The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Year by year, the lit space on the street below shrank before the shadows. Closeness should have bred caution. Anyone in the top storeys getting up to no good and pretty soon the whole Judengasse knew about it. Closed shutters turned loose talk into certainty and an outbreak of Yiddish nodding when the women took the stew to the bakers’ ovens on Friday afternoon. Closeness bred scandal but also disease. The music of the Judengasse was coughing. Rooms on the inside now had little or no air. But still the births came with a faster tempo than the deaths. God must have wanted it thus. More mouths to feed in the Judengasse, then. The regulation allowing for the five hundred families also precluded their working in any of the occupations controlled by the guilds. So there were no artisans or even retail shops outside the ghetto. It was wholesale as usual, but a living could be made from cloth, grain, wax, and then, as everywhere, old clothes, moneylending, pawnbroking. There were also the butchers and slaughterers, the mohels, the matchmakers, the teachers at the beit midrash, and always on the corners like a rash that never went away the schnorrers, the beggars, pfuey. But even they were a notch above Beteljuden out in the country; armies of them, no better than gypsies, but more pitiful and more dangerous: houseless, lawless, filthy, stinking, lousy, covered in sores, rags falling off them, the blind stumbling with their sticks, the rest shuffling from place to place, a step a...