mentioned to help me out of my poor plight, to illustrate my meaning.
Thus, once upon a stormy day, when the rain and thunder and lightning
became fearful and awesome, Motke was seen running through a street of
Wilna, at his greatest possible speed, frantically waving his hands. A
few Jews witnessing this, and overtaking him, stopped him, demanding
what the trouble was. 'Such terrible thunder and lightning,' said he,
all out of breath; 'I fear me that the Almighty is about to give us a
new Law!' Here is a blessed bit of blasphemy which strikingly voices the
protest of a law-entangled, ritual-ridden, tradition-tied people against
the grinding yoke of the Torah. There is a story by another Ghetto
jester, driving at the same evil. There came a time once--so the story
runs--when the children of Israel became weary of this heavy yoke, when
they could no longer live up to the laws forced upon them amid the
dramatic effects of Sinai, when they could no longer bear all the
sufferings and persecutions that living up to these laws entailed, and
they prayed to God that they might be delivered from the Law, that they
might be permitted to return to him the Tables of Stone; and the
Uppermost consented to take it all back; and so, upon a day, the Jews
from all corners of the earth started on a journey toward Mount Sinai,
with heavy-laden trains and ships and caravans of scrolls and Biblical
Commentaries. They came from all parts of the world--from East and West,
North and South, from the Occident and the Orient; there were all
manner of Jews, and they came by all means of transportation, but they
all labored painfully under their tremendous loads, which they brought
to be returned. At Sinai, they were to give up their burdens. Arrived
there, they piled up their great packs of 'precept upon precept' around
the holy elevation, until their luggage formed a mountain larger than
Sinai. When the Uppermost appeared in his invisible, yet blinding glory,
he asked for the meaning of this huge mountain of books, and the Jews,
with their faces to the ground, cried, 'It is the Law. Take it, O Lord.'
The Lord--so runs the story--was astonished at this, and he told the
chosen people that only ten simple rules of living had been given to
them at Sinai. He knew nothing of all these volumes. These multitudes of
laws and endless commentaries were of men's making, not of his giving.
They were empty vaporings of idle brains. He refused to take the Law
back in its present form. So the Jews journeyed to their respective
homes in all parts of the world, wiser, if not relieved of their
burdens. I was irresistibly reminded of this story, and could not help
telling it. It is the product of a far more subtle brain than Chabad's
was. I do not remember the name of the author now, but he and Chabad
unwittingly worked for the same cause."
A boisterous group of "dancing-school fellows," as "the intellectuals"
called them, entered the place, demanding, at the point of their pay,
something to eat. Keidansky's audience became restless. But he
persistently kept on, despite all kinds of interruptions.
"Religion, as you all know, is the absence of the sense of humor," he
said. "It goes to all sorts of absurd extremes. Its tower commands but
one view of life, and that view is marred by emotion. When faith is not
blind, it is, at least, short-sighted. The loyal member of the sect is
not a seer. Enthusiasts are painfully one-sided. They see, or rather
they feel, but one side. All their glances are on one thing. So we need
the man with humor, who can see all things in one glance. The jester is
the wide-eyed, all-observing fellow. He is the many-sided, much-seeing
man. The sense of humor is the true sense of proportion, and it has been
rightly urged that only the humorists have perceived and painted life as
it is. Only they have presented life in all its largeness. Of course,
the humorists, who merely chose to jest and not write great tragedies,
did not do such things, but they were ever great reformers. The man who
laughs can be deeply religious without being a pietist: he can be deeply
religious, yet behave decently; his existence is a sure cure for
hysteria. He infuses a little reason into things which prevents the
sublime from becoming ridiculous.
"A maggid, or preacher, once announced that he had written a new
commentary upon the 'Hagadah.' 'What!' everybody asked, 'are there not
enough commentaries already in existence?' 'Yes,' said Chabad, 'but he
cannot make a living out of those.' At a wedding of the Jewish
aristocracy of Wilna, where wealth was flaunted pompously, Motke was
asked to say something funny. 'All the rich men of Wilna ought to be
hanged,' he said. The wealthy guests were scandalized. 'Wherein is the
joke?' they asked. 'It is no joke,' said Motke.
"In the synagogue students of the Talmud were disputing a point
concerning the use or rejection of an egg 'with a blood-drop' in it--a
point to which so many pages of the holy books are devoted. 'Why don't
you throw the rotten egg out?' said Motke, who stood near. 'What's the
use of wasting so much time?'
"Once, it is told, when all his resources were at an end, Chabad went to
the burial committee of the town, told the members that his wife had
died and asked for the means of performing the last rites and
ceremonies. He accordingly secured a few roubles, and when the
committee-men and their officials came to take charge of the body, they
found Motke, his wife and children, at their table enjoying a bountiful
feast of roasted goose and things.
"'Gentlemen,' exclaimed the master of the household, 'you will have her;
I swear to you, you will have her. She is yours; it is only a question
of time.'
"'Fare thee well,' said Motke one day to a rich merchant. 'I am going
away, and all I want of you is a few roubles for expenses.' His request
was refused. 'Then I am not going,' he announced, 'and you need not
fare well.' Chabad was also a match-maker, and his humor made him the
best caricature of the institution. Thus once he came to a young man to
speak of a match with a certain young woman. 'Oh, but she is lame,'
protested the young man. 'Yes,' Chabad admitted, 'but that will keep her
home, and prevent her from going out too much.' 'But she is blind,' the
young man argued. 'So much the better,' said the _shadchen_; 'she will
not see you flirting with other women.' 'She is also deaf,' insisted the
youth. 'That is certainly fortunate,' was the reply; 'you will be able
to say what you please in the house.' 'But she is also dumb,' pleaded
the victim. 'Still better,' Motke assured him. 'There will always be
quiet and peace in your home.' 'But she is also humpbacked!' the young
man cried out in anger. 'Well, well,' said Chabad, 'do you expect her to
be without a single fault?' Now I am almost ready for the maledictions,"
said Keidansky, as he was nearing the close of his argument, but I was
suddenly called away.
XIV
What Constitutes the Jew?
One day when I made a perilous ascent to Keidansky's garret, barely
escaping harm through boxes and barrels and darkness and things in the
way, I found him hard at work on an article--this time in the English
language--on "What Constitutes the Jew?" A kind and interested editor to
whom I had the honor of introducing him, asked my discovery to write on
the subject, and pleased with the suggestion he took it up. He motioned
to an up-turned coal scuttle for a seat as I entered, and bade me take a
Jewish paper and be quiet. While I waited he finished his essay. "I
haven't any time to talk to you," he said, looking disconsolate and
running his long fingers through his curly black hair: "I want to read
you this thing I've just scribbled. There he goes again--" he broke off
in despair, as the old man in the next attic began to chant the Psalms.
"But I shall read louder than he does," said Keidansky, "I pay rent
here--sometimes--and King David, the fruit vendor, in there, sha'n't put
me down." I listened, and he read as follows:
"And after we have read about him in the comic weeklies, have seen him
delineated in popular works of fiction, have observed him caricatured in
various publications, have beheld him portrayed on the vaudeville stage
and have heard from the slum student of the Ghetto; after we have
visited a few money lenders--on important business--have heard our
minister talk patronizingly of him, telling pityingly of how he hath a
great past and possessed more than a few commendable qualities, and of
how he was, alas! doomed to damnation because he would not accept the
religion that he hath given to the world; after we have bought clothing
in one of his stores, taken a personal peep at the Ghetto, met a
reformed rabbi, conversed with a distant descendant of his people, read
the polite charges of his friend, the anti-Semite, and gone down and
made beautiful speeches before him prior to the election; I say even
after we have done these things, or some of these things have happened
to us, we must still ask the question: What constitutes the Jew?
"For, of a verity, he is so complex in his character, so heterogeneous
in his general composition, so diverse in his activities, so many sided
in his worldly and heavenly pursuits, so widely varying in his
appearance, so wonderfully ubiquitous, and withal such a living
contradiction, that even after we have made the above painful efforts to
understand him, we are still at a loss to know--what we know about him.
"He represents one of the ancient races and yet is as up to date as any;
he reaches deepest into the past and looks furthest into the future; he
is the narrowest conservative and the most advanced radical; in religion
he is the most dogmatic, sectarian, stationary, orthodox, and also the
most liberal and universal reformer; he is a member of the feeblest and
strongest people on earth; he has no land of his own and he owns many
lands; his wealth is the talk and the envy of the world, and none is so
poor as he; his riches have ever been magnified and exaggerated, his
dire poverty ever overlooked. 'As poor as a Jew' would be a truer simile
than the one now in use. He is the infamous Shylock, the money-lender,
yet he borrows as much and more money than he lends to others, only he
pays his debts and so there is no talk about it; Christians and others
who borrow from him go to court, denounce him, call him Shylock, and
give him several pounds of 'tongue,' though he asks not for flesh,
because it is not 'kosher,' and because whatever he is he is never
cruel. Come to think of it, what a fine thing the Shylock story has ever
been for those who did not want to pay their debts!
"He loans money to kings, and the kings oppress the Jews; he is the
great concentrator of wealth, and he is the Socialist and Anarchist
working ardently for the abolition of the private ownership of wealth;
he is eminently practical, and is ever among the world-forgetting
dreamers, 'the great host of impracticables'; he has no fine arts of his
own, and he carries off the highest prizes for his glorious contribution
to the arts of the nations. Now he is exclusively confined to his own
Hebrew, religious lore, believing that beyond it there are no heights to
scale, no depths to fathom, and then he becomes a Georg Brandes, a
great interpreter of the literatures of the world; his own literature is
so Puritanical, so religious and chaste that there is hardly a single
love song to be found therein, and then comes a Heinrich Heine. He is
the slave of traditions and the first to break them; persecute him and
he will die for the religion of his fathers; give him freedom and he
will pity them for their crude conceptions and applaud Ingersoll; he is
intensely religious and the rankest infidel; he condemns the theatre as
being immoral, and he is the first to hail Ibsen and applaud him, even
on the Yiddish stage; there is no one so clannish and so cosmopolitan as
he is, and these contrasts can be multiplied to the abuse of time and
space.
"If, then, he is everything and to be found anywhere, to be seen in all
sorts of circumstances, in all walks of life and walking in so many
diverse ways, making his way in such strongly contrasting conditions,
how shall we know him? How shall we know what constitutes the Jew? He
does not always abide in the Ghetto, and, things are coming to such a
pass, that he rarely has the old Ghetto appearance. I suppose if our
dear Mr. Zangwill had his own way he would fill the world with Ghettos.
He could use them in his business. But perhaps the time is drawing nigh
when we must have the books of Mr. Zangwill and other works of such
excellence to preserve the most picturesque life of a unique people and
save it from oblivion. The Ghetto walls are falling, falling.
"Old-fashioned folk, like other things, go out of fashion. The
old-style long garb, the 'capota,' will take itself away after the toga,
and such is the awful power of civilization that even the time-honored
skull-caps of the men and the wigs of the women are vanishing before it.
Time, with its scythe, cuts down even the curling sidelocks and the long
beards dear to tradition. Up-to-date fashion is a democratic tyrant, an
expansionist invading and permeating all places and peoples. So we
cannot count on these externals. Physiognomy is another thing by which
to be misguided. Other outer details may help us as much as medicine can
help the dead--or the living, for that matter. Then there are names.
What's in a name? An opportunity for misunderstanding. One cannot even
know himself by his name. All these artificial designations do not
designate.
"What, then, are the telling traits, the conspicuous characteristics by
which the typical, representative Jew may be known? Now I am blissfully
ignorant of anthropology, and could not analyze scientifically, even at
the risk of being destroyed critically. But through a certain
accident--an accident of birth--I may be enabled to make a few
suggestions, which I will offer with all due and undue apologies, of
course.
"First and foremost I should mention his wonderful versatility; he is
the most versatile actor in this play called life. He has acquired this
versatility throughout his wanderings, sufferings, trials and
tribulations, and, together with his prodigious adaptability, it
constitutes the secret of his survival. Originally a being of the
highest talent with the radiant glow of the Orient upon his brow, he had
walked through the histories of many nations, and being persecuted by
all peoples who recognized his talent, he received a most liberal
education in the school of sorrow. Thus his abilities were cultivated
and he learned to adapt himself easily to all circumstances and to
create his own little world wherever he pitched his tent.
"Mentally alert, keen of comprehension, quick to grasp any situation,
almost too shrewd to be wise, practical to the detriment of his high
ideals, calm, careful, cautious, calculating, hopeful in the face of
despair, optimistic to a discouraging degree, often too regular and
respectable to become great; intensely individualistic, proud of his
past, anxious about the future, ever devoted to his cause,
self-appreciatory, at times too sure of his capabilities, confident in
the ultimate decency of things, deeply in love with life--these are
among the qualities that may be attributed to the Jew.
"His isolated, peculiar and purely religious life, 'the spiritual
Palestine' which he has carried along with him in his wanderings through
the darkness and cold of the Ghettos, has under all circumstances and in
all hazards preserved those fine domestic and social qualities for which
he is noted. What can now be said about his domesticity, his love of
home and care of family; his sobriety, thrift, peacefulness and good
deportment, the readiness with which he cares for his poor, his public
spirit in the interests of his community--wherever that may be--his
unequalled kindness; what can now be said about these things would be
mere repetition; but these are nevertheless some of the undisputed
qualities which constitute the Jew. Believing himself chosen of God, he
has strong faith in the part he plays, the work he does, and the mission
he is to perform with his being. And like others who have much faith in
themselves, he has abundance of conceit. But let us not call it that.
'Sublime egotism' sounds so much better, and besides, the line of
demarcation between the two is so fine that it does not exist. The Jew
is strongly individualistic in his social tendencies, and for that
reason often so progressive. He dares to deviate from the trodden path.
He is not always in harmony with the rest of his community in which
there is from time to time much discord--discord that sometimes amounts
to war. Thus the persecution of the Jews often begins at home. His
receptive mental attitude often brings him into the ranks of the most
radical, despite his traditions, which would hold him back.
"He has talent to waste, and much of it is really wasted because he
lacks opportunity for cultivation and frequently has not the required
concentration and application. Perhaps it is better so; for if all
Jewish talent was brought out in the various forms of greatness, what
would--what would the anti-Semites not say? They would say that the Jews
have stolen their talents. For anti-Semitism is the cry of despair of
defeated mediocrity, or it is the plaint of the blinded Christian
maddened by jealousy because he has been beaten by the wandering Jew in
his own game of trade, commerce, politics, or art. But the Jew is kind,
his kindness is unsurpassed, and the Hebrew line in which his people are
called 'merciful sons of the merciful' is literally true. He pities the
anti-Semite as he pities all who suffer and who are in want of the good
things and the good qualities of life.
"The Jew is a great possibility. Sensitive of and susceptible to all
things, to the very color of the atmosphere around him, with a soul
sharpened by sorrow and a mind of keenest understanding, he can become
anything and everything, assimilate himself with any and all conditions,
and illustrate life with a new meaning or adorn it with a worthy work.
He is like unto an Æolian harp on which various breezes play various
tunes.
"His beautiful, consecrated, peaceful, religious, home life, the life
wherein the home is a synagogue and the synagogue is a home, this on the
one hand and the strange world with its hard realities, with its
stumbling-blocks and stunning blockheads, on the other, have created in
the Jew a striking two-sidedness, a kind of duality and, if I may so
call it, a sort of conciliation between the ideal and the real. This
forms another trait by which you may tell him. Thus he is very
practical, and still dreams, hopes for the restoration of Palestine, and
loves his home and his country wherever he abides. He is an ardent
Zionist and a good citizen at the same time.
"Murder, or any other kind of talent, will out. Say rather that talent
will out even if it must come in the shape of murder, so to speak.
People capable of the highest good and noblest greatness are often cast
down into the abyss of degradation by their loving neighbors, or other
circumstances. People must live, you know, and therefore they often live
a living death. Not permitted to live rightly and happily, they still
must live somehow. The instinct of self-preservation preserves much
evil, but life is life. Those who have talent and are not permitted to
use it for the good of all, use it for their own temporal good,
regardless of the consequences. The thought that I wish to leave here as
we part with the Jew is: That they who walk in darkness find the ways
that are dark. Over-praise is damning, and I want to be careful. The Jew
has on the whole been far, far better than he has been permitted to
be--and this, too, is one of the charges against him. He is a graduate
of the school of sorrow, with the highest honors.
"What is that story about the man who in his long quest after the ideal,
at last found her in the woman who has suffered?
"Well, here is the Jew, a being who has suffered."
XV
The Tragedy of Humor
"Sometimes," said Keidansky, "it is grossly immoral to live up to your
highest principle." And in reply to my half-uttered protest, he quickly
continued: "No, no; I am not jesting. It's a sad business, this jesting
about the human tragedy. For what is it but mocking each other's wounds,
laughing at one another's infirmities in this great lazaretto, where we
are all pitiful patients? What is it but scoffing at our sores, grinning
at our gashes, deriding our diseases, laughing at our own weaknesses?
No, I am not jesting," and the speaker eyed me strangely as he looked up
from his manuscript on the little table in Machtell's café.
"Beneath the levity is lead," he said slowly. "Behind all the fun is
crushing failure. Behind all the satire is sorrowful shortcoming. Behind
the smile is a searing smart. Grief lurks in the grin. Through all the
drollery despair peers forth, and there is nothing more lugubrious than
laughter. Comedy is made up of error, failure, confusion,
misunderstanding, misfortune, misdirected efforts and wasted energy.
Whenever error ends fatally it is called tragic, but that is not the
worst. The real tragedy is not the play that ends with the death of the
leading characters, but the one in which they are condemned to struggle
and live on and laugh and be laughed at. Each one of us is his own
caricature. There is so little to do, yet we all overdo it. We all
reduce our lives to absurdities. Our efforts exaggerate their importance
and betray our barbarities.
"We overdraw our characters and all our lifetime suffer in our own
estimation. The more serious we are the more extravagant is the farce.
As we creep along the roads, the shadows we cast mock and menace us.
"We are poor debtors, all. With infinite intentions in a world of
infinitesimal possibilities, our efforts constantly caricature and
cartoon our aims. All our works are filled with comic illustrations
galore. We make them ourselves, and they overshadow our works. Did you
ever see any one fall on the street and a lot of lookers-on laugh? Well,
that is in a measure the history and interpretation of humor.
"We seek and do not find; we fight and do not conquer; we play and do
not win; we attempt, but do not achieve; we aspire and do not attain; we
desire and are not gratified; we long for light yet grope on in
darkness; we struggle and are defeated; we strive for salvation and
discover it to be a mere sham; our labor is lost, our love is not
returned, our devotion is not understood, our wings are broken at the
point of flying, all our yearnings are in vain; and then, the newspaper
humorist writes half a column of pointed jottings out of these things;
or else the literary comedian will prepare a series of funny papers. Do
you understand now what an appalling, grim and gruesome spectacle there
is behind all these little jests? And how tragic it is for the humorist
who sees it all? They say that a Scotchman laughs on the third day after
he hears a joke. It does not take so long to find that there is nothing
to laugh at. It is all so sad. Think what a tremendous tragedy the funny
paragrapher sums up in a few lines and sells to 'Puck' for $2.98. Come,
take up a column of comicalities in any publication and see what is at
the bottom of every jest. What is it about? Is it about a man and a
woman linked together by law, with a Chinese wall of misunderstanding
between them, 'so strangely unlike and so strongly attached to each
other' that it is hell for both of them? Or, is it about a woman who
wears her life away in the farce of 'Vanitas Vanitatum?' Is it about the
greedy mercenary who loses his soul to gain the world? Or is it about
one who gives up the world to gain nothing?
"Is it about an enthusiastic youth who, to escape the materialism of his
surroundings, jumps from the frying-pan into Bohemia; or is it about a
philosopher who, gazing at the stars, falls into a mud puddle? Is it
about the poet starving in a garret, or is it about the artist lost in
the quest of the unattainable? Is it about the moral principle trampled
under foot because of the material advantage, or is it about the low
life of him who longs for the highest? What is it about? Is it about a
man who bleeds and a woman who laughs, or is it about beings who sell
themselves for life with promises to love, honor, cherish and protect?
Is it about some one groping in darkness, grappling with the impossible,
or is it about a great republic gone mad over the visit of an effete
representative of monarchy? Perhaps it is about a bright American girl
in quest of a titled idiot, or else about a being so degraded that he is
in mortal fear of work and has a horror for soap! It may be about
mediocrity dreaming of talent, of failures chasing the phantoms of
success, of fading beauty, waning love, of the stumbling of the blind,
or of any and all the confusions of error and the thousands of
misunderstandings of the home and of people who are near and fail to be
dear to each other. The list is too long. It can never be exhausted. But
at the bottom of any one of the jests, old or new, you will find an
excruciating little tragedy. It is all so sad, sorrowful and depressing.
The humor of the situation? Say rather the tragedy of the case.