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

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      He—the ordinary Englishman—may be dimly conscious that the Jew is the one great exception to the general curse upon the sons of Adam, and that he alone eats bread, not in the sweat of his own face, but in the sweat of his neighbour’s face—like the German cuckoo, who does not colonize, but establishes himself in the colonies of other natives. He has perhaps been told that all the world over the Jew spurns the honest toil of the peasant and the day labourer; that in the new Jewry of Houndsditch and Petticoat Lane, in the Marais, in the Ghetto, in the Juden Strasse, and in the Hárat el Yahúd (Jewish quarters) of Mussulman cities, his sole business is quocumque modo rem—sordid gains—especially by money-lending, and by usury, which may not be practised upon a fellow Jew, but which, with the cleanest of consciences, is applied to the ruin of the Gentile. He has heard that where Saxon and Celt ply pick and pan, the Hebrew broker and pedlar buy up their gains and grow rich where the working-men starve in the midst of gold. He sees that the “Chosen People” will swarm over the world from California to Australia, wherever greed of gain induces them to travel. “To my mind,” says a popular writer, “there are few things so admirable and wonderful in this life as the ‘getting on,’ as it is vulgarly called, of the Hebrew race. For one of us who, by means of infinite wriggling, panting, toiling, struggling, and hanging on by his eyebrows, so to speak, to opportunity, ambitious to emerge from obscurity, and ascend to the topmost round of the ladder, there seems to be at least five hundred Caucasian Arabs who attain the desired altitude; ay, and who manage to avoid turning giddy and toppling over. Most Jews seem to rise, and the instances of a few going ‘to the utter bad,’ as the phrase runs, seem equally as rare. How often your successful Nazarene comes to grief! At the moment you think him Lord of All he is Master of Nothing. … Jews appear to keep what they have gotten; and, what is better, to get more, and keep that too. They are not much given, I fancy, to experience the pangs of remorse; and I cannot well imagine a mad Jew. It must be something awful. On the whole, looking at the vast number of Christians I have known who from splendour have subsided into beggary, and the vast number of Hebrews I have watched advancing, not from mendicity—a Jew never begs, save from one of his own tribe, and then I suppose the transaction is more of the nature of a friendly loan, to be repaid with interest when brighter days arrive—but from extreme indigence to wealth and station, I incline to the opinion that Gentiles have a natural alacrity in sinking—look how heavy I can be—but that the Chosen People have as natural a tendency towards buoyancy. That young man with the banner in Mr. Longfellow’s ballad was, depend upon it, an Israelite of the Israelites; only I think the poet was wrong, as poets generally are, in his climax. The young man was not frozen to death. He made an immense fortune at the top of Mont Blanc by selling ‘Excelsior’ penny ices.”

      The secret of this “getting on” is known to every expert. The Jewish boy begins from his earliest days with changing a few sovereigns, and he pursues the path of lucre till the tomb opens to receive him. He is utterly single-minded in this point; he has but one idea, and therefore he must succeed. Who does not remember the retort of the Jewish capitalist to the Christian statesman who, impertinently enough, advised him to teach his children something beyond mere trade? “My first wish,” answered the Hebrew, “is to see my boys become good men of business; beyond that—nothing!”

The average Englishman cannot help observing with Cobbett, and despite Lord Macaulay, that the callings which the lower orders of Jews especially prefer are those held mean or dishonourable by other men, such as demoralizing usury, receiving stolen goods, buying up old clothes, keeping gambling-houses and betting-cribs, dealing in a literature calculated to pervert the mind of youth; combining, as a person—afterwards sent to Newgate—lately did, the trade of a cosmetic artist with the calling of a procuress, and supplying the agapemonæ of the world,[16] while occasionally producing a sharp jockey or a hard-hitting prize-fighter. He is not ignorant of their prodigious trickery, of their immense and abnormal powers of lying—the “trifle tongue,” as they picturesquely call it—and their subtle art of winning their object by roundabout ways. He cannot mistake their physical cowardice, but he remembers that the Jewish officers, once so numerous in the French army, were as brave as their Christian brethren; and again he recognizes the fact that lying and cowardice long continue to be the effects of oppression. He smiles at their intense love of public amusements, and their excessive fondness for display, evinced by tawdry finery and mosaic gold.

Knowing this, however, he supposes himself to know the worst. He has heard little of the excessive optimism of the Jew, the [Greek: παντα καλα λιαν: panta kala lian], so strongly opposed to Christianity, the “religion of sorrow.” He knows nothing of the immense passions and pugnacity, the eagerness and tenacity of Lutheran rancour displayed against all who differ from some minutiæ of oral law. He ignores the over-weening, narrow-minded pride of caste which makes the Jew “destined by God to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation”—as one of their own race, Rabbi Ascher (initiator of youth), even now repeats.[17] He cannot realize the fact that the ferocity and terrible destructiveness which characterize the Jew and his literature, from the days of the Prophets to those of the Talmudists, are present in his civilized neighbour, whom he considers to be one of the best of men—a sleeping lion, it is true, but ready to awake upon the first occasion. And he is ignorant of the Eastern Jews’ love of mysticism and symbolism, their various horrible and disgusting superstitions, and their devotion to magical charms and occult arts which lead to a variety of abominations.

      This ignorance produces weak outbursts of lamentations that the Hebrews “still cling with obstinate persistence to a hopeless hope,” Hence we read in the pages of a modern traveller—The Rob Roy on the Jordan, p. 274, by J. MacGregor, M.A. (London: Murray, 1869): “Here, as well as some twenty years ago, I heard men in Palestine call their fellows ‘Jew’ as the lowest of all possible words of abuse. When we recollect that the Jews, in this very land of their own, were once the choice people of the world; that now through the whole earth, among the richest, the bravest, the cleverest, the fairest, the best at music and song, at poetry and painting, at art and science and literature, at education, philanthropy, statesmanship, war, commerce, and finance, in every sphere of life are Jews—we may well remember the word of prophecy which told us long ago that the name of Jew would be a ‘byword and a reproach,’ even in the Jews’ own land.” It is true that, even in the Portuguese colonies, where the Jew is comparatively unknown, his name is worse than at Jerusalem, Bagdad, and Damascus; whilst “Judear”—to play the Jew—signifies the being capable of any villainy. But how long will prophecy prove true? In the coast towns of Morocco, a few years have sufficed to raise the Hebrew from the lowest of stations to equality with, and even superiority over, his Mussulman cousin. The Jew may ere long make the Gentile a “byword and a reproach.”

But the English world never hears the fact that the Jew of Africa, of Arabia, of Kurdistan, of Persia, and of Western Asia generally, is still the Jew “cunning and fierce” of the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries in Europe; that he is the Jew of the Talmud, of Shammai, and of Rabbi Shalomon Jarchi, not of the Pentateuch, of Hillel, and of Gamaliel; that he sympathizes, not with those staunch old conservatives and rationalists, the Sadducees, now gone for ever, nor with Ezra and the Priests, the Levites and the Nethiním—men of the Great Synagogue—nor with the ascetic Essenes, prototypes of Christian monkery; but with the Pharisees, the Separatists, and the Puritans of his faith, with the Captains, the Fanatics, the Zealots, the Sicarii, the Swordsmen and the Brigands of John of Giscala, of Eleazar son of Ananias, and of those who worked all the civil horrors of our first century. Some distant or adventurous journey of Sir Moses Montefiore[18] or other philanthropists, duly published with packed and partial comments in the papers of Europe, reveals to the lazy comprehension of the man of refinement that the Hebrew in many parts of the semi-civilized world is still the object of suspicion, fear, and abhorrence. He attributes the persecutions, the avarice, or the massacre to the pleasures of plunder, to the barbarous bigotry, and to the cruel fanaticism СКАЧАТЬ