Jewish Life in the Middle Ages

CHAPTER XVII. PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL CHARITES THE RELIEF OF THE POOR

CHAPTER XVII PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL CHARITmS. THE RELIEF OF THE POOR LANCELOT ADDISON, in his entertaining account of the Jews of Barbary,l is at some pains to dispel the belief prevalent at his time that •the Jews have no beggars.' He attributes this error to the •regular and commendable' methods by which the Jews supplied the needs of their poor and •much concealed their poverty.' The medieval notion that all Hebrews were rich, possibly owes its present vitality to this same cause. Deep-rooted in the Jewish heart lay the sentiment that poverty had rights as well as disabilities, and the first of those rights demanded that the poor need not appeal for sympathy by exhibiting their sorrows. In this characteristic the Jew was never Oriental, but struck out an original line of his own. Like Coriolanus, he might have exclaimed, against an alleviative or fraternal service bought by exposure and publicity: Let me o'erleap that custom; for I cannot Put on the ~wn, stand naked, and entreat them, For my wounds' sake, to give their suffrage: please you, That I may pus this doing. 1 Tlte Pr,sent Sttz14 e/tlu JnIIS (London, 1675; a second edition appeared in the following year), ch. xxv. 308 Private and Cotntntmal Cltarities No argument in favour of checking pauperism was held to justify the policy of putting the poor to shame. •Better give no alms at all, than give them in public,' 1 and even those who in the middle ages thought that aIms-giving under any and all circumstances had a shade of merit, declared that they who gave publicly and with ostentation would never get farther than the outskirts of paradise.2 Delicacy in the manner of giving was traced directly to the Scriptures, and many tender rules for sparing the blushes of the poor were derived in the Rabbinical literature of early centuries and of the middle ages from the verse;3 Blessed is he that considereth the poor: The Lord will deliver him in the day of evil;. the stress being laid on the duty of considerateness. Consideration for the poor was sometimes one of the motives for severe sumptuary laws as regards the dress of the rich. But one of the chief forms which. this considerateness assumed was to discountenance begging from door to door.' Nor were the poor to be forced to come and draw tickets from an urn before obtaining relief. Where the system of ticket-relief prevailed, the Parnass, or President of the congregation, and not the recipient of help, had to extract the tickets.6 It is true that in larger Jewish congregations street and door begging became common when, in place of freedom to reside in any part of the town, Jews were restricted to certain streets or quarters. Within the ghetto, 1 T. B. Cltagiga, 5 a. II Midrash )It,,..Jellinek, BetA Hamillrask, iii. 123. a Psalm xli. I. t Lancelot Addison notices this feature; ct. ren! 'lEn', § 547. & Judah Minz (fol. (4 a) orders that this must be done in Treviso, where the custom was introduced 'll'i'l'I 10 l'i'l'l.D H'll"' in order to discourage begging. Itinerant Mendicants the Jews formed one large family, and house-to-house begging wore a different look. Moreover, publicity in the sense that Christians would observe the beggar's progress, was no longer probable in the sixteenth and later centuries. But before the ghetto age, and especially in smaller towns, it might almost be asserted that there were no Jewish beggars at all. The fact that the Jews formed distinct communities in the midst of contemptuously indifferent or actively hostile environments, caused them t to draw nearer and closer to each other, and tended to soften and bridge over the differences of poverty and position.' 1 Hence in most Jewish communities before the thirteenth century, though the inroad of itinerant mendicants was a grievous burden on Jewish benevolence, the number of settled, resident beggars was very small. The production of this result entailed' much expenditure of money and care, but the highest form of alms-giving was reached, in the Jewish view, by taking such measures as made the poor selfsupporting and enabled them to live by their own exertions.\: The Talmud alludes to a regular class of professional mendicants who practised self-mutilation in order to attract 1 C. G. Montefiore•• Hebrew Charity...