To the ear and eye that can find sermons in stones, streets, one would fancy, must be brimful of suggestive stories. There might be differences of course. From a stone of the polished pebble variety, for instance, one could only predict smooth platitudes, and the romance in a block of regulation stucco would possibly turn out a trifle prosaic. But the right stone and the right street will always have an eloquence of their own for the right listener or lounger, and certain crumbling old tenements which were carted away as rubbish some few years ago in Frankfort must have been rarely gifted in this line. ‘Words of fire,’ and ‘written in blood,’ would, in truth, have no parabolic meaning, if the stones of that ancient Judengasse suddenly took to story-telling. A long record of sorrow, and wrong, and squalid romance, would be unfolded, and, inasmuch as the sorrows have been healed and the wrongs have been righted, it may not be uninteresting to look for a moment at the picturesque truths that lie hidden under that squalid romance, which, like a mist, hung for centuries over the Jews’ quarter.

The very first authentic record of the presence of Jews in Frankfort comes to us in the account of a massacre of some hundred and eighty of them in 1241. This persecution was probably epidemic rather than indigenous in its nature, its germ distinctly traceable to those conscientious and comprehensive attempts of Louis the Saint, in the preceding year, to stamp out Judaism in his dominions. At any rate, for German Jews, an era of protection began under Frederick Barbarossa, and the Frankfort Jews among the rest, during the next hundred years, enjoyed the ‘no history’ which to the Jewish nation, pre-eminently amongst all others, must have been synonymous with happiness. But the story begins again about the middle of the fourteenth century when the Black Plague raged, and sanitary inspection, old style, took the form of declaring the wells to be poisoned, and of advising the burning and plunder of Jews by way of antidote. Jews were prolific, their hoards portable, their houses slightly built, so the burnings and the massacres and the liftings become intermittent and a little difficult to localise, till about the year 1430, when Frederick III., egged on by his clergy, made an order for all Jews in Frankfort to reside out of sight and sound of the holy Cathedral. A site just without the ancient walls of the town, and belonging to the council, was allotted to them, and here, at their own expense, the Jews built their Judengasse.

The street contained originally some hundred and ninety-six houses, and iron-sheeted gates, kept fast closed on Sundays and saint days, grew gradually to be barred from inside as well as outside on the Ghetto. The pleasures and the hopes which Jews might not share they came by slow degrees to hate and to despise, and the men with the yellow badges on their garments learnt to cringe and stoop under their load, and the dark-eyed women with the blue stripes to their veils lifted them only to look upon their children. Undeniably, by every outward test, the poor pariahs of the Ghetto were degenerate, and their sad and sordid lives must have looked both repellent and unpicturesque to the passer-by. But it may be doubted whether the degeneracy went much deeper than the costume. If the passer-by had passed in to one of these gabled dwellings, when the degrading gaberdine and the disfiguring veil were thrown aside, he would have come upon an interior of home life which would have struck him as strangely incongruous with the surroundings. Amid all the wretched physical squalor of the street he would have found little mental and less spiritual destitution. If the law of the land bid Jews shrink before men, the law of the Book bid them rejoice before God. Both laws they obeyed to the letter. Beating vainly at closed doors, they learnt to speak to the world with bated breath and whispered humbleness, but ‘His courts’ they entered, as it was commanded them, ‘with thanksgiving,’ and ‘joyfully’ sang hymns to Him. And the ‘courts’ came to be comprehensive of application, and the ‘hymns’ to include much literature. There was always a vivid domestic side to the religion of the Jews, and the alchemy of home life went far to turn the dross of the Ghetto into gold. Their Sabbath, in the picturesque phrase of their prayer-book, was ‘a bride,’ and her welcome, week by week, was of a right bridal sort. White cloths were spread and lamps lit in her honour. The shabbiest dwellings put on something of a festive air, and for ‘Shobbus’ the poorest haus-frau would manage to have ready at least one extra dish and several best and bright-coloured garments for her family. On the seventh day and on holy days the slouching pedlar and hawker fathers, with their packs cast off, were priests and teachers too, and every day the Ghetto children, for all their starved and stunted growth, had unlimited diet from the Judengasse stores of family affection and free schooling. They were probably, however, at no time very numerous, these Ghetto babies, for up to a quite comparatively recent date (1832) Jewish love-affairs were strictly under State control, and only fifteen couples a year were allowed to marry.

Ludwig BÖrne, or LÖb Baruch as he is registered in the Frankfort synagogue (1786), was a result of one of these eagerly sought privileges, and it is easy to see how he came to write, ‘Because I was born a slave I understand liberty; my birthplace was no longer than the Judengasse, and beyond its locked gates a foreign country began for me. Now, no town, no district, no province can content me. I can rest only with all Germany for my fatherland.’ An eloquent expression enough of the repressed patriotism which was, perforce, inarticulate for centuries in the Judengasse of Frankfort.

Prison as the street must have seemed to its tenants, there was at least one occasion when its gates had the charms rather than the defects appertaining to bolts and bars. In 1498, a harassed, ragged little crowd from Nuremberg fled from their persecutors to find in our Frankfort Judengasse a safe city of refuge, and for a century or more the Imperial coat-of-arms was gratefully emblazoned on the Ghetto gates as a sign to the outer world that the Frankfort Jews, though imprisoned, were protected. Yet we may fairly doubt if the feeling of security could have been much more than skin-deep, since in 1711, when nearly the whole of the street was burnt down, we find that some of the poor souls were so afraid of insult and plunder, that many refused to open their doors to would-be rescuers, and so, to prevent being pillaged, perished in the flames. An oddly pathetic prose version of the famous Ingoldsby martyr, who ‘could stand dying, but who couldn’t stand pinching.’

When, in 1808, Napoleon made Frankfort the capital of his new grand duchy, the Ghetto gates were demolished, and many vexatious restrictions were repealed. Such new hopes, however, as the Frankfort Jews may have begun to indulge, fell with Napoleon’s downfall in 1815. Civil and political disabilities were revived, and it was not till 1854 that the last of these were erased from the statute-book.

The one house in that sad old street, the stirring sermons in whose stones might be ‘good in everything,’ would be No. 148, the little low-browed dwelling with the sign of the Rose and Star—a veritable Rose of Dawn it has proved—which was purchased more than a hundred years ago [in 1780] by Meyer Amschel Rothschild, the founder of the great Rothschild house. Every one knows the fairy-like story of that old house; how Meyer Amschel, intended by his parents to be a rabbi, as many of his ancestors had been before him, chose for himself a different way of helping his fellow-men; how he went into commerce, and made commerce, even in the Ghetto, dignified and honourable, as he would have made chimney-sweeping if he had adopted it; how he became agent to the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, how faithfully he discharged his stewardship, and how his money took to itself snowball properties, and changed the tiny Judengasse tenement into gorgeous mansions. And the old stones would tell, too, of how faithful were the old merchant prince and the wife of his youth to early associations; how sons and daughters grew up and married, and moved to more aristocratic neighbourhoods, but how Meyer Amschel and his old wife clung to the shabby old home in the Ghetto, and lived there all their lives, and till she died, nearly fifty years ago.[10] The very iron bars of those windows would speak if they could, saying never a word of their old bad uses, but telling only how kind and wrinkled hands were stretched out through them day by day, and year after year, dealing out bread to the hungry. No. 148 could certainly tell the prettiest story in all the street, and preach the most suggestive line in all the sermons carted away with those stones of the Frankfort Judengasse. And it would be a story with a sequel. For when all the other sad old houses were demolished, the walls and rafters of No. 148 were carefully collected and numbered, and for a while reverently laid aside. And now, re-erected, the house stands close by its old site, serving as the centre or depÔt for the dispensing of the Rothschild charities in Frankfort. Fanciful folks might almost be tempted to believe that stones with such experiences would be sufficiently sentient to rejoice at the pretty sentiment which refused to let them perish, and which, regarding them as relics, built them up afresh, and consecrated them to new and noble uses.