Jewish Ghetto

“ The sweat-shop will happily disappear with advancing civilization in New York. The tenement-houses will change in character, the children will learn English and partly forget their Yiddish language and peculiar customs. In spite of the fact that the Jews have been at all times and in all countries tenacious of their domestic peculiarities and their religion, the special character of the Ghetto will pass away in favorably conditioned America. ”

“ After these Marrano poetesses, silence fell upon the women of Israel for a whole century—a century of oppression and political slavery, of isolation in noisome Ghettos, of Christian scorn and mockery.131 The Jews of Germany and Poland, completely crushed beneath the load of sorrow, hibernated until the gentle breath of a new time, levelling Ghetto walls and heralding a dawn when human rights would be recognized, awoke them to activity and achievement.
Mighty is the spirit of the times! ”

“ RAEDER: Excuse me, please, one moment. I only learned something about the Jewish matter when Jews who were known to me, mostly friends of my old parents, approached me and told me that they were about to be evacuated from Berlin. And then I intervened for them. That was the only thing I knew. On occasions I was told in answer to my questions that they were to be evacuated to cities where ghettos had been established. I always understood that a ghetto was a district in a city where all the Jews lived together, so that they would not have to mingle with the rest of the population. ”

“ The ghetto, which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe. In the ghetto, the pastoral Semite, who had been made a wanderer by the destruction of his nationality, was steadily trained, through centuries, to become an urban European, with all the parasitic activities of urban economics, and all the democratic tendencies of occidental industrialism. ”

“ But the ghetto too, which has today been re-established in nearly all European countries, is only an interim solution, for mankind once awakened will not merely solve the ghetto question but the Jewish question in its totality. A time will come when the present demands, of the Jews will be fulfilled. ”

“ In the midst of the frivolous Bowery, devoted to tinsel variety shows, "dive" music-halls, fake museums, trivial amusement booths of all sorts, cheap lodging-houses, ten-cent shops and Irish-American tough saloons, the theatres of the chosen people alone present the serious as well as the trivial interests of an entire community. Into these three buildings crowd the Jews of all the Ghetto classes—the sweat-shop woman with her baby, the day-laborer, the small Hester Street shopkeeper, the Russian-Jewish anarchist and socialist, the Ghetto rabbi and scholar, the poet, the journalist. ”

“ I know a young artist, a boy born in the Ghetto, who began his conscious American life with contempt for the old things, but who with growing culture has learned to perceive the beauty of the traditions and faith of his race. He puts into his paintings of the types of Hester Street an imaginative, almost religious, idealism, and his artistic sympathy seems to extend particularly to the old people. He, for one, has become reconciled to the spirit of his father without ceasing to be an American. ”

“ I was born under the fearful conjunction of Christian bigotry and Jewish, in the Judenstrasse. In my cradle lay my line of life marked out from beginning to end. My God, what a life! You know how Germany treated her Jews—like pariahs and wild beasts. At Frankfort for centuries the most venerable Rabbi had to take off his hat if the smallest gamin cried: 'Jud', mach mores!' I have myself been shut up in that Ghetto, I have witnessed a Jew-riot more than once in Hamburg. Ah, Judaism is not a religion, but a misfortune. And to be born a Jew and a genius! ”

“ The shrewd-faced boy with the melancholy eyes that one sees everywhere in the streets of New York's Ghetto, occupies a peculiar position in our society. If we could penetrate into his soul, we should see a mixture of almost unprecedented hope and excitement on the one hand, and of doubt, confusion, and self-distrust on the other hand. Led in many contrary directions, the fact that he does not grow to be an intellectual anarchist is due to his serious racial characteristics.
Three groups of influences are at work on him—the orthodox Jewish, the American, and the Socialist ”

“ Then, too, there is a tendency among the well-to-do American Jews to look down upon their Ghetto brethren, to regard the old customs as benighted and to treat them with a certain contempt; altho they spend a great deal of charitable money in the quarter. Feeling a little 252 ashamed of the poor Russian east side Jew, they object to a serious literary portrayal of him. They want no attention called to what they deem the less attractive aspects of their race. An uptown Jewish lady, on the appearance in a newspaper of a story about east side Jewish life, wrote a protesting letter to the editor. ”

“ Here all virtues peculiarly Jewish were appreciated, and more especially by their development was that admiration to be attained which is the eager desire of the human heart. What did it matter to them that outside the Ghetto men despised what they valued so much. They cared nothing for the opinion of those outside, for it was the opinion of ignorant foes. The Jew strove to please his own people, and the approval of these brethren was to him the whole sum of life. And thus the life of the Ghetto Jew was not stunted or crippled, but whole. ”

“ The ghetto is a Jewish invention. In the beginning of the invasion of European and American cities the Jews always lived by themselves because they wanted to, because they believed the presence of Gentiles contaminated them. ”

“ FROM THE HEART OF ISRAEL.
1 THE VILLAGE KEHILLAH. Nordheim. Many persons, perhaps the majority of the readers of a certain kind of Jewish literature at present in vogue, led astray by the revival and improper application of the term Ghetto, have an idea that the great mass of the Jewish people on the continent of Europe have their habitations in filthy, noisome slums of the great cities, and that it is only in such secluded reservations, away from the contact or observation of the Gentile, that Judaism in its ancient, traditional form and pristine vigor, is or can be, maintained. ”

“ Just as Canal Street, with its cafés where the poets, Socialists, scholars and journalists meet, is the mind of the Ghetto, so Hester Street represents its heart. This picturesque street has recently become the study of several young Jewish artists.
The last few years have brought the earliest indications of what may develop into a characteristic Ghetto art. In the course of their long civilization the Jews have never developed a national plastic art. ”

“ The Young Art and its Exponents
On Hester Street, east of the Bowery, the poor Jew is revealed in many a characteristic way. It is the home of the sweat-shop, of the crowded tenement-house. Old pedlers, as ragged as the poorest beggars, stand on street corners. In long uninterrupted lines are the carts—containing fruit, cake, dry goods, fish, everything that the proletarian Jew requires. Behind these tower the crowded tenement-houses, with fire-escapes for balconies. Through the middle of the street constantly moves a mass of people. ”

“ A ragged man, who looks like a peddler or a beggar, picking his way through the crowded misery of Hester Street, or ascending the stairs of one of the dingy tenement-houses full of sweat-shops that line that busy mart of the poor Ghetto Jew, may be a great Hebrew scholar. ”

“ The Ghetto's partiality to Germany is a consequence of its loyalty to Jewry. Kinship of blood and race, ancestral allegiance, determine with the Jewish masses in America also, what side they take in this war. Although they have no political background in Europe, and their civil allegiance is absolutely American, they too are hyphenated in sentiment—Jewish-Americans. ”

“ The ghetto is not an American product but the Jews’ own importation. They have separated themselves into a distinct community. Speaking of this matter the Jewish Encyclopedia says: “The social organization of the Jews resident in America has differed little from that in other countries * * * in the main, and without any compulsion, Jews preferred to live in close proximity to one another, a peculiarity which still prevails.” ”

“ Such people are their own Ghetto gates; when they migrate they carry them across the sea to lands where they are not. Into the heart of East London there poured from Russia, from Poland, from Germany, from Holland, streams of Jewish exiles, refugees, settlers, few as well-to-do as the Jew of the proverb, but all rich in their cheerfulness, their industry, and their cleverness. The majority bore with them nothing but their phylacteries and praying shawls, and a good-natured contempt for Christians and Christianity. For the Jew has rarely been embittered by persecution. ”

“ There are other young Jews, of American university education, of strong ethical and spiritual character, who are devoting themselves to the work of forming, among the boys of the Ghetto, an ideal at once American and consistent with the spirit at the heart of the Hebraic tradition. ”

“ Those who are well off can travel in parties if they wish, taking their personal friends and connections with them. Jews, with the exception of the richest, have, after all, very little intercourse with Christians. In some countries their acquaintance with them is confined to a few spongers, borrowers, and dependents; of a better class of Christian they know nothing. The Ghetto continues though its walls are broken down. ”

“ He even is seen, more or less, with Ghetto literati who are essentially hostile to what the true Hebrew scholar holds by—a body of Russian Jewish socialists of education, who in their Grand and Canal Street cafés express every night in impassioned language their contempt for whatever is old and historical. ”

“ They all look poor, and many of them are, in fact, peddlers, shop-keepers or tailors; but some, not distinguishable in appearance from the proletarians, have "made their pile." Some are Hebrew scholars, some of the older class of Yiddish journalists. There are no young people there, for the young bring irreverence and the American spirit, and these cafés are strictly orthodox.
In spite, therefore, of his American environment, the old Jew of the Ghetto remains patriarchal, highly trained and educated in a narrow sectarian direction, but entirely ignorant of modern culture ”

“ I must state that the Germans organized the ghetto only to exterminate the Jewish population with greater ease. The head of the ghetto was the expert on Jewish questions, Muhrer, and he issued a series of mad orders. For instance, Jews were forbidden to wear watches. The Jews could not pray in the ghetto. When a German passed by, they had to take off their hats but were not allowed to look at him. ”

“ But in the meantime these few young artists, two or three particularly interested in Ghetto 271 types, five or six others, perhaps more, who occasionally contribute a sketch of the Ghetto, are in a fair way to get together a considerable body of pictures which shall have the distinction of portraying the Jewish community of the east side with fair adequacy. Certainly the interest of that Hester Street life, and of the tenement-houses that line it, is deep enough to inspire some serious man of plastic genius. ”

“ Of such men there are several in the humble corners of the New York Ghetto. One peddles for a living, another has a small printing-office in a basement on Canal Street, a third occasionally tutors in some one of many languages and sells a patent medicine, and a fourth is the principal of the Talmud-Thora, a Hebrew school in the Harlem Ghetto, where he teaches the children to read, write, and pray in the Hebrew language. ”

“ A true interpretation of Jesus by Christian people in the churches and out of them, a touch of kindness here and there without a thought of definite results, the treating of the Jew as a man and not as a special species, would do more to reach the Jewish soul than any organized missionary effort with which I am acquainted.
The two great social factors of the Ghetto are the Yiddish newspapers and the theatre, each of them in some degree entering into the life of every dweller in the Ghetto, as indeed each of them is a mixture of good and ill ”

“ He is an acquisitive little fellow, and seldom enjoys himself unless he feels that he is adding to his figurative or literal stock.
The cloak and umbrella business in New York is rapidly becoming monopolized by the Jews who began in the Ghetto; and they are also very large clothing merchants. Higher, however, than a considerable merchant in the world of business, the little Ghetto boy, born in a patriarchal Jewish home, has not yet attained. ”

“ Not a single Jew is left in the great Ghetto of Warsaw where, before the mass murders began there were 430,000.’ We cannot say that all these have certainly been killed. Some may be employed on forced labour behind the Eastern German front, but most of them are probably, by now, dead. ”

“ By confining them to those provinces where they happened to live at the time of the partitions, she created a Ghetto greater than any known to the Middle Ages; and by imposing restrictions upon the right to live and travel even within this Ghetto, she has virtually converted it into a penal settlement, where six million human beings guilty only of adherence to the Jewish faith are compelled to live out their lives in squalor and misery, in constant terror of massacre, subject to the caprice of police officials and a corrupt administration—in short, without legal right or social status. ”