Israël Zangwill

Israel Zangwill

André Spire

“I should like to plunge into the common life and let myself be carried along by the great flood of life. If I do not do so, do not ask me the cause. Why did Joseph, seeing again in Egypt the brothers who had sold him, let tears of joy escape him? Why, in spite of the horror it inspires in us, does this chaos of customs that we drag after us out of the Orient still bind us together as if we were brothers, which we are far less often than we appear to be?”

Charles Gutzkow, Uriel Acosta.

Chad Gadya!

TO GUSTAVE SITTENHEIM Referendary Counsellor at the Audit Office of Accounts Director General of the Office of the Minister of Contributions, of Peace and of Social Manufactures

— Monsieur Sitenème is not here, the usher of the office told me.

— Are you quite sure, I said to him? Do ask him at what hour he will be free, I shall come back.

— Monsieur le Directeur is always in for Monsieur. He has not come to the Ministry for more than a week. He has influenza. You will surely find him on the avenue Hoche.

I took the omnibus that passes in front of my friend’s door.

How had he remained my friend, this young Referendary Counsellor, Officer of the Legion of Honor, attached to the Office of the Minister of Social Contributions, this former schoolfellow from the School of Political Sciences, a liberal, a rebel and a libertarian, who now dismissed match-girls and broke the unions of Treasury clerks.

We had lived together such fine years of work.

He intimidated me a little. I admired him. He was so fine, so curious, so subtle, so mobile. And at the very moment when his career was about to be decided he had been so unhappy.

His father was a Galilean; naturalized French. During a winter he was spending at Munich to copy the masterpieces of the Pinakothek, his young wife gave birth. My friend might have been born in Florence, in Rome, in London, in Petersburg, in any one of the great cities where his father was obliged to reside in order to study painting. For a Jew to be born at Munich was the worst of misfortunes.

First prize in French composition, first prize in history, first prize in philosophy, the pupil Sittenheim, born at Munich, had been called up by the Academy inspector at the distribution of prizes for the Concours général; and the lycée students had looked without goodwill upon their victorious competitor. Born at Munich, said the prize lists; born at Munich, declared the birth certificate that he presented to the Recruitment Council, to the secretariat of the School of Law.

— You were born at Munich, Monsieur? said to him the Master Counsellor at the Audit Office of Accounts, charged with conducting an inquiry into the candidates for the auditorship competition. How tiresome that is! Your co-religionists are very much under attack. None of them has yet succeeded in entering this house. You would be ill received by your colleagues.

— But I am French! My mother’s family has been settled in France for more than three hundred years.

— You are right, Monsieur. As for being French in France, as for having parents in France, you have more, far more of it than many Frenchmen. But you were born at Munich. People would not understand. People would not forgive. You can see from here the headline of the Libre Parole: A German Jew at the Audit Office of Accounts. Spare us, and spare yourself, Monsieur, this annoyance. You would be so kind to withdraw your candidacy.

The heavy eyelids that masked the gaze of the old comrade of Gambetta — settled, provided for — lifted. He smiled sadly.

My friend did not withdraw his candidacy. But the list of young men authorized to present themselves for the competition did not bear his name.

He threw himself into the Dreyfusard battle. He wrote more than one article. He received more than one blow of the fist. He broke more than one cane on nationalist shoulders. He protected Zola, threatened as he left the Assize Court. At Rennes, he raised up the wounded Labori. Several years of his income went off in donations to People’s Universities, to Cooperatives. When victory came he found himself, without having wished it, the friend of powerful deputies and of Ministers. These clan chiefs, these chiefs of gangs, once in power, had need of specialists. They distrusted the Administration that had fought them. They were obliged to make use of Sittenheim’s knowledge. It was he who drew up the famous report on the reform of taxation presented by the former typesetter Descorde, deputy of the Flanders. Descorde, having become a Minister, placed my friend at the head of his Office; then three months afterward appointed him Referendary Counsellor at the Audit Office of Accounts.

An anticlerical Master Counsellor gave his daughter to Sittenheim. At the Town Hall of the Seventh arrondissement there was an astonishing civil pomp with music. The bride had for witnesses a former President of the Council and a white-plumed General. And the illustrated magazines reproduced on their front page the Honiton-lace gown that the pretty Madame Sitenne-Marin wore.

He had a motor-car. He moved in society. He was the chief of 21,000 frontier guards, of 11,000 customs officers. Could I hold it against him that he forgot his insulted, narrow, unfrequentable allies of a moment. Men of his stamp are necessary to the Government. He had fought bravely in the opposition. Victorious, he was doing his duty bravely, in the post to which fortune had carried him. Why should I have held it against him that he was now fulfilling his function, which is to defend the State against the laziness of the workers of the monopolies and the parliamentarians against the appetites of the unions of clerks. He had a little happiness. I loved him. It is so good to speak of former days with a man whose parents, friends, whole childhood one knows; with one of those rare beings with whom one converses by smiles, by gestures; who understands you at half a word.

Wrapped in a havana plaid he was stretched out on a chaise longue. I found him feverish, and in his eyes there were still tears.

— Do you know this, he said to me; and he took up from his knees a little book that he held out to me.

— Chad Gadya? What a singular title.

— What, you do not know it; you too no longer know it; you do not remember, on the eve of Passover, when, the Seder over, grandfather read:

“Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! a single kid of the goat. A single kid, a single kid that my father bought for two souzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!”

I remembered that we burst out laughing, for his father had taught us irreverence. I simply answered:

— I remember, but why these tears?

— Listen. And turning the pages, breaking off to read the finest passages, he summarized for me this tale, this meditation, this poem, the story of a dilettante, of a modern Jew de-Judaized, who after a long absence returns, at Venice, to the ancient restored palace where his family dwells. He crosses the deserted staircase, the deserted antechamber. It is Passover. The family service is drawing to its end. He silently takes his place at table. Before the symbolic dishes — the unleavened bread, the roasted bone, the lamb and the bitter herbs — a nonagenarian old man in evening dress, his father, director of the Steamboat Company, is seated on the cushions prescribed by the rite, and reads the Chaldean recitative: “Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya! a single kid of the goat! — A single kid, a single kid that my father bought for two souzim. Chad Gadya! Chad Gadya!”

What serenity, what security, what certainty! What a contrast with his feverish life of a dreamer of dreams, of a poser of problems! He had tried to love Beauty. He had chattered about the Renaissance; he had written in French poems of Hellenic inspiration. But despite all the masks with which he has tried to deck it, he feels that his soul is Jewish; can only be Jewish. His childhood in the ghetto, a long heredity had enclosed him within emotions, within impulses known in the gangways of a phylactery. Chad Gadya, Chad Gadya! The old chant awakened in him innumerable associations. How adorable it was, the ancient succession of feasts: Passover and Pentecost, New Year and Tabernacles! A desire seized him to wrap himself, like his father, in a fringed shawl, to chant, to sway with him in the impassioned rhythm of the prayer. Why had the Jews wished for emancipation? Why had they tried to escape the joyous slavery of the ghetto? Their life was entire, complete in itself. But they were uneasy, condemned to wander. German or Levantine merchants, they had helped to raise up the commercial capital of the fifteenth century; then they had arrived, Spanish émigrés, fleeing the Inquisition. What sources of energy seethed in those extraordinary hearts that united the calm of the Orient and the fever of the Occident! He recalled the headings of an old census: men, women, children, monks, nuns and Jews. Well, the Doges had had their day, Venice was a melancholy ruin, and the Jews lived sumptuously in the palaces of their patricians. Is it not miraculous, this persistence? Where is the secret of their strength, if not in their certainty of God, their unshakable confidence that He will send them His Messiah to rebuild the Temple and to place them, them, at the head of the nations?

But he, he beat his head against the disconcerting mystery of life. Science — what aid has it brought him? It classifies everything and explains nothing. Things are. To explain things is to state A as a function of B and B as a function of A. Who will explain the explanation? Perhaps only by ecstasy does one come to understand what there is behind phenomena. But no, he cannot believe; his intelligence is without remorse; for, even when reached in this way, the Essence must be judged by its manifestations, and its manifestations are often absurd, unjust.

He thought of the grape harvests ruined last year by a storm, and of the frightful poverty of the peasants under the yoke of the proprietors; he had the vision of a cuttlefish that fishermen had left gasping, almost with a human death-rattle, upon the sands of the Lido. His soul demanded justice for the hideous beast. If suffering purifies, what purification for foundered horses, for starving cats? The miracle of creation, what meaning has it for the little dogs destined for the canal? No. It is impossible for him to believe in a world led by a just God. All is but a passing flood, nothing but a flood. The wisest have always seen it: it is the cat that devours the kid, and the dog that bites the cat, and the stick that beats the dog, and the fire that burns the stick, and so on, indefinitely. And it is the people that has preserved in its ritual this nihilist lament, the race that with Ecclesiastes cried out: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” — it is this race that launched into the world this illusion of God without which life is but intolerable anguish; this God of whom he has sudden intuitions at the scent of a rose, at the laughter of a child, at the sight of a sleeping city. Certain races secrete certain beliefs, and so long as you have not killed the race you will not have killed the belief.

That alone would be satisfying: God! God! He thirsted for God. He was drunk with God, without the calm of Spinoza, without the certainty of Spinoza. He called for a real God, a living God, someone who heard, who was conscious of his, of his own existence; better still, who would manifest by a sign that He is not a metaphysical fiction. Pity, love, justice, justice for the individual, justice for all beings, even for the morsels that are sold, two sous the pair, in the marketplace! Obedience, worship? He would have prayed, would have prostrated himself for hours; he would have worn out his knees upon the flagstones. Life — even for an instant, life without God — seemed to him intolerable. Death, death at any price, to have done with crawling along the edge of life!

He slipped noiselessly through the half-open door, descended the wet steps of the marble porch and let himself slide softly into the canal; he found himself struggling, but conquered the instinctive will to live. When he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night, of the stars and of death mingled with a strange whirl of childhood memories quivering with the splendor of life, and the Hebrew words of the dying Jew tried to spring from his throat full of water:

“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” ¹

What genius, said Sittenheim! To have set these emotions, these ideas — not all of which are new — each of the steps of this drama, upon each of the degrees of the oldest, perhaps, of popular songs. Israel that fades away within us, Israel that dies absorbed into a world that is not worth it, suddenly drawn up, “a figure of granite,” before our mobile face: for us, for all those who in their childhood knew the last vestiges of the domestic cult, what a recall, what a return? Here am I, brought back, in the hours of my greatest troubles, as in the first days of the Affair, when at the Montparnasse cemetery I found written on my father’s tomb: Death to the Jews.

— Yes! an extraordinary artist, this man who in forty little pages gives the substance of all philosophies, traverses history, the sciences, the religions; a true great writer, nourished on all the culture of his time! Do you know who he is; where he comes from; in what country he lives; what he has written?

— I know only his name: Israel Zangwill. Péguy, in the article of eighty-nine pages that he has placed at the head of Chad Gadya, cites Taine, Renan, La Fontaine, Hugo, names Pascal, Kant, Michelet, Gabriel Séailles and the historian Pierre Deloire, but teaches us nothing about Zangwill.

— That is Péguy’s manner, he detests dogmatics.

— All the same, I should like to know more.

— That is not very difficult, at the first foreign bookseller you come to…

— I have not a minute. To read I must have influenza. How do you expect me to do bibliographical research, in the midst of this infernal life in which I have time neither to digest my meals, nor to be just.

I happened to have a little leisure, and we agreed that when I should know something about Zangwill I would come to speak of it to my friend.

I learned that Zangwill is one of the best-known living writers of England; that he was born in London, in 1864, of poor Jewish parents. I read his books. I saw him himself. I saw his almost white hair; his young, resolute, motionless face; his fine, uneasy hands.

And I came back, happy in advance of the fine hours of conversation that I was going to spend with Sittenheim.

It was at the Ministry, in the middle of the afternoon, that I had the best chance of finding him alone and free.

— Monsieur Martin is with the Minister. But come into his office, he will be back, the pale and clean-shaven old usher told me.

In the immense room all red with thick carpets and cherry-colored hangings, I waited a long time. At last, Sittenheim arrived, followed by an attaché who carried under his arm an enormous morocco folder full of files.

— Excuse me, he said. The Minister has had the fancy to ask for the signature at one o’clock. It would never end. And how are things going? What have you done since I last saw you, an eternity ago.

The attaché was sorting papers on a little desk in a corner of the room.

— I have traveled. I have been in England. I have read Zangwill. I have seen Zangwill.

— Zangwill? said Sittenheim to me.

The usher entered, presenting a card.

— Yes, I said, lowering my voice, Zangwill. Chad Gadya!

He reflected an instant, his eyes vague.

— Ah! Chad Gadya! How stupid I am? You will allow me, won’t you, to dispatch this! — Show him in.

— It is very difficult, I said to him, when the stout deputy had gone out, to converse here a little seriously with you. Give me a rendezvous at your house some evening, some afternoon. What the devil, you have the right to rest a few minutes.

The telephone rang.

— You see, he said to me; and turning the pages of his appointment book: not Wednesday. Nor Thursday. Friday evening a ball at the ministry; Saturday at the Élysée; Monday I must be at Aigues-Mortes: congress of the Salt Marshes; Tuesday evening I leave for Berne: international conference on the necrosis of match-girls; I represent the Minister. When I have come back, I will write to you.

— That’s it, you will write to me.

I have never received a letter.

And it is I who am obliged to write to him, to remind him of that hour of fever when he remembered that he was a Jew.

I

The Ghetto

There is always in Paris a certain number of poor Jews, Jewish workers and artisans. They live by preference in the fourth and the eleventh arrondissements, but they are drowned in an important French population. Since the pogroms, their number increases every day. However, Paris is for them only a place of passage; it is toward New York, toward London, that the Jewish workers emigrate. The debased wages, the bad conditions of work at home or in the sweat shops, the rapacity of the sweaters, seem a sweet thing to them after the crowding together in the Russian Pale, the permanent famine, the prison, the insults, the blows. In a country of political liberty, they breathe. And they arrive ceaselessly, wretched emigrants, robbed by frontier sharks, packed into the steerage of the ships, subjected to sanitary inspections, to the inquiries of the Alien acts. The least healthy, the poorest are picked out. They come back, penetrate by the ports where the police are least vigilant, and go to lose themselves in those immense ant-heaps that draw them. In New York, they are 750,000, of whom 400,000 grouped on a single square mile; in London, in Whitechapel and the surrounding quarters, more than 115,000. These modern ghettos are of voluntary formation. People who have lived in a ghetto for a couple of centuries are not capable of leaving it simply because the gates of it have been thrown down, nor of effacing the blemishes of their soul by saying the yellow rust. The isolation that was imposed upon them from without has in some sort become the law of their being. They live in heaps, one upon another, from a need of social warmth. Such men are themselves the gates of their ghettos, and when they emigrate they drag them with them across the seas into countries where there is no ghetto. From Poland, from Germany, from Holland, there has been poured upon the East of London floods of Jews: exiles, refugees, voluntary émigrés, of whom few are as much at their ease as the Jew of the proverb, but all rich in their good humor, in their industry and in their ingenuity. ²

At the end of one or two generations they speak English, but the language of the first arrivals is Yiddish. This dialect, which is, like the Jewish soul, a sort of “palimpsest” where all the nations have left their trace, is composed of Hebrew, Greek, Spanish, Russian words, cast in a matrix of corrupted Germanic words, and is written in Hebrew characters. Yiddish is spoken in almost the whole universe, everywhere where Jews are gathered together. The assimilated Jews have always made war on Yiddish, ever since the hour when Moses Mendelssohn abandoned it and recommended the Jews of Germany to make use of literary German. However, since it is the language of a proletariat of eight or ten million men, Yiddish is not in decadence. It has on the contrary developed since the anti-Jewish riots have pressed the Jews closer one against another. The Christian merchants of the East End draw up their advertisements in jargon, and the Protestant sects themselves, whose missionaries try to win over to the Gospel the wretched of the ghetto, announce the hour of their lectures and of their services by means of Hebrew characters.

It is the ghetto that Zangwill knows best. No doubt, certain of his novels, of his short stories, recount, with mockery, the life of artists, political life, social, socialist, working-class life, a real and observed world, an imaginary and invented world: London, Paris, New York, many kinds of cities and many kinds of men. However, as Kipling is above all the painter of India and of the jungle, Zangwill is above all the painter of the ghetto. He describes it in some forty tales, humorous stories, long short stories, gathered under various titles: Ghetto Tragedies, Ghetto Comedies, The King of Schnorrers, Dreamers of the Ghetto, and a novel, or rather a series of narratives, Children of the Ghetto.

In France, one would seek in vain for a work comparable to that of Zangwill. Robert Dreyfus, in a little book on the writer Alexandre Weill, ³ explains why up to the present there has been no Judeo-French literature. “The Jews of France are at present too identified with French Society, too like the other Frenchmen of all groups and of all provinces to be tempted or able to express a sensibility, ideas and tendencies different and properly Jewish (which they no longer find) in themselves.” This is exact; the Jews of France have been too few in number and too dispersed to form a class apart. They have been able to take their place in society, not by forming a group solid enough, compact enough to conquer, but by accepting one by one to be part of other groups where they were tolerated only by letting their origins be forgotten. I speak here only of those who loved money or consideration. For there has never been any lack of isolated and proud Jews. The French Jews who belong to the bourgeoisie have always proclaimed that to speak of the Jews was to provoke antisemitism. Antisemitism was born all the same, and the Jews were obliged to defend themselves. People wrote in favor of the Jews. But no work of art was born of it. Apology does not tempt an artist. What he wants is life, reality; he wants to paint; he must have good and evil, darkness and light, the comic and the tragic, the sublime and the sordid. There is no Jewish literature in France, because since the emancipation of the Jews no ghetto has reformed itself. In the Anglo-Saxon countries the ghetto has its newspapers, its music-halls, its theaters, its poets, its novelists. The ghetto reads avidly all that speaks to it of itself.

In European literature the Jew is almost always a conventional type. When he is not Shylock, the traitor, or the stock-jobber, he is Lessing’s Nathan the Wise. When George Eliot composed Daniel Deronda, she had ceased to observe men, and the Jews she painted are above and outside humanity. M. Paul Bourget, trying in L’Étape to be impartial, succeeded in making of Salomon Crémieux-Dax only a sort of plume of thin paper on which are inscribed the virtues and the vices attributed to the Jews by current opinion: interest, firmness, logic, ardor for work, perspicacity, prudence, intellectual tyranny, the spirit of inquisition, of calculation — and not a being formed of tendons, of nerves, and of good, stirring, living flesh. The fact is that, to raise up true Jews, it is not enough not to hate the Jews, or to have met in society a few Jews in evening dress well rubbed with Christianity. One must have lived in the midst of poor Jews, one must have eaten with them the Kugel of Saturday and the Matzes of Passover. One must love fried fish, carp in the Jewish style and Kosher meat. One must have spent one’s evenings with the humble folk who play, around a green table, at Napoleon, at twenty-one, at brag, at Klobbiyos, ⁴ have wandered through the crossroads where dark, curly-haired little girls dance around the mechanical piano turned by an Italian woman, the squares where the good women seated before their doors “gossip and knit as if the sea came to foam at their feet.” ⁵ One must have climbed the sticky staircases of the workmen’s houses, visited the back-rooms ⁶ where seamstresses work fourteen hours a day; the hovels where families of seven persons live on a surface of sixteen square meters; the sweat shops where a fog of fluff flies, slips into the sideboard, into the cupboard, settles on the bed, on the mirrors, enters your sleeves, your collar, spreads over the water you drink, sticks on the buttered bread you carry to your mouth, ⁷ swarming places full of cries, of tears and of laughter, “where in an airless obscurity have taken place so many adventures, have been played so many tragedies, so many farces.” ⁸ One must have been the relative or the friend of an old fanatical rabbi, full of scruples, a sort of virtuoso of religion, ⁹ who, on the eve of Passover, for fear that a crumb of leaven should remain in the house, hunts the crumbs ¹⁰ between the leaves of the books, turns out all the pockets, opens all the cupboards, searches on all fours, a candle in his hand, under the sideboard, under the beds, under the carpets; one must have accompanied the humble Rebbitzin into Petticoat Lane to do the shopping for the eve of Passover, when “the great ladies of the west of London, leaving at home their daughters who play the piano and have a subscription at Mudie’s, return to their dear lane… plunge their ungloved hands into the casks where pickled cucumbers swim in their brine, or taste, from the heaped-up barrels, the rich and juicy olives,… with no more false shame than schoolgirls… For it is the night of nights… Tonight they may laugh,… cast down all the social barriers; and, despite the brilliance of their high position which dazzles the ghetto… talk of the time of the Olov Hasholom ¹¹ with their old comrades… A scene without parallel in history, this phantasmagoria of caterpillars and butterflies meeting, as in the good old days, on the very place of their laying. A contrast of wealth and poverty so brutal that one can meet the like of it only on the gold-fields or in the new countries, and thrown all naturally into the midst of a colorless civilization by a people endowed with an indestructible gift for the picturesque.” ¹²

II

The Children of the Ghetto

The picturesqueness of the ghetto, the movement, the swarming of these Orientals, resisting at first, then assimilating themselves to the manners of the Occident — that is what this English Jew amuses himself by painting, proud of his race, and one whose culture has not blunted the eye, one of the most delicate, the most acute eyes that have ever looked upon men. He leads us into all the Jewries — the German, the Polish, the Russian; those of Bohemia, of Galicia, which are still the Middle Ages; those of the Bukovina, which are already the Orient; to Jerusalem at last, where the Jews gather less to live than to weep and to die.

He paints the cemeteries, the ancient synagogues of the German rite and of the Portuguese rite, gathers up the ancient legends, the young myths that are forming ceaselessly. He shows the Jews transplanted everywhere, speaking all languages, imagining that they are part of the soil they inhabit, and above all patriots to the point of regarding the immigrant Jews as foreigners — but, despite their diversity of types and of characters, so alike at bottom, so tried, so purified and made of a matter so durable that, like the cedar of Lebanon, “they preserve the other matters and arrest putrefaction.” ¹³

But the picturesque does not lead very far. In the landscapes, in the dwellings, beneath the tinsel and beneath the gestures, we want men who feel and above all who think. Now, the People is the Unconscious; and that is why all those who have described the workers and the peasants can only reproduce a few types always the same, encrust in the mouths of their personages a few phrases of slang, of patois, in which a rudimentary, immutable thought has set, and, to avoid monotony, fall into coarseness.

The realism of Zangwill does not take pleasure in the midst of the manners of the apaches, and if his love for psychological analysis and for detail sometimes leads him to study the complex sensibility of the most refined classes, his instinct brings him ceaselessly back toward labor.

But there exists a working class without resignation or brutality, dignified rather than sensual, mocking, sarcastic, and full of respect for the things of the intelligence, subtle, having an inner life, the sense of Religion, mad for splitting hairs over God, the origins and the meaning of the Universe, whipped ceaselessly by the sarcasms of its tribunes instead of being spoiled by the flatteries of politicians, a people, not a plebs, subjected to a moral and physical training, “a chosen race whose dietary regime has been set up by religion” — Israel, the product “of a successful social experiment.” ¹⁴

Every Jewess has dreamed that she would bring into the world a doctor of the Law. At six years old, every Jewish child learns to read in the Bible, later in the Talmud. The mother of every young Jewish girl has desired to find for her, as a husband, a doctor of the Law. Married at eleven years old, the young scholar was fed by his wife’s parents, all proud to provide for the material needs of a man who used up his life in study and meditation. For Rabbi Meir has said: “Whoever studies the Law for itself, the whole world is his debtor; he is named the Adorer, the Beloved, the Friend of the Omnipresent God, the Friend of Humanity. It clothes him with humility and with respect; it makes him capable of becoming just, pious, honest and upright; he becomes modest, patient and forgetful of injuries.” ¹⁵ If resources are lacking, the poor scholar sometimes becomes a Schnorrer, the most audacious of beggars, the scourge of the Jewries, for he knows the Law that ordains the rich to give and proclaims that he who gives is blessed. But the Law also says: “Gnaw a bone in the street rather than owe anything to anyone,” and Rabban Gamliel, son of Rabbi Judah, the prince: “It is praiseworthy to unite to the study of the Law a material occupation.” That is why “many of our sages have made themselves artisans.” In the ghetto, Zangwill could at every step find a species almost vanished from the modern world, men to whom the humblest life leaves the care of the highest thought.

He recounts the life of these dreamers of the ghetto — furriers, fruiterers, clerks, peddlers, dealers — in whose room there is always a Book; cobblers who, beating the leather, smoothing seams with a hot iron, discuss passionately on the origin of the world and the miracle, oppose or reconcile Evolution and Religion, cite Kant, Spinoza, in a workshop-room that stinks of burnt grease, of melting wax, where a coke fire crackles, fed with cuttings of leather. ¹⁶

It is in such a milieu that he makes Esther Ansell live, the central personage of his masterpiece, Children of the Ghetto, a series of narratives full of life, of the tragic and of humor, one of the most beautiful books of contemporary literature.

Esther Ansell is the daughter of a poor immigrant, who speaks only Yiddish, an odd-job worker, now a tailor, now a cobbler, now a fruit-seller in the streets, “extremely busy praying when he has nothing better to do.” Esther is the true mother of the whole family — four other children and an infirm grandmother who live in a garret of the East End of London. She is a little girl with a grave face and candid eyes, an obedient and ill-clad child, so anxious to please her schoolmistress, so passionate for study, so audaciously ambitious of becoming herself a schoolteacher. But she cannot go to school every day. She has to do the cooking, to buy the provisions. When money is lacking, she goes to the public soup-kitchen, “like, with her Oriental gait, a Rebecca in Israel going to the well.” She dreams, like all poor people, of the day when work, when chance will bring her a life less breathless, less uncertain. But, most often, her dreams are disappointed: she knocks against the door of her garret and the jug full of broth falls to the ground, breaks. The shilling she has saved to buy the fish and the meat for the eve of Passover is stolen from her at the market by a pickpocket, and her brother Benjamin, the hope of the family, whom a scholarship is raising and having instructed, dies of a bad cold.

In spite of all, she does not doubt the existence of an invisible power, although this power seems to her singularly indifferent to human joys and sorrows. She consoles herself, either by melancholically singing to the children airs in the minor key, or by holding herself at the door of a little synagogue where, fascinated, she hears the devout chant, in the twilight of a Saturday evening, the plaintive psalms of a hunted race. She never fails to light the candles of the Sabbath, nor to prepare the meat in an orthodox manner.

Never was a child more sensitive to the beauty of duty, more open to the call of truth, of self-mastery, of self-denial. When she read one of her prize-books, her eyes filled with tears, her breast with disinterested resolutions, and with the will to be just. She led a double life, just as she spoke two languages. The idea that she was a Jewess, that her people had a particular history, was always in the background of her memories. Sometimes, this idea was abruptly drawn into the foreground, when Christian children mocked her with their derisive couplets, cried out to her that they had stuck a piece of pork on the end of a fork and had stuck it onto someone of her race. But with far more force, she understood that she was an Englishwoman. She was far prouder of Nelson and of Wellington than of Judas Maccabaeus. She rejoiced to discover… that Alfred the Great had been the wisest of all Kings, that the English are masters of the whole earth and have planted colonies in the four corners of the world, that the English language is the noblest of languages and that the men who speak it have invented the railways, the steamboats, the telegraph and every thing worthy of being invented.

At last the miracle arrives. One of those demi-divinities who distribute soup to the little poor, carry clothes and meat tickets to their homes, institute prizes and scholarships — the wife of a rich merchant, Mrs. Henry Goldsmith, avid for connections, for consideration and for respectability — takes an interest in Esther Ansell, makes of her a sort of secretary and adopted daughter, takes her traveling, sends her to the University.

But Esther is not happy in this milieu where nothing is lacking save a little loftiness of soul, where persons of a certain age remain given over to purely material practices, where the young people, having no longer any religion and not yet any ideal, are preoccupied only with pleasures and with success. Sometimes a flash springs from her face and makes her appear truly pretty. But with her abstract expression, her pensive head, her air of being always alone, the slender young girl remains shy and touchy. She thinks of her origin, of her family who have been sent to the United States, and says to herself that despite her elegant toilettes and her good manners, she is all the same only an “ugly little young woman of obscure soul, subject to migraines, and absolutely penniless.”

In the drawing-room of the Goldsmiths, Esther Ansell meets Raphael Leon. Philanthropists are sometimes obliged to go into singular milieus. Raphael Leon is one of those dreamers whom Israel Zangwill loves and gently mocks, one of those poor, brave, great, admirable and somewhat ridiculous Harrow boys and Oxford men who go and settle in the East End, pass their time in approaches, counsels, lessons and lectures, and, burning to sacrifice themselves to the happiness of the human species, succeed only in having the forces of their body, the warmth of their souls, stolen from them by poor people who desire only alms and by rich people who aspire only to the votes of the beggars.

The dreams of Raphael Leon, Esther Ansell scarcely believes in them: she knows the ghetto too well. The orthodoxy, which constitutes the cement of a race, she sees it dissolving every day. She has seen the new arrivals obliged to accept English food, the English day of rest, the English language, under pain of dying of hunger in their isolation. The Race cherished by God! She has seen her father powerless, beating evening and morning a deaf heaven. The Mission of Israel — what irony, when one thinks of his filth and of his misery! Messianism, idealism, pure creations of the mind! True Judaism is a religion of “pots and pans.” However, while she converses with Raphael Leon she is singularly moved. “Enthusiasm had always poisoned her,” and, while the idealist unrolled the theses that she at once destroyed beneath her sarcasms, “the sordid image she made for herself of the Universe seemed transfigured into a joyous and sacred reality, full of infinite possibilities of works worthy of being accomplished and of noble pleasures.” Raphael almost at once loves the dark young girl; but she, who feels the sentiment of her dependence growing toward a milieu she no longer esteems, wishes to reconquer her liberty by earning her own living herself. One morning, early, when everyone is still asleep, she leaves the sumptuous house of the Goldsmiths and flees toward Whitechapel.

London awakens upon the first gestures of the patient world of labor. Esther sees again her quarter, her street, her neighbors, her house. She finds her ghetto again:

“All astir in the ghetto, for it was half past eight in the morning, a working day. But Esther had not walked a hundred meters before her heart grew heavy with painful presentiments. The good old street of former times, where she had just arrived, had been strangely changed. In place of dirty and picturesque houses, there rose a frightful row of workmen’s houses, monotonous barracks of brick, which, by their dull, dead prose, killed all gaiety, oppressed the soul. On the other hand, other streets seemed incredibly [obscured]. Is it possible that it should have been necessary [obscured] the Jewish workers, those pygmies with their childlike muscles! They seemed to her so sordid and so filthy… Was she ever able to stroll there, light of spirit, unconscious of their ugliness? The heavy yellowish fog that enveloped them, would it not rise one day, or else was it not their natural, necessary mantle? Surely, never could the sun kiss those sticky pavements, never would it come to pour upon them warmth and life. Those immense magic shops where one found everything, mint pastilles and cotton, dolls with porcelain heads and lemons, seemed to her all shrunken now between the windows of tiny dwelling-houses. The old women in black wigs, the filthy men, or men of sun-burnt skin, were still uglier and filthier than she imagined. They seemed caricatures of humanity, scarecrows in battered hats and bedraggled petticoats. But little by little, as she advanced, she understood that, despite the builders of model houses for workmen, the scene, in its essential parts, had not changed. No trace of improvement in Wentworth Street, a straight and noisy market-street, where files of carts bordered the foul roadway, exactly as in former times, and where Father [obscured] sang upon the [obscured] of fishermen and of children. Children! there were some everywhere, hanging at the breast of ill-washed women, on the knees of grandfathers who smoked their pipes, playing under the carts, dragging themselves in the gutters and in the lanes; their faces were dirty and sickly, their complexion wan, their pathetic grace protested against the [obscured] where they were being raised! A little girl in dark rags, seated on a box of oranges, watched all this swarming with a sarcastic, [obscured] gravity: the idea came to Esther of a child of the false [obscured] of the theater. In her heart she had a feeling of emptiness, the impression that she was a stranger in the midst of familiar things. What had she in common with these half-savages, with this race of half-barbarous beings? The more she looked, the lower her heart sank. There was at no level [obscured] of vice, no brutality, no drunkenness; quite simply the filth of an Oriental city, without its originality or its color. She examined the posters and the shop-fronts and caught the bungled names of beverages as she passed before the butcher’s shop. Everything seemed to her the same as in former times. Here and there, however, the hand of time had traced new signs. For Baruch Emmanuel it had drawn up a new signboard. It was a mixture of German, of bad English and of Cockney spelled phonetically in Hebrew letters… Baruch Emmanuel had prospered since the days when he advertised that he needed finishers and basters and was not able to afford them; he had several establishments and owned five two-story houses, and was treasurer of his synagogue, and spoke of the socialists as of an inferior variety of beings.

The hand of time had also built a Workmen’s Metropolis almost opposite the shop of Baruch Emmanuel, and had covered the walls of it with illustrated and moral posters… There, cabins for one person did not cost more than fourpence the night. At the sight of the newspapers hung at the window of a tobacconist’s, Esther understood that the number of persons knowing how to read had increased, for there were the sheets imported from New York drawn up at once in jargon and in Hebrew by [obscured] a great poster in Yiddish and in English announcing a meeting taught her of the existence of an offshoot of the League of the Holy Land: the Flowers of Zion society, directed by young people of the East End for the study of Hebrew and the propagation of the Jewish national idea. Just beside it, as if to show the incompatible other [side] of the life of the ghetto, was stuck another poster which had the air of a royal proclamation, informing the public that by order of the Secretary of State for War, a sale of old objects of iron and of copper, of zinc, of canvas and of leather would take place at the Royal Arsenal of Woolwich.

As she advanced the great school bell rang. Involuntarily she quickened her pace and joined the customary procession of children. She could almost imagine now that the last six years existed only as a dream. Were these in truth other children, and were they not the same who used to jostle her in former times when she patrolled in the same mud with her makeshift boy’s shoes? Surely these little girls in printed dresses, of lilac color, were her classmates. She had difficulty in understanding that the wheel of time had slightly [transformed her] into a woman, and that while she herself was living, learning, and seeing the cities and the manners of men, the ghetto, untouched by her experiences, continued to walk in its narrow rut. A new generation of children had grown up to play and to suffer in the place of the old, and that was all. This thought overwhelmed her, giving her once more the poignant sense of brute, blind forces. It seemed to her that she surprised, in this familiar scene of her childhood, the secret of the grey atmosphere of her mind. It was there that she had imperceptibly absorbed those heavy vapors that formed the background of her being, an always somber ground behind the sad colors of her joyous emotions. What had she in common with this destitution?

What? Everything. It was with that that her soul had imperceptible affinities, not with the glory of the sun, of the sea and of the forest, the palms and the temples of the South.” ¹⁷

Finding a melancholy and refined joy in torturing herself, she lets escape and pushes away all the chances that offer themselves anew, for happiness, in a Universe so wretched, seems to her a sort of monstrous exception to the normal life of humanity. And, when Raphael Leon, having met her on the steps of the British Museum, begs her to help him in the works he has undertaken, implores her to let him save her and asks her for her hand, she answers him: “It is I who must be allowed to save you from yourself, Raphael. Is it wise to marry the somber spirit of the ghetto that doubts itself?” — and she disappears into the crowd of passers-by. But, before she has succeeded in embarking for America, Raphael finds her again. Together, they will attempt to better the lot of their wretched Jewish brothers.

III

Jewish Humor

Zangwill has not looked only at the grave face of the ghetto. His talent is complete, and his gifts are multiple. He knows how to laugh.

The ghetto is not sad. Nothing is more amusing than the family gatherings among the Jews of modest condition, who are not too much de-Judaized. The Jewish proletariat is ignorant of “the great Jewish sorrow.” It is gay, it is jovial. The Jews who work have not the time to be sad. They leave pessimism to their philanthropists.

The philanthropist resembles those people who weep while reading novels. When a rich man suddenly sets himself to look a little closely at the life of the people, he is frightened by so much misery and so much baseness. He is forever saddened by it. However, the constable of the house to which he returns in the evening prevents him from dying of it. One may imagine Ecclesiastes as a sort of philanthropist king seized by a crisis of despair, after a tour through the Slums of his capital. But he returns into his palace, where there are women, servants and perfumes.

The bourgeois philanthropist, for his part, no longer resigns himself to happiness. Having dined well, he goes about, his eyes lowered, thinking of the painful condition of men, who during that time laugh and amuse themselves. It is because the people wished to continue laughing in order to continue living that it has not listened to the Lords who came to pity it in the People’s Universities, and that it has returned to the coarse joy of its music-halls. The true militants were more clear-sighted than the well-dressed young men. They knew the value of joy. Almost all are frank, good fellows, like the greater part of those who train men. The secret of their influence is not only in their “spirit of boldness,” but also in their joviality.

The Rabbis, the Doctors, who felt themselves responsible for the future, and above all for the conservation of the Jewish race, struggled against pessimism. Many among them, like the rabbi David Sichel of L’Ami Fritz, ¹⁸ were merry companions. ¹⁹ The sun did not penetrate into the ghetto, but they made laughter enter it. Laughter was at every hearth, at every table. ²⁰ They prevented the Jewish People from “letting itself be struck down” and consequently from letting itself die. It is by their good nature, a little worn out by force of use, and which has always exasperated the mystics, that Israel has endured in the midst of the collapse of the nations. Teaching less a religion than a wisdom, they accustomed their people to accept “the inevitable with good humor.” ²¹

Thus understood, the Jew does not answer the “blows of fate” by lamentations. His sadness is active. He is of the same fabric as the great mockers: Swift, who, having suffered much through men, mocked men much, and Cervantes, who, having spoiled his life by his chimerical character, wrote an immortal book to mock himself. The laughter of the Jew is voluntary, strident, bitter, hysterical. He laughs with a laughter that hurts. But he laughs. It is Heinrich Heine.

And it is Zangwill. It is because Zangwill, like Heine, sucked in his childhood the coarse milk of the Jewish joke, that he is a jester of the ghetto. Upon this Jewish ground was deposited English culture, more favorable than any other to the development of his genius, for he found there the example and the tradition of humor. English culture, united to the Jewish genius, has given birth to a new plant: Jewish humor.

I saw Zangwill, in 1909, in Paris. When I entered he was conversing with one of those young Jewish scholars whom their science cannot prevent from interesting themselves in the lot of their co-religionists persecuted in the East of Europe. Zangwill was inquiring about the worth of a few men who had offered to interest themselves in the Jewish cause.

— And doctor Ebenezer, he was saying, what do you think of him? — He is a very honest man, the other answered. But…, do you know the story of that Pole who was asked for news of his daughter? My daughter, said he, has married a man who does not know how to play cards. — What luck you have! — That is what deceives you; for he cannot help playing them.

Zangwill smiled. And seeing those two pale heads, drawn close one to the other, those bodies bent over those low seats, I asked myself whether I was in the sitting-room of a modest English hotel on the rue Saint-Hyacinthe, or in one of those Oriental academies where wise Talmudists taught according to the Haggadic method, by questions and by answers, by maxims, sentences, apologues.

Bursts of laughter, or images — that is what the Jew has always preferred to the white wall of general ideas. Whether he speaks or whether he listens, he is always the same man. Try to convince him in the form of a reasoning, and he does not follow you. He waits for you at the example. His mind does not love the continuous pressure of logical reasoning. He must have little successive shocks separated by time. Thus spoke Jesus, and the Jewish crowds grew intoxicated with his parables. Thus spoke the Rabbis, “for the Law is a basket full of delicious fruits, but heavy, round and smooth; the apologue is the handle by which it is possible to seize the basket.” ²²

So too the Jewish people possesses an immense folk-lore: little stories, fables, narratives, legends, puns, witticisms, ²³ an enormous repertory from which draw the rabbis, and the schoolmasters, the Badchen whose trade it is to make the guests laugh at wedding feasts, and the Schnorrer whose buffooneries amuse the pious host who, in order to obey the Law, always has a poor man at his table on the eve of the Sabbath.

These stories are originally from all countries: from Palestine and from Africa, from Russia, from Poland, from Galicia, from Germany, from Austria, from Alsace, from the Three Bishoprics, from Spain, from France, from Paris itself, from all the places and all the countries where the wandering people has rested, has worked in ignominy and in fear, has believed it could breathe at last. Some come from the most remote times, from the biblical or Talmudic epochs, have been recounted, written down by hand, diverted and transformed ceaselessly; the others are of yesterday, of today itself, each generation admiring, vaunting its aspirations, mocking its labors or its vices.

For one must not imagine that all the Jewish jokes that the antisemitic newspapers or books print are of Christian origin. A great number have been invented by Jews. The Jewish theater of Vienna, the Stock Exchanges of Frankfurt and of Paris, the Synagogues, the Casinos, the Clubs — they are manufactured everywhere where, for work, for religion, or for pleasure, are gathered the representatives of this susceptible and mocking race. For the Jew is a mocker, like the Frenchman. Like the Frenchman, polite and full of himself, he loves to mock himself out of politeness and out of pride. He speaks of his qualities in a low voice and in a loud voice of his failings. ²⁴

It is as if he said to his body: you are not very handsome, you are spare and awkward; to his arms: you are restless; to his hands: you are meddlers; to his very heart: you are not always chivalrous; I can do nothing about it, it is the legacy of the ancestors, and it takes more than one life to change that; but above these slaves of the past my freed mind, my free mind knows you and judges you.

There is a more troubled source among all those from which the Jewish jokes flow. Most races idealize their type. Every Greek woman is proud to have a low forehead, a straight, fleshy nose prolonging the forehead; every Armenian woman desires to have a face so round that her lover may compare it to an apple, to a pomegranate, to an orange, to the very face of the moon. A race vanquished and too long jeered at ends by despising itself. It admires no longer anything but the type of its conquerors, and their soul. There are certainly Jews who, for disinterested reasons and of faith, cease to be Jews, although they rage at not having been able to change their head in changing their God. “Ihr Antisemitismus ist mir neu,” ²⁵ a Christian, frightened by the zeal of his new co-religionist, was obliged to say to one of them. Others, without converting, are flattered when they are told that they have not the Jewish nose, the Jewish hair, the Jewish manners. Those Jews have denationalized their type, and instead of exalting their differences, of striving to remain themselves and quite apart, they adapt themselves, blend in, conform, and in some sort diminish, by their doing, that diversity of beings which is a blessing of nature. That species of Jews are ceaselessly afraid lest some boor reproach them with their Judaism. They take the lead and hasten to make witticisms against the Jews, having the air of saying: that does not touch us, we; we are not of them. It is by these heroes, who would willingly exchange the mobility of their nostrils for the standard nose of an Auvergnat, and who would [trouble] their supple soul against the disinterested, no doubt non-mercantile and brave soul of the bourgeoisie that surrounds them, that are manufactured a certain number of jokes about the shape of our nose or the cunning of our mind. So too, in this enormous mass, where there is everything, the excellent and the worst, the quintessence of sensibility and ribaldry, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish, from the irritating admiration of oneself, the traits of the most malevolent satire.

Here is a little story where the intention of the teller is clear. The Rabbi of Altona showed the unbelieving Salomon Maimon the Schofar, that primitive trumpet from which the officiant draws savage cries when the Synagogue pronounces the Herem, the Jewish excommunication: “Do people know this?” he said to him with a somber air. The disciple of Kant answered very tranquilly: “I know that it is the horn of a she-goat.”

Heinrich Heine, who relates this story, admires the immobile face and the tranquil audacity of the philosopher. ²⁶ But here is a tale of Alsace. A peddler, who has not earned a sou in his week, wishes nonetheless to be back home at Colmar for the Sabbath. He succeeds in slipping onto the platform and takes the train. On the way the ticket-collector asks him for his ticket. — I have no ticket, says the Jew. — Then pay, says the collector. — I have no money, says the Jew. The collector throws him out at the first stop. The Jew, without a word, sits down on a bench, waits a long hour, gets into the next train, and travels a few kilometers. He is checked again, driven out, sits down on a bench, waits for another train, gets in again, and so on until an employee, who had already checked him, recognizes him and says to him: Ah! it is you again. And how long will it last, this little game? The Jew sinks his head into his neck, lifts his shoulders, his arms, and with a half-smile: Until I have arrived at Colmar.

Here the intention is more doubtful. Does the teller mock the baseness of the Jew who has committed a little fraud and lets himself be jeered at without answering, or does he celebrate the tenacity of this poor devil whose adventure is a sort of tragic symbol of Israel continuing to advance under the insults and under the blows?

But in this other story, which is quite new, the intention is evident. It is a pleasant apology for cleverness.

Two stock-jobbers have, out of economy, the same mistress. The woman becomes pregnant. Who will take care of the child? — Patience, says one. — That is true, says the other. Does one know what may happen? Nothing to know save the pains of childbirth. In the street, before the door of the little hotel, the two friends meet. — Go up, says the first, I could not see that; you will tell me how it went. And he paces up and down on the pavement… At last his friend comes back down. How is the child? — The child, there is not one child, there are two children. — Two children?… Very well, very well; then we shall have one each. — Yes! That’s it!… But there is a misfortune! — What misfortune? — Well!… mine, he is dead!

Many Jewish jokes are constructed on this type and are not severe upon cunning. The antisemites ceaselessly reproach the Jews with it. With their bad faith. For they know more than one Christian farce whose Christian heroes, in the matter of cunning, could give points to Jews. But the defense of the Jews is clumsy: “with the fox, play the fox,” ²⁷ the rabbis have taught.

The psychology of a persecuted race justifies, in effect, the narratives where the Jews take in the Christians or the Infidels. But those — and they are numerous — where the Jews play one against another to see who can be the cleverest?

Everything becomes clear if one regards the Jewish joke as the amusement of a people of business-men.

What then is the point of honor of the intermediary? To impose his merchandise, and not to quit the place save with his bargain in his pocket. He must always have the last word. Such is the Schadchen, the maker of marriages, the matrimonial agent, always on the lookout for young men to marry. The mother-in-law does not please me, he is objected to; she is a stupid and wicked woman. — It is not the mother-in-law, it is the daughter you are marrying. — But she is no longer young, and not much more beautiful. — What matter! She will be only the more faithful to you for it. — She has not much money. — Who spoke to you of money? Is it money you are marrying? You are asking for a wife. — But she also has a hump. — You are very hard to please. Would you wish her to have no defect at all? ²⁸

As for the merchant, he has need of everyone. He does not wish to fall out with anyone; but at the same time he does not wish to let his hand be forced. He intends to accept only the bargains that suit him, and yet to remain the friend of those whose merchandise he refuses. He gets out of it by witticisms; with cards and bridge, the joke is the best of masks. That is why people joke so much at the tables d’hôte where commercial travelers try to amuse themselves while not letting their clientele be filched from them by their neighbors; in the officers’ messes where, according to the epochs, prowl the spies of the Congregation or the spies of the Lodges; in the drawing-rooms of the high functionaries of the Republic. A President, a Director, is frequently jovial and pleasant. The finest posts of our democracy are given to those who have known how to make the most parliamentarians and ministers laugh without unveiling the bottom of their thought. At this exercise certain Jewish viziers, great and small, have shown themselves first-rate. Their grandfathers learned for them the wit of repartee on the marketplace. One of them, a horse-dealer, was examining a saddle-horse. It is so swift, the owner of the beast said to him, that if you mount it at four o’clock in the morning you will be at six-thirty at Strasbourg. — And what do you want me to do at Strasbourg at six-thirty? ²⁹

One sees, does one not, the little chestnut eye, which ceaselessly looks in all directions, between the half-closed eyelids, the immobile face of this roller of fairs who lets fall from his barely opened lips the few sous thanks to which he keeps his independence and his friends. I think of Tristan Bernard recounting after dinner those Jewish stories that he does not publish, and which the brief tales that have made him famous resemble in a striking manner, whether by the subject or by the accent.

Jewish humor and the other kinds of humor have many traits in common: an acute sense of the irony of things; that all is vain and yet necessary; the gift of looking at the world now from the most general point of view, now in its tiniest details; wit, buffoonery, the tragic; a great sobriety with regard to oneself and an immense pleasure in breaking the narrow tablets on which are written the laws of average thought. Of this humor Zangwill knows how to make marvelous use; and he has written more than one page ³⁰ which, for the happy mixture of irony and of pathos, would rival a work like Le Tambour Legrand. ³¹ But his humor has very particular characteristics: first the frequent employment of the Jewish joke. Zangwill has gathered a great number of tales, so that certain pieces of his works are a sort of Jewish folk-lore, and that certain of his personages make one think of those “Minnesingers of the Middle Ages paying for the hospitality they receive with good stories or with gossip about what they have seen in the towns or on the roads.” ³²

He often amuses himself also by pastiching the Jewish jokes. Elsewhere, when he takes the trouble to invent, it is a mixture of biblical citations, of theologico-metaphysical discussions and of farce; God and religion, apology and blasphemy, the irritation at the limits that religions bring to our activity, the efforts we make to get out of those limits without too greatly violating the rules that we find necessary.

That, and a thousand other elements compose the humor of Zangwill; for, containing all the contraries and all the contradictions, this art so close to life is, like life, indefinable. But what it has most particular, and what would make one recognize among a thousand anonymous proses the style of Zangwill, is the constant employment — most often to mock it, but sometimes too, as if in spite of himself, to express his own thought — of Talmudic reasoning.

Someone says to a Talmudist: You owe the tithe as soon as the fruits have come into the house. — But shall I owe it, he answers, if I eat them in the courtyard? — No, if the courtyard is open, and if the neighbors can see you eat them. — And if the courtyard is open in one part and covered in another? — The covered part will be considered as the house. — But if I eat my figs on the doorstep? ³³

And had the discussion borne upon a sentiment, he would have cut it into four for you. It is because most of the Jews have been subjected for centuries to such a gymnastic that, the day the great Schools were opened to them, they showed such an aptitude for the studies of philosophy and of jurisprudence. But some minds have remained twisted and warped from it forever.

As Pascal, in his Provinciales, lent to his Jesuit Father the language of Jesuitical casuistry, Zangwill often writes, or makes his personages speak, in the convoluted language of the Talmudist commentator, the subtlest of hair-splitters, the most dangerous of adversaries because he has the pride of having the last word, and because he always ends by blocking you in a corner with an argument of detail that you feel to be false and that you rage at not being able, in logic, to demonstrate to be such. It is one of the funniest of the means of Zangwill’s talent. It is one of the most original and the newest aspects of his humor. He was the first to divine all the comic, the tragic even, that a novelist could draw from that “juridical instinct of the Hebrew who has developed the most gigantic and the most minute code of conduct that there is in the world.” ³⁴

Of each of the elements that compose the humor of Zangwill it is very difficult to give pure examples; for, even in his Essays, where he discusses in the Jewish manner subjects that are not Jewish, all the elements are mingled together and brewed with a foundation of Anglo-Saxon and Germanic humor. ³⁵ But it is with their paste that are kneaded the personages of the novels, of the tales, of the dramas of Zangwill: beings cultivated, gay, susceptible, watchful, vulgar, enthusiastic, jesting, swindlers, mountebanks, devout, ignorant, superstitious, eloquent, talkative and brave: the King of the Schnorrers, Sugarman the Shadchan, Mrs. Belcovitch, Malka, Flutter Duck; the gentle, amiable, jovial Reb Shemuel, and finally a singular hero who unites in himself the two dominant traits of the Oriental Jew, dissolute idealism and parasitism, one of the most truculent types of contemporary literature, kin to Rameau’s Nephew and to the good abbé Jérôme Coignard: Melchitzedek Pinchas, the neo-Hebrew poet:

He is a true poet, with an extraordinary power of language and an infallible gift of rhythm. He wrote in the medieval style with a profusion of acrostics, and double rhymes, disdaining the nudity of the parallelism that the first Hebrew poets used. In the intellectual domain, he devoured all things like a flame, with a marvelous rapidity and penetration, and an equal lack of judgment… The same bent of his twisted mind made him pour himself out in ingenious explanations of the Bible and of the Talmud, in new views, in new gleams upon points of history, of philology, of medicine, upon all things, upon whatever it might be. And he believed in his ideas because they were his and in himself because of his ideas. It seemed to him at times that his stature was growing, until his head touched the sun, but that was especially after drinking, and his brain kept from that contact a perpetual flame.

Pinchas sends his works to the rich Jews who, to be rid of him, give him in return a few shillings. But he accepts from all hands and carries his books to the homes of humbler people, from whom he receives, in exchange, compliments and also breakfast. Here he is presenting himself at the house of Reb Shemuel.

He entered by the street door, which was ajar, knocked lightly at the door of the room, and opened it, then he kissed the mezuzah nailed on the doorpost; he advanced toward the Rabbi, seized his hand, which held the coffee-pot, and kissed it with an equal devotion. Finally he bent down and pressed with his lips the frock-coat of the Reb. I have come, he said, to beg you to do me the honor of accepting a copy of my new collection of poems entitled The Flames of the Metatron. Is it not a fine title? When Joseph was carried up alive to heaven, he was changed into fire and became Metatron, the Great Spirit of the Cabala. Thus my soul rises into the Heaven of lyric poetry and is transformed into fire, into flame, into light.

(The face of the poet) was cut with hatchet-strokes, and not without resemblance to that of an Aztec… He held in one hand a packet of books with paper covers, and in the other an extinguished cigar. He set the books down on the table where the breakfast had been served. At last, he said, this great work is printed, that those ignorant English Jews left to molder, they who pay stupid reverends thousands and hundreds to wear white cravats.

— And who has paid for the printing of it this time, Monsieur Pinchas, said the Rabbi?

— Who, who, stammered Melchitzedek? who else but I? — But you say you are a poor devil.

— True as the law of Moses! But I have written articles for the Yiddish newspapers. They run after me. There is not in their editorial staff a single man who knows how to turn out an article. I can draw no money from it, for even [obscured], without [obscured] I would not be without having breakfasted this morning. But the proprietor of the largest of those newspapers is also a printer, and printed for me my little book in payment of my articles. I did not think, however, that the sale of it would fill my stomach… May the Almighty, blessed be He, bless you, Rabbi; naturally I will take a cup of tea. I know no one like you who knows how to make coffee with such a perfume… You are a happy mortal, Rabbi. You permit me to sit down at your table? And without waiting for the permission he took a chair and sat down; then he washed his hands, and set himself to swallow an egg. Here is your copy, Reb Shemuel, he said, after a moment. You know that you and I are the two persons in London who know how to write the sacred language correctly.

— No, no, said the Rabbi with modesty.

— Yes, yes, resumed Pinchas… You write it as well as I. But look at the dedication that I have written specially for you with my own hand: “To the light of his generation, the great Gaon whose perfection is renowned to the confines of the earth, at whose lips the whole people of God comes to ask for knowledge; to the inexhaustible source; to the powerful eagle that rises up to the heavens on the wings of Intelligence: to the Rav Shemuel. May his light never be obscured, and may, in his lifetime, the Redeemer descend upon Zion.” Take it, do me the honor of accepting it. It is the homage of the man of genius to the man of science, the humble present of one of the two only Hebrew scholars of England to the other.

Melchitzedek Pinchas knows how to get in everywhere, into the gatherings, into the societies, into the committees, where he solicits with a naïve and tireless ambition a post of president, of secretary, of treasurer, of orator. People do not dare to put him out. They know that only physical force is capable of making him leave; and that is not always without danger, as the Director of the Jewish Theater of New York experiences, who, having allowed himself to transform into a comic opera a drama written by Melchitzedek Pinchas, received, full on the stage, a blow of a cane across the face. ³⁶

But most of the time, to obtain what he desires, Pinchas employs the insinuating method.

A strike of tailor-workers is being prepared against the sweaters of Whitechapel. It is a good occasion to put himself forward. He succeeds in penetrating into the Committee room and tries to win the good graces of Simon Wolf, the great Jewish workers’ leader. He sets forth his ideas to him, but Simon Wolf is distrustful. He is afraid that Pinchas will filch his position, as he says. Then Pinchas envelops him, puts himself at his service, offers to speak at the meetings.

My words will rush forth like the torrents of the mountains to sweep away corruption… You know, Simon, you and I are the only two persons in the East of London who speak English correctly. ³⁷

— I know, but the speeches must be in Yiddish.

— Gevalt! but who knows how to speak it like you and me. You will give me a speech to deliver this evening.

— I cannot. No really! The program is arranged. You know, they are all already jealous of me; I dare not strike one of them out.

— Ah no! do not say that! pleaded Pinchas, laying his forefinger on the wing of his nose.

— It must be so!

— You are tearing my heart in two. I love you like a brother, or almost like a woman. Only a single speech.

In his eyes there shone a soliciting smile.

— I cannot, they would swoop down on me like a nest of wasps.

— A single little one, a single one, Simon Wolf.

Again his finger was stuck against his nose.

— It is impossible.

— You have not considered how much my Yiddish will inflame hearts, and that it will make the tears flow from all eyes, just as Moses made the spring gush from the rock.

— Yes, yes, but what can I do?

— Only this little favor, and I shall be grateful to you all my life.

— You know well that I would do it if I could.

The finger of Pinchas pressed with still more insistence against his nose.

— Only that, grant me that and I will ask you nothing more in my life.

— No, no. Do not torment me, Pinchas. And now you must go away. I have heaps of things to do.

— It is I whom you will never again get to be willing to pass on my ideas, said the poet, bursting out. And he went out, slamming the door.

The leader settled himself before his papers with a sigh of relief… A moment later the door opened a little and the head of Pinchas appeared, little by little. The poet was making his most amiable smile. His finger was pushing his nose in the most cajoling fashion.

— Only one little speech, Simon! Think how much I love you.

— Very well, very well! Go, I beg you. Yes, yes, I shall see, replied Simon Wolf, laughing in spite of all his annoyance.

The poet sprang forward and kissed the hem of Wolf’s jacket.

— Oh! you are a great man, he said; then he went out, closing the door gently.

IV

The Pogroms

The impossibility of being satisfied — that is the characteristic of most of the heroes of Zangwill. Natures so fine that the world, whose hand is sometimes a little rough, ceaselessly rubs them raw; dreamers, certainly, but lucid ones who hope for almost nothing from men. Vanity of vanities — that is the bitter fruit of their clear-sightedness. Evil and good struggle on roughly equal terms in the Universe, and it is doubtful whether any of our efforts can transform into good the smallest quantity of evil. The systems that found themselves upon the moral perfectibility of men are but dreams. A single wicked man destroys the effort of ten men of good will.

Then is it not wise to sit down crying: what is the use, and to await deliciously death, in the midst of the play of ideas, of colors and of perfumes — or, on the contrary, to abandon oneself to the grace of God? But the Venetian Jew, the hero of Chad Gadya, whom his fortune and his love of ideas have made a dilettante, at bottom hates the dilettantes, “the weavers of clouds, the jugglers of words,” and, wretched in the midst of enjoyments, it is he who goes toward death. As for God Himself, the almighty Creator, He can do nothing for the despairing man who abandons himself to Him. If He acts, God acts only through man. Progress is perhaps an illusion. But the races that have ceased to dream this illusion fall into decadence and die. Let us therefore act. “I am a Russian, I am for action, action, action,” says Strelitski, the rabbi of a comfortable synagogue in a fine quarter of London, who, weary of celebrating a formal cult in which he no longer believes, of speaking before a public whose soul he does not reach, of feeling himself the salaried man and in some sort “the professional panegyrist of the rich,” ³⁸ gives in his resignation and leaves for America to preach there freely a Judaism without dogmas. Like all idealists he will fall short of a part of his dreams. But he will not be discouraged. If his projects fail it will be justice, because they were merely logical, pure constructions of the mind, of the reason. Life breaks what is rational, systematic, classified, codified. “Perfect things are dead things; the law of life is imperfection and movement. Life is never logical, it is simply alive.” ³⁹ Perhaps toward forty-five, like so many other enthusiasts, he will regret, in the hours of nervous fatigue, having known so little of the sweetness of living. But a few days of sunshine, a little rest, a small success, and he will understand that he has enjoyed the only kind of pleasure that is given to his passionate nature: to spend his enthusiasm; that what matters is not “results, but action itself.” ⁴⁰ For he belongs to that race incapable of despair, to that race so active, so living, that it is impossible for it to imagine that its dead themselves will one day cease to act. “One must not envisage the future world as a place of rest,” one of its sages has said. “There, spiritual activity will continue to exercise itself.” ⁴¹

It is not therefore enough for Zangwill to move us or to amuse us by painting personages. He needs to love them. He cannot help crying out when his models are maltreated; he cannot leave in peace those who permit the Jewish people to be destroyed. The Jewish people — there are three words that certain ears bear with difficulty. The Jews claimed that they are citizens of the Jewish religion. One recalls their joy when, in a famous lecture, Renan revealed to them that their race contained a few drops of foreign blood. They had therefore mingled with the peoples! They could have the same aspirations, the same dreams! The old national ideal was indeed dead; Israel had now only a mission to fulfill: to peddle, instead of old clothes, a few new ideas; ⁴² then it would dissolve into the nations, like an amendment into a tired soil, regenerating them.

Such was, roughly, the state of mind of the cultivated Jews throughout all Europe when Zangwill was reaching the age of manhood. Israel had renounced its ancient solidarity, too egoistic, in order to spread throughout the world the ideal of universal fraternity. The Russians began to massacre their Jewish brothers. The Romanians had invented for them a condition inferior to that of citizen — that of a subject held to the burdens, not enjoying the rights. ⁴³ Vienna was electing an antisemitic municipality. In France appeared the pamphlets of Drumont and the Libre Parole; the Anglo-Saxon countries raised the barrier of the Alien acts to protect themselves against the ever-growing masses of emigrants. We are one against a thousand, thought the Jews; what is the use of resisting? Let us wait; we shall be forgotten. Zangwill flung them this poem:

Hear, O Israel, Jehovah, our God, is One. But we, people of Jehovah, are double and so undone. Slaves of eternal Egypts, baking our bricks without straw, At ease in accessory Zions, chattering over their politics; Rotting in the Romanian sun, banished into the Russian Pale, Driving to the Park, to the Bois, to the Prater, hanging at the tail of the smart set. Trembling before the bullies, bruised by a thousand goads, Clothed in purple, in fine linen, pampered at the court of Kings; Faithful friends of our enemies, slaves of a de-Hebraizing clique, In Europe the only Christians who turn the other cheek… For foreign lands risking our lives, proud of the flags of our fatherlands, In payment shown the door, our rags impaled upon their arms. O Pantaloon-Proteus of the Peoples, security comes from within! Lion of Judah, where art thou?… A donkey’s skin upon thy back! ⁴⁴

And then, as the events unfolded, as the expulsions and the massacres precipitated themselves, he tried to stir the Jewish conscience by speaking to it of the pogroms. To the cowardly Jews, he told the story of the Jewish heroes.

He told them how the Russian authority, when it needs to divert public attention from its incapacity or its corruption, prepares a pogrom. The accusation of ritual crime is launched cleverly. It is an old popular belief that the Jews need, in order to prepare their unleavened breads, the blood of a Christian child. The beadle of the synagogue is bought and lets be put, in the place of the flask of consecrated wine, a flask of ox blood. During the morning office of Passover, while the prayers of the cantor rise up before the rolls of the law in the illuminated temple, the faithful suddenly hear the clatter of a troop of horsemen, the brief noise of military orders. The great door is flung open on both leaves and a squadron of Cossacks advances on horseback, two men abreast. Halt, cries the officer. — Why does your Excellency come to trouble our prayers to God, asks the beadle? — First of all for the child’s blood… Show me that bottle under the holy ark. And, to his men: Let no one go out, man, woman or child… Kill whoever tries to escape. But Aaron Ben Amram, the pious and learned Jewish physician, who, warned in time of the felony of the beadle, had been able to replace the bottle of blood with the aromatic wine of the Consecration, advances straight in his robe of white satin and his shawl bordered with a band of silver. A soldier must know what blood is, he says with tranquillity. — The officer sniffed the uncorked neck of the bottle and his face relaxed into a faint smile. A soldier knows the smell of wine too, he said; and, leaping into the saddle, he ordered the retreat. ⁴⁵

Samooborona ⁴⁶ is the story of the pogrom itself. The news that a massacre was being prepared at Milovka, a little Polish town, arrives at the headquarters of the Samooborona (Self-defence) thanks to the indiscretions of a village pope “who had one drop of blood too much.” The young David Ben Amram is dispatched in haste to organize a local corps of the Self-defence. He carries away as many revolvers as his violin case could contain, and, in his roll of music, cartridges. He pays a visit to the merchants of the little town. The Black Hundreds, he tells them, are soon going to be unleashed upon the Jewish quarter. But the Jews must no longer let themselves be led to the slaughterhouse like lambs. Too long, when they have received blows on one cheek, they have held out the other. One must defend oneself… One must buy brownings. But the innkeeper, the timber-merchant, the horse-dealer, weep and tremble. The Rabbi proposes a day of fasting and of prayer. The others think it preferable to make a collection and to send the proceeds of it to the Governor. The pogrom will bring it in more, answers David, let us rather prepare bombs; and he recounts to them all the horrors of which, elsewhere, he has been witness: an old man scalped with a sharpened iron spoon; a poker heated white-hot driven into the eye of a woman; the skull of a child crushed under the heel of a True Russian. Bourgeois, he thundered, I want to save you in spite of yourselves!… At the same instant the door opens a little. They are seized with panic; they throw David onto the bed, hold him there firmly. But it is not the police that enters, it is simply Ezekiel Leven, a friend of David. Blessed be you who come, cried David, springing to his feet, you and I, Ezekiel, we shall save Milovka. — Alas! murmured Ezekiel, I have just drawn a bad number. I am leaving to fight for Russia.

David pays a visit successively to the bankers, to the lawyers, to the physicians, to the intellectuals, to the workers. Each belongs to a party: Octobrist, Cadet, Polish, Progressist, Social-democrat, Socialist-revolutionary, Social-Zionist, Social-Territorialist. None wishes to come to an understanding with the others. Each finds pretexts for not coming to an understanding with David. You are a Maximalist, I see it clearly, the keeper of the temple says to him. No, only a Minimalist, answers David, I want only the minimum: to save your lives. You all dream of saving the world, or at least Holy Russia. You think only of the future; I, I speak to you only of your present.

“The Pogrom arrived. But it arrived in a new form for which David himself was not prepared… No melodramatic accessories, no agents provocateurs, no hooligans with false grey beards, disguised as rioting or blaspheming Jews. The artillery was brought up quietly against the Jewish quarter, as if Milovka were an enemy town.” David was offered the chance to hide in a cellar. But he preferred to climb up onto a roof from which, with the help of a little spy-glass, he could watch the movements of the cordon of investment. His eyes did not leave a face that he had discovered among the cannon. “It was Ezekiel Leven, his former lieutenant, with whom he had dreamed of accomplishing actions worthy of the Maccabees. The new conscript, in artilleryman’s uniform, was minutely aiming a Gatling gun. “Poor Ezekiel, cried David; it is you, of us all, whose lot is the drollest. But you have forgotten that there is still another form of Self-defence.” And he turned his pistol against himself.”

In The Melting Pot, ⁴⁷ we see the consequences of the pogroms.

It is at New York that the drama unfolds. David Quixano is a young musician of genius. He belongs to that category of “Orphans of Pogroms,” such as so many steamships bring to New York. He is taken in by his uncle, the music teacher Mendel Quixano who, ten years ago already, brought from Russia his own mother, the widow of a learned Talmudist, Frau Quixano, a worthy and respectable lady, sunk in the practices and who speaks only Yiddish. Vera Revendal, a young girl who has escaped the Russian prisons only by exile, and who earns her living as an assistant in a Settlement, admires the genius of David Quixano. Soon, she confesses to him that she loves him. But David has horrible hallucinations. This exceptional being, possessed by images and by sounds, sees again ceaselessly the face of the officer who was present at the massacre of Kishineff, and who, instead of ordering his soldiers to arrest the rioters, commanded them to fire upon the women, upon the children who were escaping the massacre. Suddenly, he recognizes that the father of Vera is this chief of assassins who has killed his mother, his sister, all his family. Then Vera asks his pardon. She implores: I am going to tell you the truth, David, she cries, I was not quite sure, until now, of my love for you… often, after our enchanted moments, there was an indefinable embarrassment, a vague instinct, a relic of the age-old contempt for the Jews, a sort of strange aversion for their religion without Christ…

But now,… now David, I come to you and I say to you, repeating the words of Ruth: “Thy people shall be my people and thy God shall be my God.”

DAVID

Do not approach me. There is a river of blood between us.

VERA

Were there the seven oceans, our love would cross them.

DAVID

Easy for you to say. You have never seen the red stream carrying along the mutilated breasts of women or the crushed brains of little children.

VERA

O my God!… Let Vera console you. She kneels against David’s chair and tries to throw her arms around him.

DAVID

Take away your arms. Do you not feel the cold death that is slipping in between us.

VERA

Without being troubled, she draws David’s face toward her lips.

Kiss me, David.

DAVID

I should feel the blood upon your lips.

VERA

My love will efface it.

DAVID

Love, Christian love. For that, I have left my people, darkened the hearth that had taken me in. There was, however, in my heart a little voice that never ceased to say to me: Go back. But I listened to nothing: only the voice of the butcher’s beast. Ah! let me go home, home, home! ⁴⁸

Such is the debate. Will David be able to forgive, will he be able to forget? The great Republic, land of refuge for all the oppressed, the great Crucible where have already been melted so many races — the German, the Slav, the Anglo-Saxon, the Latin — will it be able, despite so many injustices, rancors, hatreds, to melt together the Christian and the Jew?

It is the Cid, this story! With a few changes it is the same theme: the struggle of duty and of passion, as one says at school. But how much more instinctive are the heroes of Zangwill! Far more than a combat of the reason against the heart, we are present at the struggle of the nerves against themselves; the struggle of a love and of an image, the struggle of two visions. How little David resembles that reasonable Chimène. Would she have her father, that maid of honor who calculates, who analyzes all that opinion demands she should do to avenge her father killed by her lover.

Dost thou so little fear the blame and so little the false rumors?… My glory is at stake, I must avenge myself.

David and Vera do not concern themselves with what a few well-bred people think of them. Their sentiments are of the elite, but they are people by preference and by origin. Of noble, cultivated soul. But spontaneous, passionate, intuitive, deranged if you will, deranged like all those who have once lowered their eyes upon the great drama in which the peoples struggle, and who have not the cool head of an ambitious man, nor the dry heart of a dilettante.

The Melting Pot is, I believe, the most successful work of Zangwill. All his other works have a few stains: faults of taste, a certain lack of the sense of proportions, a superabundance, and, as an English critic, M. Oliphant, says, an accumulation of detail. For this nature of a tumultuous richness it would have been good, perhaps, to pass through the French sieve. The English public is a dangerous master. It does not ask you, as ours does, to contradict yourself. It does not demand that you say only the essential. In this last work, on the contrary, the theater, which ordains conciseness, compactness, has held the office of our discipline. It has bridled Zangwill, and has given an extraordinary power to that gift he received at birth and of which he makes frequent use — that of wrenching, by means of a scene of farce, our nerves already strained by a strong dramatic situation. One will read further on ⁴⁹ one of those scenes, too long to be reproduced here: David has just announced to his uncle that Vera Revendal loves him. Mendel Quixano blames him for wishing to marry a Christian. David will therefore leave the house. At that moment Frau Quixano, who is celebrating Purim, the Jewish carnival, in the kitchen, enters laughing with Kathleen the Irish servant, puts on herself a false nose, sets one by force upon the face of Mendel, and obliges David to take his violin and to make them dance to the sound of an old Slavic dance. It is impossible not to think, in reading this scene, of the scene of the Tarantella, in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, or of the scene of Shakespeare where King Lear, become mad, imagines that he is having his absent daughters judged by his fool and by Edgar, son of Gloucester, who feigns madness.

This Jew is therefore an imitator? For the Jews, it appears, invent nothing in literature; they imitate or they corrupt. They have corrupted German literature, they are in the process of corrupting the French theater. No doubt, I know some who are famous corrupters among their writers, who, not daring to look behind them for fear of seeing there the image of their misery and of their abjection, are tempted to take for novelties what is only a tumbling-down, for a march toward liberty what is only a return toward the chimera. But the work of Zangwill is perfectly pure and healthy, although he has all the audacities of the most advanced minds. He has no more imitated Ibsen than he has aped Shakespeare.

V

The Ito

A work of art, words, sounds, to teach men, to move men — a vain thing! A few beings of the elite are reached in the depth of their sensibility; but they had no need of our voice. The others cannot hear us. Besides, has human speech ever built anything? “The sound of the trumpet made the walls of Jericho crumble; but what sounds of trumpets have edified a Jericho?” The work of life is a continuous work that the work of words slows down. Moses, who, in fact, led the Jewish people into a new land, did not know how to speak. He employed for it a sort of chief of cabinet, his brother Aaron, who made his speeches for him. Zangwill knows, however, how to prepare his speeches. But the slow action of the man of letters is not enough for the Jewish writer. This action, which is exercised without danger in the study, gives an impure glory. Like his heroes, Zangwill has always had the nostalgia of true action. He is not content to push troops forward, he wants to march before them, to lead them toward that terrestrial goal: an idealized reality. For five years, Zangwill has become a sort of Jewish leader, the modern Judge that Israel desired.

When doctor Herzl came to London with his plan for a Jewish State, it was Zangwill and his friends the Maccabaeans who received him and helped him to make his projects public. Zangwill was present at almost all the Zionist congresses and was the faithful friend and the collaborator of doctor Herzl. However, Zangwill, a diverse mind, an enemy of systems, was ignorant of none of the objections that can be made against the reconstitution of a Jewish State.

The Temple would be rebuilt. And afterward? The architect would send in his bill. People would dine out and pat themselves on the belly while telling each other old smoking-room stories. There would be fashionable dressmakers. The Synagogue would persecute everything that surpasses it, the professional priests would cut up spiritual things before an approving animal world, the press would run to the defense of the interests of the capitalists or of the politicians, the little writers would be full of gall against those who did not call them great, the directors of the national theater would seek to have the leading roles given to their mistresses. Yes, the ox will come and drink the water, and Jeshurun, become fat, will kick. ⁵⁰

Zangwill knew also what imprudence there was in choosing Jerusalem, “the center of pilgrimage of the three great religions, the least holy city under the sun,… where frightful quantities of wretches are in agony in steep lanes, full of refuse”; ⁵¹ Palestine, that devastated country, where the peoples have left only shining stones and dust, under a heap of tombs and of excrement. But, of a mind as detached from orthodoxy and as secular as doctor Herzl, he feared with him that a Jewish State installed in a new country would leave indifferent the mass of the believers. He hoped, on the contrary, that men who, at the close of the feasts of Rosh-Hashanah, part from one another, every year for eighteen centuries, wishing one another “next year in Jerusalem,” would grow enthusiastic at the idea of Zion recovered and of the Temple rebuilt. In effect, Zionism gave back to the Jews the sentiment of their unity; Israel felt itself anew a Nation. From all the countries of the Dispersion, Jews embarked for Jerusalem. Doctor Herzl negotiated with the Porte. But, abandoned by the Emperor of Germany, he received from the Sultan, instead of Palestine, a decoration, and, in despair, ill, he sought in all the corners of the world a territory in which to transplant his unhappy people. In 1903, the English Government offered him, in the East-African protectorate, a vast territory, with a charter of autonomy. But the fanatics who composed the majority of the sixth congress refused to consecrate a centime of the Zionist funds to the expenses of the mission sent to reconnoiter the country, and on July 27, 1905, one year, to the day, after the death of doctor Herzl, the seventh congress declared that the goal of Zionism could be only Palestine or the bordering countries, and refused the East-African territory.

From Russia hundreds of letters arrived to implore the chiefs of the movement to accept the English offer:

The streets of Kieff are full of lamentations; the Cossacks, the hooligans cut down, slaughter our brothers and no one is there to defend us. The organizations of the Self-defence are beaten and cannot resist the soldiers, who are better armed than they, and better disciplined. No tongue can express the tragedy that is being played out in Russia. The emigration from Kieff and its surroundings is such that in four days only the governor has delivered 5,000 passports; that means 5,000 families; and you can imagine that the number of those who pass the frontier without a passport is seven times greater… They say that they would like to go not only to Uganda, but even to hell. And that would not be worse. It would be all the same to us to live our whole life on nothing but bread and water and clothed in rags, if we breathed the air of a Jewish country… The whole Jewish nation wants Uganda, and if the Zionists have refused it, they have spoken only in their own name. If it were necessary to find a hundred thousand signatories in the region of Kieff, we should have them. If you make it a million, we should collect them at Odessa, at Warsaw, at Elisabethgrad… We have been declared outlaws, we are men whom anyone has the right to kill… it may be that he who has written you this letter will be killed tomorrow… Present yourself to the English Government and ask it for Uganda… There is only a word to say and the whole emigration will leave for East Africa. In the name of thousands of families…

Zangwill immediately founded the “Jewish Territorial Organisation” (I. T. O.), and, three weeks after the refusal of the Zionist congress, declared himself ready to accept the East-African territory. Unfortunately, the English Government had already disposed of it. Since then Zangwill directs the Ito. He negotiates, travels, gives lectures, speeches, writes pamphlets, manifestoes, exchanges an enormous correspondence, intervenes before the courts. He has many times set forth the program of the Ito. But where we find this program expounded with the most clarity and grandeur is in five speeches delivered — one before the Court of Chancery, on April 9, 1908, on the occasion of a conflict between Zionists and Territorialists, a minute plea of a business lawyer; the others before great masses of Jewish workers in public meetings held at Manchester, at Leeds or at London in December 1907, in May and June 1909, and quite recently on the occasion of the conference of the International Council of the Ito on July 18, 1909.

The goal of the Ito is to procure a territory and autonomy for those of the Jews who cannot or will not remain in the country where they live at present. The Ito therefore does not concern itself with all the Jews. Of the Jews who can or who wish to remain, only one thing is asked: to help the others. Twelve million men scattered over the whole earth — one cannot think of transporting them into a single country, in a single generation. The exodus of the Jews from Russia in 1906, after the great pogroms, may be evaluated at two hundred thousand. From Romania, from Galicia, from Jerusalem itself, Jews depart ceaselessly; the Jews have just been driven out of Morocco. The money spent by the Jews in this ceaseless emigration exceeds twenty-five millions a year: the budget of a small State.

In most cases, this Jewish emigration is an emigration of expulsion. On the way, the emigrants are subjected to vexations and to ill treatment on the part of inferior employees, of clandestine emigration agents, of sailors and of petty officers. The navigation Companies will not take account of their religious habits, which command for them a special diet. At the port of arrival, the legislation on foreigners weighs more heavily upon them than upon the others. Italians or Germans not admitted to disembark can, at a pinch, return to Italy or to Germany. Where can the Jew go who flees the Russian pogroms? What would be best for him, perhaps, is a rifle-shot as he tries to slip back over the Russian frontier.

Jewish emigration has also this particular feature, that if the Jews emigrate one by one or in small number, they suffer from isolation, and that, if they emigrate in mass, at once is reborn against them the old antisemitism. All emigrants leave, in a corner of the earth, a fatherland that will take up their defense if they are molested. For the Jewish emigrant there is no fatherland to protect him during the period when he has not yet acquired a nationality. He must find that fatherland. He must be found a territory.

What will this territory be? It must be a new creation. Instead of congesting a ghetto like that of New York with the hundred thousand Jewish emigrants who disembark every year in America, they must be scattered over the thousands of miles of a vast, healthy country. The Jews can be farmers: there are thousands of them in the world. ⁵² A peasant class, moreover, is not indispensable; it is only a means to an end, which is autonomy. This autonomy is absolutely necessary. What is the use of taking the trouble to people a new country, if the colonists have not the control of their administration? What guarantee that restrictive laws of their economic, political or religious liberty will not be imposed upon them? Autonomy alone is possible. The philanthropists have the pretension of carrying men on their backs to make them cross the river. Men do not feel comfortable up there and only mount there when they cannot do otherwise. The philanthropic colonies of the Jewish Colonisation Association (I. C. A.), which administers the foundations of Edmond de Rothschild and of Hirsch, render great services; but they offer nothing that can compete with the unhealthy attraction of the great cities. Of the 13,500 Jews who annually disembark in Argentina, scarcely 500 join the colonies of the Ica; the rest remain at Buenos-Ayres, where they form a corrupt ghetto. The action of the Ito, on the contrary, is not a political action. It wishes to constitute a point of support for free men who will cross over with their own feet. An autonomous country, with all the possibilities of an independent and proud life, a State where responsible citizens will have the joy of managing themselves their own interests, will exercise a powerful attraction. Autonomy frightens the emancipated Jews. They dread that the existence of a Jewish State should compromise their own status in the countries of liberty. Quite the contrary. First, the fact of continuing to reside in their country when they could emigrate to a Jewish land will prove their patriotism. On the other hand, their world situation is far more compromised by the existence of slaughterhouses and of cesspools, like the Russian Pale and the Moroccan Mellah, than by a prosperous Jewish State. Do they imagine that their Christian friends come back with much respect for the Jews, from Morocco where the proverb says that any Arab may kill seven Jews, and where fallen, degraded creatures live in a condition still lower than the travelers have recounted?

It is objected that there are no longer any free lands. Zionism has lost fine occasions. In 1896 Canada was looking on all sides for men; it was ready to give the Jews an immense territory with a wide autonomy. In 1907, when Zangwill began his negotiations, Canada had changed its policy. However, the Europeans have a white population absolutely insufficient to people their colonies; England has only twelve million whites to distribute throughout its colossal Empire. The Powers will end by understanding that it is not very dear to give a few thousand hectares not yet brought into value in order to have done with this irritating Jewish question, which concerns a population as important as that of Sweden, Norway, Greece and Denmark combined. If the powers refuse, it is still possible to succeed by an indirect path: autonomy can be easily attained, as it was by the citizens of Rhodesia, as it is by those of the American Territories when they have reached a sufficient number.

Among the ten or fifteen territories studied by its geographical commission, ⁵³ the Ito has retained two near enough to Palestine to attract the Jewish masses always strained toward Jerusalem. The first was Cyrenaica. Its climate, its coasts, its landscapes were reputed so beautiful in antiquity that legend had placed there the garden of the Hesperides. The Jews played an important role there. More than any other people they have ancient rights to assert over that southern coast of the Mediterranean where they had established themselves when Palestine was still a Jewish State, centuries before the Christian era. But the mission that the Ito sent into Cyrenaica found everywhere a permeable soil. The rainwater is so rapidly absorbed there that the country cannot make live, and no doubt has never been able to make live, an important population.

The other territory is Mesopotamia, the cradle of the Jewish race, formerly one of the most fertile regions of the earth, today an almost depopulated desert. A little water would suffice for it to be able to nourish millions of men. Abdul Hamid, as an astute financier, had sent there on a mission Sir William Willcocks, the famous engineer who irrigated Egypt. Sir William Willcocks came back with a more than favorable report. It would take no more than seven and a half million pounds to develop, in the ancient Chaldea, a region of more than five thousand square miles, and to make it yield a revenue of a million pounds a year. A credit of a hundred thousand pounds has been accorded, and Sir William Willcocks has been able to begin the works. The Young Turks have inscribed the restoration of Mesopotamia at the head of their program of Public Works. But capital and men are lacking to them. The occasion is propitious for the Jews to conclude a contract with Turkey, and to furnish it with the capital, the labor and the population necessary. Ahmed Riza Bey, president of the Ottoman Chamber of Deputies, has invited them to do so. ⁵⁴ It remains only to determine on what conditions and under what guarantees the Jews will accept; which of the three great Jewish organizations — the Jewish Colonial Trust (Zionist), the Ica or the Ito — will be entrusted with the honor of carrying to a successful end this gigantic work and of bringing to the Jewish question the healing remedy.

But, while waiting for the contract to be concluded, for the territory to be put into cultivation, for markets to be established, for railways to be built, a fairly long time will elapse. And the problem of emigration is an immediate problem. The Ito has therefore undertaken to regularize Jewish emigration; it directs it toward the port of Galveston in American Texas, a name hitherto unknown in the ghettos.

Galveston has been chosen because it is nothing other than a port, because it has no industry and because consequently a ghetto cannot develop there. It simply opens to the new arrivals the whole great region of the West of the Mississippi, where towns smaller and healthier than New York have need of their arms. By facilitating the establishment in this region of twenty thousand emigrants, the Ito hopes to set off a great movement of spontaneous emigration. The Jews, gathered under the direction of Jewish leaders and schoolteachers, able in case of danger to group themselves for the Self-defence, and disposing of a certain electoral power, will have a respected life.

Despite all sorts of difficulties on the part of the Russian Government, and the mockeries of the Zionist press, the Ito was able to send off a first group of emigrants on the first of July 1907, and from that date to the first of December 1907, it has transported more than a thousand of them. It has created in Russia more than a hundred and fifty centers of information, of recruitment and of careful selection of the emigrants. It has obtained from the navigation Companies notable material and moral improvements. Functionaries of the Ito travel with the emigrants and protect them against ill treatment. On arriving in the United States, the Jewish workers have obtained higher wages and have worked at once at the conditions of the workers’ Unions, so that they are not ill received by the American workers, as are the Jews who encumber the New York market.

These are the results of three years’ efforts. The Ito therefore remedies, in the measure of its forces, the ills of the present. But one must not forget for an instant the more distant goal, which is the acquisition of the territory. One must have no illusion. Although on paper the Jews enjoy a complete political equality, antisemitism rages furiously in the United States. And throughout the whole world antisemitism rises up. The theory of assimilation has gone bankrupt. We are men, and we have the right to have failings and defects, as well as virtues. Our virtues are reckoned only to each of us. Our vices are imputed to our whole race. People reproached us formerly with the filth of our poor. Now it is the well-being of our rich. Their motor-cars throw upon the passers-by a mud more sticky than the Christian motor-cars. Tomorrow their dirigibles or their aeroplanes will throw upon the squares of cities, upon the terraces, upon the gardens a heavier ballast, and shadows colder than the balloons and the aeroplanes of the other citizens. And it is not in the free countries that antisemitism is the least menacing. Gibraltar, an English port, refused to receive five hundred Jews fleeing the horrors of Casablanca; and even if the Russian Duma were to become a constitutional Parliament, it is not it that could refuse antisemitic laws to the peasants fanaticized by the popes and the lazy lesser nobility. Everywhere the Jews have everything to fear from the minute that is coming; everywhere they must keep themselves on a war footing.

Do you remember, he said, ⁵⁵ how in this country, only a few years ago, young, noble, rich men gave without counting their lives for England, how the noblest dwellings seemed like those Egyptian houses above which the angel of darkness had passed, leaving none of them without a dead man? But where is the young, noble, rich Jew who is willing to give his life for his people? During the war against Russia the greatest ladies of Japan passed their days shut up in guard-rooms and dressed in coarse garments like those of convicts, making antiseptic bandages for the wounded. Where is the noble Jewish lady who passes her days making bandages for the wounds of her people? Hunting and racing, balls, dinners, the Opera, are acceptable, after all, in the languishing hours of peace. But when we are on a war footing, when the agony of our people cries in our ears, from the Russian slaughterhouses to the Mellahs of Morocco, and from the Hara of Tunis to the desolate villages of Romania, then I say that if our upper classes do not tear themselves from their pleasures and do not make a supreme effort to bring them succor, the blood of their brothers will cry out toward them from the depths of their tombs… Is there in the world… so much as a thousand Jews who have lived even on a peace footing? The race whose naturalization was considered not long ago as a dishonor for England… wishes to make itself believed, now, the pillar of the throne and of the altar. They are Englishmen, they say, or men of fashion: Jewish affairs are not their affairs. Englishmen, they insult a great race by making use of its name to cover cowards and [shirkers] of opinion…

Is there a country in the world that, in our humiliation, does not show us Jews powerful by their riches, their name and their power: merchants, princes, statesmen, soldiers, judges, financiers. This Jewish power is a derision for us; we benefit only from the envy it gives rise to, not from the succor it could bring. This power has already destroyed us and destroys us still. Let it rise up and save us now! To send us money is not enough; we want the brain, the heart, the soul of our best, of our strongest, and not the remnants of their time and the scatterings of their philanthropy. In the American financial crisis, M. Pierpont Morgan and his friends remained the night before their work-tables to save American credit. When then will our financiers watch the whole night to prevent the destruction of our people?

United, we are invincible. We can build what we will. For centuries we have wept, we have wrung our hands, which ought to have worked. For centuries, we have cried out: For how long, Lord? For how long? The hour has come to hear the answer that heaven, for centuries, sends us in the midst of the thunder and the lightning: For how long still? For how long?

Action has therefore not impoverished the talent of Zangwill.

The broad daylight does not blind him, as it does certain men of letters whom the great cries of the people have one day drawn out of their library, and who, after having knocked their poor broad foreheads against a few rugged walls, return staggering to their dear half-light. He, he is of a size to live the novels he has written. The nights on the railway, the weeks on the steamer, the dust of the meetings, the negotiations, the correspondence do not wear him out. And when he is obliged to speak or to write, his words have the same qualities as those of his personages: sincerity, flame, eloquence, ferocity, and above all sarcasm. Never have the Jews been so maltreated as by this Jew. And yet, nothing resembles less than his work that of the professional antisemites. One has read the anecdotes that run in the Jewries and that are told to one another in the evening, when there are no Christians. The portrait that we make there of ourselves is far from flattering. We show ourselves all our blemishes, because we hope to cure ourselves of them.

Zangwill is a Jewish teller of tales. It is for that reason that, so supple, so diverse, so intellectual, so little English after all, he resembles a French writer so little. He is comic, droll, amusing, farcical, funny. He is not an ironist. The French ironist seems to lift his weary shoulders and to say: nothing is of any use, let us smile.

The Jew says also: nothing is of any use. But, at the bottom of himself, he thinks: Who knows? all is possible! let us try! Zangwill tries to regenerate his people. He no longer wants an Israel that slips into the nations, that makes itself there so small that it is tolerated, that a few places are abandoned to it, and that flattens itself anew under the cries and the insults as soon as its young power has caused fear. He shows it a new road, painful, dangerous, full of risks, but proud, and the only one worthy of a great race. “For, to suffer for two thousand years for an idea is the privilege that has been granted only to Israel, the soldier of God. That is not a tragedy, but an epic… The true tragedy, the sadness of sadnesses, consists in the martyrdom of an Israel unworthy of its own sufferings.” ⁵⁶

A TEXT BY ZANGWILL

The Melting Pot ⁵⁷

Last scene of Act II

DAVID throwing his arms like a child around the neck of his uncle ⁵⁸ I am so happy.

MENDEL Happy?

DAVID She loves me. Vera loves me.

MENDEL Vera?

DAVID Miss Revendal.

MENDEL Have you lost your mind?

DAVID Your surprise does not astonish me. Do you believe by chance that I was not surprised, I? It is as if an angel had bent down.

MENDEL Is it really true? It is not some stupid Purim farce?

DAVID True and sacred as the rising of the sun.

MENDEL But you are a Jew.

DAVID Yes, and a thinker a little? She was born to despise the Jews, her father is a Russian baron.

MENDEL Even if she were the daughter of fifty barons you could not marry her.

DAVID My uncle! Then your passion for the Synagogue was something serious at bottom.

MENDEL It is not so much the Synagogue as the call of our blood across innumerable generations.

DAVID You say that, you, you who came here into the heart of the Crucible where the furnace of God melts our race with all the others.

MENDEL Not so, not our race; not the race, and mine.

DAVID What immunity has our race? Pride and prejudices, dreams and sacrifices, traditions and superstitions, fasts and feasts, noble things and sordid things — all that must go into the Crucible.

MENDEL The Jew has passed a thousand times through the ordeal of fire, he has only been tempered and annealed by it.

DAVID Fires of hatred, not fires of love. It is that which melts everything.

MENDEL That is what I see.

DAVID To mock! You fall wide of the mark. The love that melted me, me, is not that of Vera, but the love that America showed me the day she took me in against her breast.

MENDEL Many nations have taken us in. Holland received us when Spain drove us out; but we did not become Dutchmen. Turkey received us when Germany oppressed us, we did not become Turks.

DAVID Those were not countries in formation, they were old civilizations marked with the seal of a belief. Here, in this young secular Republic, one must look forward.

MENDEL One must also look backward.

DAVID Toward what, toward Kishineff? as if its vision rose up before him. Toward that butcher’s face directing the massacre; toward those?…

MENDEL Hush! calm yourself.

DAVID Yes, I want to calm myself; but how can I calm myself, save by forgetting all this nightmare of religions and of races, by raising up my hands, my prayers and my music toward the Republic of man and the Kingdom of God. The past, I cannot change it; its evil lines are fixed in their immortal rigidity. Take from me the hope that I can change the future and you make me mad.

MENDEL You are mad already. Your dreams are mad. The Jew is detested here as everywhere. You are unfaithful to your race.

DAVID It is to America that I reserve my faith. I have faith that America will keep us its faith.

MENDEL Go away, and marry your Christian woman; and be happy!

DAVID You are sending me away?

MENDEL Would you wish to stay here and break the heart of my mother. You know well that she would go into mourning because of you as if you were her own son. Go, you have rejected the God of our fathers!

DAVID And the God of our children, have we not duties toward Him? You are right, I must have a vaster world… I must go away.

MENDEL Go then. I will hide the truth from her. She must suspect nothing. Without that she would weep for you as if you were dead.

FRAU QUIXANO, from without, in the kitchen Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

KATHLEEN Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

FRAU QUIXANO AND KATHLEEN Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

MENDEL, bitterly A merry Purim! The kitchen door opens. Frau Quixano rushes onto the stage holding David’s violin and bow. Kathleen watches the [scene] through the half-open door.

FRAU QUIXANO, laughing heartily Play again! Play!

MENDEL No, no, David, I could not bear that!

DAVID But I must. You told me that she must suspect nothing. He looks at her with love, giving to her all the muscles of his concentrated heart. It may be that this is the last time I play for her. He changes his tone and pretends to laugh heartily as he takes the violin and the bow from the hands of his grandmother. Certainly, grandmother. ⁵⁹ He plays the old Slavic dance that he played a little while ago.

FRAU QUIXANO, happy as a child Hi! Hi! She claps onto her face a grotesque false nose that she draws from her pocket.

DAVID, laughing and weeping at once Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

MENDEL, shocked Mother. ⁵⁹

FRAU QUIXANO And you too. She applies by force another false nose onto the face of Mendel, and laughs at the effect with a childish joy. Then she begins to dance to the sound of the music. Kathleen rushes onto the stage and dances joyously beside her mistress.

DAVID, his eyes full of tears, laughs with the others Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

The curtain falls swiftly; it rises again upon a tableau in which Frau Quixano, breathless with laughter and sunk into a chair, fans herself with her apron, while Kathleen, panting, has collapsed across the arms of an armchair. David is still playing, and Mendel, who has torn off his false nose, stands beside him, all somber…

WORKS OF ISRAEL ZANGWILL

Novels — Short stories — Essays — Poems

The Premier and the Painter (in collaboration with Louis Cowen), 1888. The Bachelors Club, 1891. The Big Bow Mystery, 1891. The Old Maids Club, 1892. Children of the Ghetto, 1892. Merely Mary Ann, 1893. Ghetto Tragedies, 1893. The King of Schnorrers, 1894. The Master, 1895. Without Prejudice (Essays), 1896. Dreamers of the Ghetto, 1898. They that Walk in Darkness, 1899. The Mantel of Elijah, 1901. The Gray Wig, 1903. Blind Children (Poems), 1903. Ghetto Comedies, 1907.

Theater

Six Persons. — Children of the Ghetto (in English and in Yiddish). — The Revolted Daughter. — The Moment of Death. — Merely Mary Ann. — The Serio-Comic Governess. — Jinny the Carrier. — Nurse Marjorie. The Melting Pot (Drama).

Apart from the theatrical pieces, most of which are not to be found in bookshops, and The Melting Pot, published in New York by Macmillan, the works of Israel Zangwill are published in London by William Heinemann.

Footnotes

1. Dreamers of the Ghetto, p. 453 et seq. ↩

2. Zangwill, Children of the Ghetto, p. 1. ↩

3. Robert Dreyfus: Alexandre Weill, ou le prophète du faubourg Saint-Honoré. Cahiers de la Quinzaine, 8, rue de la Sorbonne. Issue of January 10, 1908. ↩

4. Ch. of the Gh., 54. ↩

5. Ch. of the Gh., 30. ↩

6. Ch. of the Gh., 90. ↩

7. The King of Schnorrers, 391. ↩

8. Without prejudice, 292. ↩

9. Ch. of the Gh., 63. ↩

10. Ibid., 206. ↩

11. That is to say: of the times when, speaking of a dead person, one said Olov Hasholom (peace be upon him); of the good old times. ↩

12. Ch. of the Gh., 205-25. ↩

13. Ghetto Tragedies, 130. ↩

14. Ch. of the Gh., 300. ↩

15. Ch. of the Gh., 77. ↩

16. Dream. of the Gh., 456. ↩

17. Ch. of the Gh., 315 et seq. ↩

18. Erckmann-Chatrian. ↩

19. See the portrait of Reb Shemuel, in Zangwill, Ch. of the Gh., id. 1497 [obscured] and 1907 et seq. ↩

20. Moïse Schwab, Sentences du Talmud et du Midrasch, Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1878. ↩

21. Ch. of the Gh., 150. ↩

22. Sentences et proverbes du Talmud et du Midrasch, op. cit., page 231. ↩

23. Ch. of the Gh., 49. ↩

24. Sentences du Talmud, op. cit. ↩

25. “Your antisemitism was known to me, your antisemitism is quite new to me.” S. Freud, Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewuszten, Leipzig und Wien, Franz Deuticke, 1905, page 22. ↩

26. H. Heine, De l’Allemagne, pages 89-90, Renduel edition, Paris, 1835. ↩

27. Alexandre Weill, Sagesse et fleurs d’esprit des rabbins, page 150. ↩

28. Freud, op. cit., 45. ↩

29. One finds many Jewish stories in the cited work of Freud, and in particular a German version of the little story above. ↩

30. For example The Hope Extinct, in Ch. of the Gh., 189. ↩

31. Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder. ↩

32. Ch. of the Gh., page 141. ↩

33. Talmud of Jerusalem. Translation Moïse Schwab, volume III, page 62. Maisonneuve, publisher, Paris, 1879. ↩

34. The King of Schnorrers, 166. ↩

35. Without prejudice. ↩

36. Ghetto Comedies, 826. ↩

37. Ch. of the Gh., 139. We do not undertake to translate the Judeo-English accent, which further heightens the comic of the personage. ↩

38. Ch. of the Gh., 379. ↩

39. Without prejudice, 7. ↩

40. Dream. of the Gh., 456. ↩

41. Moïd Quaton, cited in Des Ailes à la Terre, publication of the Union libérale Israélite, Paris, rue Copernic, 24. ↩

42. Dream. of the Gh., 308. ↩

43. Bernard Lazare, Les Juifs en Roumanie, and Jérôme et Jean Tharaud, Bar-Cochebas, Cahiers de la Quinzaine, February 1902 and February 1907. ↩

44. Blind Children, page 129. ↩

45. Elijah’s Goblet in Gh. Com. ↩

46. Gh. Com. ↩

47. Le Creuset, a drama played for the first time on October 5, 1908, on the stage of the Columbia Theatre at Washington. ↩

48. Act III, in fine. ↩

49. Page 79. ↩

50. Dream. of the Gh., 60. ↩

51. Dream. of the Gh., 524. ↩

52. This very year there was held at New York a congress where 5,000 Jewish farmers were represented. ↩

53. Composed, among other members, of M. Oscar S. Strauss, ambassador of the United States to Turkey, and of lord Rothschild. ↩

54. See the account of the interview between Ahmed Riza and the Grand Rabbi of Turkey in Il Corriere Israelitico of Trieste, issue of April 30, 1909. ↩

55. Speech of December 7, 1907. ↩

56. Gh. Com., 46. ↩

57. The Melting Pot, drama in four acts, New York, the Macmillan Company, 1909, pages 99 to 108. ↩

58. According to the English custom the original text contains numerous indications of stage attitudes. I have translated only the most indispensable. — A. S. ↩

59. In Yiddish in the text. ↩ ↩²