No Joke (14 page)

I think the answer lies in the very concept of fellow citizens. The
profession
of Jewish comedy arose in societies where legal barriers separating Jews from their neighbors were leveled, but without necessarily establishing instantaneous trust between them. Liberal democracy invites free expression, including of the discomfiting sort. Already targets of mockery and adept at self-mockery, Jews had only to forge a new combination of the two for the titillation of a general audience that could, perhaps nervously, laugh along with those whom it did not yet fully trust. The process then proceeded apace: once liberal culture began ascribing a positive value to a sense of humor and comedy became king, the toleration of humor was overtaken by the expectation of humor, and Jews rushed in where they could earn their bread.

One of the first to exploit the potential of Jewish comedy for an emerging liberal public was Israel Zangwill (1864–1926). Born in London to Jewish immigrants (his father was from Russia, and his mother was from Poland), Zangwill became a bar mitzvah in 1877, a year after the appearance of George Eliot's
Daniel Deronda
—a book that both charted and quickened Britain's removal of social barriers against Jews and Judaism
. In this last of her novels, Eliot replaced the prevailing demand of full assimilation and Anglicization with a different ideal, which would come to be known as Zionism. Her hero discovers that he is a Jew, and that he wants to remain one, marry a Jewish woman, and help reclaim the land of his ancestors. So, too, Zangwill discovered that conversion to Christianity was no longer required as a ticket of admission to British culture and became for a time a British Zionist. In his fiction, inventing or perfecting a brand of integrationist humor that accorded well with the genteel satire of his milieu, Zangwill contributed to debates over what it meant to be an Englishman
and
a Jew.

No one could have hoped to displace Shakespeare's Shylock as the most memorable Jew in British literature, or in Charles Dickens's
Oliver Twist
, the despicable Fagin, who trains boys in the arts of stealing and deception. One way or another, as bankroller or pawnbroker, the shyster Jew of English literature would always be present in the British imagination, scheming to “jew” cultivated Christians out of their innocence and cash. Rather than fight this stereotype, Zangwill's 1894 comic masterwork
King of the Schnorrers
turns it inside out, inviting the British to enjoy what they had reviled and feared. So you think Jews care only for money and contrive to get it by nefarious means? That they use their cleverness to exploit others without ever earning an “honest” penny through hard work? Very well (Zangwill seems to be saying), I will show you how charmingly they get it done—
and
in the process, how similar their scams are to ones practiced in the higher reaches of British society.

King of the Schnorrers
transposes the repertoire of schnorrer joking into a British milieu. Shylock's hauteur doesn't hold a candle to that of Manassah Bueno Bazillai Azavedo da Costa, every syllable of whose name recalls a Spanish Jewish ancestry that (at least in fiction) puts him atop the pecking order of British Jews. Indeed, refugees from the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century had been the first Jews to “return” to Britain after the community's expulsion by the edict of Edward I in 1290. They were followed by German Jews, fleeing persecution in central Europe, and lastly by the Russian immigrants who were pouring into England in Zangwill's time. In this hierarchy of first arrivals, the impecunious da Costa lords it over his nouveau riche German Jewish compatriot Joseph Grobstock (thick stick), while both of them outrank the Polish newcomer Yankele, who wants to marry da Costa's daughter. Collectively, the three Jews—da Costa the fallen “nobleman,” Grobstock the insecure bourgeois, and Yankele the penniless invader—parody their British equivalents in, respectively, the aristocratic, moneyed, and working class.

To put readers at their ease, Zangwill situates his comic novel a century earlier, when Jews suffered from British liabilities that had since been overcome.

In the days when Lord George Gordon became a Jew, and was suspected of insanity; when, out of respect for the prophecies, England denied her Jews every civic right except that of paying taxes; when the
Gentleman's Magazine
had ill words for the infidel alien; when Jewish
marriages were invalid and bequests for Hebrew colleges void; when a prophet prophesying Primrose Day would have been set in the stocks, though [William] Pitt inclined his private ear to Benjamin Goldsmid's views on the foreign loans—in those days, when Tevele Schiff was Rabbi in Israel, and Dr. de Falk, the Master of the Tetragrammaton, saint and Cabbalistic conjuror, flourished in Wellclose Square, and the composer of “The Death of Nelson” was a choir-boy in the Great Synagogue, Joseph Grobstock, pillar of the same, emerged one afternoon into the spring sunshine at the fag-end of the departing stream of worshippers. In his hand was a large canvas bag, and in his eye a twinkle.
³

The chain of clauses in this opening paragraph of Zangwill's novel recalls a time of prejudice and discrimination, or a period when British hypocrisy limited competition from those whose wealth it exploited. The historical drumroll stops at Grobstock emerging from a synagogue service that happens to be honoring a British monarch: “The congregation was large and fashionable—far more so than when only a heavenly sovereign was concerned.”
⁴

We come on Grobstock in the act of distributing coins of various denominations in a lottery system of his own devising. As Grobstock tries to make a kind of game of his charity, the ostentatiously shabby da Costa exposes his philanthropy as no more than self-indulgence. (Indeed, superficial do-gooderism was then coming under fire in Britain as a disguised form of do-nothingism.) Contriving to have himself invited for a sabbath
meal, and promised a gift of Grobstock's cast-off clothing so that Mrs. Grobstock will not know they have a beggar at their table, da Costa begins to treat it as his own while it is still on its owner's back. “Take care, you are sputtering sauce all over that waistcoat, without any consideration for me.”
⁵
Nor does he then deign to wear the clothes he is given, selling them instead to a secondhand dealer.

Manassah and his Polish sidekick Yankele examine a theater poster of a London play they then see from box seats—without purchasing tickets. Drawings by George Hutchinson accompany almost all editions of
King of the Schnorrers
, which has been in print since 1894.

“Why did you sell my clothes?” Grobstock asks, insulted by the beggar's disdain for his own finer attire. “You did not expect me to wear them?” da Costa replies. “No, I know my station, thank God.” Thus does the king of the schnorrers deliver a stunningly aggressive rebuke to the man who has tried to ingratiate himself with his alleged betters and ends by trembling before the judgment of his inferior.

Here it is worth contrasting Zangwill with Heine when it comes to portraying Jews making their unorthodox way in a Gentile world. Whereas the German poet presents the Jew as a bewitched canine who gets to feel human only once a week, Zangwill's Jew has never lost his regal bearing. Unlike Gumpelino and Hirsch-Hyacinth, who have traded in their names to climb the social ladder, da Costa flaunts every feature of his Jewish inheritance. The more expertly he works the system, the more we relish his challenge to its hypocrisies and abuses, and such conventions as working for a living or abiding by local institutional rules. It is the essential benignity of British society, despite its prejudices, that establishes the gentler tone of this social satire in which the worst thing one suffers is loss of dignity.

Social satire happened to be a highly developed form of British writing by the time Zangwill joined its ranks. Relatively good-natured, and in some respects reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse's later jabs at the British upper-class establishment in the novels featuring the aristocratic fop Bertie Wooster and his manservant Jeeves, Zangwill's comedy in the end rewards
even poor Grobstock for the natural sympathies he has shown throughout. Da Costa pulls off a “royal wedding” for his daughter and the upstart Yankele, enriches the Spanish synagogue that he bilked to pay for the nuptials, and has Grobstock invest the money to secure the future of them both—proving the advantages of his way of life and good it can bring to others. If we accept the schnorrer as a stand-in for the Jew—compensating for his social liability through elevated self-esteem—da Costa proves the advantages of his principled way of life, and perhaps also the advantages of Jewish humor that comes at its own expense and not at someone else's.

Zangwill was no Dickens, but his scroungers are undeniably funnier than Fagin. They take only what is given them—however grudgingly; they keep their word, if sometimes altering its spirit; they stay true to the principles of their profession of schnorring, different as it may be from other professions; they display the dignity of the righteous without the conceit of the self-righteous; and they never overtly make fun of goyim. In sum, they defy the stereotype of the grasping Jew that they also embody, inviting laughter at themselves along with their victims. At the same time, Gentiles may feel an extra bit of satisfaction at being
invited
to laugh at what would seem to be negative Jewish stereotypes.

All this coincides with what the British humorist Stephen Potter describes as a shift in British humor away from “self-congratulation and even sadism of laughing at, to the sympathy and even compassion of laughing with.”
⁶
It was not to last. Fourteen years after writing
King of the Schnorrers
, Zangwill, who had by then happily married a Gentile woman and was in
a different frame of mind regarding the future of the Jews as a people proudly apart, wrote
The Melting Pot
, a tendentious play situated in the United States that promotes assimilation as a U.S. ideal. We may see this as an element of an overall move away from Jewish subjects and entry into a more exclusively English literary milieu, and away from comedy at a time when the “great age of British humour” was itself coming to an end.
⁷
The First World War crushed the good-natured British satire of 1894, and Zangwill's brand of Jewish humor followed the British trend—although I will have occasion later on to point out certain continuities as well.

The evolution portrayed by Potter, from
laughing at
to
laughing with
, is wonderfully illustrated by Richard Raskin in his study of classic Jewish jokes, one of which he traces back to an anecdote recorded in a London publication of 1822:

On one of the nights when Mrs. Siddons first performed at the Drury Lane, a Jew boy, in his eagerness to get to the first row in the shilling gallery, fell over into the pit, and was dangerously hurt. The managers of the theatre ordered the lad to be conveyed to a lodging, and he was attended by their own physician; but notwithstanding all their attention, he died, and was decently buried at the expense of the theatre. The mother came to the playhouse to thank the managers, and they gave her his clothes and five guineas, for which she returned a curtsy, but with some hesitation added [that] they had forgotten to return her the shilling which Abraham had paid for coming in.
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