Part 39

The economic condition of the Jews in the large Eastern European Ghettos is, naturally, extremely bad. Huddled together, either in certain districts of large towns or in villages where they form the greater part of the population, they are compelled to live off and on each other. Crowded into certain walks of life by anti-Jewish legislation or anti-Jewish sentiment, few of them can gain more than sufficient to keep body and soul together. In Galicia it has been estimated that five thousand Jews perish every year from typhus-fever. The Jewish wax-miners in Boryslav, to take but one instance, were forced out of the mines and reduced to utter starvation, for no other reason but because they were Jews. The failure of the harvests in Southern Russia during the last few years has reduced the wage-earners in that part of the country to the position of dependants upon the charity of others; but the Jews who live there in such large numbers do not even benefit from the assistance sent by the government. Similar conditions prevail almost continually in the rest of the Russian pale and in Roumania. The standard of life has naturally been lowered among these people and their general _morale_ has not come out of the trial unscathed.

Nor must it be forgotten that the violent dislocation of hundreds of thousands of people, such as has taken place among the Jews during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has naturally disturbed existing economic conditions, not only among the Jews themselves, but also among those into whose midst they came. These outcasts from Eastern Europe did not come to virgin soil as did the Pilgrim Fathers, but to cities and towns which were already filled with a proletariat engaged in the eager fight for life. The Jews of Berlin, Paris, London, and New York, had their hands full with the proper care of the needy ones already in their midst.

It is a mistake to suppose that the Jews as a people are rich. The proletariat among them is proportionately much larger than it is among other people; and thus it came about that the Jewish quarters in all the large cities were already well filled when they were (almost at a moment’s notice) called upon to receive double or triple the number they already held. The actual number of the Jewish poor was thereby greatly increased; for many a family that had been wealthy or in easy circumstances in Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, had been reduced to want and been compelled to take its place among those who needed the help of their brethren. This help was freely and cheerfully given all the world over. Great sacrifices were made by the richer Jews to meet the pressing needs of the hour, and, with no help from the outside world, excepting the London Mansion House Fund in 1882, the thousands and tens of thousands of immigrants were cared for. The Jewish charitable organizations, the development of which has been during the latter half of the nineteenth century the brightest spot in Jewish communal life, rose to the demands of the occasion, and the more than princely munificence of Baron and Baroness Maurice de Hirsch, in regard to the Russian Jews, may justly be looked upon with pride.

New Ghettos, however, were formed in nearly all the cities to which these immigrants came; and this name for the habitat of the poorer Jews became again familiar, aided by the popularity which some modern novelists had given to it. In the Middle Ages and down to our own time the Jews had been forced by the state to live apart in such Ghettos; sometimes for their own protection, sometimes to preserve the outside world from contact with them. The modern Ghetto is a voluntary gathering of the Jews for the purpose of mutual help and from a feeling of reciprocal obligations. To the outside observer it presents an unsightly appearance; it is the abode of poor people, and its population is usually strange in dress, manners, and speech. The sweating system (which in one form or another is to be found in all these Ghettos) has been a dreadful incentive towards grinding the face of the poor; and the results of too great a hoarding are often quite apparent; so that the general morality of the Jews in these Ghettos has suffered in consequence. A people ignorant of the language of their new home are a prey to the evil-intended, who make use of their ignorance for their own commercial and political advancement. This has been notably seen in the city of New York, where a lax city government has permitted the vampires of society to fasten their fangs upon the Ghetto and to produce conditions which call for the active interference of all those forces which seek to stamp out crime and vice. But, on the other hand, to one who is acquainted with the inner life of the Ghetto the virtues which have hitherto characterized the Jews—industry and sobriety—are still to be found there; much more frequently than in those parts where the richer classes congregate, and whose wealth enables them to withdraw their doings from the public gaze. Its members are as industrious as bees in a hive; and though extremely litigatious, drunkenness is unknown and actual crime is comparatively rare.

In order to correct the abuses of the Ghetto, two things are absolutely necessary—the increase of the actual number of Jews there must be stopped, and the crowding into certain distinct fields of work must be brought to an end. A determined effort has already been made to force the new immigrants into less crowded parts of the land to which they come. In this country this is being done by the United Hebrew Charities, and notably by the B’nai B’rith. A distinct clannish feeling has, however, to be overcome, and a fear of venturing into an unknown country where the immigrant will be surrounded by people who do not understand his peculiar social and religious customs.

That the Jew has taken by preference to certain branches of trade and work is due to the fact that anti-Jewish legislation has for centuries closed many walks of life to him, and the guild organization excluded him rigorously from many spheres of activity. Then, too, his richly developed home life has induced a certain distaste for occupations which take the wage-earner out of his home and away from his family. That, however, these inherited instincts can easily be overcome is clearly seen whenever the occasion offers. Even in Amsterdam, where three-fourths of the diamond industry is in the hands of Jews, there are to be found Jewish cobblers, cigar-makers, plumbers, carpet-weavers, mattress-makers, watch-makers, etc. In the East End of London there are, it is true, ten thousand Jews who are engaged in the clothes-making trades, but the rest of the forty thousand Jewish wage-earners of this quarter are scattered over all possible branches of work—masonry, metal-working, textile industries, furniture-making, cap-making, and the like. The same is true of New York, where, although the number of Jews employed in the tailoring industries is disproportionately large, the following list of Hebrew unions shows how far afield the Jewish workman has gone: Cap-Makers, Cap-Blockers, Shirt-Makers, Mattress-Makers, Purse-Makers, Liberty Musical Union, Jewish Chorus Union, Jewellers’ Union, Tin-Smithers’ Union, Bill-Posters, Waiters’ Alliance, Architectural Ironworkers, Hebrew Typographical Union, Tobacco Cutters, Paper-Makers, Bookbinders. The same is relatively true of all other countries where Jews live in large numbers.

It is a popular misconception that the Jew has an innate distaste for agriculture. His continued commercial life, forced upon him for many centuries, has, it is true, disaccustomed the Jew to the life of a tiller of the soil. But the Jewish state was largely an agricultural one; the legislation of the Bible and the later Law Books was clearly intended for an agricultural people; and Jews have never shown an unwillingness to return again to the soil. In Southern Russia there are to-day 225 Jewish colonies with a population of 100,000. In Palestine there are now more than twenty colonies with a population of more than 5000, and similar agricultural colonies have been established at various times in the United States, Canada, and the Argentine Republic. In many cases, it is true, these colonies have not yet become self-supporting, but this has been due in a large measure to maladministration and to the peculiar conditions under which the colonies were founded.

It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent partisan of the existing state of affairs.

INTERNAL RELIGIOUS DEVELOPMENT

The facility with which the Jews attach themselves to changed circumstances stands out characteristically through their whole history. It might, indeed, be said with some show of truth that this pliability is the weak side in the Jewish character. The readiness of the Jew to be almost anything and not simply his own self has been one of the factors producing a certain ill will against him. Disraeli was the most jingo of all imperialists in England; Lasker, the most ardent advocate of the newly constituted German Empire. This pliability is the result of the wandering life he has led and the various civilizations of which he has been a part. He had to find his way into Hellenism in Alexandria, into Moorish culture in Spain, into Slavism in Russia and Poland. When the first wave of the modern spirit commenced to break from France eastward over the whole of Europe, it reached the Jew also. While in France the new spirit was largely political, in Germany it was more spiritual. In its political form as well as in its spiritual form it reacted not only upon the political condition of the Jew, but especially upon his mental attitude. The new spirit was intensely modern, intensely cosmopolitan, intensely Occidental, and intensely inductive. The Jew had preserved to a great degree his deductive, Oriental, particularistic, and ancient mode of thought and aspect of life. The two forces were bound to meet. As a great oak is met by the storm, so was Israel set upon by the fury of this terrible onslaught. It is of interest to see in what manner he emerged from this storm—whether he has been able to bend to its fury, to lose perhaps some of his leaves and even some of his branches, but to change only in such a way as to be able to stand upright again when the storm is past.

This great clash of ideas has produced what is known as the Reform movement. It had its origin in Germany under the spiritual influences of the regeneration of German letters produced by such men as Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Lessing, and Mendelssohn. It was aided in a large measure by the fact that the government in Germany, although distinctly opposed to anything which militates against the established order of things, mixes itself very seldom in the internal affairs of the Jewish communities. This Reform movement has colored the religious development of Judaism during the three-quarters of the century which is past. The heat of the controversy is now wellnigh spent. Many of those who stood in the front ranks have passed away, so that a more just estimate of its value can be reached. It was a period of tremendous upheavals, of great physical as well as mental pain. Many a congregation was split in twain, many a family disrupted. At one time it looked as if two distinct bodies of Jews would emerge from the struggle, and the union of Israel be destroyed forever. A common enemy—anti-Semitism—joined the two forces together for a common defence; and the danger of such a split is now fairly a thing of the past.

The latter half of the eighteenth century found the Jews of Middle Europe at the lowest intellectual and social point they had up till then reached. The effect of the long Jewish Middle Ages was plainly visible. Few great minds lit up the darkness, and an intellectual torpor seems to have spread its pall over everything. A passive uniformity of practice prevailed in all the communities, whether Sefardic (Spanish and Portuguese) or Ashkenazic (German and Polish); a uniformity, because actual intellectual life had been made to run in one single groove. The Talmud had been the great saving of Judaism in the past. In the intellectual exercise which its study necessitated, the mind of the Jew had been given a field in which it could rove at will. Living apart from the rest of the world, with a wide jurisdiction over his own affairs, Talmudic law in its latest development was still the law supreme for the Jew. The Jewish Ghetto had everywhere the same aspect; the language in common use was, in all the Ashkenazic communities, the Judæo-German in one of its various forms. A certain severity in evaluating those things which were part of the outside world made itself felt. There was ample time and ample occasion for the practice of all those forms and ceremonies with which the Judaism of the Middle Ages had willingly and gladly fenced in the law. There had been little occasion for the practice of the beautiful arts or for the cultivation of letters. Life in the Ghetto was not necessarily gloomy, but it was solemn. The law was not felt as a burden, but it required the whole individual attention of those who bound themselves by it, from early morn till late at night, from the cradle to the grave. There was no place for things that come from outside, because there was no time to devote to them.

But the new European spirit in its French political form was knocking hard at the gates of the Ghetto. Little by little it made its way here and there, into all sorts of nooks and corners. It was bound in time to be heard by some of those living behind these gates. The name of Moses Mendelssohn is indissolubly connected with the history of German Judaism during the latter part of the eighteenth century. It was due to him that a vehicle was found which the new spirit could use. Himself a strictly observant Jew, he felt the pulse of the new era. The friend of Lessing and of Nicolai, he entered fully into the revival which was then making itself felt. Through his translation of the Pentateuch (1778, etc.) into High-German, he prepared the way for the further introduction of German writings to the Jewish masses. This was bound to bring with it a larger culture and a greater freedom of thought. Many of his friends, such as Wessely, Hertz-Homberg, and David Friedlander, stood by his side in this work. With the introduction of the German language and German literature, better and more modern schools were needed in which secular education should go hand in hand with the former one-sided religious training. David Friedlander was the first to found a school in the modern sense of the term; and he was followed by Jacobson in 1801, at Seesen, Westphalia, and at Cassel, and by Johlson, at Frankfort, in 1814. Between the years 1783 and 1807 such modern Jewish schools arose in Germany, Austria, Denmark, France, and even in Poland. Literature was cultivated, and the first Jewish journal (though still in Hebrew) was published in Königsberg, 1783 (_Hameassef_—the Collector). The _Gesellschaft der Freunde_, founded in Berlin in 1792, was distinctly intended for the spread of this modern culture; yet Mendelssohn’s own position was quite an untenable one. He was a thoroughly Orthodox Jew in practice, but his mental attitude was that of a modern German. He was and he was not a reformer. He held that it mattered little what philosophical position a Jew held, the Jew must observe all the ceremonies connected with the faith; these were binding upon him by the mere fact of his having been born into the Covenant. It is therefore no wonder that his translation was put under the bann in Hamburg, Altona, Fuerth, Posen, etc. His friend Friedlander wished to make of the synagogue a sort of Ethical Culture Society; and Jacobson’s preaching in Berlin contained very little of what was distinctly Jewish. The salons of Berlin, Königsberg, and Vienna, which were presided over by brilliant women, who were more or less immediate disciples of Mendelssohn, nurtured the cosmopolitan spirit which was bound to be destructive of practical Judaism. That this fruit on the Tree of Knowledge ripened too quickly is seen from the fact that all the descendants of Mendelssohn, Friedlander, and others, led astray by this cosmopolitan spirit and the philosophic presentation of Christianity by Schleiermacher, have all become devoted members of the Lutheran Church and have been completely lost to Judaism.

It was natural that these new influences should influence also the training of the modern rabbis. Secular education had been introduced into primary schools, and in some places—as, for instance, Lombardy, in 1820—the government demanded a certain amount of secular knowledge from the candidates for rabbinical positions. The Jew also desired that his leaders should have the same training as he gave his children, that they should be educated in the same atmosphere in which he himself had grown up. The old rabbinical seminaries, or Yeshibot, in which the instruction was entirely on Talmudic lines, had already run their course; the study had been found insufficient by the pupils themselves, and the schools of Frankfort, Fuerth, Metz, Hamburg, and Halberstadt had all been closed for want of students. The need of a modern seminary was felt quite early during the century; and in 1809, a Lehrer-Seminar was founded in Cassel. The earliest regular seminary for the training of rabbis, however, was founded in Padua in 1829. In Germany attempts had been made in the year 1840, but these attempts were unsuccessful. The first modern seminary was not founded in Germany until the year 1854 (Breslau). Then followed Berlin, in 1872; Cincinnati, in 1873; Budapest, in 1876. Similar institutions exist now in London, Paris, and Vienna.

In the first convulsions of the Mendelssohn period the way was paved for the second period of the Reform movement which covers the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The real issues touched the central point of Jewish life, the synagogue. It is interesting to note that during this period the chief questions were not so much theological as æsthetic. The æsthetic side of life could not be largely cultivated in the Ghetto; and the form of the service had greatly degenerated. In the course of centuries, so many additional prayers and songs and hymns had been added that the ritual was largely overburdened, and often tended rather to stifle than bring out the religious sense they were intended to conserve. Contact with the outside world created and fostered this æsthetic sense, and the influences of the writings of such men as Lessing and Mendelssohn was largely in this direction. As this æsthetic sense made its way into the homes, so also did it carve out its way into the synagogue. Demands were heard for a shorter service; for the organ to accompany the chanting of the reader; for the German language in some of the prayers and for the German sermon. Each point was bitterly contested; for the Orthodox wing had before it the wholesale apostasy of the Salon Jews. In order to introduce the vernacular into the service and into the sermon, private synagogues were opened by small coteries in Cassel (1809), Seesen (1810), Dessau (1812), and Berlin (1815). In Southern Germany the use of the vernacular was introduced between the years 1817 and 1818, also in Hungary through the influence of Abraham Chorin. In some countries the government gave its active aid. In Vienna, in 1820, German was made obligatory, and as early as 1814 Danish in Copenhagen. The greatest changes, however, were made in the Hamburg temple (under Kley and Salomon, 1818), where not only the service was made more æsthetic and the German language introduced, but certain prayers referring to the Messianic time were either omitted or altered. No wonder, then, that the Orthodox rabbis in Germany, with the support of the rabbis in various other countries, protested against such a course. The government even looked askance at these Reform proceedings, and in 1817 and 1823 ordered a number of these private synagogues to be closed. A further cause for displeasure was the introduction in 1814 of the confirmation of children in German, to replace or supplement the old Barmitzvah, a clear imitation of the ceremony in the Protestant Church of Germany. Despite opposition, however, the confirmation found its way into Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Cassel, Copenhagen, etc.

This æsthetic revolution in the synagogue could not, however, long remain the only outward sign of the new life. The great weakness of the Reform movement has been that it has lacked a philosophic basis; and, as in its first beginnings, with the exception of Hamburg, it took little note of the changed point of view from which those who fought for reform looked at the old theological ideas. Æsthetic reform was the work largely of individual persons and individual congregations. No attempt had been made either to formulate the philosophic basis upon which the reform stood, or to provide a body which should regulate the form which the new order of things was to take on. Two attempts were made to remedy these evils, both closely related one to the other.