Part 6

TO base the appeal for justice to present-day Jewry upon the cultural services of ancient Israel would be treason to the inalienable rights of man. A people may for a time be robbed of these rights, but――whatever the alleged political reason for such a crime――it cannot be legally or equitably deprived of them.

M. STEINSCHNEIDER, 1893.

* * * * *

IN a free State, it is not the Christian that rules the Jew, neither is it the Jew that rules the Christian; it is Justice that rules.

LEOPOLD ZUNZ, 1859.

THE JEWS OF ENGLAND[29] (1290‒1902)

AN Edward’s England spat us out――a band Foredoomed to redden Vistula or Rhine, And leaf-like toss with every wind malign. All mocked the faith they could not understand. Six centuries have passed. The yellow brand On shoulder nor on soul has left a sign, And on our brows must Edward’s England twine Her civic laurels with an equal hand. Thick-clustered stars of fierce supremacy Upon the martial breast of England glance! She seems of War the very Deity. Could aught remain her glory to enhance? Yea, for I count her noblest victory Her triumph o’er her own intolerance.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1902.

WELCOME OF THE HEBREW CONGREGATION, NEWPORT,[30] RHODE ISLAND, U.S.A., TO GEORGE WASHINGTON

SIR,

Permit the Children of the Stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits, and to join with your fellow citizens in welcoming you to Newport.

Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free citizens, we now (with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty Disposer of all events) behold a Government erected by the Majesty of the people――a Government which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance, but generously affording to all, liberty of conscience, and immunities of citizenship, deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language, equal parts of the great Government Machine. This so ample and extensive Federal Union, whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual Confidence, and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the great God, Who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth, doing whatever seemeth Him good.

For all the blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal and benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great Preserver of men, beseeching Him that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the Wilderness into the Promised Land may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life. And when, like Joshua, full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life and the tree of immortality.

Done and signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 17th, 1790.

MOSES SEIXAS.

BRITISH CITIZENSHIP

BRITISH patriotism is not the mediaeval demand that the citizens of any one country all think alike, that they be of the same blood, or that they even speak the same language. Britain’s mild sovereignty respects the personality of the ethnic groups found within the borders of its world-wide dominion; nay, it fosters the linguistic heritage, the national individuality even, of Irishman and Welshman, of French Canadian and Afrikander Boer, and encourages them all to develop along their own lines. Any one, therefore, who deems that patriotism exacts from him the purposeless sacrifice of his religious tradition and historic memory――that man is an alien in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon genius, and is unworthy of his British citizenship.

J. H. HERTZ, 1915.

THE RUSSIAN JEW[31]

SCIENTISTS tell us that coal is nothing but concentrated sunlight. Primeval forests that for years out of number had been drinking in the rays of the sun, having been buried beneath the ground and excluded from the reviving touch of light and air, were gradually turned into coal――black, rugged, shapeless, yet retaining all its pristine energy, which, when released, provides us with light and heat. The story of the Russian Jew is the story of the coal. Under a surface marred by oppression and persecution he has accumulated immense stores of energy, in which we may find an unlimited supply of light and heat for our minds and our hearts. All we need is to discover the process, long known in the case of coal, of transforming latent strength into living power.

I. FRIEDLANDER, 1915.

YIDDISH[32]

I HAVE never been able to understand how it is that a language spoken by perhaps more than half of the Jewish race should be regarded with such horror, as though it were a crime. Six million speakers are sufficient to give historic dignity to any language! One great writer alone is enough to make it holy and immortal. Take Norwegian. It is the language of only two million people. But it has become immortal through the great literary achievements of Ibsen. And even though Yiddish cannot boast of so great a writer as Ibsen, it has reason to be proud of numerous smaller men――poets, romancers, satirists, dramatists.

The main point is that Yiddish incorporates the essence of a life which is distinctive and unlike any other. There is nothing of holiness in any of the outer expressions of life. The one and only thing holy is the _human soul_, which is the source and fount of all human effort.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1906.

* * * * *

THERE is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on Yiddish. Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish.

LEO WIENER, 1899.

RUSSO-JEWISH EDUCATION

AMONG the Jews of Poland and Russia there was no learned estate, not because there were no scholars, but because the people itself was a nation of students. The ideal type for the Russian Jew was the _Lamdan_, the scholar. The highest ambition of the Russian Jew was that his sons, and if he had only daughters, that his sons-in-law should be _Lomdim_; and the greatest achievement of a man’s life was his ability to provide sufficiently for them, so that, relieved from economic cares, they might devote themselves unrestrictedly to Jewish learning. To be sure, this learning was one-sided. Yet it was both wide and deep, for it embraced the almost boundless domain of religious Hebrew literature, and involved the knowledge of one of the most complicated systems of law. The knowledge of the Hebrew prayers and the Five Books of Moses would not have been sufficient to save the Russian Jew from the most terrible opprobrium――that of being an _Am-Haaretz_, an ignoramus. The ability to understand a Talmudic text, which demands years of preparation, was the minimum requirement for one who wanted to be of any consequence in the community.

I. FRIEDLANDER, 1913.

PASSOVER IN OLD RUSSIA[33]

THE Passover season, when we celebrated our deliverance from the land of Egypt, and felt so glad and thankful as if it had only just happened, was the time our Gentile neighbours chose to remind us that Russia was another Egypt. It was not so bad within the Pale; but in Russian cities, and even more in the country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered by special permission of the police, who were always changing their minds about letting them stay, the Gentiles made the Passover a time of horror for the Jews. Somebody would start up that lie about murdering Christian children, and the stupid peasants would get mad about it, and fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill the Jews. They attacked them with knives and clubs, and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them, and burned their houses. This was called a ‘pogrom’. Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them, and horrible, horrible stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother’s eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain. People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived; and sometimes their hair turned white in a day, and some people became insane on the spot.

MARY ANTIN, 1911.

THE POGROM OCTOBER, 1905

IT had already lasted two days. But as nobody dined, nobody exchanged greetings, and nobody thought of winding up the clock for the night (for people slept dressed, anywhere, on lofts, in sheds, or in empty railway carriages), all notion of time had disappeared. People only heard the incessant jingling of broken glass-panes. At this terrible sound, the arms stiffened and the eyes became distended with fright.

Some distant houses were burning. Along the red-tinted street with the red pavement, there ran by a red man, whilst another red man stretched his arm, and from the tips of his fingers there broke forth quickly a sharp, snapping, cracking sound――and the running man dropped down.

A strange, sharp cry, ‘They are shoo-ooting!’ passed along the street.

Invisible and inexorable demons made their appearance. Houses and nurseries were broken in. Old men had their arms fractured; women’s white bosoms were trampled upon by heavy, dirty heels. Many were perishing by torture; others were burnt alive.

Two persons were hiding in a dark cellar; an old man with his son, a schoolboy. The old man went up and opened the outer door again, to make the place look deserted by the owners. A merchant had run in. He wept, not from fear but from feeling himself in security.

‘I have a son like you’, he said, tearfully.

He then breathed heavily and nervously, and added reflectively, ‘Like you, my boy, yes!’

The master of the house caught the merchant by his elbow, pulled him close to himself, and whispered into his ear:

‘Hush! They might hear us!’

There they stood, expectant. Now and then, a rustling; an even, sleepless breathing could be heard. The brain cannot familiarize itself with these sounds in the darkness and silence. Perhaps they were asleep, none could tell.

At night――it must have been late at night――another two stole in quietly.

‘Is it you?’ asked one of them, without seeing anybody, and the sudden sound of his voice seemed to light up the darkness for a moment.

‘Yes’, answered the schoolboy. ‘It’s all right!’

‘Hush! They might hear you’, said the owner of the cellar, catching each of them by the arm and pulling them down.

The new-comers placed themselves by the wall, while one of them was rubbing his forehead with his hand.

‘What is the matter?’ asked the schoolboy in a whisper.

‘It is blood.’

Then they grew silent. The injured man applied a handkerchief to his wound, and became quiet. There followed again a thick silence, untroubled by time. Again a sleepless breathing!

On the top, underneath the ceiling, a very faint whiteness appeared. The schoolboy was asleep, but the other four raised their heads and looked up. They looked long, for about half an hour, so that their muscles were aching through the protracted craning of their necks. At last it became clear that it was a tiny little window through which dawn peeped in.

Then hasty, frightened steps were heard, and there appeared a tall, coatless man, followed by a woman with a baby in her arms. The dawn was advancing, and one could read the expression of wild fear that stamped itself upon their faces.

‘This way! This way!’ whispered the man.

‘They are running after us, they are looking out for us’, said the woman. Her shoes were put on her bare feet, and her young body displayed strange, white, malignant spots, reminding one of a corpse.

‘They won’t find us; but, for God’s sake, be quiet!’

‘They are close by in the courtyard. Oh! be quiet, be quiet....’

The wounded man got hold of the merchant and the owner by the hand, while the merchant seized the man who had no coat. There they stood, forming a live chain, looking on at the mother with her baby.

All of a sudden there broke out a strange though familiar sound, so close and doomful. What doom it foreboded they felt at once, but their brains were loath to believe it.

The sound was repeated. It was the cry of the infant. The merchant made a kindly face and said: ‘Baby is crying....’

‘Lull him, my dear’, said he, rushing to the mother. ‘You will cause the death of us all.’

Everybody’s chest and throat gasped with faintness. The mother marched up and down the cellar lulling and coaxing.

‘You must not cry; sleep, my golden one ... It is I, your mother ... my heart....’

But the child cried on obstinately, wildly. There must have been something in the mother’s face that was not calculated to produce a tranquilizing effect.

And now, in this warm and strange underground atmosphere, the woman’s brain wrenched out a wild, mad, idea. It seemed to her that she had read it in the eyes, in the suffering silence of these unknown people. And these unhappy, frightened men understood that she was thinking of them. They understood it by the unutterably mournful tenderness with which she chanted, while drinking in the infant’s eyes with her own.

‘He will soon fall asleep. I know. It is always like that; he cries for a moment, then he falls asleep at once. He is a very quiet boy.’ She addressed the tall man with a painful, insinuating smile. From outside there broke in a distant noise. Then came a thud, and a crack, shaking the air.

‘They are searching’, whispered the schoolboy.

But the infant went on crying hopelessly.

‘He will undo us all’, blurted out the tall man.

‘I shall not give him away ... no, never!’ ejaculated the distracted mother.

‘O God’, whispered the merchant, and covered his face with his hands. His hair was unkempt after a sleepless night. The tall man stared at the infant with fixed, protruding eyes....

‘I don’t know you’, the woman uttered, low and crossly, on catching that fixed look. ‘Who are you? What do you want of me?’

She rushed to the other men, but everybody drew back from her with fear. The infant was crying on, piercing the brain with its shouting.

‘Give it to me’, said the merchant, his right eyebrow trembling. ‘Children like me.’

All of a sudden it grew dark in the cellar; somebody had approached the little window and was listening. At this shadow, breaking in so suddenly, they all grew quiet. They felt that it was coming, it was near, and that not another second must be lost.

The mother turned round. She stood up on her toes, and with high, uplifted arms she handed over her child to the merchant. It seemed to her that by this gesture she was committing a terrible crime ... that hissing voices were cursing her, rejecting her from heaven for ever and ever....

Strange to say, finding itself in the thick, clumsy, but loving hands of the merchant, the child grew silent.

But the mother interpreted this silence differently. In sight of everybody the woman grew grey in a single moment, as if they had poured some acid over her hair. And as soon as the child’s cry died away, there resounded another cry, more awful, more shattering and heart-rending.

The mother rose up on her toes; and grey, terrible, like the goddess of justice herself, she howled in a desperate, inhuman voice that brought destruction with it.... Nobody had expected that sudden madness. The schoolboy fell in a swoon.

* * * * *

Afterwards, the newspapers reported details of the killing of six men and an infant by the mob; for none had dared to touch the mad old woman of twenty-six.

OSSIP DYMOV, 1906.

UNDER THE ROMANOFFS

THE plaything of a heartless bureaucracy, the natural prey of all the savage elements of society, loaded with fetters in one place, and in another driven out like some wild beast, the Russian Jew finds that for him, at least, life is composed of little else than bitterness, suffering, and degradation.

For magnitude and gloom the tragical situation has no parallel in history. Some six millions of human beings are unceasingly subjected to a State-directed torture which is both destructive and demoralizing, and constitutes at once a crime against humanity and an international perplexity.

LUCIEN WOLF, 1912.

* * * * *

EACH crime that wakes in man the beast, Is visited upon his kind. The lust of mobs, the greed of priest, The tyranny of kings, combined To root his seed from earth again, His record is one cry of pain.

*****

Coward? Not he, who faces death, Who singly against worlds has fought, For what? A name he may not breathe, For liberty of prayer and thought.

EMMA LAZARUS, 1882.

‘SOLDIERS OF NICHOLAS’[34]

THERE was one thing the Gentiles might do to me worse than burning or rending. It was what was done to unprotected Jewish children who fell into the hands of priests or nuns. They might baptize me. That would be worse than death by torture. Every Jewish child had that feeling. There were stories by the dozen of Jewish boys who were kidnapped by the Czar’s agents and brought up in Gentile families till they were old enough to enter the army, where they served until forty years of age; and all those years the priests tried, by bribes and daily tortures, to force them to accept baptism, but in vain. This was the time of Nicholas I.

Some of these ‘soldiers of Nicholas’, as they were called, were taken as little boys of seven or eight――snatched from their mothers’ laps. They were carried to distant villages, where their friends could never trace them, and turned over to some dirty, brutal peasant, who used them like slaves, and kept them with the pigs. No two were ever left together; and they were given false names, so that they were entirely cut off from their own world. And then the lonely child was turned over to the priests, and he was flogged and starved and terrified――a little helpless boy who cried for his mother; but still he refused to be baptized. The priests promised him good things to eat, fine clothes, and freedom from labour; but the boy turned away, and said his prayers secretly――the Hebrew prayers.

As he grew older, severer tortures were invented for him; still he refused baptism. By this time he had forgotten his mother’s face, and of his prayers perhaps only the ‘Shema’ remained in his memory; but he was a Jew, and nothing would make him change. After he entered the army, he was bribed with promises of promotions and honours. He remained a private, and endured the cruellest discipline. When he was discharged, at the age of forty, he was a broken man, without a home, without a clue to his origin, and he spent the rest of his life wandering among Jewish settlements, searching for his family, hiding the scars of torture under his rags, begging his way from door to door.

There were men in our town whose faces made you old in a minute. They had served Nicholas I, and come back, unbaptized.

MARY ANTIN, 1911.

BONTZYE SHWEIG[35] (BONTZYE THE SILENT)

DOWN here, in this world, Silent Bontzye’s death made no impression at all. Ask any one you like who Bontzye was, how he lived, and what he died of; whether of heart failure, or whether his strength gave out, or whether his back broke under a heavy load, and they won’t know. Perhaps, after all, he died of hunger.

Bontzye lived quietly and died quietly. He passed through our world like a shadow. He lived like a little dun-coloured grain of sand on the sea-shore, among millions of his kind; and when the wind lifted him and blew him over to the other side of the sea, nobody noticed it. When he was alive, the mud in the street preserved no impression of his feet; after his death the wind overturned the little board on his grave. The grave-digger’s wife found it a long way off from the spot, and boiled a potful of potatoes over it. Three days after that, the grave-digger had forgotten where he had laid him.

A shadow! His likeness remained photographed in nobody’s brain, in nobody’s heart; not a trace of him remained.

‘No kith, no kin!’ He lived and died alone.

Had the world been less busy, some one might have remarked that Bontzye (also a human being) went about with two extinguished eyes and fearfully hollow cheeks; that even when he had no load on his shoulders his head drooped earthward as though, while yet alive, he were looking for his grave. When they carried Bontzye into the hospital, his corner in the underground lodging was soon filled――there were ten of his like waiting for it, and they put it up for auction among themselves. When they carried him from the hospital bed to the dead-house, there were twenty poor sick persons waiting for the bed. When he had been taken out of the dead-house, they brought in twenty bodies from under a building that had fallen in. Who knows how long he will rest in his grave? Who knows how many are waiting for the little plot of ground?

A quiet birth, a quiet life, a quiet death, and a quieter burial.

* * * * *

But it was not so in the Other World. There Bontzye’s death made a great impression.

The blast of the great Messianic Shofar sounded through all the seven heavens; Bontzye Shweig has left the earth! The largest angels with the broadest wings flew about and told one another; Bontzye Shweig is to take his seat in the Heavenly Academy! In Paradise there was a noise and a joyful tumult: Bontzye Shweig! Just fancy! Bontzye Shweig!

Little child-angels with sparkling eyes, gold thread-work wings, and silver slippers, ran delightedly to meet him. The rustle of the wings, the clatter of the little slippers, and the merry laughter of the fresh, rosy mouths, filled all the heavens and reached to the Throne of Glory. Abraham our father stood in the gate, his right hand stretched out with a hearty greeting, and a sweet smile lit up his old face.

What are they wheeling through heaven? Two angels are pushing a golden arm-chair into Paradise for Bontzye Shweig.

What flashed so brightly? They were carrying past a gold crown set with precious stones all for Bontzye Shweig.

‘Before the decision of the Heavenly Court has been given?’ ask the saints, not quite without jealousy. ‘Oh’, reply the angels, ‘that will be a mere formality. Even the prosecutor won’t say a word against Bontzye Shweig. The case will not last five minutes.’ Just consider! Bontzye Shweig!

All this time, Bontzye, just as in the other world, was too frightened to speak. He is sure it is all a dream, or else simply a mistake. He dared not raise his eyes, lest the dream should vanish, lest he should wake up in some cave full of snakes and lizards. He was afraid to speak, afraid to move, lest he should be recognized and flung into the pit. He trembles and does not hear the angels’ compliments, does not see how they dance round him, makes no answer to the greeting of Abraham our father, and when he is led into the presence of the Heavenly Court he does not even wish it ‘Good morning!’ He is beside himself with terror. ‘Who knows what rich man, what rabbi, what saint, they take me for? He will come――and that will be the end of me!’ His terror is such, he never even hears the president call out: ‘The case of Bontzye Shweig!’ adding, as he hands the deeds to the advocate, ‘Read, but make haste!’

The whole hall goes round and round in Bontzye’s eyes; there is a rushing in his ears. And through the rushing he hears more and more clearly the voice of the advocate, speaking sweetly as a violin.

‘His name’, he hears, ‘fitted him like the dress made for a slender figure by the hand of an artist-tailor.’

‘What is he talking about?’ wondered Bontzye, and he heard an impatient voice break in with: ‘No similes, please!’