150 years ago: Muslim Jew-hatred in Morocco, philosemitism in the US ~ EoZ

Friday, August 25, 2023

150 years ago: Muslim Jew-hatred in Morocco, philosemitism in the US

A number of British newspapers published the following story in August, 1873:

Outrages on Jews at Fez.

The Jewish Chronicle has received the following account of acts of torture inflicted upon Jews by Arabs at Fez.

A medical man had ordered, a few weeks ago, a poor Jewish patient to use a vapour bath. But since the conveniences for such baths do not exist in the Jewish quarters of the city, and as the Jews are actually forbidden to construct the necessary apparatus for indulging in the luxury of a vapour bath, the invalid applied to the Mahommedan bath-keeper, who yielded to the entreaties of the poor man and allowed him to enter with two other Jews by whom he was supported as he walked in. But they were at once betrayed.

A furious mob surrounded the men, who were throttled by the soldiers, dragged along the streets, beaten with sticks, knocked with hammers, cut with knives, and pelted with stones, so that their track was lined with blood.

When the wounded creatures at length presented themselves before the governor, one of them had lost an eye, and the other had his head broken open. This representative of the Sultan caused them at once to receive 500 strokes with a rod and to be thrown into prison. They were held guilty of having desecrated an Arab bath, for which delinquency it was expected that the Sultan would order that they should be decapitated..

But at the same time, another story was published in quite a few US newspapers, in the wake of the news that some hotels were banning Jews:

Messenger. "No Jews Admitted."

A lively correspondent of the Tribune writes thus from Saratoga: "You've got all the 'Jews' over with you," said a gentleman from one of the other hotels to me last evening; "they shut down on them over at our house; won't have 'em." I like that; proscription of all kind is good. I like to hear one man say that he hates an Englishman, and another, that he can't stand an Irishman. For it shows that their educations are not finished; each has something further in life to look forward to. If they live long enough they will come to the conclusion arrived at by the great French traveller, who declared that after visiting every part of the known world, he made up his mind that it was inhabited only by men and women.

But religious proscription is especially pleasing to the naked eye. So far as business dealing is concerned, an officer of one otf your most prominent banks, to whom I repeated the observation, remarked that, of all men who had dealings with his bank, he found Jews the most honest, the most faithful in the performance of the very spirit of their contracts, the most trustworthy in all money transactions. And is it not so? Among the paupers who fill our streets and our asylums, our hospitals, anu our jails, do you find a Jew? They feed their own poor. and take care of their own sick. Like the best modern engines, they consume their own smoke and rubbish.

But, aside from these material facts, there is a poetry and a grandness about the Jewish character which has always moved me to reverence. A nation without a country, a people without a home, flowing through and penetrating all nations, yet not commingling with a single one; preserving all their individualities, their religion, their language, their customs. intact; the same now as when, led by the cloud by day, and the pillar of lire at night, they went dry-shod through the cloven sea and encamped in the wilderness beneath the same stars which now stud the heavens. Show me a people like this in all history: a people around whom all the grand poetry of the Bible clusters: a people rich in traditions beyond all precedent, who have yet preserved the minutiae of those traditions, while dynasty after dynasty has crumbled around them, and nation after nation has faded from off the face of the earth; a people who have clung to the faith of their lathers, to the one God whom their fathers worshiped, asking no change and seeking no change, while creed has had its day, and decay and incessant wars over doctrinal points have desolated empires.

Mv sympathies in the play, let me confess,. have always been with Shylock. Houseless and homeless, spoiled of his wealth and robbed of his daughter, he is driven out in his old age to childless penury - and for what? Insulted and spat upon, his religion reviled, and his house dishonored, he took no revenge in cowardly murder after the Christian pattern; he sought but the fulfilment of a contract, the terms of which he had complied with, and would have complied with, probably, had positions been reversed. Would not Shylock, think you, have bared his breast to the knife in fulfillment of his bond without the spiritless fuss that Antonio made about it? Such is Jewish faith; depend upon it the despised Jew would not have sheltered himself from the fulfillment of a bargain which he himself sought under the quibble about a drop of blood,

"Won't nave jews;" talk about "the best society of New York," you do not know what it is until you have mingled with Jews, gone among the Rabbis, sat at their feet, and, in admiration of manners and learning which pass all previous experience, of a gracious gentleness which makes the toleration afforded you by any other sect seem boorish rudeness, recognized a "society" to which few can hope permanently to attain, a courtesy which comes of the scholarship and culture oi thousands or years,

"Won't have Jews," indeed!