Part 11

In Lord Burleigh’s _Precepts to his Son for the Well-Ordering of a Mans Life_, occurs the direction, ‘Thou wilt find to thy great grief there is nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.’ It is an axiom almost as pregnant of meaning as its author’s famous nod, and seems to suggest as possible that the proverbial harmony of the Jewish domestic circle may be in a measure due to its comparative immunity from she-fools. The women of Israel, _pur sang_, it is certain, are rarely noisy or assertive, and have at all times been more ready to realise their responsibilities than their ‘rights.’ In their woman’s kingdom, comprehending its limits and not wasting its opportunities, they have been content to reign and not to govern, and neither exceptional power nor exceptional intellect have affected this position. The pretty young Queen of Persia, we read, for all her new dignities, ‘did the commandment of Mordecai as when she was brought up with him,’ and Miriam with her timbrel and Deborah under her palm-tree might have been unconscious illustrative anachronisms of a very profound saying, so well content were they to ‘make their country’s songs’ and to leave it to Moses to ‘make the laws.’ The one-man rule has been always fully and freely acknowledged in Israel, and in the ideal sketch as in the real portraits of its womankind, her ‘husband,’ her ‘children,’ her ‘clothing,’ and the ‘ways of her household’ are supreme features. ‘To do a man,’ one man, ‘good and not evil all the days of his life,’ may seem to modern maidens a somewhat limited ambition, but it is just to remember that to this typical woman comes full permission to indulge in her ‘own works’ and encouragement ‘to speak with merchants from afar,’ a habit this, one ventures to think, which would open up even to Girton and Newnham graduates extended powers of conversation and correspondence in their own and foreign languages. And, withal, that pretty saying of an elderly and prosaic Rabbi, ‘I do not call my wife, wife, but home,’ has poetry and practicality too, to recommend it. For in so far as there is truth in the dictum, that ‘men will be always what women please, that if we want men to be great and good, we must teach women what greatness and goodness are,’ there really seems a good deal to be said for the old-fashioned type we have been considering, and certainly some comfort to be found in the fact that against the _ewig weibliche_ time itself is powerless. Realities may shift and vary, but ideals for the most part stand fast, and thus, despite all superficial differences, in essentials the situation is unchanged between those daughters of the desert and our daughters of to-day. Now, as then, the claim is allowed to a rightful ‘possession among their brethren.’

Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Talmud, Yoma 356.

[2] The extracts marked thus (1) were done into verse from the German of Geiger, by the late Amy Levy.

[3] From Atonement Service.

[4] Hebrew for Toledo.

[5] Alcharisi.

[6] E. B. Browning.

[7] No authority gives it later than 1140.

[8] Rabbi Seira.

[9] ‘The Lord God doth like a printer who setteth the letters backward; we see and feel well His setting, but the print we shall see yonder in the life to come.’--Luther’s _Table Talk_.

[10] Gütle Rothschild, née Schnapper, died May 7, 1849. Her eldest son, Amschel Meyer Rothschild, was born June 12, 1773, died December 6, 1855.

[11] Written in 1882.

[12] The translation is by the late Amy Levy.

[13] Messrs. Campe and Hoffmann erected their new offices during the publication (not too well paid) of the poet’s works.

[14] Matthew Arnold, _Heinrich Heine_.

[15] The Exhibition of 1855.

[16] Written in 1882.

[17] Short declaration of belief in Unity (Deut. vi. 4).

[18] ‘Old Pictures from Florence.’

[19] _On Heroes_: Lect. vi., ‘The Hero as King,’ p. 342.

[20] _Cromwell_, vol. ii. p. 359.

[21] Some chroniclers fix it so early as 1653.

[22] From ‘Declaration to the Commonwealth of England.’

[23] Jeremiah xxix. 7.

[24] In 1369.

[25] Maimonides, in his well-known digest of Talmudic laws relating to the poor, uniformly employs _tzedakah_ in the sense of ‘alms.’

[26] חטא יךאי (_yeree chet_). These ultra-sensitive folks seem to have feared that in direct relief they might be imposed on and so indirectly become encouragers of wrong-doing, or unnecessarily hurt the feelings of the poor by too rigid inquiries.

[27] We read, in mediæval times, of the existence of wide ‘extensions’ of this system of relief. In a curious old book, published in the seventeenth century, by a certain Rabbi Elijah ha Cohen ben Abraham, of Smyrna, we find a list drawn up of Jewish charities to which, as he says, ‘all pious Jews contribute.’ These modes of satisfying ‘the hungry soul’ are over seventy in number, and of the most various kinds. They include the lending of money and the lending of books, the payment of dowries and the payment of burial charges, doctors’ fees for the sick, legal fees for the unjustly accused, ransom for captives, ornaments for bribes, and wet nurses for orphans.

[28] Spanish Jews often had their coffins made from the wood of the tables at which they had sat with their unfashionable guests.

[29] This custom had survived into quite modern times--to cite only the well-known case of Mendelssohn, who, coming as a penniless student to Berlin, received his Sabbath meals in the house of one co-religionist, and the privilege of an attic chamber under the roof of another.

[30] William Blake.

[31] Shimei.

[32] In the correspondence with Lavater.

[33] Better known to scholars as Dr. Aaron Solomon Gompertz.

[34] Later, the noted publisher of that name.

[35] Fromet was the affectionate diminutive of _Fromm_--pious. Pet names of this sort were common at that time; we often come across a Gütle or Schönste or the like.

[36] _Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judenthum._

[37] _Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes._

[38] _Phædon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele._

[39] The whole correspondence can be read in _Memoirs of Moses Mendelssohn_, by M. Samuels, published in 1827.