The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam. Sir Richard Francis Burton

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СКАЧАТЬ attributed to the theistic secularism of Moses were issued with one object—namely, that of hardening and tempering the race to an extent which even Sparta ignored. The ancient Jew was more than half a Bedawin, and not being an equestrian race his annual journeys to and from Jerusalem were mostly made on foot. His diet was carefully regulated, and his year was a succession of fasts and feasts, as indeed it is now, but not to such an extent as formerly. The results were simply the destruction of all the weaklings and the survival of the fittest.

Thrice during the year, by order of the Torah (Deut. xvi. 16)—namely (1) in the Passover, or feast of unleavened bread during the first ecclesiastical and the seventh civil month; (2) at Pentecost, or Shebaoth (weeks), the feast of the wheat harvest in the third or the ninth month; and (3) at the Feast of Tabernacles, or the ingathering of the harvest in the seventh or the first month—the Jew of old was religiously commanded to appear before the Lord. He was bound to leave his home, which might be distant a hundred and fifty miles, and travel up to Jerusalem, where he led a camp life like his half-brothers in the Desert. This semi-nomad life was combined with a quasi-ascetic condition produced by the frequency and the severity of his fasts and by the austerities attending upon making ready for the Sabbath, that is to say, the preparations of Friday evening—some religious men even in the present age suffer nothing to pass their lips for seven consecutive days and nights.[7] This afflicting the soul, as it is called, served to breed a race equally hard and hardy in frame and mind. It embodied to perfection the idea of the sacrifice of personal will. Add to this the barbarous and ferocious nature of their punishments, amongst which stoning by the congregation is perhaps the most classical, and the perpetual bloodshed in the Temple, which must have suggested a butcher’s shambles.

      

      Again, the history and traditions, the faith and practice of the Jew ever placed before his eyes the absolute and immeasurable superiority of his own caste, the “Peculiar People, the Kingdom of Priests, the Holy Nation.” This exaltation justified the Hebrew in treating his brother-men as heathens barely worthy of the title of human. “Lo, the people shall dwell alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations”—an unfriendly separation and an estrangement between man and man equally injurious to the welfare of Jew and Gentile. It grew a rank crop of hideous crimes committed in the fair name of religion—what nation but the Hebrew could exult over a Jephthah who “did with his daughter according to his own,” that is, burnt her to death before the Lord? At the same time it inculcated a rare humanity amongst its own members unknown to all other peoples of antiquity: for instance, it allowed the coward to retire from the field before battle, and, strange to say, it inculcated the very highest of moral dogmas. In 250 b.c. Sochæus, and after him the Pharisees, according to Josephus, taught that God should be served, not for gain, but for love and gratitude: hence his follower Sadík forbade the looking forward to futurity, even as Moses had neglected the doctrine with studious care. Even in the present age of the world such denegation of egotism would be a higher law.

      All these specialities in combination urged the Jews to dare and to do everything against all who were not of their own blood. The inevitable conclusion of such a policy was that eventually they came into collision with all around them; that they failed in the unequal combat with pagan Rome and early Christianity; that they lost the birthplace of their nationality, and were scattered far and wide over the surface of the earth. And what has happened once may happen again.

      The Greeks of earlier days, who like the Hebrews had but one faith and one tongue, also met periodically as a single family at Delphi, the centre of their racial area. Thus that gifted people without any inspiration effectually combined with grandeur in the worship of the gods the law of harmony which should preside over human society. But the Greeks were a sensuous and a joyous race, walking under the free heavens in the glorious lights of poetry, of art, and of beauty, and could not fail to realize the truth that society based upon reciprocal benevolence means civilization and the highest stage of human society—communion with the world.

Dr. Boudin, the eminent physiologist and medical writer, remarks that the Jew is governed by statistical laws of birth, sickness, and mortality completely different from those which rule the peoples amongst whom he lives. This assertion is confirmed by the testimony of history. During the Middle Ages, when the unclean capitals of Europe and Asia were periodically devastated by the plague, the angel of death passed by the houses of the oppressed and despised Jews, although they were condemned by local regulations to occupy the worst quarters of the cities. In speaking of the pestilence of a.d. 1345, Tschudi says that it nowhere attacked the Jews. Frascator mentions that they completely escaped the typhus epidemic in a.d. 1505; they were untouched by the intermittent fevers which reigned in Rome in a.d. 1691; they were not subject to the dysentery which was so fatal at Nimeguen in a.d. 1736; and both in 1832 and 1849 it is stated upon excellent authority that they enjoyed comparative exemption from the cholera in London, although during the last-named year the city numbered nearly thirteen thousand victims.[8]

      Not less curious are the statistics showing the natural aptitude of the Jewish people, at once so national in their sentiments and so cosmopolitan in their tendencies, for universal acclimatization. The Jew and the Christian will emigrate to a British or a French colony from the same birthplace; and while, owing to the uncongenial climate, the Christian settler with his family eventually dies out, the Jewish settler increases and multiplies. In Algeria, for example, the French colonies would become extinct in a very short process of time were it not for the steady influx of immigrants, whereas the Jew takes deep root and throws out vigorous branches.

With respect to the superior longevity of the Jews, German sources supply some interesting particulars. Dr. W. C. de Neufville,[9] of Frankfort, by the collection and collation of an immense mass of statistics, has demonstrated the following facts:

      1. One-fourth of Christian populations dies at the mean age of 6 years 11 months.

      2. One-fourth of Jewish populations dies at the mean age of 28 years 3 months.

      3. One-half of Christian populations dies at the mean age of 36 years 6 months.

      4. One-half of Jewish populations dies at the mean age of 53 years 1 month.

      5. Three-fourths of Christian populations die at the mean age of 59 years 10 months.

      6. Three-fourths of Jewish populations die at the mean age of 71 years.

It is found that in Prussia the annual mortality among the Jews is 1·61 per cent, to 2·00 among the rest of the population. The annual rate of increase with the former is 1·73 per cent.; with the latter only 1·36.[10] In Frankfort the mean duration of human life is 36 years 11 months among the Christian population, and 46 years 9 months among the Jewish.

      I will now quote at full length the favourable verdict usually offered in the case of the Hebrews by the writers of Europe:

“If we trace the history of the Israelitish race from the destruction of Jerusalem to the time at which the prevalence of a more enlightened public opinion caused to be effaced from the Statute Books of European nations the barbarous and cruel enactments against the Jews, adopted in an epoch when bigotry, brutality, and persecution were rampant, we shall be constrained to admit that there has been something little less than miraculous in the preservation of this people from utter extermination. Basnage[11] (Histoire des Juifs) calculates that 1,338,460 Jews perished by fire and sword, famine and sickness, at and after the siege of the Holy City. Subsequently a host of unfortunate exiles became the objects of bitter and unrelenting persecution, fanaticism, and tyranny in every country throughout Christendom. During the two СКАЧАТЬ