Poverty and laziness

A unique nineteenth-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 (‘Mendele the Bookseller,’ pen name of S.J. Abramowitz, 1835?–1917). ² 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. It does not elevate the poor as in the Bible but damns them, following the centuries-old European tradition of questioning their legitimacy, at times cynically and cruelly. Mendele’s Hebrew version is a particularly striking contrast with the image of the poor in the Hebrew Bible. Mendele totally rejects the biblical association of poverty and moral purity; he is disgusted by the Betteljuden, the so-called orchei porchei (flotsam and jetsam), the useless, unemployed, starving Jewish multitudes; at times he is gripped by almost murderous rage at their humiliation and alleged moral corruption. Mendele’s depiction of the poor can be taken as a turning point in Jewish social psychology, a recognition of the full extent of Jewish degradation in the diaspora, and a consequent rejection of passive acceptance of poverty and the biblical elevation of the “holy poor.”