Part 14

w has had to make is the thing that has differentiated him and made him strong. Those first Christians--Primitive Christians--who lived from the time of Paul to that of Constantine, were a simple, direct, sincere and honest people--opinionated no doubt, and obstinately dogmatic, but with virtues that can never be omitted nor waived. They were economical, industrious and filled with the spirit of brotherhood, and they possessed a fine pride concerning their humility, as most ascetics do. Humility is a form of energy. It is simply going after the thing by another route, and deceiving yourself as to the motive. The Primitive Christians had every characteristic that distinguished the Jew of the Middle Ages--those characteristics which invite persecution and wax strong under it. Poverty and persecution seem necessary factors in fixing upon a people a distinctive and peculiar religion. Persecution and poverty have no power to stamp out a religion--all they do is to stain it deeper into the hearts of its votaries. Centuries of starvation and repression deepened the religious impulses of the Irish, and it has ever been the same with the Jews. If the Jew is criticized in America, it is on account of that buttinski bumptiousness upon which he has no monopoly, but which goes with the newly-made rich of any nationality who have little to recommend them beyond the walletoski. There are no poor Jews natives of America, and it is worth while noting that our richest citizens are not Jews, either. American-born Jews have enough. The poverty-stricken Jews in this country come from Russia, Bulgaria and Roumania; and their children will have money to loan, if not to incinerate, because they possess the virtues that beckon all good things in their direction. America is the true Judaic Zion. Here there are nearly two million Jews, and their religion is fast taking the form of a healthful Roycroftism. The downfall of primitive Christianity dates from the day Constantine embraced it, and thereby made it popular. Prosperity is a form of disintegration--a ripening of the fruit. Things succeed only that they may wither. The business of every great religion is to die, and thus fertilize others. The Jew has survived every foe save success. Civilization is now adopting him, and Liberal Judaism is fast becoming a Universal Religion, taught in fact, if not in name, by priests, preachers and muftis of all denominations. The end of the Jew is near--he has ceased to be peculiar. * * * * * Wolfgang Goethe was born in the city of Frankfort in Seventeen Hundred Forty-nine. Goethe gives us a very vivid description of Frankfort as he remembered it in his childhood days. He describes it as a town within a town, a fortress within a fortress. Then he tells us of a walled enclosure in this walled city, which was to him a very terrible place--it was the Ghetto, or Jews' Quarter. Through it ran the Judengasse, or street of the Jews. It was a place packed with human beings--houses, hallways, alleys, sidewalks and porches swarming with children. Goethe tells how he at times would peep through the iron gates of the Ghetto, but as a child he never ventured in. The children told one another how human sacrifices were offered in the synagogues, and as proof, pictures of Abraham and Isaac were brought forth--that proved the point. There were plenty of men in the Ghetto who looked exactly like Abraham--goodness gracious! In this Ghetto at Frankfort was born, in Seventeen Hundred Forty-three, Mayer Anselm, afterward Mayer Anselm Rothschild. When Goethe took his peep into the Ghetto, this lad was about twelve years old--Goethe was six. Forty years later these men were to meet, and meet as equals. The father of Mayer Anselm was Anselm Moses. He could not boast a surname, for Jews, not being legal citizens, simply aliens, had no use for family-names. If they occasionally took them on, the reigning duke might deprive them of the luxury at any time, without anesthetics. If a man had two names, say, "Anselm Moses," it meant that his name was Anselm and that he was the son of Moses. Mayer Anselm was the son of Anselm. Rothschild means "Red Shield," and this was the distinguishing sign on the house. All the people in that house were "Red Shields." The house was seven stories high, and at one time a hundred people lived in it. Later, when the name became popular, all of the people in that house called themselves "Rothschilds." In Goethe's time, there were just one hundred sixty houses in the Frankfort Ghetto, and these were occupied by two thousand three hundred Jews. Goethe says that the practise of walling the Jews in was to facilitate taxation--the Jews being honored by an assessment quite double that which Christians paid. At one time any Jew who paid two hundred fifty florins was exempt from wearing a yellow hat and the yellow O on his breast. Many private houses, everywhere, have walls around them, and the plan of dividing different nationalities from each other, by setting apart a certain section of the town for each, was a matter of natural selection, everywhere practised. Mayer Anselm grew up with never a thought that he belonged to a "peculiar people," nor did the idea of persecution ever trouble him. The only peculiar people are those who do not act and think as we do. Who are peculiar? Oh, the others, the others, the others. There was a big family for Anselm Moses to look after. All were hearty and healthy. The Mosaic Law says nothing about ventilation, but outside of this little lapse it is based on a very commonsense plan of hygiene. One thing which adds greatly to the physical endowment of Jewish children, and almost makes up to the child of the Ghetto for the lack of woods and fields, is that he is not launched on the sea of life with a limited supply of love. Jewish children do not refer to their father as "the Gov'ner," and elderly women as "Salem Witches," because the Jews as a people recognize the rights of the child. And the first right of a child is the right to be loved. In the average Christian household, until a very few years ago, the child grew up with the feeling constantly pressed upon him that he was a usurper and an interloper. Such questions as, "Where would you get anything to eat if I did not provide it?" were everywhere flying at the heads of lisping babyhood. The words "must" and "shall" were often heard, and that obedience was a privilege and not a duty was nowhere taught. All parents quoted Solomon as to the beauties of the rod; and that all children were perverse, obstinate and stiff-necked was assumed to be a fact. To break the will of a child was a very essential thing to do. The lack of the spirit of brotherhood that the Jew has encountered from the outside world has found a balance in an increased expression of love within his family. That most atrocious English plan of taking the child from his parents at a tender age and placing him in a boarding-school managed by holluschickies has never been adopted by the Jews. Fear, repression and shock to vibrating nerves through threats, injunctions and beatings have fixed in the Christian races a whole round of "children's diseases," which in our ignorance we attribute to "the will of God." Let this fact be stated, that old folks who are sent over the hill to the poorhouse have invited their fate. And conversely, elderly people who are treated with courtesy, consideration, kindness and respect are those who, in manhood's morning, have sown the seeds of love and kindness. Water rises to the height of its source; results follow causes; chickens come home to roost; action and reaction are equal; forces set in motion continue indefinitely in one direction. The laws of love are as exact as the laws of the tides that moan and cry and beat upon the shores, the round world over. A family of ten children born and reared in a noisome Ghetto, and all strong and healthy? Impossible, you say, yet such is the fact, and not a rare exception either. Happiness is the great prophylactic, and nothing is so sanitary as love, even though it be flavored with garlic. * * * * * The father of Mayer Anselm was a traveling merchant--call him a pedler, a Jewish pedler, and have done with it. He made trips outside of the Ghetto, and used to come back with interesting tales of adventure that he would relate to the household and neighbors who would drop in. Not many Jews ventured outside of the Ghetto--to do so was to invite insult, robbery and violence. However, to get out is to grow. This man traded safety for experience and so got out and grew. He evidently knew how to take care of himself. He was courageous, courteous, intelligent, diplomatic. He made money. And always he wore the yellow hat and the yellow patch upon his breast. In the "Red Shield" there was usually at least one Rabbi. One of the sons of Anselm Moses must be a Rabbi. The parents of little Mayer Anselm set him apart for the synagogue--he was so clever at reciting prayers and so glib with responses. Then he had an eczema for management, and took charge of all the games when the children played Hebrew I-Spy through the hallways and dark corners of the big, rambling and mysterious "Red Shield." Little Mayer must have been nine years old when his father first took him along on one of his trips. It was a wonderful event--they were gone three days, and when they returned the boy entertained the whole Judengasse with tales, slightly hand-illumined, about the wonderful things they had seen. One thing he learned, and that was that Christians were not the drunken, fighting, treacherous and bloodthirsty people he had supposed--at least, they were not all bad. Not once were they insulted or molested. They had called at the great house or castle of the Landgrave to sell handkerchiefs, combs and beads to the servants, and accidentally they had met the Landlord, himself. He it was who owned the "Red Shield." The agent of the Landgrave came every month to collect the rent from everybody. That word "Landgrave" simply meant "Landlord," a term still used even in America, where there are, of course, no Lords, only "ramrods." The Landgrave had invited Anselm Moses into his library to see his wonderful collection of coins, and Mayer Anselm, of course, slipped in, too. To describe the wonders of that house would take a book as big as the Torah--I think so! The Landgrave had a son, aged eleven, going on twelve, and his name was William. He wasn't so big as Mayer, and Mayer wouldn't be so old as William for a year, and even then he wouldn't. Children know nothing of social caste. Caste is a disease of grown-ups. It is caused by uric acid in the ego. Children meet as equals--they respond naturally without so much as a thought as to whether they ought to love one another or not. William got acquainted with Mayer by holding up a big speckled marble, and then in a burst of good-fellowship giving the marble to the little stranger boy, all before a word had been said. Then while the Landgrave was showing his treasures to Anselm who himself was a collector in a small way, the boys slipped out of the door, and William took Mayer to see the stables. "What's it for?" asked William, pointing to the yellow patch sewed tight to the breast of Mayer's jacket. "That?" answered Mayer proudly, "why, that means that I am a Jew, and I live in the Ghetto!" William gave a little start of alarm. He looked at the other lad, so brown and sturdy and frankly open-eyed, and said slowly, "You can't be a Jew, because--because Jews eat children!" "I'm a Jew--my father is a Jew--all our folks are Jews--the Jews are the Chosen People of God!" Little Mayer spoke slo