East London

by Walter Besant

The foreign element, with the exception of the Polish Jews, and that only for mutual help and at the outset, does not seek to separate itself and to create its own quarter. In the West End, it is true, there are streets principally inhabited by Italians, French, and Swiss; that is because the people are employed in the restaurants as waiters and cooks, in the laundries, in the charcuteries and provision shops, which exist for the use of the foreigner. But their children will become English; you may see them playing on the asphalted pavements outside the schools; you fail to perceive any difference between the children of the German waiter and those of the English working-man. There are thousands of German clerks in London; they come over, some to stay, some to learn the conduct and the extent of English trade and to take back with them information about markets and prices and profits, which may be useful to their friends of Hamburg and Altona. In either case they learn English as quickly as they can, and live in the English fashion. Where, again, is the French colony? There are thousands of French people in London, but there is no French colony. There is a society of Huguenot families, there is a French hospital, there are two or three French Protestant churches, but there is no part of East London, or of any other quarter of London, where we may find French the prevailing speech. There are, again, a good many Dutch. Where are they? Some of them have a kind of colony in Spitalfields, where they make cigars; as for the rest, they are scattered. One may see some of them any Sunday morning in their church, all that is left of the great church of the Augustine Friars; in that old place a scanty congregation meets for service in the Dutch language and after the Dutch use. It is pleasant to sit among them and to look around upon the serious faces of the Hollanders, our former rivals, and to make believe to listen to the sermon, which sounds so much like English until you try to make out what it means. The feet of these honest burghers rest upon the dust of many great princes and lords and noble dames buried in the church of the Augustines, because it was so holy a place that sepulture here was a certain passport through purgatorial fires, without a stay in purgatory, to the gates of heaven. Hither, on the day after the battle of Barnet, which practically ended the Wars of the Roses, they brought, in the long, grunting country wagons, the bodies of the lords and knights who fell upon the field, and buried them within this church. That of Warwick the king-maker lay here, the face uncovered, for some days, so that the people might be assured of his death. But I doubt whether the Hollander cares much about the bones of ancient nobles. There are also Swedes in East London, but the only place where I have met them is in their church near St. George’s-in-the-East, where you may see them any Sunday at the Swedish service. They are a pleasant-looking race, with brown hair and blue eyes; they appear to be largely composed of seafaring folk; one would like to be able to converse with them. However, they have no quarter of their own.

Of course, the most important foreign element in East London is that of the newly arrived Jewish immigrants. They are the poorest of the very poor; when they come over they have nothing. They are received by the Jewish Board of Guardians, which is, I believe, a model of a well-managed board; work is speedily found for them; their own people take them on at the lowest wage at which life can be sustained until they learn enough to move on and get higher pay. Their ranks are always recruited by new arrivals; there is talk of their taking work away from English workmen. Yet there seem to be no signs, as on the continent, of a Judenhetze, or any such wide-spread, unreasoning hatred of the Jew as we lately saw in France, and such as we have seen in Russia and in Germany.

The newly arrived Jews have their own colony. It has much increased of late years. They now occupy, almost to the exclusion of others, a triangular area of East London—without a map it is not easy to make the limits understood—north of the Whitechapel Road immediately without the city limits: it has a base of nearly half a mile and an altitude of three fourths of a mile. Here, for the time, the poorer Jews are all crowded together. It is alleged that they have ingenious ways of sweating each other; as soon as the Polish Jew has got his head a little above water he begins to exploit his countrymen; he acquires the miserable tenements of the quarter and raises the rent and demands a large sum for the “key”—that is to say, the fine on going in.

These Jews all succeed, unless they are kept down by their favorite vice of gambling. It is perhaps as well for their own peace that for the first few years of their residence in London they should live in their own quarter, among their own people. For the transformation of the poor, starving immigrant, willing to do anything at any wage, to the prosperous master workman is unlovely. He succeeds partly because he is extremely industrious, patient, orderly, and law-abiding. But there are other reasons. It is sometimes pretended that the Jew is endowed naturally with greater intellectual power than is granted to men of other nationality. This I do not believe. The truth seems to be that advanced by Mr. Charles Booth, I think for the first time. “The poorest Jew,” he says, “has inherited through the medium of his religion a trained intellect.” This fact, if you consider it, seems quite sufficient, taken with those other gifts of industry and obedience to order and law, to explain the Jew’s success among the poorer classes through which he works his way upward.

He is a person of trained intellect. What does this mean? Poor and miserable as he stands before you, penniless, ragged, half-starved, cringing, this man has been educated in the history of his own people, in the most ancient literature of the world, in a body of law which exercises all the ingenuity and casuistry of his teachers to harmonize with existing conditions. It is like putting into the works of an engineer, among the general hands, one who has been trained in applied mathematics. Into any kind of work which means competition, the Jew brings the trained intellect and the power of reasoning due to his religious training; he brings also the habit of looking about for chances and looking ahead for possibilities which long generations of self-defense have made hereditary. These faculties he brings into the market; with them he contends against the dull mind, untrained and simple, of the English craftsman. What wonder if he succeeds? Nothing but brute violence, which he will not meet with here, can keep him down.

This I believe to be the great secret of the Jew’s success. It is his intellectual superiority over working-men of his own class. Observe, however, that we do not find him conspicuously successful when he has to measure his intellectual strength against the better class. In law, for instance, he has produced one or two great lawyers, but not more than his share; in mathematics and science, one or two great names, but not more than his share. I am inclined to think that in every branch of intellectual endeavor the Jew holds his own. But I doubt if it can be proved that he does more. So long as we can hold our own in the higher fields there will be no Judenhetze in this country. I am informed, however, that the leaders of the people in London are persistent in their exhortations to the new-comers to make themselves English—to make themselves English as fast as possible; to send their children to the Board-schools, and to make them English. It is the wisest advice. There should be no feeling as of necessary separation between Jew and Christian. We ought to live in amity beside each other, if not with each other; we should no more ask if a man is a Jew than we ask if a man who has just joined our club is a Roman Catholic or a Unitarian.

Yet, even in this country, it cannot be said that the Jew is popular; there are prejudices against him which are no longer those concerning his religion. Here, again, I turn to the authority who has made so profound a study of the question; the importance of the question is my excuse. This is how Mr. Charles Booth explains the dislike and suspicion with which the Jews are still regarded by many: “No one will deny that the children of Israel are the most law-abiding inhabitants of East London.... The Jew is quick to perceive that law and order, and the sanctity of contract, are the sine qua non of a full and free competition in the open market. And it is by competition, and by competition alone, that the Jew seeks success. But in the case of the foreign Jews it is a competition unrestricted by the personal dignity of a definite standard of life and unchecked by the social feelings of class loyalty and trade integrity. The small manufacturer injures the trade through which he rises to the rank of a capitalist by bad and dishonest production. The petty dealer suits his wares and his terms to the weakness, the ignorance, and the vice of his customers; the mechanic, indifferent to the interests of the class to which he belongs, and intent only on becoming a small master, acknowledges no limit to the process of underbidding fellow-workers except the exhaustion of his own strength. In short, the foreign Jew totally ignores all social obligations other than keeping the law of the land, the maintenance of his own family, and the charitable relief of coreligionists.”

A Corner in Petticoat Lane.

The place and time in which to see the poorer Jews of London collected together is on Sunday morning in Wentworth Street and Middlesex Street, Aldgate—the old Petticoat Lane. These streets and those to right and left are inhabited entirely by Jews; Sunday is their market-day; all the shops are open; the streets are occupied by a triple line of stalls, on which are exposed for sale all kinds of things, but chiefly garments—coats and trousers. There is a mighty hubbub of those who chaffer and those who offer and those who endeavor to attract attention. You will see a young fellow mounted on a pair of wooden steps, brandishing something to wear; with eloquence convincing, with gesture and with action, he declares and repeats and assures the people of the stoutness of the material and the excellence of the work. The crowd moves slowly along, it listens critically; this kind of thing may become monotonous; the oratory of the salesman, in order to be effective, continually requires new adjectives, new metaphors, new comparisons; among the crowd are other professors of the salesman’s rhetoric. They know the tricks, they have learned the art. One wonders how many such fervid speeches this young man has to make before he effects a single sale. We need not pity him, although at the close of the market his voice is hoarse with bawling and the results are meager; he enjoys the thing; it is his one day of glory, and he has admirers; he knows that among the audience there are many who envy his powers and would fain take his place and deceive the people.