Jewish London

A hundred thousand men, women, and children, some of them fugitives still suffering the punishment of Cain, others just sloughing the Ghetto skin, yet others in whose ears the “hep, hep” of the Continent is a long-forgotten cry. A great congregation, the majority still standing (in its faith) with the Law-giver at Sinai, while a few are marching in the vanguard of the sceptics. An eager, restless body, most devout of peoples, yet swiftest of foot in the commercial race; fascinating microcosm of the latter-day world, yet branded with the mark of antiquity; full of the hopefulness of youth, yet seamed and scarred with the martyrdom of ages. Such, in brief, are the Jews of London.

Let us turn aside into the Whitechapel Ghetto, where they most do congregate. Many of its narrow courts and mean slums have fallen before the fiat of the sanitary authority or the advance of the factory owner. Yet enough still remains of its original quaintness, its babel of tongues and chaos of races, to make it stand prominently out as a unique entity from the dull grey mass of the East-End population. Its denizens are a complicated piece of human patchwork, with the ringleted Pole at one point, the Dutch Jew at another, the English Hebrew in his own corner, and the Gentile coster¹ running like a strange thin thread through the design. The whole is a reproduction in little of the stricken Jewish world. If you would understand the immortal agony of Jewry, go into the East-End colony. Its cosmopolitanism is symbolic of the vagabondage of the race. Its beshawled women with their pinched faces, its long-coated men with two thousand years of persecution stamped in their manner, its chaffering and huckstering, its hunger, its humour, the very Yiddish jargon itself which is scrawled on its walls and shop windows, are part of the grand passion of the chosen people.

But it is its utterly alien aspect which strikes you first and foremost. For the Ghetto is a fragment of Poland torn off from Central Europe and dropped haphazard into the heart of Britain—a re-banished Jewry weeping; beside the waters of “Modern Babylon.”

On Sunday Middlesex Street (better known as the “Lane”) and its adjoining thoroughfares are a howling pandemonium of cosmopolitan costerism, a curious tangle of humanity, with the Englishman (Jew and Gentile) in possession and the alien in the background. In these congested streets you can be clothed like an aristocrat for a few shillings, fed al fresco like an epicure for sixpence, and cured of all your bodily ills for a copper coin—the chorus of the children in the Hebrew classes often answering the roar of the gutter merchant, like a new and grotesque Church antiphony. The “Lane” on Sunday is, indeed, the last home of the higher costerism. Round its stalls the coster humour reaches its finest fancies, the coster philosophy its profoundest depths, the coster oratory its highest flights. But the most abiding impression it leaves on your mind as you struggle out of its seething, shouting, gesticulating population is of infinite picturesqueness, and the life-stream tumbling like a swirling torrent along its course.

On the weekday, however, the scene is transformed. The noise and bustle are gone. The alien with his Yiddish holds the field. You are in a city of endless toil. All day long and far into the night the factories make dismal music in the Ghetto. From break of day till the going-down of the sun rings the song of the coster through its grimy streets. “Weiber, Weiber! heimische Beigel!”² sing out the women, with handkerchief drawn tightly over head. “Customeers, customeers! veer are you?” chime in the men. “Stockings feer poor (pairs) a shilling!” groans a hapless elder driven in his old age to tempt fortune in a strange land. Often, soon after dawn, the costers are quarrelling with one another for a suitable “pitch,” with a sneer, perhaps, at a Gentile sleeping off a public-house debauch on the pavement; and long after the shadows have lengthened in the Ghetto they are still vouching by their own lives or the kindness of the Shem Yisboroch (God) to Israel for the quality of their wares. So spins the toiling Ghetto round its daily orbit.

Why do these Jews labour so? It is because of their passionate yearning for a “place in the sun.” Unlike the Gentile, they are in the East-End, not of it—strangers and sojourners in its midst; alien Dick Whittingtons in side curls and “jupizes” (long coats), who have put down their bundles a while to peer into the promised land beyond, and thereafter rest not till they have retired beaten from the struggle or found social salvation in Maida Vale.

And yet this Ghetto is not all poor. It is really homespun lined with ermine, Dives cheek by jowl with Lazarus.³ These industrious female costers, for instance, arguing volubly with reluctant customers, have left a husband—working in a factory—who is preparing to blossom into an employer, a son retailing jewellery in a second street, and a daughter selling hosiery in a third.

In a few years a vigorous pull and a pull all together will have hauled the family up to a plane of comparative affluence and the Ghetto have become a distant memory. Quite a crop of Jewish nouveaux riches, too, has ripened in the various shops and factories that stud the Ghetto.

And if the Ghetto is not wholly poor neither is it entirely famished. Kosher restaurants abound in it; kosher butcher shops are clustered in thick bunches in its most hopeless parts (seven of them at the junction of Middlesex Street and Wentworth Street), and if the expert handling of the fowls on the stalls by ill-clad Jewesses is not a revelation of epicureanism in humble life, then, most assuredly, things are not what they seem.

Only the superficial think this Jewish colony a mere vale of tears. In the groan of its machinery and the roar of its markets I can distinguish an unmistakable titter—the titter of the Hebrew at his would-be converters, the full-throated laughter of the Ghetto at the Yiddish play, the merriment of the buxom and placid-faced Jewess taking the air by her street-door, the fun of the youth in corduroys who finds a foretaste of Gan Eiden (Paradise) in a game of cricket on the broad spaces of Bell Lane or the green fields of Frying-Pan Alley. On Chometz Battel night⁴ the Ghetto even gives itself over to wild carnival till the flaring naphtha jets on the stalls have died to a spluttering flicker and the Christian world is fast asleep. Nay! let no one call the Ghetto melancholy who has not looked in at its dancing clubs and watched an old crony of seventy at a Hebrew wedding foot the furious Kosatzki with a gray old dog of ten winters more.