only for mutual help and at the outset, does not seek to separate itself
and to create its own quarter. In the West End, it is true, there are
streets principally inhabited by Italians, French, and Swiss; that is
because the people are employed in the restaurants as waiters and cooks,
in the laundries, in the _charcuteries_ and provision shops, which exist
for the use of the foreigner. But their children will become English;
you may see them playing on the asphalted pavements outside the schools;
you fail to perceive any difference between the children of the German
waiter and those of the English working-man. There are thousands of
German clerks in London; they come over, some to stay, some to learn the
conduct and the extent of English trade and to take back with them
information about markets and prices and profits, which may be useful to
their friends of Hamburg and Altona. In either case they learn English
as quickly as they can, and live in the English fashion. Where, again,
is the French colony? There are thousands of French people in London,
but there is no French colony. There is a society of Huguenot families,
there is a French hospital, there are two or three French Protestant
churches, but there is no part of East London, or of any other quarter
of London, where we may find French the prevailing speech. There are,
again, a good many Dutch. Where are they? Some of them have a kind of
colony in Spitalfields, where they make cigars; as for the rest, they
are scattered. One may see some of them any Sunday morning in their
church, all that is left of the great church of the Augustine Friars; in
that old place a scanty congregation meets for service in the Dutch
language and after the Dutch use. It is pleasant to sit among them and
to look around upon the serious faces of the Hollanders, our former
rivals, and to make believe to listen to the sermon, which sounds so
much like English until you try to make out what it means. The feet of
these honest burghers rest upon the dust of many great princes and lords
and noble dames buried in the church of the Augustines, because it was
so holy a place that sepulture here was a certain passport through
purgatorial fires, without a stay in purgatory, to the gates of heaven.
Hither, on the day after the battle of Barnet, which practically ended
the Wars of the Roses, they brought, in the long, grunting country
wagons, the bodies of the lords and knights who fell upon the field, and
buried them within this church. That of Warwick the king-maker lay here,
the face uncovered, for some days, so that the people might be assured
of his death. But I doubt whether the Hollander cares much about the
bones of ancient nobles. There are also Swedes in East London, but the
only place where I have met them is in their church near St.
George’s-in-the-East, where you may see them any Sunday at the Swedish
service. They are a pleasant-looking race, with brown hair and blue
eyes; they appear to be largely composed of seafaring folk; one would
like to be able to converse with them. However, they have no quarter of
their own.
Of course, the most important foreign element in East London is that of
the newly arrived Jewish immigrants. They are the poorest of the very
poor; when they come over they have nothing. They are received by the
Jewish Board of Guardians, which is, I believe, a model of a
well-managed board; work is speedily found for them; their own people
take them on at the lowest wage at which life can be sustained until
they learn enough to move on and get higher pay. Their ranks are always
recruited by new arrivals; there is talk of their taking work away from
English workmen. Yet there seem to be no signs, as on the continent, of
a Judenhetze, or any such wide-spread, unreasoning hatred of the Jew as
we lately saw in France, and such as we have seen in Russia and in
Germany.
The newly arrived Jews have their own colony. It has much increased of
late years. They now occupy, almost to the exclusion of others, a
triangular area of East London—without a map it is not easy to make the
limits understood—north of the Whitechapel Road immediately without the
city limits: it has a base of nearly half a mile and an altitude of
three fourths of a mile. Here, for the time, the poorer Jews are all
crowded together. It is alleged that they have ingenious ways of
sweating each other; as soon as the Polish Jew has got his head a little
above water he begins to exploit his countrymen; he acquires the
miserable tenements of the quarter and raises the rent and demands a
large sum for the “key”—that is to say, the fine on going in.
These Jews all succeed, unless they are kept down by their favorite vice
of gambling. It is perhaps as well for their own peace that for the
first few years of their residence in London they should live in their
own quarter, among their own people. For the transformation of the poor,
starving immigrant, willing to do anything at any wage, to the
prosperous master workman is unlovely. He succeeds partly because he is
extremely industrious, patient, orderly, and law-abiding. But there are
other reasons. It is sometimes pretended that the Jew is endowed
naturally with greater intellectual power than is granted to men of
other nationality. This I do not believe. The truth seems to be that
advanced by Mr. Charles Booth, I think for the first time. “The poorest
Jew,” he says, “has inherited through the medium of his religion a
trained intellect.” This fact, if you consider it, seems quite
sufficient, taken with those other gifts of industry and obedience to
order and law, to explain the Jew’s success among the poorer classes
through which he works his way upward.
He is a person of trained intellect. What does this mean? Poor and
miserable as he stands before you, penniless, ragged, half-starved,
cringing, this man has been educated in the history of his own people,
in the most ancient literature of the world, in a body of law which
exercises all the ingenuity and casuistry of his teachers to harmonize
with existing conditions. It is like putting into the works of an
engineer, among the general hands, one who has been trained in applied
mathematics. Into any kind of work which means competition, the Jew
brings the trained intellect and the power of reasoning due to his
religious training; he brings also the habit of looking about for
chances and looking ahead for possibilities which long generations of
self-defense have made hereditary. These faculties he brings into the
market; with them he contends against the dull mind, untrained and
simple, of the English craftsman. What wonder if he succeeds? Nothing
but brute violence, which he will not meet with here, can keep him down.
This I believe to be the great secret of the Jew’s success. It is his
intellectual superiority over working-men of his own class. Observe,
however, that we do not find him conspicuously successful when he has to
measure his intellectual strength against the better class. In law, for
instance, he has produced one or two great lawyers, but not more than
his share; in mathematics and science, one or two great names, but not
more than his share. I am inclined to think that in every branch of
intellectual endeavor the Jew holds his own. But I doubt if it can be
proved that he does more. So long as we can hold our own in the higher
fields there will be no Judenhetze in this country. I am informed,
however, that the leaders of the people in London are persistent in
their exhortations to the new-comers to make themselves English—to make
themselves English as fast as possible; to send their children to the
Board-schools, and to make them English. It is the wisest advice. There
should be no feeling as of necessary separation between Jew and
Christian. We ought to live in amity beside each other, if not with each
other; we should no more ask if a man is a Jew than we ask if a man who
has just joined our club is a Roman Catholic or a Unitarian.
Yet, even in this country, it cannot be said that the Jew is popular;
there are prejudices against him which are no longer those concerning
his religion. Here, again, I turn to the authority who has made so
profound a study of the question; the importance of the question is my
excuse. This is how Mr. Charles Booth explains the dislike and suspicion
with which the Jews are still regarded by many: “No one will deny that
the children of Israel are the most law-abiding inhabitants of East
London.... The Jew is quick to perceive that law and order, and the
sanctity of contract, are the _sine qua non_ of a full and free
competition in the open market. And it is by competition, and by
competition alone, that the Jew seeks success. But in the case of the
foreign Jews it is a competition unrestricted by the personal dignity of
a definite standard of life and unchecked by the social feelings of
class loyalty and trade integrity. The small manufacturer injures the
trade through which he rises to the rank of a capitalist by bad and
dishonest production. The petty dealer suits his wares and his terms to
the weakness, the ignorance, and the vice of his customers; the
mechanic, indifferent to the interests of the class to which he belongs,
and intent only on becoming a small master, acknowledges no limit to the
process of underbidding fellow-workers except the exhaustion of his own
strength. In short, the foreign Jew totally ignores all social
obligations other than keeping the law of the land, the maintenance of
his own family, and the charitable relief of coreligionists.”
[Illustration: A Corner in Petticoat Lane.]
The place and time in which to see the poorer Jews of London collected
together is on Sunday morning in Wentworth Street and Middlesex Street,
Aldgate—the old Petticoat Lane. These streets and those to right and
left are inhabited entirely by Jews; Sunday is their market-day; all the
shops are open; the streets are occupied by a triple line of stalls, on
which are exposed for sale all kinds of things, but chiefly
garments—coats and trousers. There is a mighty hubbub of those who
chaffer and those who offer and those who endeavor to attract attention.
You will see a young fellow mounted on a pair of wooden steps,
brandishing something to wear; with eloquence convincing, with gesture
and with action, he declares and repeats and assures the people of the
stoutness of the material and the excellence of the work. The crowd
moves slowly along, it listens critically; this kind of thing may become
monotonous; the oratory of the salesman, in order to be effective,
continually requires new adjectives, new metaphors, new comparisons;
among the crowd are other professors of the salesman’s rhetoric. They
know the tricks, they have learned the art. One wonders how many such
fervid speeches this young man has to make before he effects a single
sale. We need not pity him, although at the close of the market his
voice is hoarse with bawling and the results are meager; he enjoys the
thing; it is his one day of glory, and he has admirers; he knows that
among the audience there are many who envy his powers and would fain
take his place and deceive the people.
Not all the holders of stalls are so eloquent. Here, before a miserable
tray resting on crazy trestles, stand a ragged old couple. They look
very, very poor; they cast wistful eyes upon the heedless crowd; their
wares are nothing but common slippers of bright red and blue cloth. Will
you buy a pair because the makers are so old and so poor? Alas! they
cannot understand your offer; their only language is Yiddish, that
remarkable composite tongue which in one place is a mixture of Russian
and Hebrew, in another of German and Hebrew, in another of Lettish and
Hebrew. They stare, they eagerly offer their wares; a kindly compatriot
from the crowd interprets. There is a little bargaining, and the
slippers are in your pocket. Very well. It is a piece of good luck for
the old pair; like unto him who had the splendid shilling “fate cannot
harm them; they will dine to-day.” True to their national instincts,
which are Oriental, they have made you pay three times as much for the
slippers as they would charge one of their own people. Going on slowly
with the crowd one admires the variety of the wares laid out on
trestles. Who wants these rusty iron things—keys, locks, broken tools,
things unintelligible? Somebody, for there is noisy chaffering.
You observe that the newly arrived Polish Jew is for the most part a man
of poor physique; he is a small, narrow-chested, pasty-faced person. “Is
this,” you ask, “a descendant of Joshua’s valiant captains? Is this the
race which followed Judas Maccabæus? Is this the race which defied the
legions of Titus?” “My friend,” replies a kindly scholar, one of their
own people, “these are the children of the Ghetto. For two thousand
years they have lived in the worst parts of a crowded city; they have
been denied work, except of the lowest; they have endured every kind of
scorn and contumely. Come again in ten years’ time. In the free air of
Anglo-Saxon rule they will grow; you will not know them again.”
It is among these new-comers that one recognizes the Oriental note;
there is among the women a love of bright colors; among the men, even
with the poorest, a certain desire for display; an assertion of
grandeur. Look at this little shop of one window on the ground floor. It
is crowded with girls. Outside the proprietor stands. He is not tall,
but he swells with pride; a large cigar is between his lips; it is a
sign and a symbol. His poorer countrymen look with envy upon that very
large cigar. He condescends to talk because he is so proud that he must
display the cause of his glory. “All the week,” he says, “I study what
to give them on Sunday. To-day it’s bonnets. Last Sunday it was fichus.
Next Sunday? That is my secret. My wife serves the shop. I furnish the
contents. All the week my son Jacob keeps it, but there is no trade
except on Sunday.”
[Illustration: A “Schnorrer” (Beggar) of the Ghetto.]
In a second-hand furniture shop, to which we have been directed, the
proprietor sits among his tables and chairs. He also has a large cigar
for the better display of his grandeur. He is conscious of the envy with
which the man who has a shop is regarded by a man who must work with his
own hands. This man has more—he has a father. You called on purpose to
see that father. You would like to see him? You are invited to step
up-stairs. There, in a high-backed chair, with pillows on either side,
sits a little shriveled-up creature. His eyes are bright, for he has
just awakened from the sleep which fills up most of the day and all the
night. Beside him is the Book of the Law in Hebrew. Upon the open book
there rests his pipe. Two girls, his great grandchildren, sit with him
and watch him. For the old man is a hundred and three years of age. Yet
he can still read his Hebrew Bible, and he can still take his pipe of
tobacco.
“Last night,” said one of the girls, “we carried him down-stairs into
the shop, and the people crowded round to see him. He drank a whole
glass of beer—in their sight.”
The patriarch nods and laughs, proud of the feat. He then talks about
himself. He was born in the Ghetto of Venice—you can see the place to
this day. His father came to London when he was a child. His occupation,
he tells us, was formerly that of cook. He was employed as cook for the
great banquets of the City companies; in that capacity he used to drink
as much wine as he wished to have, and in those days he wished for a
great deal. His lengthened years, therefore, are not due to abstinence
from strong drink. He was also a follower of the Ring, and was
constantly engaged as second or bottle-holder in the prize-fights so
common in the first sixty years of the century. He remembers what was
once considered a great political event, the committal of Sir Francis
Burdett to the Tower of London in 1808. Sir Francis was at the time a
leading Radical. He was afterward the father of Angela, Lady
Burdett-Coutts, a leader in the noble army of philanthropists.
We are not allowed to talk too long to this ancient and venerable
survival. After a quarter of an hour or so his watchful nurses dismiss
us, and he promises to see us again—“if I live,” he adds, with a sigh.
“If I live.” It is his constant refrain. He has outlived all his
friends, all his companions, all his enemies, all his contemporaries.
There is no pleasure left to him save that of being admired on account
of extreme old age. It is enough. It binds him to life; he would not
wish to die so long as that is left. “If I live,” he says.
For my own part, I like sometimes to sit in the synagogue on the Sabbath
and listen to the service, which I do not understand. For it seems to
explain the people—their intense pride, their tenacity, their separation
from the rest of the world. Their service—I may be mistaken; I have no
Hebrew—strikes upon my ears as one long, grand hymn of praise and
gladness. The hymns they sing, the weird, strange melodies of the hymns,
are those, they allege, which were sung when Israel went out of Egypt;
they are those which were sung when in the Red Sea the waters stood up
like a wall on either side to let them through; they are those which
were sung when Pharaoh’s hosts lay drowning and the walls of water
closed together. The service, the reading, the hymns, the responses—they
are all an assertion that the choice of the Lord hath fallen upon this
people; the Lord their God hath chosen them. Let no one speak of Jews
until he has listened to their service. By their worship the mind of a
people may be discerned.
I have already mentioned the settlement of the Huguenot silk-weavers at
Spitalfields—the fields behind the old hospital and monastery called St.
Mary’s. There they have remained. Until quite recently, they carried on
from father to son the trade of silk-weaving; there are silk-weavers in
Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. An attempt has been made to revive the
trade; meantime many of the old houses remain with their wide windows on
the first floor, and over the shops one may still see the French names,
or these names rudely Anglicized. But the French settlement no longer
exists; the French language has been forgotten, and the Huguenots are
completely absorbed. They are now like all the rest of us, a mongrel
blend of Celt, Saxon, Dane, Norman, Fleming, and everything else. It is
the Anglo-Saxon blend, or, as we ought rather to call it, the
Anglo-Celtic blend.
A small colony of Italians has settled in another part of London—not in
East London. You would know the colony, which does not belong to these
pages, if you were to stumble upon it accidentally, by the barrel-organs
in the courts, by the barrows on which the Italian costers carry round
their penny ices, by the bright-colored handkerchiefs and the black hair
of the women, and by the cheap Italian restaurants, where the colonists
can rejoice in Italian cookery and Italian wine.
In the West India Dock Road, before you reach the docks, there is a
building on the north side which contains a colony always changing. It
is the home of the Indian and Malay sailors—the Lascars and the Arabs. I
remember spending a morning there with one who was afterward murdered by
Cairene ruffians in the desert of Sinai. This man loved the place
because he loved the Oriental folk who lodged there, and because he not
only talked their languages, but knew their manners and customs, and
would sit with them after their manner, talk with them on their own
subjects, and become one of themselves. On this occasion he met a
certain poor Persian scholar down on his luck. He was a man of great
dignity and presence, insomuch that one realized the truth that in the
East clothes do not make the man. He was in rags, but he had lost
nothing of his dignity. It was pleasant to see them sitting down
together on the floor, side by side, discussing and quoting Persian
poetry, and still more pleasant to see the Persian quickly yielding to
the charm of a common love of literature and treating the infidel as a
friend and a brother. It is a strange place and full of strange people;
no one can understand how strange it is, how great is the gulf between
the Oriental and the Occidental, unless he can talk with them and learn
how they think and how they regard us. My friend interpreted for me,
afterward, something of what the Persian scholar had said. Colossal is
the pride of the Oriental; inconceivable the contempt with which he
regards the restless West.
“Here as I sit by the Jumna bank,
Watching the flow of the sacred stream,
Pass me the legions, rank on rank,
And the cannon roar and the bayonets gleam.”
* * * * *
“When shall these phantoms wither away,
Like the smoke of the guns on the wind-swept hill,
Like the sounds and colors of yesterday;
And the soul have rest and the air be still?”
Nearly opposite this house is a small street which contains the Chinese
colony. Compared with the Chinese colony of New York, part of which I
once visited, one sweltering night in July, that of London is a small
thing and of no importance. Yet it is curious. There are not, I believe,
more than a hundred Chinese, or thereabouts, in all; they occupy a few
houses in this street; there are one or two small shops kept by
Chinamen; it is considered quite safe to visit the place, at all events
in the daytime; I was myself taken there by one who was personally known
to the shopkeepers. There was not much that was attractive or
interesting offered for sale, except Chinese playing-cards, which are
curious; conversation in Pidgin-English is difficult at first, but one
quickly acquires enough of the _patois_. There is a boarding-house for
Chinese in the street; the ground floor we found furnished with a tiny
joss-house, in one corner, and a large table which occupied nearly the
whole of the room; the table was covered with Chinamen sitting and
sprawling; they were wholly absorbed in a little gamble with dominoes
and small Chinese coins; their absorption in the chances of the game was
complete. One of them, the banker, manipulated the dominoes; nobody
spoke; every time that a domino was turned there was the exchange of
coins in silence. The eager, intent faces were terrifying; one
recognized the passion which sees nothing, hears nothing, cares for
nothing, feels nothing, but the fierce eagerness of play. We looked on
for five minutes. No one spoke, no one breathed. Then I became aware
that in a room, a cupboard at the back, there was a fire, with a great
black pot hanging over it and a man with a spoon taking off the cover
and stirring the contents and inspecting the progress of the stew.
Presently he came out, ladle in hand, and bawled aloud, but in Chinese.
I took his bawling for an announcement of dinner. But none of the
players heard; the banker turned up another domino; there was another
exchange of coins; no one heeded the call.
Yet it was the dinner-bell; down-stairs came chattering, laughing, and
joking, half a dozen of the boarders, each with a basin in his hand. The
cook filled every man’s basin, and they went up-stairs again, and none
of the players marked them or heeded them, or turned his head, and none
of the boarders took the slightest notice of the players. Nobody
meanwhile paid the least attention to the joss-house, where burned the
candle which is said to be the Chinaman’s sole act of worship. And
nobody took the least notice of the stranger who stood at the door and
looked on.