ABSTRACT
A unique 19th-century eyewitness portrayal of the Jewish poor, including many false beggars, is The Beggar-Book, written both in Yiddish and in Hebrew by Mendele Mokher Sefarim. This novel, one of the first significant works of modern Jewish fiction, is set in the Russian Pale of Settlement, where the largest Jewish community of the pre-1917 period lived, about five million, mostly impoverished and subjected to anti-Semitic laws and periodic violence. Mendele's beggars share the varied stigmata of the poor in European literature, with the added affliction of Russian anti-Semitism: their poverty provokes hatred, hatred justifies ancient prejudice and discrimination, which limit opportunity, enterprise, and social mobility, making poverty worse. Mendele's world is confined to Eastern Europe; he does not take into account the Western European Jews and Jews in Oriental countries, whose social and economic conditions were better in many ways than those of the Eastern European Jews.
