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Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays




Another element to which M. Leroy-Beaulieu attaches considerable
importance is the Kultur Kampf in Germany. When the German Government
was engaged in its fierce struggle with the Catholics, these
endeavoured to effect a diversion and to avenge themselves on papers,
which were largely in the hands of Jews, by raising a new cry. They
declared that a Kultur Kampf was indeed needed, but that it should be
directed against the alien people who were undermining the moral
foundations of Christian societies; who were the implacable enemies of
the Christian creed and of Christian ideals. The cry was soon taken up
by a large body of Evangelical Protestants. The 'Germania' and the
'Civilta Cattolica,' which were the chief organs of Ultramontanism in
Germany and Italy, and the 'Kreuz Zeitung,' which represented the
strictest forms of German Protestantism, agreed in fomenting it.

Still more powerful, in the opinion of our author, has been the spirit
of intense and exclusive nationality which has in the present
generation arisen in so many countries and which seeks to expel all
alien or heterogeneous elements, and to mould the whole national being
into a single definite type. The movement has been still further
strengthened by the greater keenness of trade competition. In the
midst of many idle, drunken, and ignorant populations the shrewd,
thrifty, and sober Jew stands conspicuous as the most successful
trader. His rare power of judging, influencing, and managing men, his
fertility of resource, his indomitable perseverance and industry,
continually force him into the foremost rank, and he is prominent in
occupations which excite much animosity. The tax-gatherer, the agent,
the middleman, and the moneylender are very commonly of Jewish race,
and great Jewish capitalists largely control the money markets of
Europe at a time when capital is the special object of socialistic
attacks.

The most valuable portion of this work is, I think, that examining the
part which the Jewish race is now playing in the world, and tracing
the action of historical causes on the formation of their character.
On the old problem of the continued existence of the race through so
many ages M. Leroy-Beaulieu has much to say. He reminds us that in the
East the idea of nationality is habitually absorbed in the idea of
religion, and that there are many examples of the long survival of
peoples or tribes which have lost their political individuality. He
instances the Copts of Egypt, the Maronites and Druses of Lebanon, the
Parsees of India, the Armenians and Greeks of Asia as displaying,
though in a less degree, the same phenomenon as the Jews. He
attributes the long continuance of the Jews as a separate people
mainly to two causes. One of them is Christian hatred, which compelled
the Jews for many centuries to remain a separate people, unmixed with
surrounding nations; living in a separate quarter; marrying among
themselves; strengthened and disciplined in the struggle of life by
enormous difficulties and by the constant elimination through
persecution of the weaker elements. The other is the very elaborate
Jewish ritual extending to all departments of life, which has stamped
upon them an intensely distinctive character.

The force of these causes is undoubted, but they are not, I think, the
only elements to be considered. M. Leroy-Beaulieu appears to me to
have somewhat underrated the physiological force and tenacity of the
Jewish race-type. Following the line of reasoning of a remarkable
essay of Renan, he shows very clearly that the modern Jews are far
from being pure Semites. He proves from Josephus and from other
sources that there was a considerable period, both before and after
the Christian era, when great numbers of Greeks, Latins, and Egyptians
adopted the Jewish faith; that much alien blood afterward poured into
the race through conversions among the barbarians and through the
circumcision of the slaves of Jewish masters, and that there is even
reason to believe that, in some periods of history, marriages with
Christians were not infrequent. It is probable, however, that most
alien elements that were introduced into the race sooner or later
mingled with the old stock, and no fact is more clearly shown than the
extraordinary power of the Jewish type to survive and dominate in a
mixed race. A single instance of a marriage with a Jewess will be
sufficient to perpetuate it in a family for many generations. In this
fact the Jews possess an element of stability which is wholly
independent of all considerations of creed and ritual. Few things are
more curious than the effect of persecution on the Jewish element in
Spain and Portugal. Tens of thousands of Jews in those countries were
burned at the stake or driven into exile, but great numbers also
conformed. They mixed in a few generations with the old Christian
population, and Spain and Portugal, M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly says, are
now among the countries in which the Jewish blood is most evidently
and most widely diffused.

Another consideration, which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has omitted to mention,
but which appears to me to have much weight, is the condemnation of
lending money at interest by the Church. This condemnation, which
lasted many centuries, had two important consequences. One of them was
that the Jews became almost the only moneylenders in Europe. The trade
was deemed sinful for a Christian, but it was found to be a very
necessary one; and the Jews (as some Catholic theologians observed)
being already damned, were allowed to practise it. The other
consequence was that on account of the stigma which the Church
attached to moneylending, the amount of money to be lent was greatly
diminished, or in other words, the rate of interest was enormously and
artificially raised. At a time, therefore, when Catholic intolerance
made it impossible for the Jews to mingle with and be absorbed in
surrounding nations they acquired one of the greatest elements of
power and stability that a race can possess--a monopoly of the most
lucrative trade in the world.

The physical characteristics of the race are very remarkable and they
are especially displayed among the Eastern Jews, who still maintain
scrupulously amid poverty and persecution the religious observances of
their ancestors. It is now clearly shown that the Levitical code was
in a high degree hygienic, and even anticipates some of the
discoveries of modern physiology. Prescriptions about forbidden kinds
of food and about the mode of cooking food, which only excited the
ridicule of Voltaire, have a real hygienic value in the eyes of Claude
Bernard and of Pasteur. The Jews have never adopted the Catholic
notions about the sanctity of celibacy and virginity, but they lay
great stress on the purity of marriage. Although they live chiefly in
towns, illegitimate births are proportionately rarer among them than
among either Protestants or Catholics. They have been as a rule
singularly free from the kinds of vice that do most to enfeeble and
corrode a race. They are distinguished for their domestic virtues,
especially for care of their children, and they are nearly everywhere
less addicted than Christian nations to intoxicating drinks. These
things help to explain the curious fact that in nearly all countries
the average duration of life is considerably longer among Jews than
among Christians. This superiority is general, but, as M.
Leroy-Beaulieu observes, it tends to diminish in Western countries
where Jews, being freed from disabilities, are more assimilated to the
surrounding populations. They now usually marry later than Christians;
they have on the whole fewer children, but a proportionately larger
number of Jewish than of Christian infants attain adult age. M.
Leroy-Beaulieu mentions two curious facts which are less easy to
explain. Still-born births are very rare among Jews, and there is
among them a wholly abnormal preponderance of male births over female
ones.

It might be supposed from these facts that the Jews were a robust
race, but no one who has come much in contact with them will share
this delusion. Nothing is more conspicuous among them than their
unhealthy colouring, their frail, bent, and feeble bodies. They
develop early, but they have very little of the spring and buoyancy of
youth and they have everywhere a low average of physical strength.
Malformations and deformities are common among them; their nervous
organisation is extremely sensitive, and though they are as a race
distinguished for their sound, clear, and practical judgment, they are
very liable to insanity and to other nervous and brain disorders.
Physical beauty as well as physical strength is much rarer among them
than among Christians.

The causes of this inferiority may be easily explained. Life pursued
during many generations in the crowded Ghetto; the sordid habits that
grow out of extreme poverty and out of the assumption of the
appearance of poverty, which is natural in a persecuted and plundered
race, go far to explain it; but there is another and, I think, a more
important cause which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has rather strangely
neglected. Physical strength and beauty can be maintained at a high
level in crowded town populations only by a constant influx from the
country. The pure air and the healthy labour of the fields are their
main source. This great school of health the Jews have never known.
For many centuries it would have been impossible for them to have
lived in peace as farmers or agricultural labourers among a Christian
peasantry, and if they ever possessed any aptitude or taste for
agricultural pursuits they have long since wholly lost it.

Their moral like their physical characteristics present strange
contrasts. No natural want of moral elevation or tenderness or grace
can be ascribed to the nation that has produced both the Old Testament
and the Gospels, and has most largely shaped and inspired the moral
life of the civilised world. In Christian times no race has maintained
its faith with a more devoted courage, and it has encountered and
survived persecutions before which the persecutions of other creeds
dwindle almost into insignificance. M. Leroy-Beaulieu quotes the
statement of the grand Rabbi Lehmann, that it is a clearly attested
fact that in two months of the year 1096 twelve thousand Jews, whose
names have been preserved, were massacred in the towns of the Rhine
alone, because they refused to accept a Christian baptism. The Spanish
Jews who perished by one of the most excruciating deaths rather than
forswear their faith may be numbered by thousands, and those who
preferred exile and spoliation to apostasy, by hundreds of thousands.
Even in our own sceptical and materialising age the conduct of the
Russian Jews under the recent savage persecution shows that the old
spirit is not extinct. In the face of the long and splendid roll of
Jewish heroism, it is idle to dwell on the fact that in each great
persecution some Jews have yielded to the fear of death and consented
to perform the rites of a faith which they inwardly abhorred, or on
the fact that a few Rabbis have under such circumstances justified
these feigned conversions.

Prolonged persecution, however, has had a profound influence on their
character, and its influence in some respects has been very
pernicious. Hatred naturally provokes hatred, and violent oppression
against which there is no redress is naturally encountered by
subterfuge and fraud. A race who were for centuries playing their part
in life against overwhelming obstacles learned to avail themselves of
every advantage. Adulation, servility, falsehood, and deception became
common among them. They became at once hard, wily, and rapacious, and
ready instruments in ignoble and oppressive callings. Shut out from
open paths and honourable ambitions they haunted the obscurer byways
of industry; they were to be found in many occupations which sharpen
the intellect but blunt the moral sense, and they threw themselves
passionately into the acquisition of wealth and of secret power.
Exposed for generations, even in lands where they were not more
seriously persecuted, to constant insult and contempt, they often lost
their self-respect and learned to acquiesce tamely in what another
race would resent. Slavish conditions produced, as they always do,
slavish characteristics, and, as is always the case, those
characteristics did not at once disappear when the conditions that
produced them had altered.

M. Leroy-Beaulieu has dwelt with much force on this subject, and he
ascribes considerable weight to the fact that the Jews have been
wholly outside the system of feudalism and chivalry in which the
modern conception of honour was chiefly formed. Perhaps the Jew might
retort with some justice, that he has had at least the compensating
moral advantage of having derived no part of his notions of right and
wrong from a Church in which such an institution as the Spanish
Inquisition was deemed a holy thing.

Defects of another kind have contributed largely to his unpopularity.
Great as is the power of assimilation which the Jewish race possesses,
the charm and grace of manner seem to have been among the qualities
they most slowly and most imperfectly acquire. It is natural that men
who have been excluded from honours but not from wealth should value
money and the ostentatious display of riches more than their
neighbours. In the professions in which the Jews chiefly excel, men
rise most rapidly from low origin and culture to conspicuous wealth.
Direct money-making has some tendency to materialise and lower the
character, and Jews have been for generations prominent in occupations
which do much to impair those delicacies of feeling on which the charm
of manner largely depends. Besides this, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly
remarks, though the oldest of the cultured races they are a race of
_parvenus_ in the good society of Europe. In nearly all countries they
have till very recently been excluded from the kind of society and
from the kind of education in which the best manners are formed. The
exaggerations of bad taste; the love of the loud, the gaudy, the
ostentatious, and the meretricious; the awkwardness of men who are ill
at ease in an unaccustomed sphere, who have not yet mastered the happy
mean between arrogance and obsequiousness and who are therefore
somewhat prone to both extremes, still frequently characterise them.
Few persons who know Germany will doubt that the tone of manners of
the German Jews has contributed quite as much as any other cause to
their unpopularity.

It is probable that these defects will gradually diminish, and it
would be a grave error to regard the Jewish race as wholly devoted to
material ends. The multitude of their martyrs is a sufficient answer
to the charge, and no people cherish more strongly the ideals of their
past and have more of the pride both of race and of creed. They have
at all times, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu observes, been distinguished for
their reverence for learning, and it is an undoubted fact that Jewish
families and families mixed with Jewish blood have produced an amount
and variety of ability that far exceed the average of men. The ability
goes rather with the race than with the religion. Spinosa, Heine,
Ricardo, and Disraeli--to quote but a few of the most illustrious
names--were not believers in the synagogue. Some of the forms in which
the Jews have most excelled are such as might have been expected from
their past. It is natural that the descendants of the most nomadic
and cosmopolitan of races should have been great masters of language
and in the foremost rank of philologists, and it is not surprising
that the descendants of the chief moneylenders and calculators of the
world should have produced great financiers, and have shown a very
eminent aptitude for mathematics. Medicine more than most professions
depends on individual ability, and has been exercised independently of
the favour of Churches and Governments, and in medicine the Jews were
for a long period pre-eminent. Their marked taste and turn for music
may appear more surprising. It is universally recognised and is
sufficiently evident to anyone who will look at the faces of the chief
orchestras of Europe. Besides a crowd of lesser names they have
produced among composers Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and Halevy, and among
contemporary performers Rubinstein, Joachim, Hermann Levy, and Lucca.
A Jewess is the most popular tragic actress on the contemporary stage,
and another Jewess was probably the greatest tragic actress of the
century. M. Leroy-Beaulieu notices that in painting and sculpture the
Jews have been less conspicuous, and he attributes this to their
horror of idolatry. I should rather ascribe it to the fact that
European art in its best period was mainly devoted to depicting
Christian subjects for Christian churches. At all events several
considerable Jewish names may be cited in contemporary art, and the
Dutch painter who bears the name of Israels is perhaps the greatest
living master of the pathetic in painting. In Western Europe, wherever
public life has been opened to them, Jews have thrown themselves into
almost all the great movements of their time and have distinguished
themselves in nearly all. Cremieux, who was a leading figure in the
French Republic of 1848, was a Jew both by birth and by creed. David
Manin and Leon Gambetta had Jewish blood in their veins. Lassalle and
Marx, the chief names in German socialism, as well as great numbers of
their followers belong to the same race, and more than one English
example of political eminence will occur to the reader. In both German
and Dutch literature Jewish names are frequent and they are nearly
everywhere prominent in journalism. In the army they have been much
less distinguished. Many Jews no doubt serve in the great continental
armies with honour, but the Jew is naturally a pacific being, hating
violence and recoiling with a peculiar horror from blood. The
beneficence of the Jew was for a long time very naturally confined to
his own race, but since the hand of persecution has been withdrawn,
and wherever the Jews have been suffered to mingle freely with the
Christian population, it has taken a wider range and Jewish names are
conspicuous in some of the best forms of unsectarian philanthropy.

It is the evident tendency of modern political life to split up into a
number of distinct groups representing distinct interests or forms of
thought. We find a Catholic party, a Nonconformist party, a Labour
party, a Socialist party, a Temperance party, and many others. But in
spite of the crusade that has arisen in so many countries against the
Jews, we nowhere find a distinct and clearly defined Jewish party. The
tendency of the race is rather to throw themselves ardently into
existing movements, and their power of assimilation is one of their
most remarkable gifts. As M. Leroy-Beaulieu shows by many
illustrations, they are apt in most Western nations even to exaggerate
the national characteristics, though they usually combine with them a
certain flexibility of adaptation and a certain cosmopolitanism of
view which is essentially their own.

It was inevitable that with such tendencies the old rigidity of creed
should be impaired and that the observances which completely severed
the Jew from other people should be discarded. There can be little
doubt that the dissolution of old beliefs which has been such a marked
and ominous characteristic of the latter half of the nineteenth
century has been even more common among the Western Jews than in
Christian nations, and it appears to have spread quite as rapidly
among the women as among the men. Many Jews have passed into complete
religious indifference--into absolute and often very cynical negation.
They have become, as Sheridan wittily said, like the blank page
between the Old and the New Testament. Others have taken refuge in a
kind of highly rationalised Judaism little different from pure Theism.
Some of the most independent, scientific, and trenchant criticism of
the Old Testament writings has proceeded from members of the race
which was once distinguished for the most complete and superstitious
worship of the letter of the law. Spinoza in his 'Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus' led the way in this path, and in our own day I
need only mention the writings of Salvador, Kalisch, and Darmesteter
and the remarkable Hibbert Lectures of Mr. Montefiore.

This movement, however, is chiefly confined to the Western Jews. The
Oriental Jews have retained in a far greater measure their old creed
and ritual, their old fanaticism and aspirations. To them Palestine is
still the land of promise, and they still dream that it is destined to
become once more a Jewish State. Few persons who consider the
conditions of the East and the power of the Jewish race will
pronounce the realisation of this dream to be impossible or even in a
very high degree improbable. Perhaps the most formidable obstacle is
the poverty of the land and the total absence among the Jews of
agricultural tastes and aptitudes. One thing, however, may be safely
predicted. If Palestine is ever again to become a Jewish land, this
will be effected only through the wealth and energy of the Western
Jews, and it is not those Jews who are likely to inhabit it.


FOOTNOTES:

[8] Mr. Lecky had made various notes with the intention of bringing this
essay up to date, but failing health prevented him from accomplishing
it.--ED.




MADAME DE STAEL


Among the many important works which have lately been published on the
Continent, reconstructing the history of France during the struggle of
the Revolution and during the periods that immediately preceded and
followed it, scarcely any have been so comprehensive, and not many
have been so valuable, as 'The History of the Life and Times of Madame
de Stael,' by Lady Blennerhassett. The author--a Bavarian lady who was
an intimate friend and favourite pupil of Dr. Doellinger--has brought
to her task a knowledge, which is scarcely rivalled in its
completeness, of the French, German, English, and Italian literatures
relating to the period; and she has produced a work of which it is in
one sense the merit, but in another the defect, that it sweeps over a
far wider field than might be expected from its title. It is seldom, I
think, a judicious thing to confuse the provinces of history and
biography by turning the life of an individual into an elaborate
history of his time; and in the few cases in which this method has
been successfully pursued, the biographer has selected as his subject
some man like Cromwell, or Frederick the Great, or Napoleon, who was
indisputably the chief mover of his age. When figures of less
prominence are chosen, both the history and the biography are apt to
suffer. The true perspective, or relative magnitude, of events is
impaired, and the book is almost sure to lose something of its
artistic charm and of its popularity. Mr. Masson, as it seems to me,
committed a mistake of this kind in his 'Life of Milton,' when he
grouped around the great Puritan poet--who, however illustrious, was
certainly not the central figure of his time--a full and valuable
history of the Commonwealth, and of large sections of the reigns of
Charles I. and Charles II.

In like manner, a great part of the work of Lady Blennerhassett is not
biography, but history, and history of a very high order. Madame de
Stael was so closely connected in her own person, and still more
through her father, with the early events of the French Revolution,
that we accept with gratitude the admirable sketch of that period
which Lady Blennerhassett has given us; but we should scarcely expect
to find in a work primarily devoted to Madame de Stael full and
masterly accounts of the Ministry of Turgot, of the rise and teaching
of the Economists, of the rival influence of the writings of
Montesquieu and Rousseau on the French political character, of the
effect of English influence and American example in preparing the
Revolution, and of the part played by Germans and Swedes in French
politics. At the same time, the pictures of the social and
intellectual life prevailing in the different countries with which
Madame de Stael was connected, and the full accounts given of a crowd
of persons with whom she came into casual contact, though in
themselves both interesting and valuable, often tend to divert the
reader from the main subject of the book. In truth, Lady
Blennerhassett has not been able to resist the temptation of a very
full mind to pour out all its knowledge, and, while possessing many
rare and brilliant literary gifts, she appears to me to want that
restraining sense of literary perspective which gives biography its
true proportion and symmetry. This defect has, I fear, diminished the
popularity of a most valuable book. In the original German, and in an
excellent French translation which was revised by the author and which
I especially commend to my readers, the work consists of three very
substantial volumes.[9] A hasty reader will readily conclude that, in
this short and crowded life, such a space is far more than should be
allotted to a long-vanished figure which, though interesting and
brilliant, was not of the first magnitude. But if he has the courage
to persevere, he will soon discover that few modern books have lighted
up in so many directions the political, social, moral, and
intellectual history of a momentous period, and have exhibited at once
so many kinds of talent and so wide a range of sympathies and
knowledge. The complete competence, the firm, sober, and--if I may use
the expression--masculine judgment with which Lady Blennerhassett has
grasped the great political problems of the period of the Revolution,
is not less conspicuous than the truly feminine delicacy of
observation and touch with which she has delineated social life in
many different countries, and painted the finer shades of many widely
dissimilar characters.

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