This issue of Plurielles, “Fidelity/Infidelity,” is the occasion for rereading The King of Schnorrers (Le Roi des Shnorrers) by Israel Zangwill. For the pleasure of it first, of course, so droll, subtle, and endearing is the book. For reflection as well, for it draws upon a very solid documentation of the principal Jewish community, the Sephardic one, in late eighteenth-century London, prompting us to question the place that the schnorrer occupies there, and from which we draw inspiration for our presentation of the author.
Israel Zangwill1, born in London in 1864 to parents come from Russia, died there in 1926. A prolific and generous writer, his corrosive humor and his precise observation of the society of his time were put in the service of a severe critique of both Jewish and non-Jewish milieus. Several of his books show his ambivalence with regard to the ghetto and to the Jewish society that lives there: he regards them with tenderness, for they preserve the traditions and the riches of the past; he fears that the price to be paid for this may be a certain sclerosis; he is drawn to integration into English society but reproaches it for being responsible for the persecution of the Jews and for their economic difficulties. He was a Zionist of the first hour, but he thought that the Jewish State could be established in any place that would accept it or lend itself to it, rather than in Palestine, given the conflicts he sensed there.
The King of Schnorrers was published in 1893. The book describes the Jewish community in London at the end of the eighteenth century. This community, readmitted under Cromwell, was for the most part Sephardic, come from Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands, composed above all of brokers, importers, and a few financiers. The Ashkenazim, come at the end of the seventeenth century from the Netherlands, from Germany, and from Eastern Europe, were principally peddlers and small merchants. The success of the Rothschilds began only a century later.
With finesse and humor the book allies unbridled comic imagination to the virulent critique of the failings of certain notables of this community (pride, ignorance, the forgetting of traditions become hollow formulas, vanity, avarice, class contempt, racism toward the Ashkenazi community, the imitation of the English nobility) and of its institutions (their rigidity, their inadequacy to resolve current problems).
Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa, the King of Schnorrers, serves I. Zangwill as a guide to his description of this community and as a revealer of its defects. The book is divided into six chapters.
In the first chapter, he makes sport of Grobstock, an Ashkenazi financier, administrator of the East India Company, whose pleasure is to give charity, in his own way: as conspicuously as possible, of course, but also by letting chance decide the gifts—generous, derisory, and even null for one of them. Manasseh, who has had the bad luck to receive this last one, shames the puerile philanthropist for his perverse game: how dare he amuse himself at the expense of the poor and imitate God? He succeeds in obtaining from him a considerable sum thanks to his anger, joined to an imperturbable logic—to the financier who reproaches him for having bought a salmon, a rich man’s fish, with all the alms money, he answers: “When I have no money I cannot eat it, and not when I have any either! When, then, could I eat it?”2—to the plays of speech, to seduction, as well as to the prestige conferred upon him by his belonging to the rich and powerful Sephardic community. He then easily takes the ascendancy over Grobstock and inverts the roles and the places: Manasseh makes him carry the salmon bought with the received alms, gives him as alms a coin because Grobstock has given him all the money he had in his pocket, “for it is bad to remain without a penny in one’s pocket” (p. 40), he says sententiously. Likewise, he makes the financier’s stylish and starchy valet, thus transformed into a porter, carry the clothes the latter has given him, but only to sell them at once to a merchant, thus transforming them into merchandise and money. Likewise, in the last chapter, he will transform the money he has promised for the poor, and which in reality he has had others pay, into a life annuity for himself.
Manasseh profits from Grobstock’s difficulty in identifying him: he is, to be sure, a beggar, socially inferior, but he belongs to a community superior to that of the financier. Likewise he is superior to him in height, in will, in intelligence, in physical and intellectual qualities (as for moral qualities, are they equals?). On the other hand, he spots his contradictions well and brings them to light: does he give alms out of generosity or to procure himself a surplus of enjoyment at the beggars’ expense? Manasseh refuses to enter into the game and forces him out of his ambiguity—to give alms or to play—while he himself remains in his own: he is a beggar but does not ask for alms, he demands it.
The second chapter shows how he succeeds in getting himself invited to Grobstock’s. The financier’s wife wonders whether he might not be a Spanish grandee, strangely dressed. He has had himself accompanied by another schnorrer, Yankelé, an Ashkenazi who is his parasite, his pupil, his foil, and who admires him for his qualities as a schnorrer and for his belonging to the dominant community. To be admitted to it, Yankelé asks him to give him his daughter in marriage, in response to which Manasseh asks him to show that he is worthy of her.
In the third, he succeeds in entering a theater without a ticket, along with Yankelé. More than that, he forces the doorman to apologize for having wanted to prevent the latter from entering. His technique is the same as with Grobstock: to impose by his bearing but also by the image of social power he attributes to himself, to brandish the threat of the negative consequences of a refusal to satisfy his demand. Here too he forces the inversion of roles: it is the doorman, who only did his job, who must present his apologies to the swindler. But his stratagem worked only because at least one box was empty, which he could claim was his own. But the strength of the schnorrer comes from the fact that in society there exist empty places that he can come to occupy and from which he can offer his temptations to the dissatisfied and his answers to those who doubt.
The fourth chapter. To show the king of the schnorrers that he is worthy of being his son-in-law, worthy of him, the Polish schnorrer must get himself invited to dinner by the most avaricious, the most gluttonous, and the most selfish of the rabbis. Manasseh has already succeeded at this, by dangling before the rabbi, who specializes in consolations for the dead, the profits he could draw from the development of his activity within the Sephardic community, into which Manasseh himself could introduce him. A classic technique of swindlers; the reader could expect better of his ingenuity, but the interest of this chapter is to see how Yankelé goes about reaching the same result. First of all he establishes a minimal bond of affective proximity with the rabbi by claiming (and whether it is a matter of truth or of lie matters little, for the rabbi lies too) to be from the same village. Then he has the rabbi evoke all those whom the latter knew in his childhood and who stayed in that village he had to leave young, and, at each name, he says in a lugubrious voice, “dead,” beyond all verisimilitude. Manasseh will moreover reproach him for having needlessly multiplied the number of the “dead”: “One does not waste the merchandise like that!” Finally, the rabbi, invaded by sadness, neglects his dishes, upon which Yankelé can then throw himself.
But the trial passed does not suffice; the malicious word must still demonstrate Yankelé’s capacity to become the son-in-law of the King of Schnorrers. To Manasseh, who expresses a certain regret—“I had envisaged that she would marry a king of the schnorrers”—he answers: “By marrying her I shall be one. I shall have schnorred your daughter—the most precious thing in the world! And I shall have schnorred her from a king of the schnorrers, what is more. And I shall have schnorred your services as matchmaker into the bargain!!!”
The fifth chapter shows how Manasseh defies the Mahamad, the council of five, the supreme instance of the community, which has summoned him to excommunicate him if he persists in wanting to marry his daughter to an Ashkenazi. He refuses to respect the decorum and the ritual of the audience, presents himself as an old man whom the notables refuse permission to sit, as a pious man who devotes his life to the study of the sacred texts, as a poor man without a penny whom it is therefore useless to condemn to pay a fine, as the only one, along with the secretary, to know the community’s reference texts—and he demonstrates that none of them forbids such a marriage—as a schnorrer to whom the laws, by reason of his marginality, do not apply. But he also brandishes a double threat: political—to use his influence to prevent the reelection of those who would dare to punish him—and spiritual—the poor man is the instrument of divine justice—and the president collapses, victim of a stroke.
The last chapter shows how Manasseh, on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage, declares that he is donating large sums to the synagogue for the poor, how he manages to have others pay them, using threat, flattery, seduction, the reminder of a thoughtless promise. To the president he says that the Ashkenazim will not make the distinction between him and the community, that his promise commits the entire community, toward God as toward men, and that it would be regrettable to appear like those who do not keep their word. In the end, he has this sum allotted to him as a life annuity.
Is this a happy ending? For Manasseh, no doubt. For Yankelé too. But for his daughter? We do not know her feelings toward her husband, nor the future of a marriage contracted under such conditions. The book ends on a nostalgic note: the king will have no heir, he will remain alone in history, and the worth of the schnorrers will decline.
Whatever the worth of the King of Schnorrers, he can exist only within the precise context of the community in which he lives. This community appears particularly rigid, but he can nonetheless find enough room for maneuver in it to develop his activity. It seems to be still in the time of its splendor, but its decline has perhaps already begun. There exists no Jewish bourgeoisie in it, I. Zangwill specifies at the outset, only the very rich and the very poor. How can the king of the Schnorrers find his place there? Isaac Babel reports this phrase of an old Russian man, in 1920: “If there were in the world only wicked rich men and poor vagabonds, how would they live, the saints?” (Red Cavalry (Cavalerie Rouge), L’Âge d’Homme, 1972, p. 42). Is Manasseh’s role to introduce a little play between the very rich and the very poor—he who belongs to neither of these two components but circulates freely between them? He could redistribute a part of the excessive riches, but his industry profits only himself.
The Sephardic community described in the book appears particularly frozen in its structures and its archaic rules (the Ascamot, “the tangled network of rules providing for everything from the policy of the synagogue… to the distribution of Passover cakes to the poor”): “The fathers of the synagogue who drafted their constitution in pure Castilian… wanted their statutes to cement and not disintegrate their community. It was a tactless tyranny…, a rigid administration of a code of cast iron forged… when the colony of Dutch-Spanish exiles needed a military regime.” The rituals and the rules survive in it long after the memory of their meaning and their origin has disappeared: “These descendants still made elaborate salutations and circumlocutions… although Castile was as vague in their memory as the writings that faded on the panels… and although none of these gentlemen of the Mahamad managed to know the statutes thoroughly—all the more so as there was only one single member who understood the Portuguese in which they had finally been drafted.”
But it is not totally frozen, otherwise Manasseh would have no room for maneuver. In a society in disorder his methods would no doubt be different. His success comes from his understanding of social functioning, which he observes, within which he acts, but without ever letting himself be caught in its traps and seductions, without illusion about the worth of such-and-such an instance, of such-and-such a personage, of such-and-such an activity, of such-and-such a function. He has nothing to defend, but what does he have to gain, apart from money? The pleasure of playing and of winning, of showing his superiority over the powerful?
Manasseh’s lucrative tricks are possible only in a society where the possibility of divergent interpretations of the codes persists, and where individuals are not strictly homogeneous to their characters and their social role, not totally identified with their function, and keep a share of doubt about the legitimacy of their acts, their power, their knowledge. This is what allows Manasseh to say to his prey: “You do not know what you are saying or what you ought to know, you are not worthy of occupying your place.” He can do so all the better since he himself possesses a great knowledge and knows how to make good use of it. Thus, possessing nothing, he has nothing to lose, neither financially nor socially, unlike his victims. But in every society there exist empty places, unoccupied spaces, questions that have not yet found their answer, and reciprocally, and it is these that the schnorrer puts in his service. He plays likewise on the relative permeability of the social spaces, which makes it possible for him to be the stranger accepted by reason of the ignorance of what he is and of the fear his dupes have of committing a gaffe or a blunder by not recognizing his supposed rightful place. Thus, Grobstock can accept, by forcing himself a little, to believe that Manasseh is an important figure of the other community and that his appearance is a foreign fashion or an effect of eccentricity. Manasseh can, in a later chapter, make the notables, who nonetheless know him well, believe that he is on good terms with important figures of the other community.
Manasseh is expert in the art of spotting the weaknesses and the defects of institutions and of individuals, of making them the efficient motor of his mischief, and in so doing of revealing them in broad daylight. But he is not, for all that, a rebel; he defends no cause, has no ideal. He is perfectly integrated into his community, as much as all the others whom the author describes with so much bite, like caricatures in a coconut-shy. This is why his exploits, which are necessary to him in order to live, reveal the defects of this society. But this revelation, which could have subversive effects, is not his goal, only the means of achieving his ends, and their consequence. The reason for this is perhaps that he has the awareness that this society, such as it is, is necessary to him. It would be difficult for him to leave it, and it is only out of bravado that, threatened with excommunication, he threatens in return the Mahamad with joining the Ashkenazi community. Likewise, to want to change it or to destroy it would be suicidal for him. If it disappeared he would be like the fish beached on the sand. The decline of the schnorrers (on the last page the author evokes “the degenerate schnorrers of today”) will accompany that of the community. The author specifies that it “will be necessary to wait a quarter-century more for the Ascamot (the rules) to be translated into English, from which point their authority would be lost.” The marriage of his daughter with Yankelé, the Ashkenazi schnorrer, is perhaps for Manasseh, who senses this decline, only the means of preserving himself from it by advancing one of his pawns into the other community.
Manasseh’s marginality is only apparent. Before the Council of Five he certainly relies upon it to affirm that the laws destined for the normal members of the community could not, by reason of it, apply to him. But at other moments he affirms that his activity is necessary to the moral well-being of the latter, for it allows them to give charity. And on several occasions, at the beginning and at the end of the book, he says that his words and his acts commit the entire community, and he has shown clearly that he shares its racist and contemptuous prejudices about the Ashkenazim. To Grobstock: “You are the refugees of the ghettos of Russia, of Poland, and of Germany… while we honored the royal courts with our presence. We made the name of Jew something honorable; you debase it.” To Yankelé: “Our Judaism differs in no essential point from yours—it is a question of blood. You cannot change your blood.” A major argument to explain that nothing can change, since the differences are first of all biological.
His strength is to be the one who has nothing and therefore nothing to lose: his possessions are immaterial, his “land of Jerusalem” and his “provinces of England.” He is also the one who is without social belonging but who circulates freely in all places and all milieus, getting himself received everywhere. He belongs to the Sephardic community, does not hesitate to recall it and to make good use of it. He knows perfectly the sacred texts and the founding texts of the community, its rules and its social functioning, the place that each individual occupies in it and the privileges that the latter thinks are attached to it. And he knows how to play upon them. In this frozen and compartmentalized society these pieces of knowledge allow him to move freely and to have a certain advantage over those who are stuck to their place.
A contradiction, then, between the inevitably subversive effects of his actions and the need he has that this society to which he belongs should remain identical to itself. He cannot accept the evolution of the practices of giving, for example, which would be done “through the intermediary of a secretary and vaunted in annual reports”: he requires “the human warmth one finds in personal relations.” Likewise Manasseh asks Grobstock to designate him permanently as the one who receives the clothes the latter no longer wants: a search for stability, for security, for a lifetime guarantee, which he will obtain at the end of the book. The argument he employs, and which Grobstock understands perfectly, is that of the importance of preserving one’s brand image, one’s reputation, the obsession of his interlocutor: “Because it is wounding to one’s reputation to lose a client.” If the schnorrer succeeds so well, it is because he shares the modes of thinking of the society in which he lives. Likewise he refuses to wear the clothes that Grobstock has donated to him: he does not want to appear and to be other than he is, even in play, even provisionally. No more than he wants to change his role, and he recounts the bitter story of the schnorrer who, yielding to the pressure of decent folk and agreeing to work, lost everything.
The book thus prompts the reader to question the paired couples stability/instability and fidelity/infidelity. Fidelity to frozen rules, ideas, and practices leads to sclerosis, but too rapid an evolution loses tradition and identity. A society that changes very quickly, under the effect of its own dynamic, is a society in revolution. A society can freeze under the effect of a dictatorship, internal or external, or of its own sclerosis. The path is narrow between these pitfalls. Borges, in The Lottery in Babylon (La Loterie à Babylone)3, had imagined a society that was at once frozen in its rigorous rules of functioning and at the same time permanently in motion: all the citizens had to participate in the lottery, which was played permanently, and whose stake could be accession to the highest powers, slavery, or death: a society become “an infinite game of chance.”
The King of Schnorrers is neither an outlaw (on the contrary, he never ceases to recall the spirit of the law, even while playing on its ambiguities and its flaws). He is thus quite different from the more or less big-hearted crooks sung by later books4, and from those whom misery has constrained to transgressions of the law and of traditional values, and who own up to it5. He would rather be a thorn in the side, a court jester, a satirical critic of the defects of the society in which he fully participates.
What will become of him when society changes? I think back to the phrase addressed, in anguish, by the old prostitute to the judge and to the young Soviet commissar come to restore order in the town (we are at the beginning of the Soviet revolution): “What will become of the whores? — They will disappear. — Will they be allowed to live, or not? — Yes, but their life will be different, better.”6 The King of Schnorrers prompts us to complete the question: “And the magnificent swindlers?” Have they disappeared, have they adapted, by what, by whom have they been replaced? How to recognize them today? In this contradiction of the King of Schnorrers between the subversive effects of his actions and his need for a stable society are perhaps found those of the author (cf. the preface by Richard Marienstras, op. cit.), torn between the ghetto and the common society, between the necessary evolution of Judaism and the preservation of traditional values, between the temptation and the fear of assimilation.
The only way out for one who wants to change position, apart from the transformation of society that the book does not evoke, is individual ascension through marriage: “A Sephardi cannot marry an Ashkenazi woman! That would be degrading!” “Yes…, but, in the other direction, an Ashkenazi can marry a Sephardi woman, no? That is an ascension.” In this project of Yankelé’s, the woman counts for very little (“Any Spanish woman would be a windfall, even one with a face like a Passover cake”) and: “It is not so much that I desire your daughter for a wife as you for a father-in-law.” In this phrase are also expressed his ambiguous and complex relations to Manasseh. Likewise, a little later, he will say: “You are already a father to me, why would you not be a father-in-law?”
Manasseh’s genius is his skill in making frozen positions and identities shift, in showing their polysemy and their multiple potentialities, beyond appearances and habits, whether it be a matter of social places, of texts, or of objects. We have seen it: he has made of the financier a valet and a beggar, of the valet a porter. He hastened to transform the clothes given by Grobstock into merchandise and money. He excels at showing the multiple interpretations that texts can receive. Likewise, each person can embody several characters. Thus, Yankelé, addressing him who is astonished at his pretensions to marry his daughter and to support her (“You told me you were poor as Job”), specifies: “That, I told you as a schnorrer. But now I speak to you as a suitor.” And he adds, in another reversal that is a return to square one: “And as a suitor, I tell you that I can schnorr enough to support two wives,” to which Manasseh answers: “But do you say that to da Costa the father or to da Costa the matchmaker?” Or again: “You are too much a man of honor to know as a philanthropist what I said to the matchmaker, to the father-in-law, and to the fellow schnorrer. On the other hand I shall take free meals at your house as a son-in-law and not as a schnorrer.” But the field and the time of these changes are limited.
Likewise, the symbol can have as much value and efficacy as the real object (“the land of Jerusalem” and “the provinces of England”). The social prestige of an individual is due to his real wealth as much as to that attributed to him in the imaginary. The imaginary dead are as precious as the real dead, and Manasseh reproaches Yankelé for having used, with the rabbi, far more of them than was necessary to reach the goal: “Why did you kill so many people?” The contraries too are of equal worth: “I could have obtained with the truth as much as with a lie,” and the negative is worth the positive: Yankelé gets himself paid not to come to get paid; he counts as income the money he will not spend and that he could have spent if…, etc.
The mastery of these multiple potentialities requires the precise and rigorous definition of each situation: a veritable work of exegete, of categorization, of distinction. Thus, to Yankelé, who expounds to him how he will be able to provide for the needs of his wife: “Stop! cried Manasseh, suddenly seized by a scruple. Must I listen to financial details on a Sabbath day?”, to which Yankelé answers, thus showing his qualities as a schnorrer, and that from this point of view Manasseh would not have to blush at having him for a son-in-law: “Certainly, when they are tied to my marriage, which is a commandment. It is the Law that we are discussing in reality.” Likewise, they discuss at length what is work (and for which it is therefore not shameful to get oneself paid) and what is not, for a schnorrer: to pray, to wake people to attend the service, to announce the dead, not to come to schnorr? Is going to fetch one’s alms work or walking on foot? Is it work if an activity procures pleasure?
Death is very present in the book. Manasseh has a grandiose, cynical, utilitarian vision of it, and he makes of it one of the arguments he addresses to his victims: “Charity delivers from death.” For this reason, whatever the economic and social fluctuations that make the security of work uncertain, the schnorrer will always be necessary to the well-off classes to allow them thus to keep at bay the fear of death. The episode at the rabbi’s illustrates this well. The race of men toward pleasures, toward honors, toward riches, toward appearance is perhaps a flight from death and from the fear of death, but a vain one, since these can at any moment catch up with them, like the president of the Mahamad. And Yankelé says, with insistence: “Someone must die so that I may live.” A good part of his income comes from the commemorations of the dead, and he assesses the prospects for its growth: “In a few years many fathers and mothers are going to have to die here, and each parent leaves two or three sons, and each child two or three brothers and a father. And then every day more and more German Jews arrive here, which means that more and more are going to die.”
Close to the obsession with death is that with passing time. The miserly rabbi, evoking his renown—invented—as a child prodigy preacher, regrets it: “Until the age of nine I was still an attraction, but each year the miracle diminished. I kept fighting, but my age was gaining against me daily… A man does not remain a little boy forever.” Grobstock’s wife, at Manasseh’s instigation, thinks back with nostalgia to the time of old when “her father who, following a current of the time, had divided his time between the Law and profit.” The author, on the last page, evokes “the degenerate schnorrers of today.”
The merit of the book is to mingle the brilliance of fantasy and humor with the gravity of the questions it raises in the reader. That of the King of Schnorrers is to make good use, to his profit, of his intelligence, his lucidity, and his audacity. Of his fidelity too, for he is the one who does not change. All the others, confronted with his provocations, show the inconsistency of their character but also their opportunism. But his fidelity to himself, to his character, his appearance, the place he occupies in society, is of a quite different worth than that of the institutions of the community, faithful to archaic rules, become over time inadequate to resolve the problems of the present, incapable of evolution, incomprehensible to all, including to those whose responsibility is to defend and to apply them. But the fidelity of the King of Schnorrers to himself seems unable to exist except within the context of the community to which he belongs. The paradox of his action is that he reveals the weaknesses and the flaws of this community, but, failing to choose to make it evolve, he risks accentuating its decline, and his own at the same time.
Notes
We take up the biographical elements given by Richard Marienstras in his fine preface to the French edition of 1980 (JC Lattès). A new French edition was published recently by Autrement.↩︎
A rejoinder that delighted Freud (cf. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (Le mot d’esprit et ses rapports à l’inconscient)).↩︎
Ficciones (Fictions). Gallimard, 1957.↩︎
Max Barabander in The Little World of Krochmalna Street (Le Petit Monde de la Rue Krochmalna), by I.B. Singer, or Benya Krik in the Odessa Tales (Contes d’Odessa) of I. Babel.↩︎
Oser Warszawski. The Smugglers (Les Contrebandiers). Seuil, 1989.↩︎
Isaac Babel. Odessa Tales (Les Contes d’Odessa). Gallimard, 1979, p. 114.↩︎