The economic condition of the Jews in the large Eastern European
Ghettos is, naturally, extremely bad. Huddled together, either in
certain districts of large towns or in villages where they form the
greater part of the population, they are compelled to live off and
on each other. Crowded into certain walks of life by anti-Jewish
legislation or anti-Jewish sentiment, few of them can gain more than
sufficient to keep body and soul together. In Galicia it has been
estimated that five thousand Jews perish every year from typhus-fever.
The Jewish wax-miners in Boryslav, to take but one instance, were
forced out of the mines and reduced to utter starvation, for no other
reason but because they were Jews. The failure of the harvests in
Southern Russia during the last few years has reduced the wage-earners
in that part of the country to the position of dependants upon the
charity of others; but the Jews who live there in such large numbers do
not even benefit from the assistance sent by the government. Similar
conditions prevail almost continually in the rest of the Russian pale
and in Roumania. The standard of life has naturally been lowered among
these people and their general _morale_ has not come out of the trial
unscathed.
Nor must it be forgotten that the violent dislocation of hundreds of
thousands of people, such as has taken place among the Jews during
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, has naturally disturbed
existing economic conditions, not only among the Jews themselves,
but also among those into whose midst they came. These outcasts from
Eastern Europe did not come to virgin soil as did the Pilgrim Fathers,
but to cities and towns which were already filled with a proletariat
engaged in the eager fight for life. The Jews of Berlin, Paris, London,
and New York, had their hands full with the proper care of the needy
ones already in their midst.
It is a mistake to suppose that the Jews as a people are rich. The
proletariat among them is proportionately much larger than it is among
other people; and thus it came about that the Jewish quarters in all
the large cities were already well filled when they were (almost at a
moment’s notice) called upon to receive double or triple the number
they already held. The actual number of the Jewish poor was thereby
greatly increased; for many a family that had been wealthy or in easy
circumstances in Russia, Galicia, or Roumania, had been reduced to want
and been compelled to take its place among those who needed the help
of their brethren. This help was freely and cheerfully given all the
world over. Great sacrifices were made by the richer Jews to meet the
pressing needs of the hour, and, with no help from the outside world,
excepting the London Mansion House Fund in 1882, the thousands and
tens of thousands of immigrants were cared for. The Jewish charitable
organizations, the development of which has been during the latter
half of the nineteenth century the brightest spot in Jewish communal
life, rose to the demands of the occasion, and the more than princely
munificence of Baron and Baroness Maurice de Hirsch, in regard to the
Russian Jews, may justly be looked upon with pride.
New Ghettos, however, were formed in nearly all the cities to which
these immigrants came; and this name for the habitat of the poorer
Jews became again familiar, aided by the popularity which some modern
novelists had given to it. In the Middle Ages and down to our own
time the Jews had been forced by the state to live apart in such
Ghettos; sometimes for their own protection, sometimes to preserve
the outside world from contact with them. The modern Ghetto is a
voluntary gathering of the Jews for the purpose of mutual help and
from a feeling of reciprocal obligations. To the outside observer it
presents an unsightly appearance; it is the abode of poor people, and
its population is usually strange in dress, manners, and speech. The
sweating system (which in one form or another is to be found in all
these Ghettos) has been a dreadful incentive towards grinding the face
of the poor; and the results of too great a hoarding are often quite
apparent; so that the general morality of the Jews in these Ghettos
has suffered in consequence. A people ignorant of the language of
their new home are a prey to the evil-intended, who make use of their
ignorance for their own commercial and political advancement. This has
been notably seen in the city of New York, where a lax city government
has permitted the vampires of society to fasten their fangs upon the
Ghetto and to produce conditions which call for the active interference
of all those forces which seek to stamp out crime and vice. But, on
the other hand, to one who is acquainted with the inner life of the
Ghetto the virtues which have hitherto characterized the Jews—industry
and sobriety—are still to be found there; much more frequently than
in those parts where the richer classes congregate, and whose wealth
enables them to withdraw their doings from the public gaze. Its members
are as industrious as bees in a hive; and though extremely litigatious,
drunkenness is unknown and actual crime is comparatively rare.
In order to correct the abuses of the Ghetto, two things are absolutely
necessary—the increase of the actual number of Jews there must be
stopped, and the crowding into certain distinct fields of work must
be brought to an end. A determined effort has already been made to
force the new immigrants into less crowded parts of the land to which
they come. In this country this is being done by the United Hebrew
Charities, and notably by the B’nai B’rith. A distinct clannish feeling
has, however, to be overcome, and a fear of venturing into an unknown
country where the immigrant will be surrounded by people who do not
understand his peculiar social and religious customs.
That the Jew has taken by preference to certain branches of trade
and work is due to the fact that anti-Jewish legislation has for
centuries closed many walks of life to him, and the guild organization
excluded him rigorously from many spheres of activity. Then, too,
his richly developed home life has induced a certain distaste for
occupations which take the wage-earner out of his home and away from
his family. That, however, these inherited instincts can easily
be overcome is clearly seen whenever the occasion offers. Even in
Amsterdam, where three-fourths of the diamond industry is in the
hands of Jews, there are to be found Jewish cobblers, cigar-makers,
plumbers, carpet-weavers, mattress-makers, watch-makers, etc. In
the East End of London there are, it is true, ten thousand Jews who
are engaged in the clothes-making trades, but the rest of the forty
thousand Jewish wage-earners of this quarter are scattered over all
possible branches of work—masonry, metal-working, textile industries,
furniture-making, cap-making, and the like. The same is true of New
York, where, although the number of Jews employed in the tailoring
industries is disproportionately large, the following list of Hebrew
unions shows how far afield the Jewish workman has gone: Cap-Makers,
Cap-Blockers, Shirt-Makers, Mattress-Makers, Purse-Makers, Liberty
Musical Union, Jewish Chorus Union, Jewellers’ Union, Tin-Smithers’
Union, Bill-Posters, Waiters’ Alliance, Architectural Ironworkers,
Hebrew Typographical Union, Tobacco Cutters, Paper-Makers, Bookbinders.
The same is relatively true of all other countries where Jews live in
large numbers.
It is a popular misconception that the Jew has an innate distaste for
agriculture. His continued commercial life, forced upon him for many
centuries, has, it is true, disaccustomed the Jew to the life of a
tiller of the soil. But the Jewish state was largely an agricultural
one; the legislation of the Bible and the later Law Books was clearly
intended for an agricultural people; and Jews have never shown an
unwillingness to return again to the soil. In Southern Russia there are
to-day 225 Jewish colonies with a population of 100,000. In Palestine
there are now more than twenty colonies with a population of more
than 5000, and similar agricultural colonies have been established
at various times in the United States, Canada, and the Argentine
Republic. In many cases, it is true, these colonies have not yet
become self-supporting, but this has been due in a large measure to
maladministration and to the peculiar conditions under which the
colonies were founded.
It cannot be denied that a goodly part of the Jewish proletariat
belongs to the Socialist party. The whole Biblical system is in itself
not without a Socialist tinge; and the two great founders of the modern
system, Lasalle and Marx, were Jews. It is no wonder that in Russia
many of the leading anarchists were of the Jewish race, for the Jew
suffered there from the evils which Nihilism was intended to correct
ten times more than did his fellow-Russian. But the Jew is by nature
peace-loving; and under more favorable circumstances, and with the
opportunity of a greater development of his faculties, Socialism in his
midst has no very active life; the Jew very soon becoming an ardent
partisan of the existing state of affairs.