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It is there a punishable offence to use the cherem as a means of extortion and annoyance; therefore, in this matter of the cherem, as in that of the dram-shops, and of the houses of bad fame (both so largely in the hands of the Jews), as well as in that of the rate of usury, the Russian government has the solution of all these so-called "Jewish Questions" in its own hands. Such questions are simply matters of domestic legislation, affairs for the minister of the interior and for the police | section.

It is rather difficult to see how the banks are to be prevented from lending money to Jews so long as they command the very best securities, but there can be no doubt as to the fact that the Jews lend more than they borrow. They may do the one occasionally, but the other is their great raison d'être; and as eight-tenths of an ignorant peasantry and nine-tenths of a bankrupt aristocracy are in debt to them, it will be difficult to prevent the Russians from hating usurers who, whether they be Jewish agents in Podolia, or Hindoo money-lenders in the Deccan, or "gombeens" in Galway, are as a class all alike rapacious and successful. These usurers might be less essential if the tax

excessive; but as in the gubernaja of Novgorod the imports exceed the rental by 565,100 roubles, the moujik must borrow, and the blame of his misery cannot be entirely charged upon the Jews.

The next grievance against the Jews is that they object to registration. They certainly do avoid, when they can, having their births, deaths, marriages, removals registered; neither are they always anxation of the Russian peasantry were less ious to enrol themselves under the heads of their occupations, since "usurer," "brothel-keeper," and "informer" do not look much better on the leaf of a register than they do on a head-stone. Like the Raskolnic, the Jews have also a religious prejudice against being numbered. Yet here again the Austrian government has disposed of the difficulty, and every Austrian Jew is now not only registered, but is obliged to have a surname to which he answers: hence the mass of names like "Morgenstern" and " Abendstern," which have come to replace the "Chaims," "Itzigs," and "Yankels," that used to prevail among the Hebrews.

As far as the grain trade is concerned, a calculation shows that last year not more than one-fifth of the harvest produce of Russia had been garnered, or brought to the Russian sea-ports. The reason of this, says the Internationale GetreideZeitung,

is that the Jews, since the disturbances, have ceased to deal with the Russian population;

will lend the farmers and landlords no more money, will buy no more grain of them, and will not use their carrying and mercantile machinery for shipping grain. The consequence is that considerable quantities of corn rot in the fields and are eaten by the mice. Messrs. Ignace Ephrussi and Co., the well-known bankers of Odessa, and the most important house in South Russia, have dissolved a business established since 1834. The withdrawal of capital, activity, and intelligence from the Empire will seriously affect the grain-markets of Europe, and must be in the first place ruinous to Odessa, which, after complaining of the Jews and their bargains, is left to regret the ruin which the outraged Hebrews are able to bring upon it.

The last and heaviest item in the list of Jewish sins is the matter of usury. To the old law commercial avocations were unknown: the idea of capital had not been seized by the patriarchs, whose wealth lay chiefly in flocks and herds; and usury, when it first appeared, was absolutely condemned. Long before the Christian era the Jews, however, having learned the methods of the Syrian trad ers, became traders themselves, and from the hour that they ceased to possess a country, they have thrown themselves with passion into the traffic in money. By their superior intelligence, sobriety, perspicacity, and mutual support, they Every country has the Jews that it dehave now obtained the monetary control serves to have; and if the Russian and of the world. The report from Odessa Polish Jew may be conceded to be an uncomplains that they have benefited too pleasant specimen of his race, he has at much by the loans which can be effected least a rather more intellectual life than by the State banks. "Though the amount the peasant whom he cheats. Nor are of taxes paid by the Jews is small, they the Russian Jews likely to improve in take to themselves the right of borrowing their present medium. Till they have millions. With their millions, they mo- equal rights they will continue to hold to. nopolize the trade in grain, buy the stand-gether in that aggressive fashion which ing corn, command local labor, in short, plunge into a whole series of usurious experiments."

Mr. Goldwin Smith calls tribalism. And what notions of equity are they likely to learn in districts where the lands of Polish

nobles, put up to forced sale by the gov- | robbed, and murdered (1880) in Odessa; ernment, can be bought in by themselves while in Galicia, during the revolt of the at a nominal price? What sense of jus- peasants against the landowners, not one tice is cultivated by imperial judges who hair of one Jew's head was touched by receive bribes and expect gifts? Why insurgents bent upon a rough and ready should the Russian Jew go softly when revenge for old and oppressive abuses. M. capital hardly exists but in his hands, Basily ought to have thought of this modwhen society, such as it is, is held to- ern instance before writing that "these gether by Jewish loans; when the country, riots, as measures of popular justice, had half peopled, and quarter civilized, is crip- no admixture of cupidity." The Jews pled by an overgrown and unproductive themselves value the property destroyed army?* in Odessa at 1,187,881 roubles; ConsulBut it is intolerable, retorts the Russian | General Stanley puts it under 3,000l.; Jew-baiter, that the Semitic brain should and, whether we adopt the maximum or assert any superiority over the Slavonic the minimum, the facts remain that propone. This brings us to the extraordinary erty has been destroyed, and that, as a measures recommended in some of the result of the "effervescences" of the last governments. We will not pause to speak two years, one hundred thousand miseraof M. Chegarym's pamphlet on "The An- ble families of the Hebrews have been nihilation of the Jews;" its amazing title driven from their homes; no restitution speaks for itself; and we will pass rather has been offered to them; and no money to the recommendations sent in from has been forwarded to the Mansion House Kherson and Pereyczlar. Jews are not Fund. Well might the lord mayor say of to be allowed to enter any schools of the these creatures, "who had escaped from higher education; Jews are not to teach Russia mostly with their lives and the in any school; Jews are not to have Chris-scant rags that cover them, that their distian servants; Jewesses are not to wear tress and destitution are unspeakable." silk or satin; and Jews are not to dispense Lord Shaftesbury says that "since the medicines. The last restriction reminds age of Titus nothing so hideous has been us of a mediæval squib which attributes seen;" and Victor Hugo "laments the to Jussuf, prince of the Jews of Constan- monstrous phenomenon of persecution tinople, the following advice to the perse- which has risen before the eyes of Chriscuted Jews of Spain: — tian Europe."

Of what you say concerning the King of Spain wishing to make you Christians, do so, since you cannot do otherwise. As to the order to plunder you of your goods, make your sons merchants, and plunder them of theirs. They destroy, you say, your synagogues: make your sons clergymen, that they may profane their religion and their churches. If they afflict you with other vexations, strive to get State employment for your children, in order to avenge yourselves. For what you say of taking away your lives, make your sons apothecaries and physicians, and take away theirs.

Whether General Ignatieff ever heard this story or not we know not, but it is hard to believe that he and his friends had no fanatical or covetous motives, or that the effervescences were not got up to order. Grant that the Russian and Polish Jews have a thousand disagreeable qualities, the Galician Jews are not so very unlike them as to explain away these two facts, viz., that Russian Jews are baited,

* Peace footing: 839,075 men, and 94,625 horses. War: 2,149,300 men, and 257,300 horses.

† Amador de los Rios quotes this forged letter from

the MS. in the Library of Madrid. It is also copied into a curious MSS. history of the nobility of Provence

which exists in the Library of Grasse.

But whither are the Jewish emigrants to turn?

Germany cries out against Jewish im migrants; the exiles have been eminently unsuccessful in the United States; while Hungary exclaims that, having already far more Hebrews than she knows what to do with, she cannot and she will not have a hundred thousand more Jews quartered upon her.

The Jewish population of Hungary is about five hundred thousand, and, thanks to this fact, and to strong agitation on the part of those ultra-Liberals who would fain upset M. Tisza's government, and at all times prefer fishing in troubled waters, effervescences have also arisen in Hun. gary. The Jewish question, of which Hommel says that "it is the most burning one of our decade," there promises many complications, and the disease of persecution has already exhibited the familiar premonitory symptom. A Hungarian delegate at the Dresden Conference rose up to tell a monstrous tale; and a Hungarian press correspondent, belong. ing to the anti-Semitic party, promulgates as authentic the murder of a young Chris tian girl, called Esther Solomozy.

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After the most diligent search her body
could not be recovered. It appears to be a
fact that large sums of money were offered to
the girl's mother by the Jews to induce her to
represent her daughter as being always of a
roving disposition, and possessed of such a
mania for wandering that she was likely to have
strayed away to some relations at a distance.
It is a further fact that the two Jewish boys
whose statements about Esther first led to the
belief in her murder, have never retracted their
assertions, or even contradicted themselves.
The magistrate who conducted the inquiry,
wishing to trap one of them, said, "Oh! but
Esther is alive, for she has come home." The
boy replied gravely, "That cannot be, or else
we are not alive." To baffle him further, the
magistrate added, "Well, I am going to sum-
mon her now."
The reply was, "As miracles
do not happen nowadays, there is no resurrec-
tion possible for the girl whose throat we saw
cut."
The inhabitants of the district of Tisza-
Eszlar are in a state of excitement, and this
story cannot fail to add a dark page to the his-
tory of fanaticism.

and in 1490, Juan di Passimento was
added to the list of Spanish saints be-
cause of his supposed sacrifice at Guardia.
The same things happened in England.
For attempting to crucify a child at Nor-
wich, they were fined twenty thousand
marks (A.D. 1226). They crucified a child
at Lincoln, and, after a mockery of a trial
(A.D. 1255), eighteen Jews were hanged,
and little St. Hugh was canonized. For
the crucifixion of a child at Northampton,
fifty were hanged; and a few years later,
(A.D. 1287) the Jews were sent out of En-
gland, where they did not reappear till
they received permission from Cromwell
to settle in London, and to build a Span-
ish
synagogue there.

All this is horrid enough, but, urges the Hungarian agitator, "this particular murder must be true, for the Jews cut Esther's throat two days before Easter, just as the Jews of Damascus did to the Père Thomas." Thomas the Capucin We are quite convinced that it will do and his servant disappeared in February, so, though not in the sense in which the 1839. A Jewish barber and seven aged Hungarian writer intended it; for, when Jewish merchants were fastened on as his the newspapers announced, a few weeks sacrificial murderers, tormented, and inlater, that the body of Esther had been duced to make something which the found in the Theiss, the discovery of her French consul treated as a confession. uninjured corpse was most unwelcome to They afterwards stoutly denied everythe agitators. They hastened to declare, thing that they had admitted, and the first, that it had never been found; next, Austrian consul, M. Merlato, tried to that, having been found and buried, it soothe the popular excitement, but advice ought to be dug up for a fresh examina- such as his is seldom listened to. A gention; thirdly, that the editor of the Freie eral rising on the part of the Syrian Presse was a Jew; and, finally, that the Christians took place, and though Sir whole influence of the house of Roths- Moses Montefiore, always generous and child had been used in Vienna to hush up patriotic, went to Cairo, to obtain redress the tragedy. This extraordinary accusa- from headquarters for his co-religionists, tion that of sacrificing a young Chris- the populace is to this day convinced that tian child, or maiden, at Easter is the Père Thomas fell a sacrifice to Talquite familiar to the Jews. They have mudic rites at the Paschal feast. In got a specific name for it, as if for the Roumania, in Moldavia, in Russia, and in plague or the cholera, and they expect its Poland, the same belief still obtains, and reappearance from time to time, while a Russian writer says that " as Easter they are painfully aware that it is ever, approaches the terror of the peasantry like the stormy petrel, the herald of a is quite unfeigned." So we imagine is new persecution. In 1080 the Jews were their fear of ghosts, and their belief in all banished from France, and their wealth the rossalka; just so unfeigned is the confiscated, on account of the sacrifice of Highlander's credence that such and such a boy at their Passover. In 1432 they a lake has its kelpie or its "water-horse;" were said to have pricked St. Wernher of and still more nervous is the Roman vineBacharach to death indeed it is note-dresser about the evil eye, or the Limousin worthy that the greater number of these peasant about the were-wolf. Time was imputed crimes happened in that fifteenth when that mysterious wolf had his thoucentury which was so fatal to the Jews all sands of victims, and when learned bishover Europe. In 1442, three Israelites ops composedly sent to the stake wretched were reported to have murdered a child women who on one day in the week beat Trent, and all the Jews were seized, came wolves! Yet the French peasant tortured, and robbed. In 1443, the Jews of to-day is not encouraged to fear the of Milan, when accused of the same were-wolf, and has never with his bodily crime, had to pay twenty thousand florins; | eyes beheld the animal he dreads, so he

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has less excuse for fearing it than the of Rothschild which is worthy of being Russian peasant has for anticipating the commemorated wherever the words patripossibility of a murder which has a reli- otism and charity are known. Five thou gious or sacrificial object. To him are sand persons were brought by Baron well known both the crimes of the self. Rothschild to the outlying quarters of mutilators, and of the Stranniké (who Clignancourt, Mont Parnasse, and the think it right to take the lives of heretics), like. New houses had been painted and and he is aware of the baffled efforts of papered for them, and food and bedding the police to deal with the Bezpopotzi of sent down to meet the exiles. Each one Yaroslav, who murder new-born infants. of them received Is. 3d. a day until some Such incidents explain how an ignorant means, were discovered to render each peasantry will drink in any tale of hor-individual independent. These five thou rors, were it ten times as lugubrious as that of Esther, the maid of Tisza-Eszlar. But Esther will have her victims, as she already has her adherents. The riots in Presburg may be said to be dedicated to her memory, and, to lay the disturbance which has been raised by her name, the troops have had to be called out in the region of the Theiss. The Russian press is delighted, because there is now another Christian country which can divide with holy Russia the disgrace of Jew-baiting; but, in spite of its sombre and self-gratulatory prognostications, there is every of an English protectorate. reason to hope that a firm and enlightened government will render any continuance of this unprincipled agitation impossible within the limits of the Austrian Empire.

Various schemes were started last year for housing the exiled Jews. Their emigration to America proved a miserable failure, and Mr. Laurence Oliphant's scheme for planting them along the brook Jabbok was utterly chimerical. English Protestants looked with greater favor on the fund collected by Lady Strangford and the Earl of Shaftesbury for the colonization of north Syria by the Jews. But this idea does not meet with a hearty response from the Jews themselves: they do not cordially wish to be taken back to Palestine or its borders; though, on the other hand, it must be said that the Jews of Bucharest have combined to form colonies at Lydda, and factories at Jaffa, which promise well for the future of their trade along the Levant. The Mansion House Fund has had a great and a deserved success. With such a chairman for its executive committee as Sir Julian Goldsmid, it has been able to do wonders. Not the faintest suspicion of proselytising has attached to that noble expression of English sympathy, and it has deserved the praise of a very practical people for the very practical nature of the work it accomplished through the trying summer of 1882. Paris has been the scene of an immigration at the expense of the house |

sand persons make a large deficit, even in the purse of a Rothschild, and still the Jewish question looms darkly on the horizon, unanswered as regards the local habitation of many thousands of Hebrews. In England there are hearts and brains which in the face of the Jewish difficulty are elaborating a large measure for their relief. But we fear they have little to hope for from the scheme advocated by M. Cazalet in connection with the project for the Euphrates Valley railway, as backed by the universal panacea

In the present state of the Egyptian question it would be premature for us to speculate how many decades must elapse before an emigration such as M. Cazalet sketches can be resolved on, not to say carried out in Syria; and it will be more to the purpose, before bringing this paper to a close, to inquire how the Jews regard the question of a return to Palestine.

Without being obliged to believe the cynical story of the Jew, who said that he and his were pas assez bêtes to return to Jerusalem, it will suffice to say that the Jewish mind is not at this moment turned towards a reoccupation of the old historic boundaries. Three classes of minds object to it. The first consists of the largethinking persons who would not limit the brilliant prospects of the spiritual future of the Jewish race within a geographical boundary. They believe that the Jerusa lem of the latter-day promises is not a local habitation, just as there are Christians who feel that the mere restoration of the Israelites to Palestine would be no true fulfilment of prophecy; the good things of the Land of Promise having been but types of Jehovah's love to his people, now so much more clearly declared in the person and mission of Christ. A very opposite class are the ultra-orthodox, who feel that it must be impious to buy land, or to have land bought for them, in the country which they expect to receive again directly from the hand of God. Practical thinkers, again, recognize that the country of Pales

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tine is too poor and too small to afford of in "I cheated you? ha! ha! and nourishment to over six million He now what do you propose that I should give brews; perhaps even to afford standing you my friendship in return for your conroom for them all, were they to be sud-tempt?" He rose and went to the door, and denly swept back within its limits. They added, "You see that it was no use to disturb are also aware that under Turkish officials me." I had certainly found a different man in their lives and fortunes would be very Jerusalem from the one I had left at Doubno.

secure.

in.

The Jews are the least proselytizing As matters stand at present, the Jews people in the world. They consider the who do inhabit their own land are poor, truth, or rather the knowledge of it, to be dirty, and unthriving; yet it is none the a national perquisite, and by no means inless true, that an odd change of manners tended as either glad tidings or great joy. and temper comes over even the poorest for all nations. Their sermons exhort to Jew as soon as he treads again the streets deeds of kindness and to almsgiving, but of that city of David, to breathe the air never to any endeavor to disseminate the of which is wisdom, while its soil is hap-doctrines to which men owe their moral piness to the living, and to the buried dignity and their spiritual life. Proselytes, dead insures a share in the first resurrec- from Judaism are also rare. Isaac Distion. Prince Lubomirsky, once an exten-raeli, even after he had had his own son sive landowner, and owner of Christian baptized, seemed to take a sort of grim and Jewish souls (to use the proper Rus- pleasure in chronicling, in his "Genius of sian term), met in Jerusalem an old tenant | Judaism," the small success of the Lonof his own who would not so much as recognize his former lord.

"How, then, do you not recognize me? I am the Prince of Doubno." He turned roughly aside. "Oh! I recognize you well enough, but I wish to be let alone," and as he mur mured a word which surely was "Raca!" he brushed his sleeve, and disappeared into a side

street.

Much scandalized, and rather vexed, I narrated my adventure at my hotel, where I found that it surprised no one but myself. I was informed that the Jews, feeling themselves to be here on their own ground, hate us all, and particularly dislike the Russians. I determined to inform myself with regard to Yankel. I had always had easy relations with him at Doubno. If he came up to the castle while I was at dinner, I used to give him a glass of wine, and then he would drink my health, after kissing my sleeve. Yankel is now an elder in Jerusalem, rich, benevolent, and well thought of in the City, where, being Cahen, he reads prayers. I used all my influence to have a visit from him at my hotel. At last Yankel came. As I entered he rose up. He no longer kissed my sleeve; it was rather for me timidly to offer my hand. He took it with visible repugnance. "You seem to have a grudge against me; what have I done to you" "Why have you come to Jerusalem?" "I have come as a pilgrim : to us as well as to you it is a Holy City." He shook his head. "Are you happy in Jerusalem?" "Certainly; the City is holy and beautiful; only people will come to it who have nothing to do here." Jerusalem is holy, I grant you, but it is not beautiful." "If you don't like it, why do you come here to annoy those who come here to pray?" I now lost my temper. "Why, my friend Yankel, even though you do live in the Holy City, you might as well be civil to me, if it were only for the sake of all you cheated me

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don Mission. A good many conversions have been effected lately in Alexandria, and the last Russian return puts the number of converts at three hundred and ninety-eight, which is however but a small proportion out of the ten thousand five hundred and seventy-one souls reported to have recently joined the Orthodox Church. All conversions in countries where legal disabilities exist must be viewed with suspicion, whether they are obtained by benevolent persons among the indigent and unthriving, or have been adopted from prudential motives by the place-hunting class. Genuine converts to dogmatic Christianity-such as Neander, the late Dr. Wolff, the Père Ravignan, Dr. Paulus Cassel, Dr. Edersheim, and Adolph Saphir- are as rare as they are interesting.

The Jewish race exhibits a peculiar power of amalgamation, without real fusion or union-witness the existence of several thousand, who, near the ancient Thessalonica, conform outwardly to Mahometanism, without really abjuring their national creed, and without allowing intermarriages with the Turks. In all countries they catch something of the prevailing spirit of the age of that Zeitgeist which is the unseen compeller of all our minds, and against which even Hebrew tenacity itself is not proof. For example, the liberal and philosophical deism of the French a thing of the past in Paris. In Gersynagogues threatens to make rabbinism many we note such a drifting into indifference alike to the Mosaic Law and to the Christianity professed around them, that a large portion of its modern infidel

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