when, to ‘the Hagars and Ishmaels of mankind,’ rules for gleaning and
for ‘fallen grapes’ would, perforce, be meaningless, and new means for
the carrying out of _tzedakah_ had to be devised. In Alms of the Chest,
קופה (_kupah_), and Alms of the Basket, תמחוי (_tamchui_), another
exhaustive system of relief was formulated. The _kupah_ would seem to
have been a poor-rate, levied on all ‘residents in towns of over thirty
days’ standing,’ and ‘Never,’ says Maimonides, ‘have we seen or heard of
any congregation of Israelites in which there has not been the Chest for
Alms, though, with regard to the Basket, it is the custom in some places
to have it, and not in others.’ These chests were placed in the Silent
Court of the Sanctuary, to the end that a class of givers who went by
the name of Fearers of Sin,[26] might deposit their alms in silence and
be relieved of responsibility. The contents of the Chest were collected
weekly and used for all ordinary objects of relief, the overplus being
devoted to special cases and special purposes. It is somewhat strange to
our modern notions to find that one among such purposes was that of
providing poor folks with the wherewith to marry. For not only is it
commanded concerning the ‘brother waxen poor,’ ‘_If he standeth in need
of garments, let him be clothed; or if of household things, let him be
supplied with them,’ but ‘if of a wife, let a wife be betrothed unto
him, and in case of a woman, let a husband be betrothed unto her._’ Does
this quaint provision recall Voltaire’s taunt that ‘Les juifs ont
toujours regardé comme leurs deux grands devoirs des enfants et de
l’argent’? Perhaps, and yet, Voltaire and even Malthus notwithstanding,
it is just possible that the last word has not been said on this
subject, and that in ‘improvident’ marriages and large families the new
creed of survival of the fittest may, after all, be best fulfilled.
Philosophers, we know, are not always consistent with themselves, and
if there be truth in another saying of Voltaire’s--‘Voyez les registres
affreux de vos greffes crimines, vous y trouvez cent garçons de pendus
ou de roués contre un père de famille’--then is there something
certainly to be said in favour of the Jewish system. But this by the
way, since statistics, it must be owned, are the most sensitive and
susceptible of the sciences. This ancient betrothing, moreover, was no
empty form, no bare affiancing of two paupers; but a serious and
substantial practice of raising a marriage portion for a couple unable
to marry without it. By Talmudic code, ‘marriages were not legitimately
complete till a settlement of some sort was made on the wife,’ who, it
may be here parenthetically remarked, was so far in advance of
comparatively modern legislation as to be entitled to have and to hold
in as complete and comprehensive a sense as her husband.
But whilst Alms of the Chest, though pretty various in its
application,[27] was intended only for the poor of the place in which
it was collected, Alms of the Basket was, to the extent of its
capabilities, for ‘the poor of the whole world.’ It consisted of a daily
house-to-house collection of food of all sorts, and occasionally of
money, which was again, day by day, distributed. This custom of
_tamchui_, suited to those primitive times, would seem to be very
similar to the practice of ‘common Boxes, and common gatherynges in
every City,’ which prevailed in England in the sixteenth century, and
which received legal sanction in Act of the 23rd of Henry VIII.--‘Item,
that 2 or 3 tymes in every weke 2 or 3 of every parysh shal appoynt
certaine of ye said pore people to collecte and gather broken meates and
fragments, and the refuse drynke of every householder, which shal be
distributed evenly amonge the pore people as they by theyre discrecyons
shal thynke good.’ Only the collectors and distributors of _kupah_ and
_tamchui_ were not ‘certaine of ye said pore people,’ but unpaid men of
high character, holding something of the position of magistrates in the
community. The duty of contributing in kind to _tamchui_ was
supplemented among the richer folks by a habit of entertaining the poor
as guests;[28] seats at their own tables, and beds in their houses being
frequently reserved for wayfarers, at least over Sabbath and
festivals.[29]
The curious union of sense and sentiment in the Talmudic code is shown
again in the regulations as to who may, and who may not, receive of
these gifts of the poor: ‘_He who has sufficient for two meals_,’ so
runs the law, ‘_may not take from tamchui; he who has sufficient for
fourteen may not take from kupah_.’ Yet might holders of property,
fallen on slack seasons, be saved from selling at a loss and helped to
hold on till better times, by being ‘meanwhile supported out of the
tithes of the poor.’ And if the house and goods of him in this temporary
need were grand, money help might be given to the applicant, and he
might keep all his smart personal belongings, yet superfluities, an odd
item or two of which are vouchsafed, must be sold, and replaced, if at
all, by a simpler sort. Still, with all this excessive care for those
who have come down in the world, and despite the dictum that ‘he who
withholdeth alms is “impious” and like unto an idolater,’ there is yet
no encouragement to dependence discernible in these precise and prolix
rules. ‘Let thy Sabbath be as an ordinary day, rather than become
dependent on thy fellow-men,’ it is clearly written, and told, too, in
detail, how ‘wise men,’ the most honoured, by the way, in the community,
to avoid ‘dependence on others,’ might become, without loss of caste or
respectability, ‘carriers of timber, workers in metal, and makers of
charcoal.’ Neither is there any contempt for wealth or any love of
poverty for its own sake to be seen in this people, who were taught to
‘rejoice before the Lord.’ In one place it is, in truth, gravely set
forth that ‘he who increaseth the number of his servants’ increaseth the
amount of sin in the world, but this somewhat ascetic-sounding statement
is clearly susceptible of a good deal of common-sense interpretation,
and when another Master tells us that ‘charity is the salt which keeps
wealth from corruption,’ a thought, perhaps, for the due preservation of
the wealth may be read between the lines.
On the whole, it looks as if these old-world Rabbis set to work at
laying down the law in much the spirit of Robert Browning’s Rabbi--
‘Let us not always say,
Spite of this flesh to-day,
I strove, made head, gained ground upon the whole.
As the bird wings and sings
Let us cry, ‘All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.’
After this manner, at any rate, are set forth, and in this sense are
interpreted in the Talmud, the Biblical injunctions to _tzedakah_, to
that charity of alms-deeds which, as society is constituted, must, as we
said, be considered somewhat of a class distinction.
But for the charity which should be obligatory all round, and as easy of
fulfilment by the poor as by the rich, the Talmud chooses the other
synonym חסד (_chesed_), and coining from it the word _Gemiluth-chesed_,
which may be rendered ‘the doing of kindness,’ it works out a
supplementary and social system of charity--a system founded not on
‘rights,’ but on sympathy--dealing not in doles, but in deeds of
friendship and of fellowship, and demanding a giving of oneself rather
than of one’s stores. And greater than _tzedakah_, write the Rabbis, is
_Gemiluth-chesed_, justifying their dictum, as is their wont, by a
reference to Holy Writ. ‘Sow to yourselves in righteousness
(_tzedakah_),’ says the prophet Hosea (Hos. x. 12); ‘reap in mercy
(_chesed_)’; and, inasmuch as reaping is better than sowing, mercy must
be better than righteousness. To ‘visit the sick,’ to promote peace in
families apt to fall out, to ‘relieve all persons, Jews or non-Jews, in
affliction’ (a comprehensive phrase), to ‘bury the dead,’ to ‘accompany
the bride,’ are among those ‘kindnesses’ which take rank as religious
duties, and one or two specimens may indicate the amount of careful
detail which make these injunctions practical, and the fine motive which
goes far towards spiritualising them.
Of the visiting of the sick, the Talmud speaks with a sort of awe. God’s
spirit, it says, dwells in the chamber of suffering and death, and
tendance therein is worship. Nursing was to be voluntary, and no charge
to be made for drugs; and so deeply did the habit of helping the
helpless in this true missionary spirit obtain among the Jews, that to
this day, and more especially in provincial places, the last offices for
the dead are rarely performed by hired hands. The ‘accompanying of the
bride’ is _Gemiluth-chesed_ in another form. To rejoice with one’s
neighbour’s joys is no less a duty in this un-Rochefoucauld-like code
than to grieve with his grief. A bride is to be greeted with songs and
flowers, and pleasant speeches, and, if poor, to be provided with pretty
ornaments and substantial gifts, but the pleasant speeches are in all
cases, and before all things, obligatory. In the discursive detail,
which is so strong a feature of these Talmudic rulings, it is asked:
‘But if the bride be old, or awkward, or positively plain, is she to be
greeted in the usual formula as “fair bride--graceful bride”?’ ‘Yes,’ is
the answer, for one is not bound to insist on uncomfortable facts, nor
to be obtrusively truthful; to be agreeable is one of the minor virtues.
Were there anything in the doctrine of metempsychosis, one would be
almost tempted to believe that this ancient unnamed Rabbi was speaking
over again in the person of one of our modern minor poets:
‘A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.’[30]
The charity of courtesy is everywhere insisted upon, and so strongly,
that, on behalf of those sometimes ragged and unkempt Rabbis it might
perhaps be urged that politeness, the _politesse du cœur_, was their
Judaism _en papillote_. ‘Receive every one with pleasant looks,’ says
one sage,[31] whose practice was, perhaps, not always quite up to his
precepts; ‘where there is no reverence there is no wisdom,’ says
another; and as the distinguishing mark of a ‘clown,’ a third instances
that man--have we not all met him?--who rudely breaks in on another’s
speech, and is more glib than accurate or respectful in his own.
And as postscript to the ‘law’ obtaining on these cheery social forms of
‘charity’ a tombstone may perhaps be permitted to add its curious
crumbling bit of evidence. In the House of Life, as Jews name their
burial-grounds, at Prague, there stood--perhaps stands still--a stone,
erected to the memory, and recording the virtues, of a certain rich lady
who died in 1628. Her benefactions, many and minute, are set forth at
length, and amongst the rest, and before ‘she clothed the naked,’ comes
the item, ‘she ran like a bird to weddings.’ Through the mists of those
terrible stories, which make of Prague so miserable a memory to Jews,
the record of this long-ago dead woman gleams like a rainbow. One seems
to see the bright little figure, a trifle out of breath may be, the gay
plumage perhaps just a shade ruffled--somehow one does not fancy her a
very prim or tidy personage--running ‘like a bird to weddings.’ She
seems, the dear sympathetic soul, in an odd, suggestive sort of way, to
illustrate the charitable system of her race, and to show us that,
despite all differences of time and place and circumstances, the one
essential condition to any ‘charity’ that shall prove effectual remains
unchanged; that the solution of the hard problem, which may be worked
out in a hundred ways, is just sympathy, and is to be learnt, not in the
‘speaking from afar’ of rich to poor, but in the ‘laying of hands’ upon
them. The close fellowship of this ancient primitive system is perhaps
impossible in our more complex civilisation, but an approximation to it
is an ideal worth striving after. More intimate, more everyday communion
between West and East, more ‘Valentines’ at Hoxton are sorely needed.
Concert-giving, class-teaching, ‘visiting,’ are all helps of a sort, but
there are so many days in a poor man’s week, so many hours in his dull
day. Sweetness and light, like other and more prosaic products of
civilisation, need, it may be, to be ‘laid on’ in those miles of
monotonous streets, long breaks in continuity being fatal to results.
MOSES MENDELSSOHN
‘I wish, it is true, to shame the opprobrious sentiments commonly
entertained of a Jew, but it is by character and not by controversy that
I would do it.’[32] So wrote the subject of this memoir more than a
hundred years ago, and the sentence may well stand for the motto of his
life; for much as Moses Mendelssohn achieved by his ability, much more
did he by his conduct, and great as he was as a philosopher, far greater
was he as a man. Starting with every possible disadvantage--prejudice,
poverty, and deformity--he yet reached the goal of ‘honour, fame, and
troops of friends’ by simple force of character; and thus he remains for
all time an illustration of the happy optimistic theory that, even in
this world, success, in the best sense of the word, does come to those
who, also in the best sense of the word, deserve it.
The state of the Jews in Germany at the time of Mendelssohn’s birth was
deplorable. No longer actively hunted, they had arrived, at the early
part of the eighteenth century, at the comparatively desirable position
of being passively shunned or contemptuously ignored, and, under these
new conditions, they were narrowing fast to the narrow limits set them.
The love of religion and of race was as strong as ever, but the love had
grown sullen, and of that jealous, exclusive sort to which curse and
anathema are akin. What then loomed largest on their narrow horizon was
fear; and under that paralysing influence, progress or prominence of any
kind became a distinct evil, to be repressed at almost any personal
sacrifice. Safety for themselves and tolerance for their faith, lay, if
anywhere, in the neglect of the outside world. And so the poor pariahs
huddled in their close quarters, carrying on mean trades, or hawking
petty wares, and speaking, with bated breath, a dialect of their own,
half Jewish, half German, and as wholly degenerate from the grand old
Hebrew as were they themselves from those to whom it had been a living
tongue. Intellectual occupation was found in the study of the Law;
interest and entertainment in the endless discussion of its more
intricate passages; and excitement in the not infrequent excommunication
of the weaker or bolder brethren who ventured to differ from the
orthodox expounders. The culture of the Christian they hated, with a
hate born half of fear for its possible effects, half of repulsion at
its palpable evidences. The tree of knowledge seemed to them indeed, in
pathetic perversion of the early legend, a veritable tree of evil, which
should lose a second Eden to the wilful eaters thereof. Their Eden was
degenerate too; but the ‘voice heard in the evening’ still sounded in
their dulled and passionate ears, and, vibrating in the Ghetto instead
of the grove, it seemed to bid them shun the forbidden fruit of Gentile
growth.
In September 1729, under a very humble roof, in a very poor little
street in Dessau, was born the weakly boy who was destined to work such
wonderful changes in that weary state of things. Not much fit to hold
the magician’s wand seemed those frail baby hands, and less and less
likely altogether for the part, as the poor little body grew stunted and
deformed through the stress of over-much study and of something less
than enough of wholesome diet. There was no lack of affection in the
mean little Jewish home, but the parents could only give their children
of what they had, and of these scant possessions, mother-love and
Talmudical lore were the staple. And so we read of the small
five-year-old Moses being wrapped up by his mother in a large old shabby
cloak, on early, bleak winter mornings, and then so carried by the
father to the neighbouring ‘Talmud Torah’ school, where he was
nourished with dry Hebrew roots by way of breakfast. Often, indeed, was
the child fed on an even less satisfying diet, for long passages from
Scripture, long lists of precepts, to be learnt by heart, on all sorts
of subjects, was the approved method of instruction in these seminaries.
An extensive, if somewhat parrot-like, acquaintance at an astonishingly
early age with the Law and the Prophets, and the commentators on both,
was the ordinary result of this form of education; and, naturally
co-existent with it, was an equally astonishing and extensive ignorance
of all more everyday subjects. Contentedly enough, however, the learned,
illiterate peddling and hawking fathers left their little lads to this
puzzling, sharpening, deadening sort of schooling. Frau Mendel and her
husband may possibly have thought out the matter a little more fully,
for she seems to have been a wise and prudent as well as a loving
mother; and the father, we find, was quick to discern unusual talent in
the sickly little son whom he carried so carefully to the daily lesson.
He was himself a teacher, in a humble sort of way, and eked out his
small fees by transcribing on parchment from the Pentateuch. Thus, the
tone of the little household, if not refined, was at least not
altogether sordid; and when, presently, the little Moses was promoted
from the ordinary school to the higher class taught by the great
scholar, Rabbi Frankel, the question even presented itself whether it
might not be well, in this especial case, to abandon the patent,
practical advantages pertaining to the favoured pursuit of peddling, and
to let the boy give himself up to his beloved books, and, following in
his master’s footsteps, become perhaps, in his turn, a poorly paid, much
reverenced Rabbi.
It was a serious matter to decide. There was much to be said in favour
of the higher path; but the market for Rabbis, as for hawkers, was
somewhat overstocked, and the returns in the one instance were far
quicker and surer, and needed no long unearning apprenticeship. The
balance, on the whole, seemed scarcely to incline to the more dignified
profession; but the boy was so terribly in earnest in his desire to
learn, so desperately averse from the only other career, that his
wishes, by degrees, turned the scale; and it did not take very long to
convince the poor patient father that he must toil a little longer and a
little later, in order that his son might be free from the hated
necessity of hawking, and at liberty to pursue his unremunerative
studies.
From the very first, Moses made the most of his opportunities; and at
home and at school high hopes began soon to be formed of the diligent,
sweet-tempered, frail little lad. Frailer than ever, though, he seemed
to grow, and the body appeared literally to dwindle as the mind
expanded. Long years after, when the burden of increasing deformity had
come, by dint of use and wont and cheerful courage, to be to him a
burden lightly borne, he would set strangers at their ease by alluding
to it himself, and by playfully declaring his hump to be a legacy from
Maimonides. ‘Maimonides spoilt my figure,’ he would say, ‘and ruined my
digestion; but still,’ he would add more seriously, ‘I dote on him, for
although those long vigils with him weakened my body, they, at the same
time, strengthened my soul: they stunted my stature, but they developed
my mind.’ Early at morning and late at night would the boy be found
bending in happy abstraction over his shabby treasure, charmed into
unconsciousness of aches or hunger. The book, which had been lent to
him, was Maimonides’ _Guide to the Perplexed_; and this work, which
grown men find sufficiently deep study, was patiently puzzled out, and
enthusiastically read and re-read by the persevering little student who
was barely in his teens. It opened up whole vistas of new glories, which
his long steady climb up Talmudic stairs had prepared him to
appreciate. Here and there, in the course of those long, tedious
dissertations in the Talmud Torah class-room, the boy had caught
glimpses of something underlying, something beyond the quibbles of the
schools; but this, his first insight into the large and liberal mind of
Maimonides, was a revelation to him of the powers and of the
possibilities of Judaism. It revealed to him too, perchance, some latent
possibilities in himself, and suggested other problems of life which
asked solution. The pale cheeks glowed as he read, and the vague dreams
kindled into conscious aims: he too would live to become a Guide to the
Perplexed among his people!
Poor little lad! his brave resolves were soon to be put to a severe
test. In the early part of 1742, Rabbi Frankel accepted the Chief
Rabbinate of Berlin, and thus a summary stop was put to his pupil’s
further study. There is a pathetic story told of Moses Mendelssohn
standing, with streaming eyes, on a little hillock on the road by which
his beloved master passed out of Dessau, and of the kind-hearted Frankel
catching up the forlorn little figure, and soothing it with hopes of a
‘some day,’ when fortune should be kind, and he should follow ‘nach
Berlin.’ The ‘some day’ looked sadly problematical; that hard question
of bread and butter came to the fore whenever it was discussed. How was
the boy to live in Berlin? Even if the mind should be nourished for
naught, who was to feed the body? The hard-working father and mother had
found it no easy task hitherto to provide for that extra mouth; and now,
with Frankel gone, the occasion for their long self-denial seemed to
them to cease. In the sad straits of the family, the business of a
hawker began again to show in an attractive light to the poor parents,
and the pedlar’s pack was once more suggested with many a prudent,
loving, half-hearted argument on its behalf. But the boy was by this
time clear as to his vocation, so after a brief while of entreaty, the
tearful permission was gained, the parting blessing given, and with a
very slender wallet slung on his crooked shoulders, Moses Mendelssohn
set out for Berlin.
It was a long tramp of over thirty miles, and, towards the close of the
fifth day, it was a very footsore, tired little lad who presented
himself for admission at the Jews’ gate of the city. Rabbi Frankel was
touched, and puzzled too, when this penniless little student, whom he
had inspired with such difficult devotion, at last stood before him; but
quickly he made up his mind that, so far as in him lay, the uphill path
should be made smooth to those determined little feet. The pressing
question of bed and board was solved. Frankel gave him his Sabbath and
festival dinners, and another kind-hearted Jew, Bamberger by name, who
heard the boy’s story, supplied two everyday meals, and let him sleep in
an attic in his house. For the remaining four days? Well, he managed; a
groschen or two was often earned by little jobs of copying, and a loaf
so purchased, by dint of economy and imagination, was made into quite a
series of satisfying meals, and, in after-days, it was told how he
notched his loaves into accurate time measurements, lest appetite should
outrun purse. Fortunately poverty was no new experience for him; still,
poverty confronted alone, in a great city, must have seemed something
grimmer to the home-bred lad than that mother-interpreted poverty, which
he had hitherto known. But he met it full-face, bravely,
uncomplainingly, and, best of all, with unfailing good humour. And the
little alleviations which friends made in his hard lot were all received
in a spirit of the sincerest, charmingest gratitude. He never took a
kindness as ‘his due’; never thought, like so many embryo geniuses, that
his talents gave him right of toll on his richer brethren. ‘Because I
would drink at the well,’ he would say in his picturesque fashion, ‘am I
to expect every one to haste and fill my cup from their pitchers? No, I
must draw the water for myself, or I must go thirsty. I have no claim
save my desire to learn, and what is that to others?’ Thus he preserved
his self-respect and his independence.