October 1870 Atlantic Monthly

"Our Israelitish brethren are now subjected to a trial peculiar to themselves. From being persecuted everywhere, they are beginning to be honored and sought."

Our Israelitish Brethren

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Did the reader ever try to compute what it has cost our Israelitish brethren to keep two Sundays a week, and four sets of holidays a year? Besides their own religious and national festivals, they have been compelled, generally under ruinous penalties, to abstain from business on those of the countries in which they have dwelt. Thus in Catholic countries, for several centuries, they were obliged to be idle:

1.Fifty-two Sundays;
2. Thirty holidays of obligation;
3. Fifty-two Saturdays or Sabbaths;
4. An average of twelve other holidays of their own: total, one hundred and forty-six days per annum, or about two days in every five!

In Protestant countries, the usual number of idle days, including their fifty-two Saturdays and twelve festivals and fasts, has been one hundred and ten, or about two days in every six. In other words, the Jews in Catholic countries have been obliged, by law and conscience, to abstain from business nearly three days a week, and in Protestant countries a little more than two. Of late years, since Catholics have become much less strict in the observance of Sundays and holidays, the Jews suffer more inconvenience in Protestant than in Catholic lands. The rigor of the Scotch and the Puritan Sunday is especially grievous to them, even to the present hour; while in Paris, Hamburg, and Vienna Sunday is, in some branches of business, the best day of the week.

This fact of the double set of holidays would alone have sufficed to exclude them from agriculture. A ripe harvest will not wait from Friday till Monday for any of our scruples; and two good planting days lost in a late, wet spring would often make the difference between a crop and no crop. Fancy a market-gardener in strawberry time, or a florist in May, obliged to cease work half an hour before sunset Friday afternoon, and unable to offer anything for sale till Monday morning! Even the thirty Catholic holidays of obligation placed the farmers of Catholic countries under a disadvantage that was obvious to all who lived near the line dividing a Catholic from a Protestant country. Voltaire, who lived for thirty years close to the frontier of France, within two miles of Protestant Geneva, dwells upon this in many a passage of exquisite satire. Readers remember the scene in which the priest rushes from the tap-room, "red with wrath and wine," to rebuke the yeoman who had "the insolence and impiety" to plough his field on a Saint's day, "instead of going to the tavern and drinking like the rest of the parish. The poor gentleman was ruined: he left the country with his family and servants, went to a foreign land, turned Lutheran, and his lands remained uncultivated for many years." If thirty extra holidays were a serious injury to French farmers, it will not be questioned that ninety-four made agriculture an impossible pursuit to Israelites.

Except where Jews lived together in large numbers, as in Poland and some parts of Germany, the same fatality of their lot sufficed to exclude them from most workshops, counting-rooms, and stores. Who could take an apprentice with the understanding that he was to be always absent on Saturdays? Who, a clerk, on the condition of not having him on the busiest day of the week? Even here, in these free cities of America, where Jewish merchants and bankers are often obliged to employ Christian clerks, they labor under the disadvantage of having to pay salaries for three hundred and nine days' work per annum, while only getting two hundred and fifty-seven days' attendance. In short, if the reader will take the trouble to trace all the consequences of the conscientious adherence of our lsraelitish brethren to their holy days, he will discover that during many centuries of their dispersion among Christian nations, that adherence would have been enough of itself to confine their able men to the trade in money and jewels, and their ordinary men to petty traffic and hard bargaining. Money at interest keeps no holy day. Like the trees of the Scotch laird in the novel, it grows while the owner sleeps. It earns revenue both while the lender prays in the synagogue and while the borrower worships in the cathedral. On Good Friday as on the Day of Atonement, through merry Christmas and joyous Purim, on the days of Passover, the fourth of July, the fifth of November, still it yields its increase. Hence strong Israelites usually deal in money; and as to the rank and file, we must allow, if we would be just, that the trader who has to keep his shutters closed two or three days a neck must, as a general thing, carry as business at small expense, and make the most of every transaction.

But if, a thousand years ago, the Jews had reached that point of development which would have enabled then with a good conscience to give up their seventh-day Sabbath, and rest only on ours, it would not have availed to give them a choice of occupations. In the night of superstition, no Jew could own or hold land on endurable conditions in any country of Christendom. Nor could he belong to any guild of mechanics; and hence he could not be himself a mechanic, nor apprentice his son to a mechanic. He could not lawfully hire a Christian servant in some countries. He could not enter a university or a preparatory school in any country; and so the liberal professions were closed to him. He could not be an artist, even if any Christian prince would have bought pictures of him, because, in the black ages, there were only two kinds of pictures that yielded much revenue or renown, -New Testament scenes, and indecent pictures from the Greek and Roman poets. The former a Jew could not paint; the latter he would not, for the Jews have preserved, through all vicissitudes, a certain chastity of mind and taste, which makes such subjects abhorrent to them. A good Jew knows better than must men the unutterable preciousness of an unprurient soul and an uncontaminated body; for there is nothing which his religion inculcates so sedulously and in so many ways. At the present hour they are probably the chastest seven millions of people under the sun.

The tory Carlyle, with the baser instinct of his party,—which is, to grovel before the strong and trample on the weak,—makes this exclusion of the Jews from all the more honorable and expanding pursuits the occasion of a most bitter taunt. The celestial powers, he says, when a people have become hopelessly debased, sometimes toss them in utter contempt a great bag of money, as if to say, "Take Eliot! Be that your portion!" How cruelly unjust is this! The Encyclopedia Britannica, an invaluable work, but uniformly narrow and reactionary on religious subjects, while admitting that, in the dark ages, Jews had no choice but to be money-lenders, while allowing that they had no means either of revenge or self-defence, except in extorting usurious interest from their plundering oppressors, stamps with reprobation their "meanness and injustice" in so doing. But the same writer on the same page (Vol. XII. p. 778) has no word of encomium for those heroic Jews, who he says presented their breasts to the sword rather than violate their conscience; nor for those high-minded Jewish maidens and wives, who fastened stones to their bodies and sought refuge in the river from the polluting touch of Christian soldiers. In one of our best periodicals, while I am writing these paragraphs, I read an impatient paragraph, complaining of the "obstinacy" of the Russian Jews in avoiding agriculture and sticking to petty traffic. As if, in all the empire of Russia, until very recently, an Israelite could own an acre of land, or till a farm to advantage, while forced to observe the numerous festivals of the Greek Church!

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