The English Jews.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XI, Issue 3439, 19 February 1890, Page 2

The English Jews.

There are, in reality, says a writer in a Home paper, no English Jews properly so called. Tliat ,is to jay,, there are no Jews} in than 100 families,'perhaps excepted--who have been here long-enough to have lost all trace of a nationality other than ; Jews. There, are two i ; colbuies of Jews who havo settled'inthe cities of Great Britain who, Laving once differod violently .iu language, in civilisation, and .in.all that .civilisation; superinduces, * are graiddall/'' becoming welded together, and will in. time create a community 'of English Jews whoi.afteflthenianuer ,f of the race, will probably becime ' mora English iu.: all V distinctive■•: qualities of intelleot aud ocoupation than the English themselves; but as yet there are no "distinctively English 1 • - Jews; : there has not been time. It is not yet 200 jyears sinoo tbe first ... community of word; f i which is simply modern Hebrew for Spaniards, but in is usage includes the .Jews of tbe Mediterranean, Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Levantines, all of whom thought' in Spanish or Portuguese, and kept apoounts. and wrote there letters in those lauguagesr-settled iii tngland.ir.j j and of thorn-scarcely any remained •'' permanently. With one or two exceptions their very names hava disappeared. •It was not till the; days of .Queen > Anno,' when Sir Solomon' Medina : ' ■ was the leading capitalist oh Change, and paid Marlborough £6OOO a year for early information-and; profitable contracts, that tho Jows became'at : all numerous, and even thon they ; were almost all—not quite—Jews of. tho South, mainly Portugneso.Levan-' tinos, or Italians, men bearing names like _Mendez, Gomez,.- Kodriguez, Miranda, Lopes, and the like. It was not tilltho end of the seventeenth century that tho Jews from whom tho English idea of the raoo is usually • derived—tho " Ashkenazim"~the German and Polish 'Jews, in Spite" 'of <"•• great discouragement from their forerunnors, bogan to settlo iu any numbers, an.d not till 1722 that they were enabled,' by tho liberality of : Moses of Breslau-calling himself in England Moses Hart-4o ostablisb : asyiiagoguooftheirown. . Smoo then the Asbkenazim haver!" far out-numbered thoir rival, till, indeed Englishmen scarcely know of auy Jews. ' But the division between these branohes of the Jews has always been, and is still, very great, The Sephardim, bred among the races of .tho South, accustomed to high office, proud of rank-as well as .- lineage, despistd the? Ashkenazim, or Jews of the North, who have been' forced by ciroumstauc&s to bo hucksters and littlo merchants. Some of tho greatest of modern Jews : havo/">' been Germans,'but the arlstooracy - of the race lived, as Lord Beaconsfield affirms, sometimes under fright*. ful oppression, on the Bhoros of tho Mediterranean.

. So the Southern Jews hold them/ solves to be higher, nobler, purer, in k 'some mysterious'-way, than': '-M% Northern Jews, and in this feeling of pride of birth flashes out even now in synagogue arrangements, in books like Lbrd r -Beaconsfield's- "■' .f'Tanored" (whore he himself, by birth a Sephardim, exalts the sephardim into an aristocraoy), and in tho attack of the speculator Mires on the ' House of Rothschild, an /extraordinv;: i'■, ary pamphlet in which Mires attri-* c butes.his fall to the hatred of the ;; A Bhkeiiazim for the Sephardim, This mutual dislike has not died out, though it is not so strong as it was, for formerly a man born of the Sephardim, who married into the rival congregation, was looked upon -. 'bb a duke's boh would bo .who married a housemaid-as one who, although ho had done nothing unlawful or immoral, had nevertheless disgraced himself and his order. ■" When Jacob Israel Bernal, great grandfather of the late Mr Bernal Osborne, in 1744 proposed to a German Jewess, hiß congregation, ; though they consonted to the union, :. expressed their' strong disapproba- !■ tion, and to disoourage for the future Buoh ill-advised connootioDS, inapoßedjj -

npou Mr.Beraal.soma ratlia hmnili: atingcoiiclilionW.;lN v oitlier tlio niembera of tbo fietli* Din,' ! nor tlie Hazanitp (niiniatefs) ; ; wcvo, to.. bo present 'at' tbo solomnisation of jfoi marriage;, 'tbo bridegroom was iwt to bo called up to tho law in that ' capaoity; no offering's, woro to be made for bis hoaltli. and no colebration of any kind .was to take place in tbe Synagogue. ; To this day, though the Jews best known Jo-.tuV outer world—tho Hothscbilds, Goldmids, Cohens, Levis -are all Asbkonazim, something of atrfotislo, eome flavour of aristocratic "standing, indefinablebut perceptible, still adheres to the members of tho eldersynagogue, andobsorversproteud tbatibespeoisUook of tho Oriental Jews, a look well rendored in Holman Hunt's " Finding of the Saviour in tbe Temple," more especially in the boy who is bending over his oldest ■' Rabbi, is still confined to the fcpbardim. ,