THE NUMBERS AND THE POVERTY OF THE JEWS.
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IT is hard for any one who reads the book which Mr. Fisher Unwin has just published upon the Jews of London to refrain from asking why the Jews are less than eight hundred millions, and why they are as a nation the poorest of all the white peoples. Mr. C. Russell and Mr. H. S. Lewis, whose essays make np the book, are both 'of them qualified observers, and they both of them, like all others who have discussed the subject, affirm that the Jews are to an exceptional degree a healthy people, that celibacy among them is most unusual, and that Jewish mothers are remarkable for their large families. Moreover, the children are carefully nursed, and affectionately brought up, con- ditions which are found to-day in India also, and which tend to the rapid multiplication of a race. Yet it is as certain as anything of the kind can be that the Jews increase in numbers but slowly, that they have taken fifteen hundred years to double their strength, and that their total numbers in the world do not exceed at the outside eight millions. If they had multiplied like Anglo-Saxons, or Germans, or Slays of the present day, they would exceed eight hundred millions ; and what is it that has kept them down ? The usual answer is oppression; but have they ever been more oppressed than the Irish, who in the last century increased from two millions to eight, or the population of Russia under serfage, whose rate of increase must have been rapid, or the negroes of the Southern States of America, who doubled their numbers in a century P They have never been much worse fed than the rest of mankind, and they have never been visited with any specially destructive epidemics. So far as is known the rate of mortality common among them is the usual rate of those among whom they live, nor is there any evidence that the Psalmist's early attempt to define the duration of life has ever since been falsified. They live, apart from accident, to seventy, or, if they are unusually strong, to eighty, just as they did in his time, and as the healthy races have done ever since. The notion that all intellectual classes fade gradually away, the constant exercise of the brain tending to sterility, has many facts to support it; but though the Jews as a body are intelligent, they have hardly reached the level at which that law is supposed to operate. An idea current among the Jews themselves, that an unusual proportion of daughters are born to them, is plausible, for that must be the tendency among the polygamous families of mankind, or that evil system could not continue ; but there is no statistical evidence of the fact, while they have ceased for ages to be polygamists. No one tells us in any country of any great body of Jewish spinsters marriageable but unmarried. The best explanation, we conceive, is that the Jews multiply at the normal rate of the Semitic tribes, which is certainly less than the present rate among Anglo-Saxons, Germans, or Slays (that rate is probably a temporary spurt produced by unknown conditions, for it has no warrant in their previous history), but that the fact is concealed by a leakage the extent of which they are unwilling to acknowledge. Although they are splendidly enduring; and meet all fOrins of oppression for the sake of conversion with a dour non possworus, they have also an assimilating instinct which induces them to take upon themselves the characteristics of the race among whom they live; and the moment, therefore, that oppression is relaxed they tend to glide into the body of the population. They first become secularists and give them- seises up to " getting on," then they grow impatient of the confining restrictions which their law imposes, and then they disappear into the general community. Mr. C. Russell declares that in England this process is so incessant and so rapid that in no long time the English Jews will as a people disappear, and though we think with his collaborator, Mr. H. S. Lewis, that this is an exaggeration, and that various causes will always preserve to the Jews a faithful remnant, we believe that the main thesis is true, and that no race which does not persecute them need fear the over-multiplication of the Jews. They have eaten out no people, and they will eat none out. There will as time goes on be much admixture of Jewish blood among all white peoples, indeed there is much already ; but it is probable on the evidence that this will be no source of deterioration. The race brings to the nations a certain intellectual quickness which the Aryan greatly needs, great though rather cynical sense, an occasional but decided power of dreaming great dreams, and a power of endurance which is not to be despised. We could tolerate a good many John Brights.
The terrible and persistent poverty of the Jew is much more difficult to account for. His average of intelligence is distinctly higher than that of the races among whom he lives, so distinctly that Jewish boys in London educated in Christian schools have been known to forego prizes they might have won because they found that the hostility aroused by their constant success had become intolerable. They are among the most industrious of mankind, working if permitted for hours which excite the wrath of Trade-Unions, and this even when they are badly paid. They spend in proportion to their rivals scarcely any- thing on food, they never drink, and they devote themselves to getting on with a singleness of purpose rand a remorseless energy which their strongest advocates characterise as debasing. They save money too. Lord Beaconsfield was probably wrong in attributing to the whole people that "faculty of accumulation" which has marked individuals and families of the race, for that is inconsistent with the instinct for gambling which seems inherent in the majority of them, and is admitted by the keenest observers among themselves; but still they love to hoard and to become rich. They do not become rich,thowever. The mass of them all over the world are horribly poor. Even in countries like England and France the work of their relief committees never ceases, and in the East of Europe they have difficulty in keeping them- selves alive, and sink from sheer poverty into a squalor which disgusts their neighbours and is the despair of local philan- thropists. It is all oppression, we are told ; but who oppresses them here? And even here the fact that the Jews are very poor is patent to any one who has ever visited Whitechapel. Now why is that ? The most plausible explanation is that out of nothing nothing can come, and that as the Jews do not own a country they have no estate from which to dig out general prosperity. That, however, is not very convincing. Outside Russia, at all events, the Jews enjoy a share of any estate any people has, and ought with their industry, their sobriety, and their saving habits to be universally prosperous. They are not, and why they are not is a problem through which after much study we can see our way but dimly. We suppose, however, that the ultimate explanation is something like this. The universal and deep poverty of the masses of mankind, which has existed in all ages, in all climates, and under all circumstances, the hianslzious races suffering from it nearly as much as the care- less races, seems to point to a general cause, which can only be that the world does not really produce quite enough to go round, that only individuals or classes can have sufficient to be comfortable, and that the .remainder of the total produce, which is the portion of the majority, when
divided is for each household very little indeed. If that is true—and it must be partially true—we do not know that the Jews are much worse off than other pdOples. In many countries they regard evidences of poverty as piotec- tions against envy and exactions, and even in Whitechapel, we are told, it is unwise for lookers-on to confound apparent squalor with real want. The Jews, in fact, only share that common lot of humanity which is an eternal perplexity to the benevolent, but which seems to be enforced by some Lawgiver stronger than Kings. This explanation is sufficing so far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough, for the industrial qualities ought to raise him universally above the common lot. They fail to do so to an inexplicable degree, and we can only guess without proof that a race which declines to plough really rejects a source of prosperity more effective and durable than we always perceive, or that the Jews, as Asiatics, share in the unexplained weakness which has throughout history prevented the tribes of Asia from reaping the full benefit of their marvellous economic resources. If the Chinese with their superb industry remain at least twice as poor as they need be, why should not the Jews ?
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