comedy, and it must have been irresistible, was his. Then after due
pause he gravely proceeded, that insomuch as Sabbathai’s pretensions to
Palestine were an infringement on Turkish vested rights in that
province, the repentant prophet must give an earnest of his recovered
loyalty as a Turkish subject by turning Turk and abjuring Judaism
altogether. And cheerfully enough Sabbathai assented, audaciously adding
that such a change had been long desired by him, and that he eagerly and
respectfully welcomed this opportunity of making his first profession
of faith as a Mahometan in the presence of Mahomet’s namesake and
temporal representative.
And thus the scene, at which one knows not whether to laugh or cry, was
over; and when the curtain rises again it is on the merest and most
exasperating commonplace--on Sabbathai, fat and turbaned, living and
dying as a respectable Turk. For the actors behind the scenes, there was
never any call, neither to hail a Saviour nor to mourn a martyr. For
them, this puzzling bit of passion-play was just a mirage in the
wilderness of their lives; and for many and many a weary year foolish
and faithful folk debated whether it was mirage or reality. For his
dupes survived him, this sorry impostor of the seventeenth century; and
their illusion, hoping all things, believing all things, withered into
delusion and died hard. Such faculty perhaps, for all its drawbacks,
gives staying-power to man or nation. It is where there is no vision
that the people perish.
NOW AND THEN
A COMPOSITE SKETCH
‘The old order changeth, giving place to new,’ and many and bewildering
have been such changes since the daughters of Zelophehad trooped down
before the elders of Israel to plead for women’s rights. The claim of
those five fatherless, husbandless sisters to ‘have a possession among
the brethren of our father’ has been brought, and has been answered
since in a thousand different ways, but the chivalrous spirit in which
it was met then seems, in a subtle sort of way, to symbolise the
attitude of Israel to unprotected womanhood, and to suggest the type of
character which ensured such ready and respectful consideration. It is
curious and interesting in these modern days to take up what Heine
called the ‘family chronicle of the Jews,’ and to find, as in a long
gallery of family portraits, the type repeating itself through every
variety of ‘treatment’ and costume. Clear and distinct they stand out,
the long line of our Jewish maids and matrons, not ‘faultily faultless’
by any means, yet presenting in their vigorous lovableness a delightful
continuity of wholesome womanhood, an unbroken line of fit claimants for
fitting woman’s rights.
Foremost among all heroines of all love tales comes, of course, she
whose long wooing seemed ‘but as a few days’ to her young lover, so
strong and so steadfast was the worship she won. To the young, that
maiden ‘by the well’s mouth’ will stand always for favourite text and
familiar illustration, but to older folks the sad-eyed _mater dolorosa_
of the Old Testament is to the full as interesting and as suggestive an
ideal. One pictures her with sackcloth for sole couch and covering
spread upon the bare rocks, selfless and tireless, through the heat of
early harvest days till chill autumn rains ‘dropped upon them,’ scaring
‘the birds of the air and the beasts of the field’ from her unburied
dead. And then, as corrective to the pathos of Rizpah and the romance of
Rachel, the sweet, homely figure of Ruth is at hand to suggest a whole
volume of virtues of the comfortable, everyday sort; the one character,
perhaps, in all story who ever addressed an impassioned outburst of
affection to her mother-in-law, and then lived up to it. But the
solitariness of the circumstance notwithstanding, and for all the fact
that she was a Moabitess born, Ruth, in the practical nature of her good
qualities, is a typical Jewish heroine. For what strikes one most in the
record of these long ago dead women is that there is so much sense in
their sentiment, so much backbone to their gentleness and
simple-mindedness. They do little things in a great way instead of
attacking great things feebly. Their womanhood in its entire naturalness
belongs to no especial school, fits in to no especial groove of thought.
The same peg serves for a Solomon or a Wordsworth, for an aphorism or a
sonnet. The woman whose ‘price was above rubies,’ and she who was
‘Not too great or good
For human nature’s daily food,’
might either have stood for the other’s likeness; and if the test of
poetry be, as Goethe says, the substance which remains when the poetry
is reduced to prose, the test of an ideal woman may be perhaps how she
would translate into reality. The ‘family chronicle’ stands the test,
and a dozen instances of it at once occur to memory. Michal, with her
husband in danger, does not wait to weep nor to exclaim, but, strong of
heart as of hand, helps him to escape, and, ready of resource, by her
quick, deft arrangement of the bedchamber, gains time to baffle his
pursuers. Hannah, for all her holy enthusiasm, is mindful of the bodily
needs of her embryo prophet, and as she comes with her husband to offer
the ‘yearly sacrifice’ at Shiloh, brings with her the ‘little coat’
which she has made for the boy, and which, we may be quite sure, she has
remembered to make a little bigger each time. Nor less, in her
far-sighted scheming for her favourite son, is Rebekah heedless of
‘human nature’s daily food.’ For all her concentration of thought on
great issues she remembers to make ready ‘the savoury meat such as his
father loved’ before she sends Jacob to the critical interview. It is
altogether with something of a shock that we ponder on that curious
development. The scheming, unscrupulous wife seems quite other than the
simple country maiden with her quick assent to the grave young husband
whom she was able to ‘comfort after his mother’s death.’ Was that
pretty, frank ‘I will go’ of hers only unconventional, one wonders, or
perhaps just a trifle unfeeling, foreshadowing in the young girl, so
ready to leave her home, a rather rootless state of affections, an
Undine-like indifference to old ties? That touch of the carefully
prepared dinner at any rate makes us smile as we sigh, putting us _fin
de siècle_ folks, as it does, in touch with tent life, and keeping the
traditions of home influence unaltered through the ages.
In Lord Burleigh’s _Precepts to his Son for the Well-Ordering of a Mans
Life_, occurs the direction, ‘Thou wilt find to thy great grief there is
nothing more fulsome than a she-fool.’ It is an axiom almost as pregnant
of meaning as its author’s famous nod, and seems to suggest as possible
that the proverbial harmony of the Jewish domestic circle may be in a
measure due to its comparative immunity from she-fools. The women of
Israel, _pur sang_, it is certain, are rarely noisy or assertive, and
have at all times been more ready to realise their responsibilities than
their ‘rights.’ In their woman’s kingdom, comprehending its limits and
not wasting its opportunities, they have been content to reign and not
to govern, and neither exceptional power nor exceptional intellect have
affected this position. The pretty young Queen of Persia, we read, for
all her new dignities, ‘did the commandment of Mordecai as when she was
brought up with him,’ and Miriam with her timbrel and Deborah under her
palm-tree might have been unconscious illustrative anachronisms of a
very profound saying, so well content were they to ‘make their country’s
songs’ and to leave it to Moses to ‘make the laws.’ The one-man rule has
been always fully and freely acknowledged in Israel, and in the ideal
sketch as in the real portraits of its womankind, her ‘husband,’ her
‘children,’ her ‘clothing,’ and the ‘ways of her household’ are supreme
features. ‘To do a man,’ one man, ‘good and not evil all the days of his
life,’ may seem to modern maidens a somewhat limited ambition, but it is
just to remember that to this typical woman comes full permission to
indulge in her ‘own works’ and encouragement ‘to speak with merchants
from afar,’ a habit this, one ventures to think, which would open up
even to Girton and Newnham graduates extended powers of conversation and
correspondence in their own and foreign languages. And, withal, that
pretty saying of an elderly and prosaic Rabbi, ‘I do not call my wife,
wife, but home,’ has poetry and practicality too, to recommend it. For
in so far as there is truth in the dictum, that ‘men will be always what
women please, that if we want men to be great and good, we must teach
women what greatness and goodness are,’ there really seems a good deal
to be said for the old-fashioned type we have been considering, and
certainly some comfort to be found in the fact that against the _ewig
weibliche_ time itself is powerless. Realities may shift and vary, but
ideals for the most part stand fast, and thus, despite all superficial
differences, in essentials the situation is unchanged between those
daughters of the desert and our daughters of to-day. Now, as then, the
claim is allowed to a rightful ‘possession among their brethren.’
Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty at the Edinburgh
University Press
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Talmud, Yoma 356.
[2] The extracts marked thus (1) were done into verse from the German
of Geiger, by the late Amy Levy.
[3] From Atonement Service.
[4] Hebrew for Toledo.
[5] Alcharisi.
[6] E. B. Browning.
[7] No authority gives it later than 1140.
[8] Rabbi Seira.
[9] ‘The Lord God doth like a printer who setteth the letters
backward; we see and feel well His setting, but the print we shall see
yonder in the life to come.’--Luther’s _Table Talk_.
[10] Gütle Rothschild, née Schnapper, died May 7, 1849. Her eldest
son, Amschel Meyer Rothschild, was born June 12, 1773, died December
6, 1855.
[11] Written in 1882.
[12] The translation is by the late Amy Levy.
[13] Messrs. Campe and Hoffmann erected their new offices during the
publication (not too well paid) of the poet’s works.
[14] Matthew Arnold, _Heinrich Heine_.
[15] The Exhibition of 1855.
[16] Written in 1882.
[17] Short declaration of belief in Unity (Deut. vi. 4).
[18] ‘Old Pictures from Florence.’
[19] _On Heroes_: Lect. vi., ‘The Hero as King,’ p. 342.
[20] _Cromwell_, vol. ii. p. 359.
[21] Some chroniclers fix it so early as 1653.
[22] From ‘Declaration to the Commonwealth of England.’
[23] Jeremiah xxix. 7.
[24] In 1369.
[25] Maimonides, in his well-known digest of Talmudic laws relating to
the poor, uniformly employs _tzedakah_ in the sense of ‘alms.’
[26] חטא יךאי (_yeree chet_). These ultra-sensitive folks seem to
have feared that in direct relief they might be imposed on and so
indirectly become encouragers of wrong-doing, or unnecessarily hurt
the feelings of the poor by too rigid inquiries.
[27] We read, in mediæval times, of the existence of wide ‘extensions’
of this system of relief. In a curious old book, published in the
seventeenth century, by a certain Rabbi Elijah ha Cohen ben Abraham,
of Smyrna, we find a list drawn up of Jewish charities to which, as
he says, ‘all pious Jews contribute.’ These modes of satisfying ‘the
hungry soul’ are over seventy in number, and of the most various
kinds. They include the lending of money and the lending of books,
the payment of dowries and the payment of burial charges, doctors’
fees for the sick, legal fees for the unjustly accused, ransom for
captives, ornaments for bribes, and wet nurses for orphans.
[28] Spanish Jews often had their coffins made from the wood of the
tables at which they had sat with their unfashionable guests.
[29] This custom had survived into quite modern times--to cite only
the well-known case of Mendelssohn, who, coming as a penniless
student to Berlin, received his Sabbath meals in the house of one
co-religionist, and the privilege of an attic chamber under the roof
of another.
[30] William Blake.
[31] Shimei.
[32] In the correspondence with Lavater.
[33] Better known to scholars as Dr. Aaron Solomon Gompertz.
[34] Later, the noted publisher of that name.
[35] Fromet was the affectionate diminutive of _Fromm_--pious. Pet
names of this sort were common at that time; we often come across a
Gütle or Schönste or the like.
[36] _Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judenthum._
[37] _Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Daseyn Gottes._
[38] _Phædon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele._
[39] The whole correspondence can be read in _Memoirs of Moses
Mendelssohn_, by M. Samuels, published in 1827.