XII. THE WANDERING RACE.

Professor Child, of Harvard University, has remarked that, “in the second form of the legend, the punishment of perpetual existence, which gives rise to the old names, Judæus non mortalis, Ewiger Jude, is aggravated by a condemnation to perpetual change of place, which is indicated by a corresponding name, Wandering Jew, Juif Errant, etc.”⁠[29] In this change a great deal of history is represented. The Jewish race under persecution steadily became a wandering race. They were compelled to “move on” by the remorseless police of Christendom. One after another the laws of nations detached them from the soil, from the trade-guilds, from civic position, and they became a nation without a country.

This process went on for a long time before it was represented in any myth or legend. Mohammed said, “The Jews are the People of the Book.” Joshua ben Siras ben Eliezer, a priest in Jerusalem two hundred years before the burning of the Second Temple (quoted by Heine), wrote, “All this is the Book of the Covenant made with the Most High God, namely, the Law which Moses commanded as a precious treasure to the House of Jacob. Wisdom floweth therefrom as the water of Pison when it is great, and as the water of Tigris when it overfloweth its banks in spring. Instruction floweth from it as the Euphrates when it is great, and as Jordan in the harvest. Correction cometh forth from it as the light, and as the water of the Nile in autumn. There is none that hath made an end of learning it, there is none that will ever find out all its mystery, for its wisdom is richer than any sea and its word deeper than any abyss.”

So spake the genius of Israel, and, so speaking, itself uttered its first doom. A people to whom a book had become their Fatherland, which had come to see in it their Jordan, their Tigris, their Nile, had already given up their hold upon the territories of this world and become a wandering colony of Jahve, governed by a code unrelated to the vices or the aims of other races. This abstract country, whose geography was books and texts, was fenced around and fortified as strongly as the territory of any nation. Its fortresses were ceremonies, customs, national traditions, and a perfect patience derived from faith in the God of their fathers. The Cain whom they abhorred was not more effectually “cursed from the earth,” prohibited from tillage of the ground than this race which had taken Jahve for their portion and his law for their habitation.

In such a system there could be no compromise. And as a matter of fact there never was any compromise with the enemies of their faith. These people, who have shown ingenuity and cleverness of every kind, have never developed any sort of Jesuitism. I was astonished lately at learning of an instance in which a Jew outwitted his persecutors in true Christian style, for I never heard of another. This Jew was a pedlar, and he was wandering in France in the neighbourhood of one of those districts where the Virgin Mary is still continually opening new water-cure establishments. This Jew, having heard the latest miracle which had evoked a new fountain, smiled, and even made light of it. Thereon the innkeepers excited a mob, and they resolved to hang the miscreant—that is, the unbeliever—faggots being old-fashioned. They seized the poor pedlar and bore him off pallid with terror. As they passed near the new fountain, the Jew begged permission to moisten his lips thereat; this was conceded, but no sooner had the water touched his lips than he leaped about with joy, and declared that the fountain had healed a severe rheumatism which he had suffered from for many years. “A miracle! a miracle!” shouted the crowd; the Jew suddenly became a hero, and was carried before the priest, who appointed the next day to baptize him before all the people and make a grand demonstration. The Jew, however, disappeared during the night.

This story, which I found in a recent number of the Jewish World, is a modern appendage to the old legend mentioned by Mr. Baring-Gould, that the gipsies were said to wander under a doom pronounced on them because they refused to shelter the Virgin and child in the flight into Egypt. But this witty pedlar is not a fair representative of the race. “Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” said Shylock. Though Shylock has been regarded by many as a type of avarice and extortion, yet even he cannot be tempted by money when his struggle with the Merchant becomes a religious issue. Shakspeare rightly shows Shylock unyielding; many times the money due to him cannot bribe him from the blow he feels empowered to strike for his despised Israel. And when, in the beginning of this century, Nathan Rothschild started as the great banker of London, no temptations could induce him, shrewd as he was, to lend money or enter into any contracts for the benefit of Spain or its colonies. The Israelite was never lost in the banker, and showed his supremacy when it came to a race which had banished his own from the Iberian Peninsula; though at the same time his charities and those of his house have included Christians hardly less than Jews. The same unyielding religious spirit was shown when thirty-three years ago Baron Lionel de Rothschild was elected Member of Parliament for the City of London. The honour of being the first Jew in that body could not induce him to swear his allegiance “on the true faith of a Christian,” and on the New Testament. He remained out of his seat for eleven years—and with him David Salomons, who paid the penalty of £500 for voting in the House without being duly sworn—when Parliament yielded to men who did not yield, and the oath was changed for Jews.

It has sometimes excited wonder why this wanderer among the races, uncompromising amid the hatred of ages, was not exterminated. It must often have appeared to them that, like the bush in their own legend, they were burnt without being consumed, because their God was in the bush. But no miraculous force need be sought in the case, nor any exceptional tenacity of life in them as a race; their circumstances developed in them special faculties adapted to the commerce and civilisation of the world. Heine said truly “the Jews were legally condemned to become rich.” The populace generally believed that Jewish wealth was got from the Devil, their wages for maintaining the kingdom of Antichrist in the world. The Jewish banker, Samuel Bernard, who died in 1789, leaving a large property, had a black cock which was popularly believed to be connected with his wealth. The suspicion was confirmed when the bird died a day or two before its master.

As a matter of fact the Jews were driven to deal in money and jewellery—a word supposed by some to be derived from “Jew”—by the general exclusion of them from the possession of land and from the acquisition of property by handicraft. Gold and silver alone were left for their enterprise.

And there were good causes why they amassed wealth. The first was that they did not spend it on Gentile baubles. They cared not for the pomps and luxuries of a world to which they did not belong. Why then did they want to accumulate it? Why were they so thrifty and unwearied in their pursuit of gold? To ascribe this to avarice is to accept a popular fallacy refuted by the history of that people, who are even lavish in their charities and in their support of public enterprises (as in England and America) where they are free and equal citizens. In their earlier days the Jews’ hope of recovering their country and re-establishing their Theocracy under the Messiah was a passionate aspiration, it was as sincere as any patriotism; every Jew held his wealth and his life as a trust for that end. All their wealth they hoped one day to lay at the Messiah’s feet. So it began, and then a new factor re-enforced it. The wealth of the Jews became the main means of their survival as a people. Kings and Popes protected them for the money they could get out of them. But for this they would certainly have been exterminated. From them chiefly was extorted the money for Henry the Second’s Crusade in their own Holy Land. Mainly by their labour and wealth Westminster Abbey was built. By such protective extortions there was established a certain force of natural selection and evolution, based on their wealth, which gradually made them the financial princes of Europe and bankers of the world.

Whatever German bigots may say, the financial supremacy of the Jews has been well and wisely exercised. The nations not included under it have fared according to their folly. When Queen Isabella of old wished to protect the Jews because of such advantages, she was confronted by the fanatic who said, “Judas sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver; will you sell Him for thirty millions?” So the Jews suffered in Spain; but what did Spain suffer? What did Holland and England gain by the Spanish Jews, first tolerated, then welcomed in their cities? This Germany will be able to answer if the jealous bigots there let loose on the Jews should succeed in driving them out of the country.

“Thou, O Daniel, shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” So early did the compulsory tendencies of the Jews reveal themselves. Their alienation among other peoples made them close up in their ceremonial law as in a shell; their book was sealed amid inferior ‘revelations’ swarming around them, and themselves sealed in it: but, meanwhile, detached from the soil and the guilds of every country, forced to be exchangers, pedlars, they must travel to and fro, and their knowledge was increased. They became so well acquainted with the lore of different lands, with the medical and other knowledge of various countries, that they were supposed to possess occult powers. Occasionally, this reputation might be of service to them, as in the instance where Queen Elizabeth employed a Jewish physician for his supposed occult knowledge; but more often it harmed them, as in the evil fate that overtook that same physician, whom jealous rivals accused of an attempt to poison the Queen. For many centuries they presented the most remarkable instance of a people who had largely outgrown their primitive superstitions, and acquired a religious and intellectual enlightenment beyond the rest of the world, who yet kept all this culture within the hard walls of their barbaric stronghold, their ancient forms and formulas, from which they did not dare to venture.