hall sounding with the voices of hundreds of Jewish children. I know not if it is always so, or if this great assemblage is only temporary, during the preparation for the Passover, but all along the sides of this great room were curtained divisions, and classes sitting divided, busy at their tasks, and children upon children as far as you could see; and somehow as you look you almost see, not these children only, but their forefathers, the Children of Israel, camping in their tents, as they camped at Succoth, when they fled out of the land of Egypt and the house of bondage. Some of these here present to-day are still flying from the house of bondage; many of them are the children of Poles, and Russians, and Hungarians, who have escaped over here to avoid conscription, and who arrive destitute and in great misery. But to be friendless, and in want, and poverty-stricken, is the best recommendation for admission to this noble charity. And here, as elsewhere, any one who comes to the door is taken in, Christian as well as Jew.
I have before me now the Report for the year 5619 (1858), during which 1,800 children have come to these schools daily. 10,000 in all have been admitted since the foundation of the school. The working alone of the establishment—salaries, repairs, books, laundresses, &c.—amounts to more than 2,000l. a year. Of this a very considerable portion goes in salaries to its officers, of whom I count more than fifty in the first page of the pamphlet. “12l. to a man for washing boys,” is surely well-spent money; “3l. to a beadle; 14l. for brooms and brushes; 1l. 19s. 6d. for repair of clocks,” are among the items. The annual subscriptions are under 500l., and the very existence of the place (so says the Report) depends on voluntary offerings at the anniversary. That some of these gifts come in with splendid generosity, I need scarcely say. Clothing for the whole school arrives at Easter once a year, and I saw great bales of boots for the boys waiting to be unpacked in their schoolroom. Tailors and shoemakers come and take measurings beforehand, so that everybody gets his own. To-day these artists having retired, carpenters and bricklayers are at work all about the place, and the great boys’ school, which is larger still than the girls’, is necessarily empty,—except that a group of teachers and monitors are standing in one corner talking and whispering together. The head master, with a black beard, comes down from a high desk in an inner room, and tells us about the place—about the cleverness of the children, and the scholarship lately founded; how well many of the boys turn out in after life, and for what good positions they are fitted by the education they are able to receive here;—“though Jews,” he said, “are debarred by their religious requirements from two-thirds of the employments which Christians are able to fill. Masters cannot afford to employ workmen who can only give their time from Monday to Friday afternoon. There are, therefore, only a very limited number of occupations open to us. Some of our boys rise to be ministers, and many become teachers here, in which case Government allows them a certain portion of their salary.”
The head mistress in the girls’ school was not less kind and ready to answer our questions. During the winter mornings, hot bread-and-milk are given out to any girl who chooses to ask for it, but only about a hundred come forward, of the very hungriest and poorest. When we came away from —— Square a day before, we had begun to think that all poor Jews were well and warmly clad, and had time to curl their hair and to look clean, and prosperous, and respectable, but here, alas! comes the old story of want, and sorrow, and neglect. What are these brown, lean, wan little figures, in loose gowns falling from their shoulders—black eyes, fuzzy, unkempt hair, strange bead necklaces round their throats, and ear-rings in their ears? I fancied these must be the Poles and Russians, but when I spoke to one of them she smiled and answered very nicely, in perfectly good English, and told me she liked writing best of all, and showed me a copy very neat, even, and legible.
Whole classes seemed busy sewing at lilac pinafores, which are, I suppose, a great national institution; others were ciphering and calling out the figures as the mistress chalked the sum upon a slate. Hebrew alphabets and sentences were hanging up upon the walls. All these little Hebrew maidens learn the language of their nation.
In the infant-school, a very fat little pouting baby, with dark eyes, and a little hook-nose and curly locks, and a blue necklace and funny ear-rings in her little rosy ears, came forward, grasping one of the mistresses’ fingers.
“This is a good little girl,” said that lady, “who knows her alphabet in Hebrew and in English.”
And the little girl looks up very solemn, as children do, to whom everything is of vast importance, and each little incident a great new fact. The infant-schools do not make part of the Bell Lane Establishment, though they are connected with it, and the children, as they grow up, and are infants no longer, draft off into the great free-school.