Jewish settlement

“ Some of the Jews were sold into slavery; some went to Rome, where they swelled the congregation existing there since the second century B.C., and where they had several synagogues and catacombs used as cemeteries. Others again emigrated to Babylonia, where a Jewish settlement existed since the destruction of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, or settled on the northern coast of Africa, and on the islands of the Mediterranean. ”

“ In 1499 the Jews were expelled from Nuremberg and Ulm, in 1493 from Magdeburg, in 1496 from the province of Styria, and somewhat later from Ratisbon and Saxony. The exiles sought refuge in villages and little towns under the rule of the nobles, or emigrated to Poland, where, toward the end of the fifteenth century, there was already a considerable Jewish settlement. This soon became in numbers the most important in Europe. ”

“ Having brought our story to the close of an epoch, we will pause and glance at the status of the Jew in other lands. The dispersion of Israel in a voluntary way had already begun, though Judea was still the centre of gravity. So the sway of the High Priest reached not only to the Palestinian provinces—Phœnicia, Samaria, Galilee, Gilead, Edom and Philistia—but extended through parts of Asia Minor and to lands on both banks of the Mediterranean Sea. These lands of Jewish settlement outside of Palestine are called the Diaspora. ”

“ The original settlement had consisted of cruelly hunted and persecuted small traders, and reinforcements had come from the like stock. It was a community in which Judaism struck deep roots, but the soil was poor to begin with, and was always terribly in want of modern methods of manuring. In theory and practice, in manners, outward appearance, language, views, and opinions, these Polish Jews were most conservative, some might even say stagnant or retrogressive. There came to be among their students many who inclined more to Kabbala than to Talmud, and to Talmud than to Torah ”

“ The Jew comes from many countries. The greater part of all our recent Jewish immigration comes from Russia, from what is called the “Jewish Pale of Settlement” in the western part of that country. Other Jews come from Austria, Roumania, Germany and Turkey. In 1914, the Jews were the fourth largest in numbers among our immigrants, nearly 143,000. [31]
We must also bear in mind that all of these millions who came to America do not remain with us. There is a constant emigration going on, a departure of aliens back to their native land either for a time, or for all time. ”

“ The Society of Jews and Jewish Company will grant cheap passage and certain advantages in settlement to those only who can present an official testimonial from their local authorities, certifying that they have left their affairs in good order.
Every just private claim originating in the abandoned countries will be heard more readily in the Jewish State than anywhere else. We shall not wait for reciprocity; we shall act purely for the sake of our own honor. ”

“ But when our desperadoes increase the value of the land by their presence and by the labor they expend on it, they make it at the same time increasingly attractive as a place of settlement to people who are better off.
Higher and yet higher strata will feel tempted to go over. The expedition of the first and poorest settlers will be conducted by conjoint Company and Society, and will probably be additionally supported by existing emigration and Zionist societies. ”

“ It is not our purpose here to tell the almost miraculous story of the foundation of the earliest Jewish settlements or “colonies” in the eighties, how by sheer endurance the pioneer settlers maintained their hold in the face of appalling difficulties, and how by the time when the great war broke out there had been created the nucleus of a thriving Hebrew nation, firmly attached once more to its ancestral soil, and repossessed of its ancestral tongue.1 We have merely to glance at a few of the outstanding facts and personalities of this revival (Appendix lxxviii) . ”

“ Life in Germany.—The English Jews who went further, and found a refuge in the German states, like the Continental Jews who joined them there, when exiled a century later, were certainly no better off. Germany, so called, extended from Russia in the east to the Netherlands in the west; and Jewish settlements existed in all the principal states and provinces. In the flourishing cities on the banks of the Danube or the Elbe, on the Maine or the Rhine, the Jews were all nominally ‘serfs of the Imperial Chamber,’ and avowedly under the protection of the Emperor. ”

“ By order of the Popes, the masters of vessels, bound for any parts connected with Palestine as a destination, were forbidden to carry Jewish freight or Jewish passengers. Their own land was denied to outcast Jews. Emigration, however, of some sort was growing imminent. Poland and Turkey, in their undeveloped civilisation, were found to be tolerant of aliens, and in these countries Jewish settlements began to be made. ”

“ Among the native Jews of Germany, if Berlin is to be taken as a typical example of Jewish communities in large cities, there is no organic social body, complete in itself, consisting of various classes, following all imaginable trades, ranging from the chimney-sweep and the cobbler to the merchant prince. Such communities, forming organic wholes in themselves, you may find in Russia, Galicia, Roumania, and in the newer Jewish settlements of England and America. ”

“ In Palestine the chief Jewish settlements are at Jerusalem, Safed, and Tiberias, and there are small agricultural colonies at Jaffa and Safed. At Nablous there is a remnant of Samaritans who, as in the old days, are quite distinct and aloof from their Jewish half-brothers. At Jerusalem all sects and many nationalities are represented. Ashkenazim, Sephardim and Karaites, Russians and Poles, and Rabbis from all parts of the world, come to weep and to pray, and to lay their bones among the ruins of the city which was once the joy of the whole earth. ”

“ A consideration of the legal status of the Jews in each of the countries of Eastern Europe and of the chief forces that have ruled their history for more than a third of a century will enable us to see some of the dynamic aspects of the recent history of the East-European Jews and the underlying causes of their recent emigration. ”

“ They were a sort of resident pilgrims. Others came to get away from oppression and persecution. Gradually the success of the farm colonies attracted the attention of Jews all over the world, and regularly organized movements for planting Jewish settlements in the Holy Land sprang up. More and more colonists began to come because they wanted to get on the land and saw in Palestine chances of greater freedom and success in life than in the crowded streets and small shops of European cities. ”

“ And often, in order that the royal treasury might be kept well filled, and the ‘protection’ of the king secured, the Jews were forced to prey upon the people. Their neighbours could not have liked them if they would, and thus, Jews were quite alone in the kingdom, left to themselves, without the chance of making a friend among the populace, or the priests, or the nobles. ”

“ It is good to be able to ‘write injuries in dust, and kindnesses in marble.’ In 1492, the Jews were wickedly expelled from the land in which they had been, for centuries, so happy, and 200 years later we hear of descendants of those cruelly exiled Jews sending secretly to Spain and Portugal for citrons and branches of the palm, that their ‏סוּכּוֹת‎ might look ‘homelike’ in the bleak north lands in which their lot was cast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The circumstances of the age, as we have seen,22 made traders of them, and the tendency of the age was to despise trade, and, while profiting by Jewish enterprise, to put every difficulty in its way. Jews were thus a caste apart. ‘Society,’ in the Middle Ages, knew of only two classes—the lords who owned the soil, and the serfs who, swearing on the Gospel their oaths of fealty, tilled the soil and went with it. In neither rank—in that of landowners nor in that of land-cultivators, were Jews to be found. In the feudal system there was no place for Jews. ”

“ In Russia and Poland.—The two and a half million Jews who are to be found at the present day in these wide and but semi-civilised territories, are still unhappily circumstanced. The ignorance and fanaticism of the native population, and the unintelligent policy of the governing classes, combine to make the position of the Jews a painful and a precarious one. ”

“ I have also omitted the other small section of black Jews, namely, the Beni-Israel in India, whose origin is likewise a subject of doubt, many Western Jews even disputing their geniune Israelitish descent.
The whole Jewish nation, at any rate in Europe, is usually divided into two great bodies or families. ”

“ From the time when Jerusalem fell, till the beginning of the sixth century, the troubles of the Jews who were settled on the banks of the Tigris and of the Euphrates had been but slight; occasionally irritating, but very rarely serious. In Mesopotamia, for a very long period, Jews as citizens were undistinguishable from other citizens, and they on their side, as a certain Rabbi Samuel expressed it, ‘respected the law of the land no less than the law of Moses.’ Their Judaism was absolutely uninterfered with, and they had leisure for little scholarly quarrels among themselves. ”

“ Before resuming the story of Judea under the procurators, let us take another survey of Jews and Judaism in lands outside of Palestine. The voluntary dispersion still went on. The Jews were now scattered over all the Roman Empire, which included Asiatic and European lands from Syria to Spain. We also find our ancestors, at the beginning of the Christian era, in Arabia and in Parthia, an Asiatic kingdom south of the Caspian Sea. But, however widely scattered, religion was the bond of union and Jerusalem the spiritual centre. ”

“ Christians were forbidden on pain of excommunication to have any intercourse with Jews or to purchase from them. When they settled in towns they were forced to live in particular suburbs. ... The incredible increase of the Jewish population, supposed to be three times as rapid as that of the Polish inhabitants, was very alarming, as the Jews managed to avoid all public burdens and taxes. ”

“ Unlike England and France and Spain, Germany never went to the length of expelling her Jews altogether, but she would hunt them, now and again, from place to place in her dominions, and the hospitality she extended to them was, at best, the hospitality of a sponging-house. There is not a state, nor a province, nor a city of now united Germany which has not, at some time or other, taken its evil share in ill-treatment of the Jews. Prague, in Bohemia, could, perhaps, tell the most sensational tales of all, if it were well or wise to write out such sad stories in sober pen and ink. ”

“ But that small colonies of men, transported into strange and populous nations, should preserve a distinct existence, and not insensibly moulder away, and mix themselves with their numerous native masters; This, I think, is without example in the history of mankind. If the Jews might be expected to abound any where, it should, methinks, be in Judæa; where the sight of the holy land, and the memory of their past fortunes, might invigorate their prejudices, and perpetuate their attachment to the Jewish name and worship. ”

“ Moral and Material Effects upon the Jews.—Walled off from the high roads of life, and shunned for shambling along its bypaths, the Jews of Germany, in these cruel circumstances, were slowly deteriorating in their manners and in their modes of living. Hemmed in by the ghetto, they were growing content with the ghetto. Meeting with contempt and hatred all round, they were beginning to hate back again, and to feel, in their turn, as bitter and as unreasoning a contempt for everything belonging to their persecutors. ”

“ German Jews were the Emperor’s Jews—his absolutely. He might sell them, or pawn them, or make presents or legacies of them. And, as a rule, the Emperors did protect this property of theirs from other depredators. If the vassal princes of the various states desired to plunder the Jews, they had to do it after a fashion that should not be found out. For this ‘protection,’ the Jews, of course, had to pay a tax to their protector. On some occasions it was raised so high as a third of each man’s ascertainable property. ”

“ In the eye of the law they were heretics, to be compelled or converted into Christianity, but to stand distinctly outside of it meanwhile. War was the all but universal profession. Jews might not hold military rank. They might not even be civil guardians of the peace, since ‘no Jew in any cause could be witness against a Christian.’ They might neither aspire to be owners of land, nor leaders of men. ”

“ JEWS OF JERUSALEM
The Jews are rapidly coming into their own. The Holy City now contains some thirty thousand of them; they form about half of its whole population. They have acquired the right to own land in Palestine, and they can come and go as they please. This has not always been the case. Jewish immigration used to be prohibited, and such Jews as bought real estate had to purchase and hold it under other names. ”