The Jew, The Gypsy and El Islam. Sir Richard Francis Burton. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Sir Richard Francis Burton
Издательство: Bookwire
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Жанр произведения: Языкознание
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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. How often your successful Nazarene comes to grief! At the moment you think him Lord of All he is Master of Nothing. … Jews appear to keep what they have gotten; and, what is better, to get more, and keep that too. They are not much given, I fancy, to experience the pangs of remorse; and I cannot well imagine a mad Jew. It must be something awful. 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. That young man with the banner in Mr. Longfellow’s ballad was, depend upon it, an Israelite of the Israelites; only I think the poet was wrong, as poets generally are, in his climax. The young man was not frozen to death. He made an immense fortune at the top of Mont Blanc by selling ‘Excelsior’ penny ices.”

      The secret of this “getting on” is known to every expert. The Jewish boy begins from his earliest days with changing a few sovereigns, and he pursues the path of lucre till the tomb opens to receive him. He is utterly single-minded in this point; he has but one idea, and therefore he must succeed. Who does not remember the retort of the Jewish capitalist to the Christian statesman who, impertinently enough, advised him to teach his children something beyond mere trade? “My first wish,” answered the Hebrew, “is to see my boys become good men of business; beyond that—nothing!”

      This ignorance produces weak outbursts of lamentations that the Hebrews “still cling with obstinate persistence to a hopeless hope,” Hence we read in the pages of a modern traveller—The Rob Roy on the Jordan, p. 274, by J. MacGregor, M.A. (London: Murray, 1869): “Here, as well as some twenty years ago, I heard men in Palestine call their fellows ‘Jew’ as the lowest of all possible words of abuse. When we recollect that the Jews, in this very land of their own, were once the choice people of the world; that now through the whole earth, among the richest, the bravest, the cleverest, the fairest, the best at music and song, at poetry and painting, at art and science and literature, at education, philanthropy, statesmanship, war, commerce, and finance, in every sphere of life are Jews—we may well remember the word of prophecy which told us long ago that the name of Jew would be a ‘byword and a reproach,’ even in the Jews’ own land.” It is true that, even in the Portuguese colonies, where the Jew is comparatively unknown, his name is worse than at Jerusalem, Bagdad, and Damascus; whilst “Judear”—to play the Jew—signifies the being capable of any villainy. But how long will prophecy prove true? In the coast towns of Morocco, a few years have sufficed to raise the Hebrew from the lowest of stations to equality with, and even superiority over, his Mussulman cousin. The Jew may ere long make the Gentile a “byword and a reproach.”

      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; we do not reason that the cause which from ancient times has confined the Jew to Ghettos and to certain quarters in all great continental cities resulted, not only from his naturally preferring the society of his co-religionists, but also from the fact that his Christian neighbours found it advisable to consult by such means their own safety and that of their families. The disappearance of children was talked of at Rome and in all the capitals of Italy even throughout the early part of the present century, when constitutional rule and the new police were unknown, as freely and frequently as at Salonika, at Smyrna, and in all the cities