It may not be known that
the male Russian and Polish Jew can generally read his Hebrew Bible
as well as a Yiddish newspaper, and that many of the Jewish arrivals
at the barge office are versed in rabbinical literature, not to
speak of the large number of those who can read and write Russian.
When attention is directed to the Russian Jew in America, a state of
affairs is found which still further removes him from the illiterate
class, and gives him a place among the most ambitious and the
quickest to learn both the written and the spoken language of the
adopted country, and among the easiest to be assimilated with the
population.
The cry raised by the
Russian anti-Semites against the backwardness of the Jew in adopting
the tongue and the manners of his birthplace, in the same breath in
which they urge the government to close the doors of its schools to
subjects of the Hebrew faith, reminds one of the hypocritical miser
who kept his gate guarded by ferocious dogs, and then reproached his
destitute neighbor with holding himself aloof. This country, where
the schools and colleges do not discriminate between Jew and
Gentile, quite another tale to tell. The several public evening
schools of the New York Ghetto, the evening school supported from
the Baron de Hirsch Fund, and the private establishments of a
similar character are attended by thousands
of Jewish immigrants, the great majority of which come here
absolutely ignorant of the language of their native country. Surely
nothing can be more inspiring to the public-spirited citizen,
nothing worthier of the interest of the student of immigration, than
the sight of a gray-haired tailor, a patriarch in appearance,
coming, after hard day's work at a sweat-shop, to spell "cat, mat,
rat," and to grapple with the difficulties of "th" and
"w." Such a spectacle may be seen in scores of the class-rooms in the
schools referred to. Hundreds of educated young Hebrews earn their
living and often pay their way through college by giving private
lessons in English in the tenement houses of the district,--a type
of young men and women peculiar to the Ghetto. The pupils of these
private tutors are the same poor, overworked sweat-shop "hands" of
whom the public hears so much and knows so little. A tenement house
kitchen turned, after a scanty supper, into a class-room, with the head of the family and his boarder bent over an
English school reader, may perhaps claim attention as one of the
curiosities of life in a great city; in the Jewish quarter, however,
it is a common spectacle.
Nor does the tailor or
peddler who hires these tutors, as a rule, content himself with an
elementary knowledge of the language of his new home. I know many
Jewish workmen who before they came here knew not a word of Russian,
and were ignorant of any book except the Scriptures, or perhaps the
Talmud, but whose range of English reading places them on a level
with the average college-bred American.
The innumerable Yiddish
publications with which the Jewish quarter is flooded are also a
potent civilizing and Americanizing agency. The Russian Jews of New
York, Philadelphia, and Chicago have within the last twenty years
created a vast periodical literature which furnishes intellectual
food not only to themselves but also to their brethren in Europe. A
feverish literary activity unknown among the Jews in Russia,
Romania, and Austria, but which has arisen here among the immigrants
from those countries, educates thousands of ignorant tailors and
peddlers, lifts their intelligence, facilitates their study of
English, and opens to them the doors of the English library. The
five million Jews living under the Czar had not a single Yiddish
daily paper even when the government allowed such publications,
while their fellow countrymen and co-religionists who have taken up
their abode in America publish seven dailies (six in New York and
one in Chicago), not to mention the countless Yiddish weeklies and
monthlies, and the pamphlets and books which to-day make New York
the largest Yiddish book market in the world. If much that is
contained in these publications is rather crude, they are in this
respect as good--or as bad--as a certain class of
English novels and periodicals from which they partly derive their
inspiration. On the other hand, their readers are sure to find in
them a good deal of what would be worthy of a more cultivated
language. They have among their contributors some of the best
Yiddish writers in the world, men of undeniable talent, and these
supply the Jewish slums with popular articles on science, on the
history and institutions of the adopted country, translations from
the best literatures of Europe and America, as well as original
sketches, stories, and poems of decided merit. It is sometimes said
(usually by those who know the Ghetto at second hand) that this
unnatural development of Yiddish journalism threatens to keep the
immigrant from an acquaintance with English. Nothing could be
further from the truth. The Yiddish periodicals are so many
preparatory schools from which the reader is sooner or later
promoted to the English newspaper, just as the several Jewish
theatres prepare his way to the Broadway playhouse, or as the
Yiddish lecture serves him as a stepping-stone to that
English-speaking self-educational society, composed of workingmen
who have lived a few years in the country, which is another
characteristic feature of life in the Ghetto. Truly, the Jews "do
not rot in their slum, but, rising, pull it up after them."
The only time when
Jewish laborers threatened to come in serious conflict with the
cause of American workingmen was during the great 'longshoremen's
strike of 1882, at the very beginning of the new era in the history
of Jewish immigration. Ignorant of the meaning of strikes, the
newcomers blindly allowed themselves to be persuaded by
representatives of ship-owners to take the places of former
employees. No sooner, however, had the situation been explained to
the "scabs" than they abandoned their wheelbarrows, amid the
applause of the striking Gentiles. Since then the Jewish workmen
have been among the more faithful members of the various
trades-unions of the country. So far from depressing wages and
bringing down the standard of living, the Jewish workingman has been
among the foremost in the struggle for the interest of the
wage-earning class of the country. If he brings with him a lower
standard of living, his keen susceptibilities, his "intellectual
avidity," and his "almost universal and certainly commendable desire
to improve his condition" impel him to raise that standard to the
level of
his new surroundings. Unlike some of the immigrants of other
nationalities, the Essex Street Jew does not remain here in the same
plight in which he came. Poor as he is, he strives to live like a
civilized man, and the money which another workingman perhaps might
spend on drink and sport he devotes to the improvement of his home
and the education of his children. If "it may be stated as axiomatic
that home-builders are good citizens," the Jewish immigrant makes a
very good citizen indeed.
I have visited the houses of many American
workingmen, in New England and elsewhere, as well as the residences
of their Jewish shopmates, and I have found scarcely a point of
difference. The squalor of the typical tenement house of the Ghetto
is far more objectionable and offensive to the people who are doomed
to live in it than to those who undertake slumming expeditions as a
fad, and is entirely due to the same economical conditions which are
responsible for the lack of cleanliness in the homes of such poor
workingmen as are classed among the most desirable contribution to
the population. The houses of the poor Irish laborers who dwell on
the outskirts of the great New York Ghetto (and they are not worse
than the houses occupied by the poor Irish families of the West
Side) are not better, in point of cleanliness, than the residences
of their Jewish neighbors. The following statement, which is taken
from the report made by the Tenement House Committee to the Senate
and Assembly of the State
of New York on January
17, 1895, throws light on the subject.
"It is evident," says
the committee, "that there are other potent causes besides density
of population at work to affect the death-rate of the tenement
districts, and the most obvious one is race or nationality. It will
be observed at once that the wards showing the greatest house
density combined with a low death-rate, namely the Tenth and Seventh
Wards, are very largely populated by Russian and Polish Jews. This
is, in fact, the Jewish quarter of the city. On the other hand, the
wards having the highest death-rate ... constitute two of the
numerous Italian colonies which are distributed through the city
.... The greatest density (57.2 tenants to a house) is in the
Tenth Ward (almost exclusively occupied by Jews), which also has the
lowest death-rate .... The low deathrates of the Seventh and Tenth
Wards are largely accounted for by the fact previously mentioned,
that they are populated largely by Russian Jews."
To be sure, life in a
Tenth Ward tenement house is wretched enough, but this has nothing
to do with the habits and inclinations of its inmates. It is a broad
subject, one which calls in question the whole economic arrangement
of our time, and of which the sweating system--the great curse of
the Ghetto--is only one detail.
Is the Russian Jew
responsible for the sweating system? He did not bring it with him.
He found it already developed here. In its varied forms it exists in
other industrial as well as in the tailoring trades. But far from
resigning himself to his burden the Jewish tailor is ever struggling
to shake it from his shoulder. Nor are his efforts futile. In many
instances the sweat-shop system bas been abolished or its curse
mitigated. The sweating system and its political ally, the "ward
heeler," are accountable for ninety-nine per cent of whatever vice
may be found in the Ghetto, and the Jewish tailor is slowly but
surely emancipating himself from both. "The redemption of the
workers must be effected by the workers themselves" is the motto of
the two dailies which the Jewish workingmen publish for themselves
in New York. The recurring tailor strikes, whose frequency has been
seized upon by the "funny men" of the daily press, are far less
droll that they are represented to be. Would that the public come
gain a deeper insight into these struggles than is afforded by
newspaper reports! Hidden under an uncouth surface would be found a
great deal of what constitutes the true poetry of modem life,--tragedy more heart-rending, examples of a heroism more touching,
more noble, and more thrilling, than anything that the richest
imagination of the romanticist can invent. While to the outside
observer the struggles may appear a fruitless repetition of
meaningless conflicts, they are, like the great labor movement of
which they are a part, ever marching onward, ever advancing.
The anti-Semitic
assertion that the Jew as a rule avoids productive labor, which is
pure calumny so far as the Jews of Russia, Austria, and Roumania are
concerned, would certainly be out of place in this country, where so
many of the Jewish immigrants are among the most diligent
wage-earners. As to the remainder, it includes, besides a large army
of poor peddlers, thousands of such "businessmen" as news-dealers and
rag-men, whose occupations are scarcely
less productive or more agreeable than manual labor.
Farming settlements of
Jews have not been very successful in this country. There are some
Jews in Connecticut, in New Jersey, and in the Western states, who
derive a livelihood from agriculture, but the majority of the Jewish
immigrants who took to tilling the soil in the eighties have been
compelled to sell or to abandon their farms, and to join the urban
population. But how many American farmers have met with a similar
fate! This experience is part of the same great economic question,
and it does not seem to have any direct bearing on the peculiar
inclinations or disinclinations of the Hebrew race. It may not be
generally known that in southern Russia there are many flourishing
farms which are owned and worked by Jews, although, owing to their
legal disabilities, the titles are fictitiously held by Christians.
Hundreds of Russian and Polish Jews have been
more or less successful in business, and the names of several of
them are to be found on the signs along Broadway.
The first educated Russian Hebrews to come to
this country were attracted neither by the American colleges nor by
the access of their race to a professional career. In the minds of
some cultured enthusiasts, the general craze for shaking oft the
dust of the native land and seeking shelter under the stars and
stripes crystallized in the form of a solution of the Jewish
question. Of the two movements which were set on foot in 1882 by the
Palestinians and the Americans, the American movement seemed the
more successful. Several emigrant parties (the Eternal People, New
Odessa) were sent out with a view to establishi ng
agricultural colonies. The whole Jewish race was expected by the
Americans to follow suit in joining the farming force of the United
States, and numbers of Jewish students left the Russian universities
and gymnasiums to enlist in the pioneer parties. All these parties
broke up, some immediately upon reaching New York, others, after an
abortive attempt to put their plans into practice, although in
several instances undertakings in the same direction have proved
partially successful. The would-be pioneers were scattered through
the Union, where they serve their brethren as physicians, druggists,
dentists, lawyers, or teachers.
Only from three to five
per cent of the vacancies in the Russian universities and
gymnasiums are open to applicants of the Mosaic faith. As a
consequence, the various university towns of Germany, Switzerland,
Belgium, France, and Austria have each a colony of Russo-Jewish
pilgrims of learning. The impecunious student, however, finds a
university course in those countries inaccessible. Much more
favorable in this respect is the United States, where students from
among the Jewish immigrants find it possible to sustain themselves
during their college course by some occupation; and this advantage
has to some extent made this country the Mecca of that class of
young men. It is not, however, always the educated young men, the
graduates of Russian gymnasiums, from whom the Russian members at
the American colleges are recruited. Not to speak of the hundreds of
immigrant boys and girls who reach the New York City College or the
Normal College by way of the grammar schools of the Ghetto, there
are in the colleges of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Boston,
as well as among
the professional men of the Jewish colonies, not a few former
peddlers or workmen who received their first lessons in the
rudimentary branches of education within the
walls of an American tenement house. I was once consulted by an
illiterate Jewish peddler of thirty-two who was at a loss to choose
between a medical college and a dry goods store. "I have saved two
thousand dollars," he said. "Some friends advise me to go into the
dry goods business, but I wish to be an educated man and live like
one."
The Russian-speaking
population is represented also in the colleges for women. There are
scores of educated Russian girls in the sweat-shops, and their life
is one of direst misery, of overwork in the shop, and of privations
at home.
Politically the Jewish quarter is among the
most promising districts in the metropolis. The influence of the
vote-buyer, which is the blight of every poor neighborhood in the
city, becomes in the Ghetto smaller and smaller. There is no method
of determining the number of votes which are secured for either of
the two leading parties by any of the several forms of bribery
enumerated by Mr. James Bryce.
If some immigrants have not the
"adequate conception of
the significance of our institutions," of which Vice-President
Fairbanks speaks, it is the American slum politician who gives the
newcomer lessons in that conception; and if it happens to be an
object lesson in the form of a two-dollar bill and a drink, the
political organization which depends upon such a mode of "rolling up
a big vote" is certainly as much to blame as the ignorant
bribe-taker.
The ward heeler is as
active in the Ghetto as elsewhere. Aided by an army of "workers,"
which is largely made up of the lowest dregs of the neighborhood, he
knocks, on election day, at the door of every tenement house
apartment, while on the street the vote market goes on in open
daylight as freely as it did before there was a Parkhurst to wage
war against a guilty police organization. This statement is true of
every destitute district, and the Jewish quarter is no exception to
the rule. As was revealed by the Lexow committee, some of the
leading district "bosses" in the great city, including a civil
justice, owe their power to the political co-operation of criminals
and women of the street. Unfortunately this is also the case with
the Jewish neighborhood, where every wretch living on the profits of
vice, almost without exception, is a member of some political club
and an active "worker" for one of the two "machines," and where,
during the campaign, every disreputable house is turned. into an
electioneering centre. If the Tenth Ward has come to be called "the
Klondike" of the police, so much the worse for the parties who are
directly responsible for the evil which justifies both that
appellation and the name of "Tenderloin," which is home by a more
prosperous neighborhood than the Ghetto.
The malady is painful
enough, but it is not the guilty politician from whom the remedy is
to be expected. As to the Jewish quarter, the doctrine of self-help
is practiced by the workingmen politically as well as economically.
In proportion as the intelligence of the district is raised by the
thousand and one educational agencies at work, "the many
characteristics of the best citizens," the Jews of the East Side
come to the front, and the power of the corruptionist wanes.
The Jewish immigrants
look upon the United States as their country, and when it engaged in
war they did not shirk their duty. They contributed three times
their quota of volunteers to the army, and they had their
representatives among the first martyrs of the campaign, two of the
brave American sailors who were wounded at Cardenas and Cienfuegos
being the sons of Hebrew immigrants.
The Russian Jew brings with him the quaint
customs of
a religion full of
poetry and of the sources of good citizenship. The orthodox
synagogue is not merely a house of prayer; it is an intellectual
centre, a mutual aid society, a fountain of self-denying altruism,
and a literary club, no less than a place of worship. The
study-rooms of the hundreds of synagogues, where the good old people
of the Ghetto come to read and discuss "words of law" as well as the
events of the day, are crowded every evening in the week with poor
street peddlers, and with those gray-haired, misunderstood
sweat-shop hands of whom the public hears every time a tailor strike
is declared. So few are the joys which this world has to spare for
those overworked, enfeebled victims of "the inferno of modern times"
that their religion is to many of them the only thing which makes
life worth living. In the fervor of prayer or the abandon of
religious study they forget the grinding poverty of their homes.
Between the walls of the synagogue, on the top floor of some
ramshackle tenement house, they sing beautiful melodies, some of
them composed in the caves and forests of Spain, where the wandering
people worshiped the God of their fathers at the risk of their
lives; and these and the sighs and sobs of the Days of Awe, the
thrill that passes through the heartbroken talithcovered
congregation when the shofar blows, the mirth which fills the house
of God and the tenement homes upon the Rejoicing of the Law, the
tearful greetings and humbled peace-makings on Atonement Eve, the
mysterious light of the Chanuccah (a festival in memory of the
restoration of the Temple in the time of the Maccabeans) candles,
the gifts and charities of Purim (a festival commemorating the.
events in the time of Esther), the joys and kingly solemnities of
Passover,--all these pervade the atmosphere of the Ghetto with a
beauty and a charm without which the life of its older residents
would often be one of unrelieved misery. |