Although my present inquiry relates to London life in London streets,
it is necessary that I should briefly treat of the Jews generally, as
an integral, but distinct and peculiar part of street-life.
That this ancient people were engaged in what may be called
street-traffic in the earlier ages of our history, as well as in the
importation of spices, furs, fine leather, armour, drugs, and general
merchandise, there can be no doubt; nevertheless concerning this part
of the subject there are but the most meagre accounts.
Jews were settled in England as early as 730, and during the sway
of the Saxon kings. They increased in number after the era of the
Conquest; but it was not until the rapacity to which they were exposed
in the reign of Stephen had in a great measure exhausted itself, and
until the measures of Henry II. had given encouragement to commerce,
and some degree of security to property in cities or congregated
communities, that the Jews in England became numerous and wealthy.
They then became active and enterprising attendants at fairs, where
the greater portion of the internal trade of the kingdom was carried
on, and especially the traffic in the more valuable commodities, such
as plate, jewels, armour, cloths, wines, spices, horses, cattle, &c.
The agents of the great prelates and barons, and even of the ruling
princes, purchased what they required at these fairs. St. Giles’s fair,
held at St. Giles’s hill, not far from Winchester, continued sixteen
days. The fair was, as it were, a temporary city. There were streets of
tents in every direction, in which the traders offered and displayed
their wares. During the continuance of the fair, business was strictly
prohibited in Winchester, Southampton, and in every place within seven
miles of St. Giles’s hill. Among the tent-owners at such fairs were the
Jews.
At this period the Jews may be considered as one of the bodies of
“merchant-strangers,” as they were called, settled in England for
purposes of commerce. Among the other bodies of these “strangers” were
the German “merchants of the steel-yard,” the Lombards, the Caursini
of Rome, the “merchants of the staple,” and others. These were all
corporations, and thriving corporations (when unmolested), and the Jews
had also their Jewerie, or Judaisme, not for a “corporation” merely,
but also for the requirements of their faith and worship, and for their
living together. The London Jewerie was established in a place of which
no vestige of its establishment now remains beyond the name--the Old
Jewry. Here was erected the first synagogue of the Jews in England,
which was defaced or demolished, Maitland states, by the citizens,
after they had slain 700 Jews (other accounts represent that number as
greatly exaggerated). This took place in 1263, during one of the many
disturbances in the uneasy reign of Henry III.
All this time the Jews amassed wealth by trade and usury, in spite
of their being plundered and maltreated by the princes and other
potentates--every one has heard of King John’s having a Jew’s teeth
drawn--and in spite of their being reviled by the priests and hated by
the people. The sovereigns generally encouraged “merchant-strangers.”
When the city of London, in 1289, petitioned Edward I. for “the
expulsion of all merchant-strangers,” that monarch answered, with all
a monarch’s peculiar regard for “great” men and “great” men only,
“No! the merchant-strangers are useful and beneficial to the great
men of the kingdom, and I will not expel them.” But though the King
encouraged, the people detested, _all_ foreign traders, though not
with the same intensity as they detested and contemned the Jews, for
in _that_ detestation a strong religious feeling was an element. Of
this dislike to the merchant-strangers, very many instances might be
cited, but I need give only one. In 1379, nearly a century after the
banishment of the Jews, a Genoese merchant, a man of great wealth,
petitioned Richard II. for permission to deposit goods for safe keeping
in Southampton Castle, promising to introduce so large a share of
the commerce of the East into England, that pepper should be 4_d._
a pound. “Yet the Londoners,” writes Walsingham, but in the quaint
monkish Latin of the day, “enemies to the prosperity of their country,
hired assassins, who murdered the merchant in the street. After this,
what stranger will trust his person among a people so faithless and so
cruel? who will not dread our treachery, and abhor our name?”
In 1290, by a decree of Edward I., the Jews were banished out of
England. The causes assigned for this summary act, were “their
extortions, their debasing and diminishing the coin, and for other
crimes.” I need not enter into the merits or demerits of the Jews of
that age, but it is certain that any ridiculous charge, any which it
was impossible could be true, was an excuse for the plundering of
them at the hands of the rich, and the persecution of them at the
hands of the people. At the period of this banishment, their number
is represented by the contemporaneous historians to have been about
16,000, a number most probably exaggerated, as perhaps all statements
of the numbers of a people are when no statistical knowledge has been
acquired. During this period of their abode in England, the Jews
were protected as the villeins or bondsmen of the king, a protection
disregarded by the commonalty, and only giving to the executive
government greater facilities of extortion and oppression.
In 1655 an Amsterdam Jew, Rabbi Manasseh Ben-Israel, whose name is
still highly esteemed among his countrymen, addressed Cromwell on
the behalf of the Jews that they should be re-admitted into England
with the sanction, and under the protection, of the law. Despite the
absence of such sanction, they had resided and of course traded in
this country, but in small numbers, and trading often in indirect
and sometimes in contraband ways. Chaucer, writing in the days of
Richard II., three reigns after their expulsion, speaks of Jews as
living in England. It is reputed that, in the reigns of Elizabeth
and the first James, they supplied, at great profit, the materials
required by the alchymists for their experiments in the transmutation
of metals. In Elizabeth’s reign, too, Jewish physicians were highly
esteemed in England. The Queen at one time confided the care of her
health to Rodrigo Lopez, a Hebrew, who, however, was convicted of an
attempt to poison his royal mistress. Francis I., of France, carried
his opinion of Jewish medical skill to a great height; he refused on
one occasion, during an illness, to be attended by the most eminent of
the Israelitish physicians, because the learned man had just before
been converted to Christianity. The most Christian king, therefore,
applied to his ally, the Turkish sultan, Solyman II., who sent him “a
true hardened Jew,” by whose directions Francis drank asses’ milk and
recovered.
Cromwell’s response to the application of Manasseh Ben Israel was
favourable; but the opposition of the Puritans, and more especially
of Prynne, prevented any public declaration on the subject. In 1656,
however, the Jews began to arrive and establish themselves in England,
but not until after the restoration of Charles II., in 1660, could it
be said that, as a body, they were settled in England. They arrived
from time to time, and without any formal sanction being either granted
or refused. One reason alleged at the time was, that the Jews were well
known to be money-lenders, and Charles and his courtiers were as well
known money-borrowers!
I now come to the character and establishment of the Jews in the
capacity in which I have more especially to describe them--as
street-traders. There appears no reason to doubt that they commenced
their principal street traffic, the collecting of old clothes, soon
after their settlement in London. At any rate the cry and calling of
the Jew old clothesman were so established, 30 or 40 years after their
return, or early in the last century, that one of them is delineated
in Tempest’s “Cries of London,” published about that period. In this
work the street Jew is represented as very different in his appearance
to that which he presents in our day. Instead of merely a dingy bag,
hung empty over his arm, or carried, when partially or wholly filled,
on his shoulder, he is depicted as wearing, or rather carrying, three
cocked hats, one over the other, upon his head; a muff, with a scarf
or large handkerchief over it, is attached to his right hand and arm,
and two dress swords occupy his left hand. The apparel which he himself
wears is of the full-skirted style of the day, and his long hair, or
periwig, descends to his shoulders. This difference in appearance,
however, between the street Jew of 1700 and of a century and a half
later, is simply the effect of circumstances, and indicates no change
in the character of the man. Were it now the fashion for gentlemen to
wear muffs, swords, and cocked hats, the Jew would again have them in
his possession.
During the eighteenth century the popular feeling ran very high against
the Jews, although to the masses they were almost strangers, except
as men employed in the not-very-formidable occupation of collecting
and vending second-hand clothes. The old feeling against them seems to
have lingered among the English people, and their own greed in many
instances engendered other and lawful causes of dislike, by their
resorting to unlawful and debasing pursuits. They were considered--and
with that exaggeration of belief dear to any ignorant community--as an
entire people of misers, usurers, extortioners, receivers of stolen
goods, cheats, brothel-keepers, sheriff’s-officers, clippers and
sweaters of the coin of the realm, gaming-house keepers; in fine, the
charges, or rather the accusations, of carrying on every disreputable
trade, and none else, were “bundled at their doors.” That there was
too much foundation for many of these accusations, and still _is_, no
reasonable Jew can now deny; that the wholesale prejudice against them
was absurd, is equally indisputable.
So strong was this popular feeling against the Israelites, that it
not only influenced, and not only controlled the legislature, but it
coerced the Houses of Parliament to repeal, in 1754, an act which they
had passed the previous session, and that act was merely to enable
foreign Jews to be naturalized without being required to take the
sacrament! It was at that time, and while the popular ferment was at
its height, unsafe for a Hebrew old clothesman, however harmless a man,
and however long and well known on his beat, to ply his street-calling
openly; for he was often beaten and maltreated. Mobs, riots,
pillagings, and attacks upon the houses of the Jews were frequent, and
one of the favourite cries of the mob was certainly among the most
preposterously stupid of any which ever tickled the ear and satisfied
the mind of the ignorant:--
“No Jews!
No wooden shoes!!”
Some mob-leader, with a taste for rhyme, had in this distich cleverly
blended the prejudice against the Jews with the easily excited but
vague fears of a French invasion, which was in some strange way
typified to the apprehensions of the vulgar as connected with slavery,
popery, the compulsory wearing of wooden shoes (_sabots_), and the
eating of frogs! And this sort of feeling was often revenged on the
street-Jew, as a man mixed up with wooden shoes! Cumberland, in the
comedy of “The Jew,” and some time afterwards Miss Edgeworth, in the
tale of “Harrington and Ormond,” and both at the request of Jews, wrote
to moderate this rabid prejudice.
In what estimation the street, and, incidentally, all classes of Jews
are held at the present time, will be seen in the course of my remarks;
and in the narratives to be given. I may here observe, however, that
among some the dominant feeling against the Jews on account of their
faith still flourishes, as is shown by the following statement:--A
gentleman of my acquaintance was one evening, about twilight, walking
down Brydges-street, Covent-garden, when an elderly Jew was preceding
him, apparently on his return from a day’s work, as an old clothesman.
His bag accidentally touched the bonnet of a dashing woman of the town,
who was passing, and she turned round, abused the Jew, and spat at him,
saying with an oath: “You old rags humbug! _You_ can’t do that!”--an
allusion to a vulgar notion that Jews have been unable to do more than
_slobber_, since spitting on the Saviour.
The number of Jews now in England is computed at 35,000. This is
the result at which the Chief Rabbi arrived a few years ago, after
collecting all the statistical information at his command. Of these
35,000, more than one-half, or about 18,000, reside in London. I am
informed that there may now be a small increase to this population, but
only small, for many Jews have emigrated--some to California. A few
years ago--a circumstance mentioned in my account of the Street-Sellers
of Jewellery--there were a number of Jews known as “hawkers,” or
“travellers,” who traverse every part of England selling watches,
gold and silver pencil-cases, eye-glasses, and all the more portable
descriptions of jewellery, as well as thermometers, barometers,
telescopes, and microscopes. This trade is now little pursued, except
by the stationary dealers; and the Jews who carried it on, and who were
chiefly foreign Jews, have emigrated to America. The foreign Jews who,
though a fluctuating body, are always numerous in London, are included
in the computation of 18,000; of this population two-thirds reside in
the city, or the streets adjacent to the eastern boundaries of the city.