How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New YorkRiis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
History
How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York
Riis, Jacob A. (Jacob August)
Poor -- New York (State) -- New York; Tenement houses -- New York (State) -- New York
Bitter as are his private feuds, it is not until his religious life
is invaded that a real inside view is obtained of this Jew, whom the
history of Christian civilization has taught nothing but fear and
hatred. There are two or three missions in the district conducting a
hopeless propagandism for the Messiah whom the Tenth Ward rejects,
and they attract occasional crowds, who come to hear the Christian
preacher as the Jews of old gathered to hear the apostles expound the
new doctrine. The result is often strikingly similar. "For once," said
a certain well-known minister of an uptown church to me, after such an
experience, "I felt justified in comparing myself to Paul preaching
salvation to the Jews. They kept still until I spoke of Jesus Christ as
the Son of God. Then they got up and fell to arguing among themselves
and to threatening me, until it looked as if they meant to take me out
in Hester Street and stone me." As at Jerusalem, the Chief Captain
was happily at hand with his centurions, in the person of a sergeant
and three policemen, and the preacher was rescued. So, in all matters
pertaining to their religious life that tinges all their customs, they
stand, these East Side Jews, where the new day that dawned on Calvary
left them standing, stubbornly refusing to see the light. A visit to
a Jewish house of mourning is like bridging the gap of two thousand
years. The inexpressibly sad and sorrowful wail for the dead, as it
swells and rises in the hush of all sounds of life, comes back from
the ages like a mournful echo of the voice of Rachel "weeping for her
children and refusing to be comforted, because they are not."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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