Richard Francis Burton

“ He—the ordinary Englishman—may be dimly conscious that the Jew is the one great exception to the general curse upon the sons of Adam, and that he alone eats bread, not in the sweat of his own face, but in the sweat of his neighbour’s face—­like the German cuckoo, who does not colonize, but establishes himself in the colonies of other natives. ”

“ Bright remarks, religious bigotry is slow to die away altogether; and even in educated English society there are few Christians who do not think themselves entitled to approach a Jew with a sense of secret superiority. If a Jew is ostentatious or obtrudes his wealth, if his women are loaded with jewellery, if he talks the slang of the sporting world in order to show what a fine creature he is, society is as right to put him down as to put down any Christian like him. ”

“ He cannot realize the fact that the ferocity and terrible destructiveness which characterize the Jew and his literature, from the days of the Prophets to those of the Talmudists, are present in his civilized neighbour, whom he considers to be one of the best of men—a sleeping lion, it is true, but ready to awake upon the first occasion. And he is ignorant of the Eastern Jews’ love of mysticism and symbolism, their various horrible and disgust­ing superstitions, and their devotion to magical charms and occult arts which lead to a variety of abominations. ”

“ Here and there an old country house produces a scion which to all appearance is more Jewish than the Jews themselves. A peculiar characteristic of the blood is an extreme fondness for show, for colour, for splendour and magnificence in general. The rich Jew must display his wealth; like the Parsee, he makes and spends whilst his rivals the Greek and the Armenian make and hoard. In certain continental cities where he now reigns supreme he renders society impossible to the Christian. ”

“ For one of us who, by means of infinite wriggling, panting, toiling, struggling, and hanging on by his eyebrows, so to speak, to opportunity, ambitious to emerge from obscurity, and ascend to the topmost round of the ladder, there seems to be at least five hundred Caucasian Arabs who attain the desired altitude; ay, and who manage to avoid turning giddy and toppling over. Most Jews seem to rise, and the instances of a few going ‘to the utter bad,’ as the phrase runs, seem equally as rare. ”

“ Those familiar with the annals of old families in England are aware of the extent to which they have been mixed with Jewish blood, even from the days when religious prejudice is mistakenly represented to have been most malign. Indeed, of late centuries our nation has never prided itself, like the Portuguese and the Iberians generally, in preserving its blood “pure and free from taint of Jew and Infidel.” The cross perpetually reappears in outward form as well as in mental quality. ”

“ On the whole, looking at the vast number of Christians I have known who from splendour have subsided into beggary, and the vast number of Hebrews I have watched advancing, not from men­dicity—a Jew never begs, save from one of his own tribe, and then I suppose the transaction is more of the nature of a friendly loan, to be repaid with interest when brighter days arrive—but from extreme indigence to wealth and station, I incline to the opinion that Gentiles have a natural alacrity in sinking—look how heavy I can be—but that the Chosen People have as natural a tendency towards buoyancy. ”

“ Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, pas­sions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? ”

“ OF all Europeans, the Englishman, who boasts of being a staunch friend to the people “scattered and peeled,” and whose confident ignorance and indiscriminate philanthropy are bestowed upon them equally with the African negro, knows least of the customs and habits of his protégés, and especially of those of Jews in foreign countries. The neglect of things near to us must be the reason why we know so little of the inner life of Jewry: there are, however, other concomitant causes. In our native land the Hebrew lives protected, and honoured, in fact, as one of ourselves. ”

“ An English Jew is an Englishman, admires English habits and English education, makes an excellent magistrate, plays to perfection the part of a squire, and even exercises discreetly the power which, with its inexhaustible oddity, the English law gives him, while it denies it to the members of the largest Christian sect, and presents incumbents to livings so as to please the most fastidious bishops. The French Jews were stout friends of France during the war—served as volunteers in the defence of Paris, and opened their purses to the national wants, and their houses to the suffering French. ”

“ The dirty, greasy usurers of Rumania are the humble brethren of the financiers of London and Frankfort, and that the Jews are a great power in Europe is incontestable. What are, it may be asked, the secrets of their power? They are religion, the capacity for making money, and internal union. ”

“ The German Jews were as stout Germans in their turn; and in war, as in peace, they are always ready to show themselves Germans as well as Jews. It is the combination of the qualities of both nations that is now raising the foremost of the German Jews to their high rank in the world of wealth. ”

“ In that world, to be a German is to be a trader whom it is very hard to rival, to be a Jew is to be an operator whom it is impossible to beat; but to be a German Jew is to be a prince and captain among the people.
“In this way the Jews have managed to overcome much of the antipathy which would naturally attach to men of an alien race and an alien religion. The English Jew is not seen to be standing aloof from England and Englishmen. But it is impos­sible there should not be some sort of social barrier between the Jew and the Christian. ”

“ If they are not decoyed into Christianity by their social aspirations, Jews are unassailable, for the most part, by the force of either persecution or argument; and al­though there are some conversions to be attributed to Christian reasoning or Christian gold, they are probably counterbalanced by the accessions to Judaism of Christian women who marry Jewish husbands. The Jews therefore lead, and must lead, on the whole a family life marked by something of reserve and isolation. ”

“ The money they have gives them consequence; but it is not only the money itself that does this; it is the qualities that go to making money which raise them—the patience, the good sense, the capacity for holding on when others are frightened, the daring to make a stroke when the risk is sufficient to appal. And the Jews are not only religious and rich; they are bound together by intimate ties. The inner world of Judaism is that of a democracy. ”

“ Leisure, activity of mind, and the desire to hand on the torch of instruction from the women of one generation to those of another, inspire Jewesses with a zeal for education, a love of refinement, and a sympathy with art. ”

“ We should enjoy his society but for a certain coarseness of manner, and especially an offensive familiarity, which seems almost peculiar to him. We marvel at his talents, and we are struck by the adaptability and by the universality of his genius. ”

“ In the country towns of modern Persia, as in Turkey, the Jew is popularly believed to make away with children. The Muhammadan boy, meeting a Hebrew in the streets, will pluck his grey beard, taunt him with the Bú‐e‐Shimít—the rank odour which is everywhere supposed to characterize the race—tread upon his toes, and spit upon his Jewish gabardine. ”

“ It artfully opened to the admiring eye of ignorance a noble garden of time‐honoured experience, a goodly parterre of racial and social piety and benevolence, a paradise of religious wisdom, from which a few transplanted shoots would suffice to enrich and adorn a wilderness of rugged and neglected fields. ”

“ Homes of the best type are of course to be taken as the standard when it is inquired what are the characteristics of a race as seen at its best; and European family life has few things equal to show to the family life of the highest type of Jews. Their isolation, again, makes most of the men liberal and free from the prejudices of class, just as their connexion with their dispersed brethren relieves them from the pressure of insular narrowness. ”

“ The rivière must disfigure the beautiful neck and bosom of the bride. At the theatre those boxes are most valued where the light falls strongest upon the precious stones, and where costly textures and valuable laces stand out to the greatest advantage. ”

“ Again, we hardly reflect that, as intolerance begets intolerance and injury breeds injury, a trampled and degraded race will ever turn when it can upon the oppressor, and that the revenge of the weak, the slavish, and the cowardly will be the more certain, ruthless, and terrible because it has a long score of insults and injuries to reckon up. ”

“ The millionaire never dreams of despising, or fail­ing to aid, his poorest and most degraded brother. The kindness of Jews for Jews is unfailing, spon­taneous, and unaffected. The shabbiest hat‐buyer or orange‐seller of Houndsditch is as sure of having the means provided for him of keeping the sacred feast of the Passover as if he lived in a Piccadilly mansion. To the eyes of the Jews even the most degraded of Jews do not seem so degraded as they do in the eyes of the outer world. The poorest have perhaps possessions which redeem them in the eyes of their brethren ”

“ These people—so exclusive, so intensely national, so intimately linked together—have shown the most astonishing aptitude for identifying themselves with the several countries in which they have cast their fortunes. ”

“ Finally, is it surprising that amongst an ignorant and superstitious race of outcasts such random acts and outbreaks of vengeance, pure and simple, should by human perversity pass, after the course of ages, into a semi‐religious rite, and be justified by men whose persecution has frenzied them as a protest and a memorial before the throne of the Most High against the insults and injuries meted out by the Gentile to the children of Abraham? ”

“ To all these permanent causes of Jewish eminence there must, however, be added one that has had only time to develop itself since extreme bigotry has died away, and since in Western Europe the Jews have been treated, first with con­temptuous toleration, then with cold respect, and, finally, when they are very, very rich, with servile adoration. ”

“ They cannot intermarry except for special political or other cogent reasons, and it necessarily chills the kindness and intimacy of family intercourse when all the young people know that friendship can never grow into anything else. In order to overcome this obstacle many wealthy Jews have chosen to abjure their religion and enrol their households in the Christian communion. ”

“ He has heard that where Saxon and Celt ply pick and pan, the Hebrew broker and pedlar buy up their gains and grow rich where the working‐men starve in the midst of gold. He sees that the “Chosen People” will swarm over the world from California to Australia, wherever greed of gain induces them to travel. “To my mind,” says a popular writer, “there are few things so admirable and wonderful in this life as the ‘getting on,’ as it is vulgarly called, of the Hebrew race. ”

“ The Hebrew race is so marked in its characteristics that it has ever been the theme of over‐praise or of undue blame, like those individuals concerning whom society cannot be neutral; and of late years the transitions of public opinion which usually moves slowly have been comically abrupt. ”

“ A toilette from Paris twice a week not only ministers to the womanly enjoyment of the wearer, and to the sensuous pleasures of the beholders, but also shows that the house is wealthy and that the firm has spare money to throw away. ”

“ We do not waste time upon thought or inquiry whether the persecution, the avarice, or the massacre may not be the direct result of some intolerable wrong, of some horrible suspicion which has gradu­ally assumed the form of certainty, and which calls for the supreme judgment of the sword ”

“ The women too have been ennobled, not degraded, by being thrown on themselves and on their families for their sphere of thought and action. They are almost always thoroughly in­structed in business, and capable of taking a part in great affairs ”

“ Their family life by being secluded has gained in warmth and dignity. [10] In very few families is there so much thoughtfulness, consideration, parental and fraternal affection, reverence for age, and care for the young as in Jewish families. ”

“ The average Englishman cannot help observing with Cobbett, and despite Lord Macaulay, that the callings which the lower orders of Jews especially prefer are those held mean or dishonourable by other men such as demoralizing usury, receiving stolen goods, buying up old clothes, keeping gambling-­houses and betting‐cribs, dealing in a literature cal­culated to pervert the mind of youth ”

“ Their effects are remarkable upon the feeble brains of certain Christians, who, in conversation and mission­ary matters, have been thrown much in Jewish society, and who end by thoroughly believing all these absurd claims. ”