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Fabulous insight into the lives of
Victoria's Jews
Diaspora. The word always makes me think of dandelions. Perhaps
that's because the fairy-like seeds that scatter in the breeze
are called spores - I still play the children's game of plucking
a stalk and counting how many times I have to blow to free
all the fluff.
Historians talk of the diaspora as if Jewish people floated
in clouds around the world. That's the only way demographics,
and economics, can build a picture - a hundred here, a thousand
there. A boatload, an exodus, a migration.
But people are like single seeds, and occasionally a story
survives to tell how one spore was separated from the head
of the dandelion and carried on the wind. I discovered one
of those tales in a second-hand bookshop last week.
The book was a reprint of an extraordinary piece of Victorian
journalism called London Labour And The London Poor by Henry
Mayhew, and the synchronicities in the story, the way one
man's life almost 200 years ago mirrored episodes of my own,
shocked me.
Mayhew was a pioneer. He walked the streets of the capital
in the 1840s and 1850s, interviewing the working people, transcribing
every word of their dialect. Journalism didn't catch up with
his painstaking methods for a century or more - Isaac Pitman
had recently invented his shorthand system, but few reporters
used it as skilfully as Mayhew.
Every news-hound now is armed with a pocket tape-recorder
or a camcorder, but there's no technology to lead a reporter
to the people with the best tales to tell. That requires intuitive
gifts, and Mayhew's instincts for a story were almost supernatural.
His three-volume collection of interviews includes autobiographical
transcripts by orphaned flower girls, pickpockets, birdsellers,
crossing sweepers, chimney sweeps, sewermen, a blind bootlace
seller, a ratcatcher, strolling actors, disabled soldiers,
ex-convicts, organ grinders with monkeys, inmates of the workhouse,
street conjurors, musicians and tinkers.
Many of the stories are horrifying accounts of poverty -
and several contain insights into Jewish life in Victoria's
London.
The only spark of kindness in the existence of an eight-year-old
girl who sold watercress around Clerkenwell was shown to her
by a Jewish household. The child had been sent out to work,
selling ha'penny bunches of cress from a basket, when her
baby cousin grew old enough to toddle, he didn't need a nursemaid,
so the girl found herself out of doors in all weathers.
In winter, she couldn't afford to fill her basket with cress,
and no one would buy anyhow: ''When I goes up to them, they
says, 'They'll freeze our bellies'!''
She ate two slices of bread and butter for breakfast, and
two more for supper, with a mouthful of meat for Sunday lunch.
''On a Friday night I goes to a Jew's house till 11 o'clock
on a Saturday night. All I has to do is snuff the candles
and poke the fire. You see they keep their Sabbath then, and
they won't touch anything; so they gives me my vitals and
three ha'pennies, and I does it for 'em. I have a reg'lar
good lot to eat.
''Supper of Friday night, and tea after that, and fried fish
of a Sat'day morning, and meat for dinners, and tea and supper,
and I like it very well.''
Those meals were surely all that kept the child from starving.
I suspect the kindly Jew could easily have found someone to
snuff the candles for nothing, but that his weekly care for
the girl made his Sabbath truly holy.
The tale of the old man who sold rhubarb and spice in the
street is worth the price of the book on its own. He called
himself an Arab, and wore a turban, but was in fact a Jew
from Mogadore in Morocco.
Mayhew's acute ear for phonetics renders his speech so clearly,
I can hear this sad, honest man speaking in my head.
''De people were Mahomedans in Mogadore, but we were Jews,
just like here, you see. De first ting de Jews teesh de schildren
is deir duty to deir faders and deir moders. And dey love
one anoder more than de gold...
''O yes, I love my moder very mush. I am old man now but
I never forgot her yet. I tought I should come back soon.
If I had tought I never see no more, not all de gold in de
world would take me from her.''
The young adventurer sold silk and cotton handkerchiefs in
Gibraltar while the English army was driving Napoleon out
of Spain, and arrived in London in 1811 -''When I come here,
I tink I am in heaven altogether, God a'mighty forgive me,
such sops [shops] and such beautiful tings.''
He sold rhubarb and spices, one of seven Jews all from the
Mogadore area who dressed in turbans and Turkish robes - ''because
people like to buy de Turkey rhubarb of de men in de turbans''.
Four of them clubbed together to set up a shop in Exeter,
a city which has exerted a powerful draw for me in recent
years. I find it fascinating, and much more than a coincidence,
that I should learn by accident of how a band of Jewish entrepreneurs
should have chosen Exeter to seek their fortune.
The shop went badly, though: ''We take and trust, and lose
all our money. T'oders never keep a sop before, and not one
of us was English scholar; we was forced to keep a man, and
dat way we lose all our money.''
He returned to live at St Mary Axe in the City, where the
Norman Foster skyscraper that Londoners nickname the Gherkin
is being built today.
Married twice, his second wife was a Christian, and his loyalty
to her kept him out of the Jewish hospital at Mile End, even
when he was nearly crippled with rheumatism at 73.
''De Jews is very good to deir old people. If it was not
for my old woman I be like gentleman now in de hospital; but
you see, I marry de Christian woman and dat is against our
people. And I would never leave her, no not for all de good
in de world to come to myself. If I am poor, I am not de only
one.''
Email
him at uri@urigeller.com
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