Our Israelitish Brethren

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Edmond About's report of the condition of the Jews in Rome is fresh in the recollection of many. He glances backward at the time, not remote, when every evening at the hour Christians go to the theatre the gates of the Jews' quarter were locked for the night; when on days of holy festival Jews were made to run races for the amusement of Christians; when every year a city official gave them a representative kick, an honor for which they had to pay four thousand francs; when they were compelled to present publicly to every new Pope a Bible; when they were obliged to pay the salary of a Christian priest employed to preach a sermon to them every Saturday, and they could only avoid attending this service by paying a fine; when their Ghetto bred such deadly pestilence, that some of them almost lost the semblance of humanity, and "they might have been mistaken for beasts, if one had not known them to be intelligent beings, apt for business, resigned to their lot, simple in their requirements, kind-hearted, devoted to their families, and irreproachable in their conduct." Such was their condition in Rome. M. About tells us what it is. The present Pope, he reminds us, has indeed taken away the gates of the Ghetto, so that Jews can go about the city after dark; he has dispensed them from the annual kick and its annual price, and he has closed the church to which they were required to go on Saturdays to be converted.

But the author adds; "I secretly questioned two well-known inhabitants of the Ghetto. When they understood why I concerned myself with their affairs, the poor men exclaimed; 'For Heaven's sake, do not publish that we are wretched; that the Pope actively regrets his concessions of 1847; that doors invisible, but impassable, close the Ghetto, and that our condition is worse than ever. All that you might say in our behalf would be visited upon us, and instead of benefiting you would injure us."' The inquirer visited the Ghetto, in the low ground near the Tiber, and found it "the most horrible and neglected quarter of the town," in which not the humblest of the thousand prelates about Rome would set his foot, any more than as Indian Brahmin would cross the threshold of a Pariah's hovel. "I learned,” says this author, “that the most humble employment in the most humble office would as soon be given to a beast as to a Jew; that for a child of Israel to ask in Rome to be employed as a commissary, would he more absurd than for the giraffe of the Jardin des Plantes to ask for an under-prefectship in Paris.” No Jew can own a foot of land in the papal dominions, nor cultivate one, unless in the name of a Christian; and if a Jew, using this artifice, ventures to cultivate a garden or a farm, his harvest is safe from pillage only so long as the legal device remains a secret. Let but the Christians around learn that the harvest is the property of an Israelite, and “a rage for plunder” seizes them, which leaves the hapless proprietor with desolated fields.

This is the testimony of a witness who is prejudiced, as all modernized minds are prejudiced, against government by priests. Let me summon another witness, a Christian who writes to L’Ami d’Israel an account of his visit to the Roman Ghetto; “It is situated on the borders of the Tiber, in a place subject to inundations; the population is confined in narrow, dirty streets; and although the Jews are much too numerous for this small quarter, they are not allowed to take up their abode beyond the limits of the Ghetto. The closing of the gates is discontinued, but the prohibition as to residence remains the same. I was struck with the activity and industry of the Jews; for while one sees a great many idlers and crowds of beggars in Rome itself, in the Ghetto every one is at work, and there is not a beggar visible.” The struggle for life, this writer remarks, is so severe, that out of a population of more than four thousand, two thousand five hundred are extremely poor, and in part dependent upon the charity of their neighbors.

As Israelites are now looked upon and treated in Rome, so were they once regarded and treated in every capital of Europe; and their partial emancipation is a thing too recent to have more than begun to obliterate the effects of fifteen centuries of outrage and contempt. For the faults which we see in them, and which clearly result from the contracted Ghetto and the exclusion from the broadening employments, we should blame ourselves, not them; and when a Jew plays upon us a scurvy trick, let us go out straightway and kick a Christian for it.

In conversing upon this subject with the enlightened and accomplished Israelites now to be found in all our cities, I am amazed at the absence of everything like rancor and fury from their hearts when they dwell upon the wrongs of their race. A decent Christian boils with anger as he reads of the indignities they have suffered; but they, the victims of our insensate aversion, speak of these indignities with such calmness and good temper, that I have been ready to exclaim: The Jews ore the only Christians! And certainly, if the peculiar virtue of Christianity is the patient endurance of outrage, then we must admit that they have excelled all known people in practising the religion which Christians have preached. But of course the patient endurance of outrage is not the great Christian virtue, nor is it a virtue at all, unless the outrage is irredressable. But that has been precisely their case. Usually a small number in the midst of a hostile population, they have been obliged to endure or perish; they have had such a training in some portions of the Sermon on the Mount as no other race has ever had.

If a Christian would know these people aright, that is, if he would know their best, he must observe their home life; for the great secret of Jewish persistence is the strength of that mingled affection and pride which binds families together. The family, the Sabbath,—in those two words are hidden the secret of Jewish history since their dispersion. Let us accompany a good orthodox Jewish family through their calm and cheerful Sabbath, and see how they keep it and enjoy it. I select an orthodox family, instead of a "Reformed," merely because the orthodox Jew is an historical person; as he keeps his Sabbath, his fathers have kept it for many centuries.

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