Books-New and Old
"Made in Germany"
More Literature of the Jewish National Rebirth.
At the time of this writing (March, 1920) the German nation is at its lowest nadir of decline. Whatever physical sufferings ıhere are to be sustained by the dwellers within the German Republic, are fully shared, class for class, by the German Jews. Spiritually, however, the Jewish community rises way above the general level of morose and irritable despondency which is now the dominant note of German public life. While their compatriots are well-nigh despairing of the commonwealth, the Jews of Germany, since the Armistice, have undergone an amazing national rebirth manifesting itself in every branch of communal life.
One of its happiest manifestations is a veritable springtime of Jewish publishing ventures—periodicals, book-concerns, newspapers —all maintaining themselves in the face of colossal difficulties—lack of paper, dearth of labor, a ruined veluta, and anti-Semitic attacks. The chiefest of these flourishing institutions is the Juedische Verlag, Berlin, a vast center for the interpretation and distribution of every variety of national letters, from the classics of Yiddish humor to philosophical, historical and archæological guides, handbooks and treatises. The Juedische Verlag celebrated the other day the twentieth anniversary of its foundation. Its catalogue is an illuminating document of the Jewish national risurgimento in Germany that began with the beginnings of the modern Zionist movement and shares now in its international good fortunes.
Five publishing items of recent imprint have come to hand the other day with our foreign mail. The most important of these is "Die Judenstadt von Lublin," by Mayer Balaban, profusely illustrated with drawings by K. R. Henker. It contains, in succinct presentation, the chronicles of one of those central Ghettoes of Eastern Europe whose history is an epitome of European-Jewish history during the ages of seclusion, separation, and comparative homogeneity.
The city of Lublin in Poland is a very old burg—a town-center of considerable prestige as far back as the fourteenth century. In the ante-bellum days before August, 1914, it had over a quarter of a million inhabitants. It has since been depopulated through war, epidemics and the new Polish regime of mismanagement. The hurricanes of history have swept over it more than once, wasting its wealth and decimating its population. Like a New England factory- town, it consists of hill and dale—the hill for the privileged classes, the plains for the misera contribuens plebs—among them the Jews. With this difference: neither the privileged classes nor the hill they dwell on in its architectonic aspect are strictly twenty-first century. The classes are chiefly prelates and feudal lords, their churches, cloisters, palaces and patrician dwellings are semi-Gothic and semi-modern like the inhabitants. At the foot of the Schlossberg (Castle- Hill) cowers the Judenstadt of: Lublin, with dark alleys, filthy streets and profoundly unsanitary housings. There are a great many churches on the hill, and as many schuls and Talmud-Torahs in the Ghetto below. The lower town, without drainage, without a decent water-supply, without proper street-cleaning, is a typical Polish maremma of neglect. When the Russians evacuated Lublin during the war, they left a typhoid plague behind them. The Austrians aflıxed a skull-and-crossbones poster at the gates of the Ghetto, forbidding access to their soldiers.
This fortified city of the old Polish kings has had a Jewish community of wide renown ever since the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury. Around the middle of that century, Lublin was a fair-town, a market of international prestige, attracting to itself at fair-times the merchants and commercial agents of Germany, France, Italy, Hungary, Turkey and Armenia. The chief staples sold and exchanged here were linen, velvet, silk, rugs, pelts, wine, spices, dyes and salt. The economic privileges of the citizens, such as exemption from import-dues, right of tax-free staples, etc., were highly valuable and the wealth of the burgher-classes considerable. Whatever share in this wealth the Jewish community managed to acquire was contested from the very beginning. For about 350 years, reckoning from 1521, the economic history of the Jews of Lublin is prototypical for that of other large kehillas in Poland—a long-drawn contest of varying fortunes between Jews and burghers, with king and nobility wavering between the two parties, inclined, for interested and sometimes for equitable reasons, to favor the former, but in the end nearly always compelled to give way to the protestations and urgencies of the latter. With a shift in economic interests there was always a kaleidoscopic shift of parties to the contest. Sometimes a strong king. with an unusual share of statesmanlike insight into economic «roupings in his head—and perhaps a good deal of Jewish gold in his pockets— would sternly insist upon a reinstatement of the Jews into rights and privileges snatched from them by the burghers. At other times, a weak king deep in debt to the townsmen would let them do with their Jews whatever they pleased, until the 'nobility. importuned by their Jewish commercial agents and tax-farmers rose in stormy protest against .anti-Jewish exactions threatening the prosperity of their retainers and, indirectly, their own. When the prelacy endeavored to have the Jews expelled from this or that part of the town, the burgher- lessors, for a change, took the side of the Jews, not desiring to lose their well-paying lessees, refusing to exempt them in the face of any number of royal ordinances. Sometimes the artisan gzuilds would rise against their Jewish competitors, force royal judgments against them, or, failing this, mob them; at other times, they would compromise with the Jewish craftsmen, on the basis of an annual mulct. Of this strange tug-of-war between social groups, and the spiritual life within the Lublin Ghetto based upon such a shifting material foundation, Mr. Balaban’s “Judenstadt von Lublin” zives a wonderfully interesting account.