Part 6

The word which in these venerable folios is made to express the thing is, in itself, significant. In the Hebrew Scriptures, though the injunctions to charitable acts are many, an exact equivalent to our word ‘charity’ can hardly be said to exist. In only eight instances, and not even then in its modern sense, does the Septuagint translate צדקה‎ (_tzedakah_) into its Greek equivalent, ἑλεημοσὑνη, which would become in English ‘alms,’ or ‘charity.’ The nearest synonyms for ‘charity’ in the Hebrew Scriptures are צדקה‎ (_tzedakah_), well translated as ‘righteousness’ in the Authorised Version, and חסד (_chesed_), which is adequately rendered as ‘mercy, kindness, love.’ The Talmud, in its exhaustive fashion, seems to accentuate the essential difference between these two words. _Tzedakah_ is, to some extent, a class distinction; the rights of the poor make occasion for the righteousness of the rich, and the duties of _tzedakah_ find liberal and elaborate expression in a strict and minute system of tithes and almsgiving.[25] The injunctions of the Pentateuch concerning the poor are worked out by the Talmud into the fullest detail of direction. The Levitical law, ‘When ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field’ (Levit. xiv. 9), gives occasion of itself to a considerable quantity of literature. At length, it is enacted how, if brothers divide a field between them, each has to give a ‘corner,’ and how, if a man sell his field in several lots, each purchaser of each separate lot has to leave unreaped his own proportionate ‘corner’ of the harvesting. And not only to leave unreaped, but how, in cases where the ‘corner’ was of a sort hard for the poor to gather, hanging high, as dates, or needing light handling, as grapes, it became the duty of the owner to undertake the ‘reaping’ thereof, and, himself, to make the rightful division; thus guarding against injury to quickly perishable fruits from too eager hands, or danger of a more serious sort to life or limbs, where ladders had to be used by hungry and impatient folks. The exactest rules, too, are formulated as to what constitutes a ‘field’ and what a ‘corner,’ as to what produce is liable to the tax and in what measure. Very curious it is to read long and gravely reasoned arguments as to why mushrooms should be held exempt from the law of the corner, whilst onions must be subject to it, or the weighty _pros_ and _cons_ over what may be fairly considered a ‘fallen grape,’ or a ‘sheaf left through forgetfulness.’ Yet the principle underlying the whole is too clear for prolixity to raise a smile, and the evident anxiety that no smallest loophole shall be left for evading the obligations of property compels respect.

Little room for doubt on any disputed point of partition do these exhaustive, and, occasionally, it must be owned, exhausting, masters leave us, yet, when all is said, they are careful to add, ‘Whatever is doubtful concerning the gifts of the poor belongeth to the poor.’ The actual money value of this system of alms, the actual weight of ancient ephah or omer, in modern lbs. and ozs. would convey little meaning. Values fluctuate and measures vary, but ‘a tithe of thy increase,’ ‘a corner of thy field,’ gives a tolerably safe index to the scale on which _tzedakah_ was to be practised. Three times a day the poor might glean, and to the question which some lover of system, old style or new, might propound, ‘Why three times? Why not once, and get it over?’ an answer is vouchsafed. ‘_Because there may be poor who are suckling children, and thus stand in need of food in the early morning; there may be young children who cannot be got ready early in the morning, nor come to the field till it be mid-day; there may be aged folk who cannot come till the time of evening prayer._’ Still, though plenty of sentiment in this code, there is no trace of sentimentality; rather a tendency for each back to bear its own burden, whether it be in the matter of give or take. Rights are respected all round, and significant in this sense is the rule that if a vineyard be sold by Gentile to Jew it must give up its ‘small bunches’ of grapes to the poor; while if the transaction be the other way, the Gentile purchaser is altogether exempt, and if Jew and Gentile be partners, that part of the crop belonging to the Jew alone is taxed. And equally clear is it that the poor, though cared for and protected, are not to be petted. At this very three-times-a-day gleaning, if one should keep a corner of his ‘corner’ to himself, hiding his harvesting and defrauding his neighbour, justice is prompt: ‘_Let him be forced to depart_,’ it is written, ‘_and what he may have received let it be taken out of his hands._’ Neither is any preference permitted to poverty of the plausible or of the picturesque sort: ‘_He who refuseth to one and giveth to another, that man is a defrauder of the poor_,’ it is gravely said.

In general charity, there are, it is true, certain rules of precedence to be observed; kindred, for example, have, in all cases, the first claim, and a child supporting his parents, or even a parent supporting adult children, to the end that these may be ‘versed in the law, and have good manners,’ is set high among followers of _tzedakah_. Then, ‘_The poor who are neighbours are to be regarded before all others; the poor of one’s own family before the poor of one’s own city, and the poor of one’s own city before the poor of another’s city._’ And this version of ‘charity begins at home’ is worked out in another place into quite a detailed table, so to speak, of professional precedence in the ranks of recognised recipients. And, curiously enough, first among all the distinctions to be observed comes this: ‘_If a man and woman solicit relief, the woman shall be first attended to and then the man._’ An explanation, perhaps a justification, of this mild forestalment of women’s rights, is given in the further dictum that ‘Man is accustomed to wander, and that woman is not,’ and ‘Her feelings of modesty being more acute,’ it is fit that she should be ‘always fed and clothed before the man.’ And if, in this ancient system, there be a recognised scale of rights for receiving, so, equally, is there a graduated order of merit in giving. Eight in number are these so-called ‘Degrees in Alms Deeds,’ the curious list gravely setting forth as ‘highest,’ and this, it would seem, rather on the lines of ‘considering the poor’ than of mere giving, that _tzedakah_ which ‘helpeth ... who is cast down,’ by means of gift or loan, or timely procuring of employment, and ranging through ‘next’ and ‘next,’ till it announces, as eighth and least, the ‘any one who giveth after much molestation.’ High in the list, too, are placed those ‘silent givers’ who ‘let not poor children of upright parents know from whom they receive support,’ and even the man who ‘giveth less than his means allow’ is lifted one degree above the lowest if he ‘give with a kind countenance.’

The mode of relief grew, with circumstances, to change. The time came when, to ‘the Hagars and Ishmaels of mankind,’ rules for gleaning and for ‘fallen grapes’ would, perforce, be meaningless, and new means for the carrying out of _tzedakah_ had to be devised. In Alms of the Chest, קופה (_kupah_), and Alms of the Basket, תמחוי (_tamchui_), another exhaustive system of relief was formulated. The _kupah_ would seem to have been a poor-rate, levied on all ‘residents in towns of over thirty days’ standing,’ and ‘Never,’ says Maimonides, ‘have we seen or heard of any congregation of Israelites in which there has not been the Chest for Alms, though, with regard to the Basket, it is the custom in some places to have it, and not in others.’ These chests were placed in the Silent Court of the Sanctuary, to the end that a class of givers who went by the name of Fearers of Sin,[26] might deposit their alms in silence and be relieved of responsibility. The contents of the Chest were collected weekly and used for all ordinary objects of relief, the overplus being devoted to special cases and special purposes. It is somewhat strange to our modern notions to find that one among such purposes was that of providing poor folks with the wherewith to marry. For not only is it commanded concerning the ‘brother waxen poor,’ ‘_If he standeth in need of garments, let him be clothed; or if of household things, let him be supplied with them,’ but ‘if of a wife, let a wife be betrothed unto him, and in case of a woman, let a husband be betrothed unto her._’ Does this quaint provision recall Voltaire’s taunt that ‘Les juifs ont toujours regardé comme leurs deux grands devoirs des enfants et de l’argent’? Perhaps, and yet, Voltaire and even Malthus notwithstanding, it is just possible that the last word has not been said on this subject, and that in ‘improvident’ marriages and large families the new creed of survival of the fittest may, after all, be best fulfilled.

Philosophers, we know, are not always consistent with themselves, and if there be truth in another saying of Voltaire’s--‘Voyez les registres affreux de vos greffes crimines, vous y trouvez cent garçons de pendus ou de roués contre un père de famille’--then is there something certainly to be said in favour of the Jewish system. But this by the way, since statistics, it must be owned, are the most sensitive and susceptible of the sciences. This ancient betrothing, moreover, was no empty form, no bare affiancing of two paupers; but a serious and substantial practice of raising a marriage portion for a couple unable to marry without it. By Talmudic code, ‘marriages were not legitimately complete till a settlement of some sort was made on the wife,’ who, it may be here parenthetically remarked, was so far in advance of comparatively modern legislation as to be entitled to have and to hold in as complete and comprehensive a sense as her husband.

But whilst Alms of the Chest, though pretty various in its application,[27] was intended only for the poor of the place in which it was collected, Alms of the Basket was, to the extent of its capabilities, for ‘the poor of the whole world.’ It consisted of a daily house-to-house collection of food of all sorts, and occasionally of money, which was again, day by day, distributed. This custom of _tamchui_, suited to those primitive times, would seem to be very similar to the practice of ‘common Boxes, and common gatherynges in every City,’ which prevailed in England in the sixteenth century, and which received legal sanction in Act of the 23rd of Henry VIII.--‘Item, that 2 or 3 tymes in every weke 2 or 3 of every parysh shal appoynt certaine of ye said pore people to collecte and gather broken meates and fragments, and the refuse drynke of every householder, which shal be distributed evenly amonge the pore people as they by theyre discrecyons shal thynke good.’ Only the collectors and distributors of _kupah_ and _tamchui_ were not ‘certaine of ye said pore people,’ but unpaid men of high character, holding something of the position of magistrates in the community. The duty of contributing in kind to _tamchui_ was supplemented among the richer folks by a habit of entertaining the poor as guests;[28] seats at their own tables, and beds in their houses being frequently reserved for wayfarers, at least over Sabbath and festivals.[29]

The curious union of sense and sentiment in the Talmudic code is shown again in the regulations as to who may, and who may not, receive of these gifts of the poor: ‘_He who has sufficient for two meals_,’ so runs the law, ‘_may not take from tamchui; he who has sufficient for fourteen may not take from kupah_.’ Yet might holders of property, fallen on slack seasons, be saved from selling at a loss and helped to hold on till better times, by being ‘meanwhile supported out of the tithes of the poor.’ And if the house and goods of him in this temporary need were grand, money help might be given to the applicant, and he might keep all his smart personal belongings, yet superfluities, an odd item or two of which are vouchsafed, must be sold, and replaced, if at all, by a simpler sort. Still, with all this excessive care for those who have come down in the world, and despite the dictum that ‘he who withholdeth alms is “impious” and like unto an idolater,’ there is yet no encouragement to dependence discernible in these precise and prolix rules. ‘Let thy Sabbath be as an ordinary day, rather than become dependent on thy fellow-men,’ it is clearly written, and told, too, in detail, how ‘wise men,’ the most honoured, by the way, in the community, to avoid ‘dependence on others,’ might become, without loss of caste or respectability, ‘carriers of timber, workers in metal, and makers of charcoal.’ Neither is there any contempt for wealth or any love of poverty for its own sake to be seen in this people, who were taught to ‘rejoice before the Lord.’ In one place it is, in truth, gravely set forth that ‘he who increaseth the number of his servants’ increaseth the amount of sin in the world, but this somewhat ascetic-sounding statement is clearly susceptible of a good deal of common-sense interpretation, and when another Master tells us that ‘charity is the salt which keeps wealth from corruption,’ a thought, perhaps, for the due preservation of the wealth may be read between the lines.

On the whole, it looks as if these old-world Rabbis set to work at laying down the law in much the spirit of Robert Browning’s Rabbi--

‘Let us not always say, Spite of this flesh to-day, I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole. As the bird wings and sings Let us cry, ‘All good things Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.’

After this manner, at any rate, are set forth, and in this sense are interpreted in the Talmud, the Biblical injunctions to _tzedakah_, to that charity of alms-deeds which, as society is constituted, must, as we said, be considered somewhat of a class distinction.

But for the charity which should be obligatory all round, and as easy of fulfilment by the poor as by the rich, the Talmud chooses the other synonym חסד (_chesed_), and coining from it the word _Gemiluth-chesed_, which may be rendered ‘the doing of kindness,’ it works out a supplementary and social system of charity--a system founded not on ‘rights,’ but on sympathy--dealing not in doles, but in deeds of friendship and of fellowship, and demanding a giving of oneself rather than of one’s stores. And greater than _tzedakah_, write the Rabbis, is _Gemiluth-chesed_, justifying their dictum, as is their wont, by a reference to Holy Writ. ‘Sow to yourselves in righteousness (_tzedakah_),’ says the prophet Hosea (Hos. x. 12); ‘reap in mercy (_chesed_)’; and, inasmuch as reaping is better than sowing, mercy must be better than righteousness. To ‘visit the sick,’ to promote peace in families apt to fall out, to ‘relieve all persons, Jews or non-Jews, in affliction’ (a comprehensive phrase), to ‘bury the dead,’ to ‘accompany the bride,’ are among those ‘kindnesses’ which take rank as religious duties, and one or two specimens may indicate the amount of careful detail which make these injunctions practical, and the fine motive which goes far towards spiritualising them.

Of the visiting of the sick, the Talmud speaks with a sort of awe. God’s spirit, it says, dwells in the chamber of suffering and death, and tendance therein is worship. Nursing was to be voluntary, and no charge to be made for drugs; and so deeply did the habit of helping the helpless in this true missionary spirit obtain among the Jews, that to this day, and more especially in provincial places, the last offices for the dead are rarely performed by hired hands. The ‘accompanying of the bride’ is _Gemiluth-chesed_ in another form. To rejoice with one’s neighbour’s joys is no less a duty in this un-Rochefoucauld-like code than to grieve with his grief. A bride is to be greeted with songs and flowers, and pleasant speeches, and, if poor, to be provided with pretty ornaments and substantial gifts, but the pleasant speeches are in all cases, and before all things, obligatory. In the discursive detail, which is so strong a feature of these Talmudic rulings, it is asked: ‘But if the bride be old, or awkward, or positively plain, is she to be greeted in the usual formula as “fair bride--graceful bride”?’ ‘Yes,’ is the answer, for one is not bound to insist on uncomfortable facts, nor to be obtrusively truthful; to be agreeable is one of the minor virtues. Were there anything in the doctrine of metempsychosis, one would be almost tempted to believe that this ancient unnamed Rabbi was speaking over again in the person of one of our modern minor poets:

‘A truth that’s told with bad intent Beats all the lies you can invent.’[30]

The charity of courtesy is everywhere insisted upon, and so strongly, that, on behalf of those sometimes ragged and unkempt Rabbis it might perhaps be urged that politeness, the _politesse du cœur_, was their Judaism _en papillote_. ‘Receive every one with pleasant looks,’ says one sage,[31] whose practice was, perhaps, not always quite up to his precepts; ‘where there is no reverence there is no wisdom,’ says another; and as the distinguishing mark of a ‘clown,’ a third instances that man--have we not all met him?--who rudely breaks in on another’s speech, and is more glib than accurate or respectful in his own.

And as postscript to the ‘law’ obtaining on these cheery social forms of ‘charity’ a tombstone may perhaps be permitted to add its curious crumbling bit of evidence. In the House of Life, as Jews name their burial-grounds, at Prague, there stood--perhaps stands still--a stone, erected to the memory, and recording the virtues, of a certain rich lady who died in 1628. Her benefactions, many and minute, are set forth at length, and amongst the rest, and before ‘she clothed the naked,’ comes the item, ‘she ran like a bird to weddings.’ Through the mists of those terrible stories, which make of Prague so miserable a memory to Jews, the record of this long-ago dead woman gleams like a rainbow. One seems to see the bright little figure, a trifle out of breath may be, the gay plumage perhaps just a shade ruffled--somehow one does not fancy her a very prim or tidy personage--running ‘like a bird to weddings.’ She seems, the dear sympathetic soul, in an odd, suggestive sort of way, to illustrate the charitable system of her race, and to show us that, despite all differences of time and place and circumstances, the one essential condition to any ‘charity’ that shall prove effectual remains unchanged; that the solution of the hard problem, which may be worked out in a hundred ways, is just sympathy, and is to be learnt, not in the ‘speaking from afar’ of rich to poor, but in the ‘laying of hands’ upon them. The close fellowship of this ancient primitive system is perhaps impossible in our more complex civilisation, but an approximation to it is an ideal worth striving after. More intimate, more everyday communion between West and East, more ‘Valentines’ at Hoxton are sorely needed. Concert-giving, class-teaching, ‘visiting,’ are all helps of a sort, but there are so many days in a poor man’s week, so many hours in his dull day. Sweetness and light, like other and more prosaic products of civilisation, need, it may be, to be ‘laid on’ in those miles of monotonous streets, long breaks in continuity being fatal to results.

MOSES MENDELSSOHN

‘I wish, it is true, to shame the opprobrious sentiments commonly entertained of a Jew, but it is by character and not by controversy that I would do it.’[32] So wrote the subject of this memoir more than a hundred years ago, and the sentence may well stand for the motto of his life; for much as Moses Mendelssohn achieved by his ability, much more did he by his conduct, and great as he was as a philosopher, far greater was he as a man. Starting with every possible disadvantage--prejudice, poverty, and deformity--he yet reached the goal of ‘honour, fame, and troops of friends’ by simple force of character; and thus he remains for all time an illustration of the happy optimistic theory that, even in this world, success, in the best sense of the word, does come to those who, also in the best sense of the word, deserve it.

The state of the Jews in Germany at the time of Mendelssohn’s birth was deplorable. No longer actively hunted, they had arrived, at the early part of the eighteenth century, at the comparatively desirable position of being passively shunned or contemptuously ignored, and, under these new conditions, they were narrowing fast to the narrow limits set them. The love of religion and of race was as strong as ever, but the love had grown sullen, and of that jealous, exclusive sort to which curse and anathema are akin. What then loomed largest on their narrow horizon was fear; and under that paralysing influence, progress or prominence of any kind became a distinct evil, to be repressed at almost any personal sacrifice. Safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith, lay, if anywhere, in the neglect of the outside world. And so the poor pariahs huddled in their close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a dialect of their own, half Jewish, half German, and as wholly degenerate from the grand old Hebrew as were they themselves from those to whom it had been a living tongue. Intellectual occupation was found in the study of the Law; interest and entertainment in the endless discussion of its more intricate passages; and excitement in the not infrequent excommunication of the weaker or bolder brethren who ventured to differ from the orthodox expounders. The culture of the Christian they hated, with a hate born half of fear for its possible effects, half of repulsion at its palpable evidences. The tree of knowledge seemed to them indeed, in pathetic perversion of the early legend, a veritable tree of evil, which should lose a second Eden to the wilful eaters thereof. Their Eden was degenerate too; but the ‘voice heard in the evening’ still sounded in their dulled and passionate ears, and, vibrating in the Ghetto instead of the grove, it seemed to bid them shun the forbidden fruit of Gentile growth.