Even when he was beating the living daylights out of an opponent, delivering a facer to that particular spot between the brows which would bring on temporary blindness, or a sickener to the mark, the pit of the stomach, there was something oddly cherubic about Dan Mendoza: the long lashes fringing wide brown eyes; the Cupid’s bow lips; the mass of dark, curly hair, grown long and artfully cut, tied at his neck with a black silk ribbon. One day that lovelock would be his undoing. He was too pretty to be taken seriously. And too short and too light into the bargain: five foot seven and barely 160 pounds, the weight of an apprentice. But when he stripped before the set-to, the Fancy saw that the handsome head was planted atop a bull neck and a barrel chest, and this should have warned anyone taking him on that they might not escape without a good deal of hurt. But one after the other, cocky bruisers looked at Dan and saw nothing but a dirty little Jewish tough from Mile End chancing his arm. Go on, how much damage could an Ebrew do? Quite a lot, as it turned out. Mendoza had bottom, as Pierce Egan, the writer of Boxiana, Or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, recalled years afterwards, ‘a bottom never impeached; and possessing wind that was seldom disordered’.1 Without bottom (the fortitude to take punishment and come back smack-sharp from it) and without wind (staying power) you could have all the skill in the world and you would still go down. But Dan had both, and more too, for he was reckoned the neatest stopper and the quickest hitter in the game.2 Others could deliver a more violent blow but Dan would stop them with his hard arm as if they had hit a rock, and then would counterpunch so quickly that the barrage of hits turned into a single rhythmic fusillade.3 If you were unguarded, the punishing counterblow, the one you would still be feeling days later, would be the Mendoza, otherwise known as the chop or chopper: a sudden upward (or, more rarely, downward) diagonal swipe with the knuckled back of the hand. To land those you not only needed great rigidity between wrist and elbow but phenomenal flexibility at the shoulder. Try a mock Mendoza, preferably in the air, and you’ll see what I mean. Those who got chopped usually assumed a look of surprise. There were those of course who judged the Mendoza a typically Jewish trick: low-down and dirty; but then they would, wouldn’t they?
A good part of the Fancy who pursued his set-tos up and down England, once converted to the skills of the Jew, gave him the confidence of their bets. Then, they did handsomely out of the fortunes of Dan and joined in the lusty choruses of ‘Mendoza forever!’ For the Jews, to have one of their own cheered rather than pelted with abuse or stones was a giddy novelty. So, not quite believing their luck, they too sang the praises of their hero. There were eight thousand Jews living in England by the late eighteenth century and a thousand of them were said to have shown up at Doncaster for the third and last of his great grudge matches with Richard Humphreys. ‘Daniel, Daniel, vekhayam!’ they chanted after the victory; ‘Daniel, Daniel, live forever!’
Mendoza lived long enough, at any rate, to publish his memoirs when he was fifty-two, the first of any professional sportsman, but then he was the first in many things. No Jew before him had been taken to Windsor in the royal carriage to converse with King George, and easily too, as if they were old companions strolling the castle terrace.4 Before Mendoza, with the notable exception of Gluckel of Hameln’s memoir, Jewish autobiographies had been the exclusive province of rabbis, philosophers, men of mind and faith like Leone Modena and Solomon Maimon.5 But not all Jews, then and now, however regrettably, see their fate governed by the exertions of philosophy, and this was especially so in worldly, violent, business-crazy Hanoverian England. Not that Mendoza was mindless; quite the opposite. He was, conceded Pierce Egan, ‘intelligent and communicative’, singular qualities in a Broughton’s Rules fighter.6 Mendoza liked to think of himself as a ‘professor of pugilism’ and he created an ‘academy’ of self-defence while he was still in his twenties. His first book, The Art of Boxing, was dedicated to ‘his Scholars’. Bare-fist pugilism, though often accused of ‘blackguardism’, he believed to be a science which, properly analysed, comprehended and learned, would always prevail over brute disadvantages of height and weight.7 His teaching was in the first place for all those who wanted to follow his example, and many, especially among the Jews of London, did. A succession of Jewish pugilists – ‘Dutch’ Sam Elias, Elisha Crabbe, Aby Velasco and many more – were his disciples. But his memoir is full of instances of his being picked on, insulted and assaulted as a Jew, and this was the strongest motive in Mendoza’s choice of vocation. He was certainly not the first Jew to have fought back against intimidation with something more physical than reasoned indignation, but he was the first to write about it. Jews who mastered a Mendoza would no longer be taken as easy quarry; there had been centuries of stooping and shuffling. ‘Spit in a Jew’s face, give him a box on the ear with one hand and a farthing with the other,’ a character in a popular novel said, reflecting what had been commonly assumed, ‘and he will pocket the affront and thank you.’8 After Dan you might, instead, expect a Jew to take a fighting stance.
When Mendoza was born in 1764, no one among England’s Jews had forgotten the paranoid hatred which had greeted mild attempts to pass a Jewish naturalisation bill eleven years earlier. It had been met with a barrage of vicious absurdities. Squibs and broadsides claimed the Jews, those inveterate accomplices of ‘Old Corruption’, had bribed the Pelham government. Members of the Commons and Lords had apparently agreed to be circumcised in return for election funds. One caricature had a prominent supporter of the bill, Sir William Calvert, being circumcised on the very steps of St Paul’s! But the Ancient Constitution would not ‘give an inch’. Ha ha ha. The Jews were notorious clippers, whether of foreskins or coin. Everyone knew Jewish brokers controlled the stock market, never mind that the number of brokers was limited to twelve. Now they would buy up the shires! Locusts is what they were, a horrid creeping swarm, stripping anything on which they alighted. And like vermin they carried contagion on their foul-smelling bodies. ‘I verily believe,’ wrote one typical pamphleteer, ‘that if the naturalisation bill should occasion a second swarm of this kind of locusts to come and settle in the town we should have a kind of plague or sickness as often they have in Constantinople.’9 The lord mayor of London, Sir Crisp Gascoigne, warned that the measure would ‘tend greatly to the dishonour of the Christian religion’. Before you knew it the cathedrals would be turned into synagogues and the tombs at St Paul’s and Westminster would contain the remains of ‘Sir Nadab Issachar’ and ‘The Rt Hon. the Earl of Balaam’. On Guy Fawkes Night 1753, the effigy of the gunpowder plotter was replaced by a mannikin Jew, with hooked nose and beard, burned to black ash on the bonfire in imitation of a Spanish auto-dafé. ‘That I hate every Jew / Believe I speak true’ ran the popular refrain. A fantasy of the anti-Semites was that Jews secretly craved and gobbled the very pork they pretended to abhor. Caricatures featured buxom Jewesses, their breasts spilling from the neckline, leaning greasily forward to kiss a piglet, an anglicised version of the old German Judensau in which Jews sucked at the teats of porkers or greedily swallowed their shit. 1753 and the years following saw random pork forcings. Jews on the road or in taverns were jumped on, roped to a pillar, their mouths pulled open and crammed with scalding gammon and bacon. ‘Get a bit of pork / Stick it on a fork / And give it to a Jew boy, a Jew.’10 (Some tavern keepers served only pork items, as a display of anti-Jewish patriotism.) In mid-Wales on the road between Abergavenny and Crickhowell, the body of the pedlar Jonas Levi was found. His box of wares had been plundered and his skull smashed in; fragments of bone were scattered beside the rest of him.11 There were other murders, some in the navy seaports where Jews bought and sold from sailors. Strains of this frantic hatred, often taking the form of spitting randomly into the face of a passing Jew or pulling his beard, persisted well into Mendoza’s time. Francis Place, the radical tailor, remembered that ‘when a Jew was seen on the streets it was a signal for assault. I have seen many Jews hounded and hunted, kicked, cuffed, pulled by the beard and spat upon and so barbarously assaulted in the streets without any protection from passers-by or police … Dogs could not be worse used.’12
If you went to the Jewish districts of London, one author wrote, you will find that ‘the followers of Moses are the most nasty, filthy people under the canopy of heaven’.13 On Easter Sunday, in some school playing grounds, Robert Southey recalled, you could hear the merry chant of the boys: ‘Christ is risen / Christ is risen / All the Jews must go to prison.’ Some of the abuse recycled medieval persecution, proposing punitive taxes to be imposed on Jews for their presumptuous temerity. In 1775 one such petitioner to the prime minister, Lord North, was considerate enough to make it clear that he was ‘not for exterminating them [the Jews], but surely My Lord it will be equitable and just to make them pay something for such extraordinary favours’ as they presently enjoyed.14 Most of the English looked on Jewish religious rituals with supercilious bafflement, but others were capable of going much further. ‘There is something hateful in the very nature of those ceremonies which they have the infamy to call religious,’ wrote the radical William Cobbett in one of his many anti-Semitic outbursts.15 Others wanted to impose the yellow badge or the old twin-tablet white badge ordered by Edward I, since the most dangerous Jews were those who didn’t look Hebrew enough – not the bedraggled hairy hawkers, but the unbearded, the smooth-jawed who might pass for Christian. On the other hand, for all their spurious airs of civility, if you looked hard enough you could always tell. There were certain giveaways. ‘You know a Jew at first sight,’ wrote William Romaine, a famous evangelical preacher at St George’s Hanover Square, ‘look at his eyes. Don’t you see a malignant blackness underneath them which gives them such a cast as bespeaks guilt and murder. You can always tell a Jew by this mask it throws such a dead livid aspect over all his features that he carries enough evidence in his face to convict him of being a crucifier.’
No one said that of Daniel Mendoza’s face, or to it, especially not after it had become one of the most famous phizzes in England. In the late 1780s and 90s it was everywhere: on tankards and teapots; snuff boxes and rummers; posters and songsheets. And it was a departure from the usual Jewish grotesque beloved by the caricaturists: lank-haired, bearded, greasy-chopped, hook-nosed.16 Though it was beyond even his power to succeed entirely, for a while at least, Mendoza elbowed Shylock aside as the archetype of a Jew. No squalid usurer he, hunched over his counting table, ‘my dearing’ you to death while he cracked his knuckles and took your measure and your money. All Mendoza had in common with Shylock was his mercilessness to those who had impugned him, betrayed him, not lived up to their word. He was a great one for keeping one’s word was Daniel Mendoza.
No sportsman before him had taken control of his own persona, promoted it so creatively, and turned ‘Mendoza the Jew’ from an expression of surprised contempt to one of star-struck admiration; created, in fact, the first thoroughly marketed sports celebrity cult. The astral metaphor was used on a sportsman for the first time when it was written he was ‘a star of the first brilliancy’.17 Though he was not especially observant, so far from running away from his Jewishness, Mendoza turned it into a promotional asset, especially when matched against paragons of English manhood like Richard Humphreys, ‘Butcher Martin’ or Tom Tyne. And his strength came almost as much from his words as from his bare knuckles. He played the press like a fortepiano, turning his bouts into theatrical feuds into which the opposition walked: inadvertent extras in a stage melodrama. Exchanges of letters were published in the papers. The public took sides and then bought tickets. Seconds and ‘bottle holders’ were hired from the growing circle of Mendoza’s defeated opponents who turned into his devotees, so that the personnel around the stage resembled platoons of rivals. When their hero was impugned or, as they saw it, robbed of a decision, they were ready to get stuck in themselves and, much to the joy of the spectators, a by-fight ensued. No one understood better than Mendoza how that newborn but ravenous monster, the English Public, needed feeding not just with gory spectacle but with a gripping Story. In the very improbability of a Fighting Jew he knew he had a thriller. In his raw-boned, chop-fisted way, Dan Mendoza was yet another consummate narrator of the story of the Jews. But he was also aware that he had begun an entirely new chapter: the Jew who fights back.
The Jewish London in which Mendoza grew up was a culture of social extremes, even by the standards of Hanoverian England. At the bottom end were the trudging legions of street hawkers and pedlars; at the other end, the Monied. Grandees like Samson Gideon and the brothers Goldsmid made fortunes as financiers of government debt at a time when to fight far-flung imperial and European contests, administrations were chronically short of funds. But they also worked on the capital market as stock jobbers, licensed brokers on the Exchange, denizens of Jonathan’s Coffee House where they traded gossip and stock predictions, even sometimes, to the outrage of the rabbis, on the Sabbath itself following morning services at the Ashkenazi ‘Great Synagogue’ in Duke’s Place, or the Portuguese synagogue of Bevis Marks.18 Alongside them were merchants of diamonds and coral like the Francos, de Castros, the Franks and the Pragers, importing rough stones from Madras where they stationed buying agents, often family members. As with almost all Asian trade, it was difficult to find a commodity the Indians wanted in return for their merchandise. Usually this meant shipping out bullion. But the diamond traders had managed to acquire one item southern India could not get enough of: Corallium rubrum, red coral, branch or staghorn. High-caste Hindus roped chains of it about their throats, arms and ankles and laid it on the funeral pyres of departed kin to ensure a safe passage to the future life.19 Every spring, hundreds of boats sailed from Marseilles, Livorno, Naples and Corsica, towards the North African coast. They dropped anchor at a safe distance from the reefs while diving boys working from skiffs harvested the precious underwater tongues and branches. Six thousand to eight thousand pounds of coral was considered a decent harvest, brought to market at Livorno where a thriving Jewish community shipped much of the merchandise on to London for the outward-bound diamond trade. Most of the rough diamonds coming into London from India (and later Brazil) were first sent to Amsterdam and Antwerp for polishing and cutting into rose facets, table stones or Peruzzi brilliants, before being returned to the city for retail. But there were some polishers and cutters in east London like Abraham Levy, and Levy Norden, ‘an opulent and very considerable jeweller … having diamond mills in Wheeler Street, White Chapple’, who imported, cut and sold all within the same firm.20
Some of the old-fashioned among the monied continued to live above their business chambers and warehouses in Bishopsgate and Broad Street. They put in regular appearances at one of the big synagogues, the Ashkenazi Great Synagogue on Duke’s Place near Aldgate, enlarged to magnificence in the 1760s by George Dance the Elder, or the Sephardi Bevis Marks, opened in 1701, its exterior hidden away but the interior modelled on the grand Portuguese wonder in Amsterdam: dark panels and branching brass candelabra. They came to the services, tricorn-hatted and wigged, the young men grudgingly forgoing dress swords replaced by wooden substitutes, which, after some debate, the rabbis had allowed were permissible according to halakha. Without those sham hilts showing, they ran the risk of being set on while they walked to shul. The communities adopted the same kind of genteel obligations as elsewhere in the European diaspora: a modest, six-bed hospital for the poor; funds for burials; Hebrew schools with a smattering of modern instruction. When George III succeeded to the throne in 1760, the two communities combined to form a ‘Board of Deputies’ to make representations to the government and inaugurated its duties by presenting ceremonial congratulations to the new monarch.
A number of the bigwigs sought more fashionable, leafy addresses. Daniel Defoe reported in his Tour in 1722 that ‘the Jews have fixd upon Highgate and Hampstead for country houses’, while some bought houses in the newly constructed squares of the West End and Marylebone. By the 1760s, those at the top of the tree ventured south to the riverside hamlets of Richmond, Teddington, Isleworth, Mortlake and Twickenham. When Yosef Hayim Azulai, an emissary from the Palestine communities, seeking financial support, came to London and tried to do the rounds of prospective benefactors, he was told, with the usual shoulder shrug and outspread hands that signified Jewish regret, that alas they had all ‘gone to the country … to tend their gardens’. Modish architects were lined up to build Anglo-Palladian or Adam villas, complete with little rotundas, and libraries stocked with Sir William Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings or Colen Campbell’s Vitruvius Brittanicus, Pope and Dryden as well as Maimonides and Mendelssohn. On a fine summer evening the Jewish gentry would stroll out to the sandy riverside path, a pair of small dogs gambolling at their heels, drop a pinch of snuff into their anatomical snuffbox between thumb and index finger, take a deep, nostril-sucking sniff, and as the tingling pleasure set in, survey the winding river; their delightful Thames. It was all very comme il faut. When the son-in-law of the diamond merchant Jacob Prager, who himself lived comfortably in Amsterdam, went to stay with Jacob’s brother Yehiel at his house in Clapton, he found himself in an idyll of gentility surrounded by footmen, valets, gardeners. Jacob wrote to his brother that though the boy had returned home it was with ‘English air in his head – all he talks about is the richness, the influence, the pleasant life you lead … unlike anyone in the world’.21 Back in town the rabbis vented their displeasure at the disgraceful immodesty of fashionable Jewish women ‘naked to the cleavage … two full spans back and front’. ‘The whole aim’ of such get-ups, wrote Hart Lyon, the long-serving, long-suffering chief rabbi of the Duke’s Place synagogue, was ‘not to appear like daughters of Israel’.22
For the grandees themselves, though, going riverside was not to be taken as abandoning the ancestral faith. Indeed there were some ceremonies – taschlikh, the casting of bread on the waters on Rosh Hashanah afternoon, to carry off sinful impurities – for which the proximity of the Thames came in handy. And although the new suburban addresses put them well beyond walking distance of the city synagogues, many of them built private prayer rooms inside their houses from which on the New Year, a shofar could be blown to the surprise of passing bargemen. They made the most of their milieu. Benjamin Goldsmid’s house boasted thirty bedrooms, all with laid-on water, and a substantial art collection which included work by Rubens and Van Dyck on New, as well as Old, Testament subjects, but it also had a fine private synagogue. Their tables were abundantly supplied (mostly but not invariably kosher); their writing desks and armoires handsomely inlaid; their hounds glossy-coated, their manners irreproachable, their cellars enviably stocked. Baronial-scale portraits of Goldsmids done by the masters of the Academy stared from the walls. It was all damn’d magnificent. When Benjamin threw an enormous party to celebrate his friend Nelson’s victory on the Nile, the whole of society clamoured for invitations. When his brother Abraham moved into his own grand villa, Morden Lodge, he threw a feast for three hundred. Naturally, the Prince Regent was among the guests, trailing the usual entourage of fops, blades and macaronis.
Whether they formally stayed Jews or abandoned rigorous observance, the patriciate socialised with Gentile friends and neighbours. The repartee of the Thames Jews and the chatty informality of their women were diverting enough for them to be asked to dinner by the nabob of Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole, who thought the odd Jew added to his dinner company brought social colour and intellectual liveliness. How amusing these Jews could be when they put their minds to it! Why, a man might almost forgive them the barbarousness of their superstitions; and if they insisted on taking the knife to their infants’ foreskins in the name of some strangely invented covenant it was, one supposed, entirely their own affair.
One of those riverside Jews whose company Walpole enjoyed was the diamond merchant Aaron Franks, member of a dynasty that stretched across the Atlantic. His New York nephew Moses had come to London in the early 1760s, swiftly becoming a Figure in the Ashkenazi trading community and a major donor to the rebuilding of Duke’s Place in 1766. Before long Moses Franks was himself the owner of a fine villa, with large stables, at Teddington known as ‘The Grove’ into which he moved with his wife, Aaron’s daughter Phila, whom Joshua Reynolds did his best to flatter. In November 1774 they would have encountered Horace Walpole at Aaron’s house in Isleworth when he arranged a chamber recital by the chazzan of the Great Synagogue at Duke’s Place, Myer Lyon. As ‘Michael Leoni’ the opera singer, Lyon was much in demand by society, and that November evening he delighted the mixed gathering. ‘I heard Leoni,’ wrote Walpole (usually hard to impress), ‘who pleased me more than anything I have heard these hundred years.’ Lyon/Leoni’s performance of Handel songs and arias was ‘full of melancholy’ – a quality predictably associated with Jewish performers. Though full of vocal feeling, Walpole added that he sang ‘in a genuine simple style and did not put one in pain like the rope dancers’.
Myer Lyon had come from Frankfurt in 1767 to be cantor at Duke’s Place and held the post for decades while also making a brilliant career in opera and theatre. He was typical of a whole subculture of London performers who managed to stay unapologetically Jewish and yet find a place in the public world of the theatre. His post at the Great Synagogue was conditional on being a yehudi kasher, an observant Jew, so no Saturday performances (until Sabbath was over in the evening) and no celebratory pork pies. Like Mendoza, he knew very well how to turn his Jewishness into a cultural asset, so that he became admired for elaborate melismas, assumed by both fans and critics to be an extension of his cantorial flourishes. (They were probably right.) Scaling the octaves and hitting the falsettos when called for, he developed a following which crossed over from the Jewish to the non-Jewish public and which would come in throngs to Duke’s Place on the Sabbath and high holidays to hear him perform. One of them, the hymn composer Thomas Oliver, was so taken by the chazzan’s ‘Yigdal Elohim Chai’ that he turned it into ‘The God of Abraham Praise’ for church use. In Hymns Ancient and Modern the composer is still listed as ‘M. Leoni’.23
Lyon also took on pupils, coaching them both for shul and, if they showed enough promise, for the stage. His star protégé was the orphan John Braham, whom he said he found on the street selling pencils and trained as a meshorrer: a descant chorister for the synagogue. When Braham was just thirteen, Lyon gave him his debut at Covent Garden on the evening of his own benefit recital in 1787 where the youth gave his all to Thomas Arne’s ‘The Soldier, Tir’d of War’s Alarms’. After Lyon emigrated to Jamaica to be cantor in the synagogue at Kingston (his opera voice declining), Braham was taken in charge by Abraham Goldsmid, who paid for lessons by the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini. By the time his voice broke, he had developed into a tenor good enough to sing with and for the best: royalty, quality and both Napoleon Bonaparte and Horatio Nelson. In his prime he could command the immense sum of £2,000 for fifteen performances in Dublin, and his singing in The Death of Nelson in 1811 was so affecting that Emma Hamilton collapsed in an emotional swoon and had to be carried from the house. Or so it was said. Though Braham took up with the very un-Jewish Nancy Storace, he does not seem to have converted and may even have sung at his old place of worship on special occasions: weddings, Kol Nidrei. Like Mendoza and the Jewish prizefighters after him, Braham was conscious of being seen and heard as a Jew and never hid from it. How could he, when sneeringly anti-Semitic verses were published about him? ‘His voice and his judgement completely atone / for that heap of repulsion he cannot disown,’ a typical product rhymed. Even a tepid admirer like Leigh Hunt thought the ‘nasal’ quality of his singing could be attributed to ‘moral, even monied causes’.24
Stage Jews – caricatural knuckle-cracking wheedling figures – were a standard feature of a lower type of comedy; but Jews on stage made themselves strongly felt across a whole range of Georgian entertainment. As would forever be the case, Jewish talent welcomed the chance to play to the gallery of expectations while taking back the stereotypes from the Gentiles and stopping short of gross self-mockery. Hannah Norsa knew lowlife London better than most, and became the first and most famous Polly Peachum in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, getting the authentic colour of her acting from her father’s Covent Garden tavern, the Punch Bowl. Being the mistress of the supreme master of patronage, the prime minister Robert Walpole (often taken as the butt of Macheath jokes), did nothing to harm her career. Jewish conjurers and magicians were in demand, none more so than Jacob Philadelphia who hailed from that city, many of them hired by the circus impresario Philip Astley.25 But Jacob ‘Jemmy’ Decastro was the first great Jewish comic actor of the English theatre, prepared, if needs and the purse must, to do a bit of clowning on the side for Mr Astley’s Amphitheatre or his kowtowing hanky-panky Ombres Chinoises show. Decastro’s Jewish progress through show business would become very familiar in the generations which followed, all the way through to the era of music hall, radio and cinema.26 He was an East End Sephardi boy from Houndsditch (like Mendoza), with an uncle who was a warden at Bevis Marks and a severely rabbinically minded father who made sure Jacob was schooled in Gemara and who raised eyebrows at his stage work. But the adolescent Jacob fell hard for the beauties of English literature, oratory and theatre, saving up to see David Garrick, who seemed to him to combine all three arts, whenever he could. At fifteen he formed a Purim theatricals company and was so fine in the comic parts that he was in demand at all the great Jewish houses, and some non-Jewish ones too. Despite all this rumbustiously precocious talent, what young Jacob really wanted was a nice position with one of the Madras diamond-trading houses and was bitterly disappointed when that prospect failed to materialise. So he fell back on the talent which had everyone chuckling and applauding. Jemmy Decastro was a born mimic: an impressionist. He could do everyone, but his speciality was the comedian Tom Weston. When Jemmy started off in the Weston voice ‘LAWD he was frumpt’, polite company fell apart with laughing, so much so that if Weston was unavailable or too expensive, Jemmy would be hired to play him in his place. For a while it seemed that the Decastro Weston, much to the comedian’s annoyance, was funnier than the original. And Jemmy had other strings to his bow, none of them especially subtle but all of them entertainment gold. He could warble Jewishly and in the Italian style with a falsetto that couldn’t quite make it but the audience knew was Leoni or Braham. He became a fixture at Astley’s Amphitheatre and on tour with both father and son, and, needless to say, was recruited as an after-dinner act by the talent collector Abraham Goldsmid who just had to have the best musicians, singers, comics and tragedians on tap at Morden Lodge whenever he needed tip-top entertainment for his friend Nelson, or the Prince of Wales.
There were other ways to service Gentile delight. Virtuoso silversmiths like Abraham Lopes de Oliveira, just two generations out from a New Christian grandfather banker in Madrid, were excluded from the regular profession by the Guild of Goldsmiths and worked most of the time for synagogues providing exquisite crowns and finials for the Sefer Torah. But Oliveira’s moment came when he was commissioned to make the elaborately wrought and chased plate which served as the annual gift for incoming lord mayors of London. On Lord Mayor’s Day, Oliveira’s dishes would be piled high with pyramids of toothsome Sephardi confectionery – bolos de amor, the little love cakes flavoured with just a drop of orange-flower water; sugar-ring rosquilhas, sometimes with anisette, sometimes not; quejados, and melting masapoin – all coming from the sumptuous kitchen of the Sephardi queen of confectionery: Leonor Marais.27
Inevitably, there were some, especially among the ‘Deer Park’ Jews, who were tempted by the pragmatic font. After all, they could not help noticing that the landed but embarrassingly mortgaged classes were open to the possibility of assistance from Jewish money through intermarriage. The pattern is familiar: the first generation retained its accent, its knowledge of Hebrew (sometimes even publishing learned commentaries in the ancestral tongue), keeping accounts and business correspondence in Yiddish or Ladino, and even sometimes keeping its beards. Their lives were coloured by the habits of the last family address: Hamburg, Altona, Amsterdam or Frankfurt. But in the next generation, beards, accents and any vestiges of distinguishing dress had all gone, the patriarchs and matriarchs accepting the assimilation, if not always happily. Samson Gideon supposed that in exchange for ponying up a cool million at the time of the Jacobite rebellion and invasion, and another timely £300,000 so that Britain could enter the War of the Austrian Succession, allowing George II to pose as the Victor of Dettingen, it was the decent thing to do to make him a baronet. But notwithstanding its obligations, the quality looked at Gideon and saw the coarsely pretentious stockjobber of the Exchange and passed him over. For all Gideon’s airs and his insistence that he was not in fact a supporter of the naturalisation bill, he still found himself grotesquely caricatured. An anti-government print called ‘The Good Conference with the Jew Predominant’ has Gideon speaking in fractured, thick-tongued English: ‘Dare [sic] Gentlemens, my very good friends, dere be de puss [purse] collected by my tribe for de great favour.’28 But Gideon’s honour was merely postponed a generation. The father knew what had to be done, and the baptism of his son allowed his heir to be raised, in due course, to a baronetcy. Transformed into Lord Eardley, the younger Samson Gideon married a girl of impeccable country pedigree and without more fuss or ado the erstwhile Jew vanished into the velvet-coated ranks of the landed aristocracy.
Hanoverian England was a monied oligarchy, and despite nose-holding in the shires at the disagreeable prospect of riding to hounds with ambitious Hebrews, there were few sections of Georgian society that would not, ultimately, open their doors to persons of Jewish origin, assuming that their ‘better sort’ would do the decent thing at the font and add a little sweetener at the bank. One by one institutions opened up even to the nominally converted. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, men who had been born Jews, and in many cases whose parents remained so, could be found in the fellowships of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Society, the Royal College of Physicians, Oxford colleges, Masonic lodges (a crucial site of social connection), as privy councillors to the government of Ireland, barristers in the Inns of Court and as senior officers in the Royal Navy. They were on friendly terms with the leading lights of Hanoverian culture, with David Garrick and William Hogarth, and their portraits were painted by the best, including two successive presidents of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West.
As elsewhere, in other times and places, Jewish medicine made more friends than Jewish money. Isaac Schomberg – son, grandson and brother to physicians – was Garrick’s doctor, and was, therefore, the last person Garrick saw alive in 1779. The great thesp is reputed to have looked at his Jewish doctor and friend and said ‘Though last not least in love’, which sounds suspiciously epigrammatic for a dying man. It is thought that Thomas Hudson, who painted a sweetly sympathetic portrait of Isaac, did so as repayment for services rendered. Isaac was known for his ‘warm benignity of soul’. Yet the path to acceptance was never uncomplicated. Isaac’s father had been born Meyer Löw in Vetzburg, Württemberg. That Meyer’s father was also a doctor doubtless encouraged the son who, like other Jewish students in Germany, was able to study medicine at university, in this case the Ludoviciana at Giessen. Dr Meyer then moved around the Ashkenazi world, practising in Schweinsberg and Metz before settling in London in 1721. If his English was weak (as it almost certainly was), he could get by on Judaeo-German Yiddish spoken by most of the congregation at Duke’s Place. And the language would have been an asset in his first post as doctor to the Ashkenazi poor who made up the largest part of the population of the City and east London. This, however, was not the kind of job Meyer Schomberg (as he now called himself) was likely to settle for. The better-off and well-connected Jews of Duke’s Place, much taken with the learned doctor, whose English improved by leaps and bounds, helped with introductions to the City’s merchants, and Schomberg had his own strategies for enlarging his practice. A grudgingly admiring observer described him as ‘a fluent talker and a man of insinuating address’ who had the nerve to do something which had never occurred to anyone in the English profession: rent a large property and, on certain days, keep open house and a generous table. ‘All the young surgeons were invited and were treated with indiscriminate civility that had much the appearance of friendship but in reality meant nothing more than that they should recommend him to practices.’29 Such cordial hospitality without regard to rank was thought shockingly improper, but it had exactly the hoped-for effect. Schomberg’s practice grew until he was earning four thousand guineas a year by 1740. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society in 1726, a brother of the Regular Order of Swan and Rummer Lodge of Masons in 1730 and their Grand Steward four years later, thus guaranteeing an even wider circle of patients. It helped of course that the Masonic cult was based on their ritualised obsession with the architecture of Solomon’s Temple. Meyer and his wife Rachel had seven sons and a daughter Rebecca. Their life as middle-class professional London Jews should have been full of satisfaction.
Which, somehow, it was not. Meyer feuded with a fellow doctor, the Sephardi Jacob de Castro Sarmiento who, for some reason, he could not abide and whose career he actively tried to thwart, publicly accusing his rival of misprescribing opiates and other sundry malpractices. This argumentative side he passed on to his son Isaac, who embarked on a two-decade bitter dispute with the Royal College of Physicians. Most of Isaac’s famous patients came to him notwithstanding his lack of the college’s certification.
Another son, Ralph, became a thorn buried deep in his father’s side. Educated at Merchant Taylors’ School, one of the few places that briefly admitted Jewish boys in the eighteenth century, Ralph turned into a dissolute spendthrift and was packed off by his father to European academies where he proceeded to waste Meyer’s generous allowance of £100 per annum.30 Not satisfied with stiffing his papa, Ralph actually tried to sue him when the allowance was stopped. Summarily ordered home from Europe Ralph took himself off to Scarborough, where there were no Jews at all but where a family acquaintance, Dr Shaw, offered to keep an eye on the wastrel. As soon as he got wind of this supervision Ralph moved further off to Malton until once again he had exhausted all means of support.
In a show of contrition, Ralph attempted a reconciliation with Meyer, asking him whether he might, perhaps, return to London and set up (like one of his brothers) as a notary public. At this point, the father could deny the son nothing. He not only agreed but established Ralph in an office by the Royal Exchange with a partner who in no time at all was complaining that Ralph had neglected business quite disgracefully. Rather after the fact, Ralph then announced that notarising suited him not at all. Before Meyer could bear down on him with the full force of fatherly fury, Ralph shipped off to Barbados where he became tutor to a planter family, still somehow managing to draw heavy bills on the long-suffering Meyer’s account. When that line of credit ran dry, back he came to London, and despite an ongoing career which made the lives of Fielding’s heroes seem constant by comparison, managed to win the affection and hand of Elizabeth Crowcher, the daughter of a prosperous London merchant. This was the moment (as for so many others in the second Jewish generation) when a quick trip to the font might have been in order to seal the match and plan the church wedding. But it is not at all clear that Ralph was ever baptised. If he were not still a Jew, why would he pursue his latest career project – that of becoming a physician like his brother Isaac and his father – at Marischal College in Aberdeen? For in the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment, indeed the embodiment of its liberalism, Marischal College had become the first and only institution in Britain to accept Jews as medical students. Undertaking a correspondence course, Ralph qualified as a doctor in 1744. The newly reminted Dr Ralph Schomberg went off again to establish himself in a practice at Great Yarmouth. Over the uncharacteristically quiet years which followed he and Elizabeth produced a brood of ten children. Like his baptised brother Alexander, educated at St Paul’s before embarking on a brilliant naval career which saw him serve with James Wolfe in the St Lawrence campaign, Ralph underwent this passage into Englishness without ever thinking of changing his name. He was just Dr Schomberg the provincial physician. Occasionally of course the respectable ordinariness of it all made him restive and he would go off to Bath where on the pretext of taking the waters, or ministering them, he managed to enjoy its society to the full. Apparently he was not the only Jew there, either. ‘Bath is at present very full and brilliant,’ Ralph wrote merrily to his good friend Emanuel Mendes da Costa, known to him as ‘Manny’, ‘to which the presence of HRH the Duke of York does not a little contribute. I am not idle. We have a good many Bnei Israel here.’31 But the occasional outing in society seems not to have been quite enough to satisfy Ralph’s itch for petty devilry. The image he liked to project in his retirement at Pangbourne was that of the valetudinarian country gentleman, part-time doctor, a mild and upright soul which is how Gainsborough portrayed him, full-length, leaning on his cane in some oaken glade of Albion. But according to sources possibly not altogether cordial towards rusticating Jews, or at any rate this one, he had been caught with his hand in the Sunday church collection.
Emanuel Mendes da Costa would have his own serious difficulties with the law, but not before he had made a name for himself as a serious, estimable, natural scientist.32 Like the Schombergs, da Costa was a second-generation Jew, conscious of the journey his family had made (Portugal and Holland) and of the lustre of the extended da Costa clan. But unlike Meyer Schomberg, Emanuel’s father would come to grief in a rash commercial venture. Misfortune prompted the sons to cast around for some sort of anchorage in British society, though they went about it in very different ways. Emanuel’s brother Jacob, who came to call himself Philip, attempted to elope with a wealthy heiress-cousin, Catherine da Costa Villalene. When she dismissed the idea, Jacob was caddish enough to sue her for breach of contract!33 Emanuel, on the other hand, became passionate about fossils, accumulating a large collection of specimens and contributing to the debate on the formation of the earth’s crust – the arguments between Vulcanists and Neptunists as to whether geological fire or flood had been primordially decisive. Emanuel, who also dabbled in ancient Hebrew history, produced enough respectable notices on this and that subject for him to be elected both to the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, both palladiums of the learned in Georgian London. To the scientific gentry, the Jewish fossilist – and author of A Natural History of Fossils – became in his own right a charming human curiosity: the Jew who remained faithful to his religion and yet had plunged scientifically into the history of creation. Any teasing about his Jewishness was generally of the most genial kind. Invited to help create a fossil grotto for the Duke of Richmond’s garden, his host enquired about the dining arrangements during his stay, ‘unless the lobsters of Chichester should be a temptation by which a weaker man might be seduced’. There could be other foods too ‘which would be an abomination to your nation’. Then came the genuinely touching expression of enlightened fellowship: ‘we are all citizens of the world and see different customs and tastes without dislike or prejudice as we do different names and colours’.34
Emanuel seemed content enough to be established among this company of science and learning. But he was always a little hard up or, by his own judgement, hard done by. His wife was a Pardo but from the less propertied end of the family, and his impoverished father upbraided Emanuel and his brother David for not doing better, so that they might give some assistance to their old pa in his declining years. ‘I have not one son,’ the old boy bitterly grumbled, ‘to give a helping hand.’ Emanuel and David had not ‘followed his advice and found wives with fortunes [and] it shocked him to think they were bringing so many beggars into the world’. At the time they made their matches ‘you were all young and healthy and no father or mother or sister to maintain but only your sweet selves’.
Emanuel was not listening. He was caught in the fossil trap. The bigger his collection, the more he could publish learned Notes, and the more admiring interest he attracted from natural scientists at home and abroad, his network of learned correspondents stretching from Sweden to France. The great naturalist the Comte de Buffon knew all about him; so did Linnaeus. He was on personal terms with the archaeologist of Avebury and Stonehenge, Sir William Stukeley, and with the great octogenarian physician-scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It was with the good wishes and support of these patriarchs of British science that Emanuel campaigned for the clerkship of the Royal Society which, if secured, came with rent-free lodging in Crane Court off Fleet Street and a £50 stipend. In the spring of 1763, the new clerk-librarian moved into Crane Court. Four years later, Emanuel Mendes da Costa was revealed to have systematically embezzled funds from the Society by misrepresenting full members (who paid the entirety of their subscription) as partial members (who paid in yearly instalments), either pocketing the difference or more likely treating it as an interest-free loan. When a fellow complained that his name had been published under the wrong category, the fraud was exposed, and after the usual expressions of incredulous indignation, Emanuel was bundled off to the King’s Bench Prison. The ugly stereotypes of the double-dealers seemed to have been vindicated by the kind of person who ought to have served as a counter-example of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. This was definitely Not Good for the Jews.
Astoundingly, it was not all that bad for Emanuel Mendes da Costa! He had lost his great collection, most of his library and all of his patrons and colleagues, but such was the unstoppable, ingenuous sense of self-belief, and what must have been a gift for instruction, that a whole new avenue opened up for him: shells. He became the first great British conchologist; indeed the coiner of the term itself. Inside King’s Bench were other gentlemen and ladies who had unaccountably fallen from grace and fortune but were enthusiastic about taking courses of lectures on both fossils and shells from da Costa, who supplied them for a fee. His classes in the prison were between fifteen and twenty, and were in such continuous demand that after four years he was able to buy his way out of confinement. By this time he had enough material to write and publish his Elements of Conchology in 1776 and, two years later, on a note of scientific patriotism, his British Conchology. Neither made him much money, but somehow he recovered, especially abroad, from his disgrace and became something of a figure once more in the natural sciences, adding credentials from foreign academies from Sweden to Austria; the further away from his embarrassment the better. Once a month on the Monday before the new moon, he would join the discussions of the Society for the Promotion of Natural History. He was even capable of some moral righteousness at the liberties taken by Linnaeus in his anatomical description of the Venus dione shell, a lavender-pinkish furled beauty of a bivalve whose parts Linnaeus had evidently enjoyed labelling ‘anus’, ‘vulva’, ‘labia’ and so on. Mustering shock at the ‘obscenity’, da Costa suggested instead ‘slopes’ and ‘declivities’. The rabbis would have approved.
Were Ralph and Manny, and for that matter the rest of the better-off, better-educated London Jews, with their fashionable pretensions, their modish dress and bag wigs, not to mention their periodically shifty relationship with English society, Jews at all? Or were they just in the waiting room for complete assimilation? For all their straying from the strict and narrow, there is no doubt that the two old rogues thought of themselves as Jewish. Manny would periodically order pots of ‘sour crout’ from Ralph’s wife Elizabeth, to whom he had presumably taught the art of ethnic pickling. With the autumn high holy days coming on, Manny would make sure to wish Ralph, up in un-Hebraic Great Yarmouth, ‘a good Rasasana [Rosh Hashanah]’, though it seems unlikely that either of them would be going to shul to hear the shofar. But in his habitually warm-hearted way, and even from the King’s Bench Prison, Manny made sure to wish Elizabeth ‘a merry Christmas and a happy New Year’. They were, to be sure, the kind of Jews of whom the rabbis complained they seemed to prefer Christmas puddings to matzot. So by the rigorous standards prevailing in Lithuania or Poland, where there was strict observance to the letter of the law (setting aside, as Jews usually could not, just who was qualified to adjudicate what that letter was), Manny as well as Ralph had definitely left the fold.
For some of the guardians of Judaism the business of the whiskers was not trivial. To take the hirsute or the smooth-chinned path was to tell the world if one wished first and foremost to join with its ways or whether Jews had been commanded to keep themselves distinctively separate. Rabbi Hirsch Lewin, who was scandalised by the casualness of English Jews, especially the demands of those who had married Christian wives, to be called up for the Reading of the Torah (as many were), proclaimed that shaving itself violated a fundamental principle of the Torah and told you all you needed to know about the pseudo-quasi-Jews of England. Naphtali Franks, one of a transatlantic dynasty whose mother Isabel had warned about the loose ways of his London cousins, thrived there, stayed Jewish, married a cousin and became a great dignitary of Duke’s Place, but he shaved, wore a bag wig, and looked in all visible respects just like anyone else in the world of society and business. When asked why he was leaving Duke’s Place, Rabbi Hart Lyon replied that it was because that was the first religious question he’d ever been asked during all his years at the synagogue. It is certainly true that, however it had come about, the community of English Jews was seldom riven by intense philosophical debates between both Jews and Jews, and their Gentile counterparts. Maimonides did not haunt the coffee-house chatter, and the mighty tides of Hasidic and messianic Judaism storming through the east European diaspora turned to dribbling shallows when they washed onto British shores. Which does not mean there were no arguments within the synagogues. But they were most often arguments of the shouted kind that happen in families and between neighbours rather than reasoned debate. A typical incident was when the din (usually made by gregger wooden rattles) racketing away at the mention of the villain Haman on Purim during the reading of the Esther scroll turned so tumultuous that the officers of Bevis Marks called in the watch to arrest the worst offenders. Among them was a young man belonging to the Furtado family, and although he may have been part of a group who later apologised for the near riot, his father Isaac took the opportunity of publicly denouncing the synagogue as a nest of hypocrites. ‘I do renounce your Judaism … the inherent sentiments and principles of your World to Come, and have sent you the key of my drawer [beneath his synagogue pew] to dismember myself from so irreligious a society … you are dropsical with pride.’ It was an outrage, he went on, that the hospital for the Jewish Poor on which they took such pride had a mere six beds; that for the most part the patients were treated by an apothecary rather than a physician; and that at Passover all they got to eat were matzot. At the end of his magnificently abusive notice of quit (a kind of reverse excommunication), Furtado made sure to add that his wife Sarah ‘also wishes to dismember herself from your society’. Nonetheless the choleric Isaac Furtado remained at least a social Jew, building tenements for some of the poor of the East End and making sure he was buried in the Jewish cemetery. Those last rites were often telling. Joshua Montefiore, the uncle of the much more famous statesman Moses Montefiore – who had led a life of astounding colonial adventure, attempting to colonise Bulama Island off the West African coast for the Crown, and taking part in the campaign to conquer Martinique and Guadeloupe from the French – ended up on a farm in Vermont. But knowing his end was approaching he wrote out the Kaddish in transliterated English so that his second non-Jewish wife could read it at his funeral.
Some of the outbursts against rabbinical conservatism were more than the usual. In 1746 Meyer Schomberg published his Hebrew Emunat Omen (A Physician’s Faith). It was a withering critique of the pettiness of rabbinical and institutional hair-splitting in Orthodox Judaism, the endless scholastical picayunery as well as the hypocrisy of the pillars of the community. He and his sons had been criticised for sporting those wooden sword hilts, a necessary measure of prudence rather than a trifling vanity, by bigwigs of the synagogue who habitually kept Gentile mistresses ‘as if they were fulfilling a commandment without shame … and they also live and lodge with them in intimate embrace while they reject the kosher daughters of Israel who are our own flesh and blood’.35 He was almost certainly thinking of Joseph Salvador, one of the leaders of the Sephardi community but notorious for patronising infamous courtesans like Kitty Fisher and Mrs Caroline Rudd. Schomberg moved from the polemical to the theological, invoked Maimonides’ principles of the faith in his Mishneh Torah, while claiming that King David had already reduced the 613 commandments of the Torah to an indispensable eleven. Most of Schomberg’s principles amounted to a kind of thinly Judaised deism which he himself (along with like-minded Jews) believed brought them closer to some sort of commonly held enlightened faith. ‘The absolute first duty of a Jew is to believe in a God, an existing Being who brought into existence everything before our eyes.’36 What sounds like an early version of reformist Judaism was a farewell gesture, since although he and two of his sons stayed loyal to Judaism, Meyer actually encouraged his boys to walk to the font if it would further their prospects. Only the naval officer Alexander (later Sir Alexander) and Isaac – one baptised, one not – had fulfilled his expectations. And as hard-hearted parents do, he expressed his disappointment by dividing the vast part of his legacy between those two, the remainder of the Schombergs getting just a shilling each. No wonder old Ralph was reduced to filching from the Sunday collection.
Oranges and lemons
Say the bells of St Clement’s
You owe me five farthings
Say the bells of St Martin’s
When will you pay me?
Say the bells of Old Bailey
When I grow rich
Say the bells of Shoreditch37
When will that be?
Say the bells of Stepney
I’m sure I don’t know
Says the great bell of Bow38
Poor Jews sold those oranges and lemons. The chimes of the nursery rhyme in Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song Book plot the map of their day. St Clement’s was not St Clement Danes at the end of the Strand, but St Clement Eastcheap, down by the Thames wharves where citrus boxes shipped in from Jewish traders in Livorno were unloaded. Close by St Martin’s – not St Martin-in-the-Fields but St Martin Outwich – was the moneylender who had stood them the necessary to buy their fruit. They had better sell enough to repay him or he would have his claws deep in and no mistake and end up in Newgate, where they would hear the leaden chimes of St Sepulchre, right opposite the Old Bailey. Their lodgings – rookeries and tenements – were in the narrow streets and alleys named for the old ditches: Houndsditch, Shoreditch, Fleetditch, some of the most crowded and impoverished places in London. Whitechapel and Stepney – the parish of St Dunstan’s – were already as they were to be for another two centuries, packed with Ashkenazi Jews, around five thousand of them, from Poland and Germany, sometimes by way of Holland. But the records of the ma’amad at Bevis Marks synagogue in the City show there were poor Sephardim too – perhaps fifteen hundred or so – from Italy, Morocco and Tunis, who had come to London via Livorno or Amsterdam and who specialised in dried fruit, citrus and tobacco. From St Mary-le-Bow and Cheapside the orange sellers would claim a selling turf in the heart of the City, around Leadenhall or Threadneedle Streets, or north in fancy Finsbury Circus, or else down along Cannon Street, past St Paul’s and Fleet Street all the way to the Strand and Leicester Fields, crying and plying their wares, hoping to sell all they had by nightfall. Many didn’t. Court records are full of orange sellers who had another string to their bow, not always legal.
The lives of the street vendors never went near the gardens of Teddington, Isleworth and Roehampton. But some, even many, of them might have crowded into Duke’s Place and Bevis Marks on the eve of the Day of Atonement or the New Year. We know of at least one poor but religious Sephardi Jew who prayed with the propertied in Bevis Marks because while he was doing this on Rosh Hashanah his son Abraham was out stealing silk handkerchiefs and yards of fine cloth, clearly untroubled by the prospect of being struck off the Book of Life in the year to come.39 It might have caused the pious father more grief to hear the name of his errant son called out for excommunication, as happened to all Jewish criminals under the jurisdiction of Bevis Marks. Other than when the synagogues filled for the festivals and high holidays, most of the contact between the shaven and the unshaven poor Jews would have been through charity: visits from the doctors or apothecaries at the Jews’ Hospital on the Mile End Road, the first of the old-age homes in Stepney, and on inspection days at the Jews’ Free School for orphaned boys, founded in 1732 by the patriarch of Duke’s Place, Moses Hart, and then, as numbers expanded, moving to Houndsditch in 1788.
The speech of the vast majority was Yiddish and a modicum of fractured English, though never as broken as the grossest caricatures in print and on stage liked to make out. Jack Bannister, the great low comedian of Drury Lane who certainly knew thespian Jews like Jemmy Decastro, had a speciality of nasal Jewspeak which could never be exaggerated enough for the hooting gallery. Occasionally Christians would be confounded to hear humbly dressed, bearded or bonneted Jews and Jewesses speak the King’s English without all the usual gargling and honking. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge, downwind of an old-clothes hawker, asked why he couldn’t say ‘OLD CLOTHES’ rather than the habitual guttural cry of ‘Ol clo, ol clo’ or ‘O cloash’, he was startled to receive the reply in perfect English that ‘Sir, I can say “old clothes” as well as you can but if you had to say so ten times a minute for an hour together you would say “ogh clo” as I do now’.40 Coleridge confessed to being so stunned that he ran after the old-clothes man and gave him a shilling by way of condescending apology.
The masses of poor London Jews were hawkers of second-hand merchandise of one kind or another. Traditionally – as in Venice during the foundation years of the ghetto – this is all they had been legally permitted to do. Even after some of the restrictions had been lifted (and in many places they had not), the daily trade in used clothes and haberdashery was the staple of the Jewish poor. They were the Jews with the sacks slung over their shoulder, empty in the morning; with any luck bulging with items ready to be sold by mid-afternoon. But there were also countless box Jews: often the latest newcomers who had been set up by Duke’s Place or Bevis Marks with an initial pedlars’ pack; the money to be repaid in weekly or monthly instalments as they became established in their street trade. Inside the boxes, slung from straps around their necks (much as in street trading to this day in much of the world), were pencils, sealing wax, fancy cane-heads, crystal buttons, needles, pins and thimbles, fans, crude portrait prints of the king and queen, badly painted plaster figurines, cheap trinkets and jewellery, watches, the occasional cuckoo clock and dried rhubarb – the precious cure-all, especially for constipation or other growls of the bowel. After they were set up, the families were on their own, though since both peddling and old-clothes selling were so territorial, there would generally be kindly councillors in the Houndsditch coffee or grog shops who would give them a sense of where not to go; or where, after the passing of a fellow hawker, a patch had opened up.
The old-clothes day started before the light.41 Out from the rookeries of Houndsditch, Whitechapel and Mile End would emerge the bearded Jews, on their heads the flat, broad-brimmed slouch hats their fathers and grandfathers had worn in Brody or Posen. By the end of the day they would be covered with other hats for sale at Rag Fair, so they would go through the streets with a multi-tiered tower of the hats wobbling on their crowns. The men would likewise be covered by the long kaftan-like coats, heavy in all weathers, some of them embroidered with black thread and slightly waisted in the old Polish way. On their feet were buckled shoes rather than boots. If they wore out beyond what the ‘clobberer’ repair men could save, well, there were always more old shoes waiting for them. Sometimes they walked alone; sometimes with their wives, layers of aprons and woollen skirts about them, with a bag hanging from the belt for the goods; and sometimes, too, young children, for eight or nine was the age at which the boys at any rate were to be initiated into the trade.
First off, the needs of the stomach: a ‘wishy-washy’ coffee from one of the local hole-in-the-wall establishments; a ‘tuppeny buster’ heel of bread, dipped in milk if they were lucky; and if they were feeling rich, a piece of fried fish – an unheard-of novelty until the Sephardi Jews brought it to England – eaten cold, the common delicacy of the merchant tables of the Thames-side villas and the West End and the low haunts of the East.42 For most of the used-clothes shleppers, that would be the only meal of the day, not least because the majority kept kosher and if their walks took them into the West End or north-east London, there would be no providers of Jewish food. Meyer Levy claimed to be able to last the day with ‘only the smell of an oily rag’, though others took a little box of tea leaves in the hope of finding some hot water to make a midday cup.
The business was intensely territorial, everyone abiding by their own walks – unless they didn’t, in which case matters would come to abuse and blows. Occasionally two old-clothes buyers might agree to share a route and its proceeds, known as a ‘rybeck’. Dawn hours would see a procession of men with sacks walking towards the markets – Billingsgate, all slithery brightness, pails full of fish guts; Smithfield, the kingdom of bloody aprons; Leadenhall’s avenues of hanging hides; and Newgate, where the stinking Fleetditch had been recently covered as a closed sewer and paved over to make an arcaded market. On warm days the better sort of people covered their faces with perfumed handkerchiefs and sniffed at a cloved orange sold by the Jewish citrus men. In all of the markets, porters, haulers and packers had aprons, leggings, shoes to sell. But some of the walkers emerging from Whitechapel, after a morning nip of brandy and water, would go east to the dockyard districts – Shadwell, Wapping and Limehouse – where sailors, nursing sore heads, their money gone while they slept on tavern floors or in the laps of whores, would sell items from their bags and bundles to the Jews.43 If the old-clothes men were lucky and savvy they knew which of the tars might have got their hands on a little braid and frogging, surreptitiously cut from some officer’s coat or hat. You could go on prospecting all morning for this kind of gold: further east to the barracks at Woolwich, more soldiers, more finery – some of it saved from the dead and stowed away by mates. Downstream on the eastern walks lay mournful treasure: the hulks, prison ships moored in the Thames Estuary where the obliging captains made the clothes of convicts available. The prisoners would get some of the money but at a price specified by the buyer, and only after the captain and crew had taken a cut for their services.
Western walkers, descending from Tower Hill down Cannon Street into the City, would make for livery and hackney stables where the coachmen and their families lodged above the horses. These were the places to get their hands on old saddles, harnesses, reins, whips, boots and carriage lanterns, as well as the prized ‘glasses’ that had been coach windows and could be cut down if needed using rough cutting diamonds to be had in Whitechapel. Enterprising buyers would then make for middling-sort districts in the West End: a long trudge to Fitzroy Square and Bloomsbury but with the sure prospect of tempting a tradesman’s wife with china, glass or trinkets, in return for long-cast-off clothes that she knew her husband would never miss. The inevitable haggling would take place between the ladies’ maids and the Jews, for even if they were the wife of a grocer or a master dyer, it was unthinkable to be dealing directly with the ignoble Jew. Finally there would be the back mews and servants’ doorways to the houses of the great and the rich in the new West End: Hanover Square in the shadow of St George’s; Mayfair, Cavendish and Devonshire Squares. It was said that the Jews encouraged the footmen and the ladies’ maids to filch from their masters and mistresses, but the fact was that the discarded wardrobes of the fashionable had to go somewhere, and servants knew very well what need never be seen again. There was seldom a handkerchief count in the great houses. Into the sacks went hose and breeches, out-of-style bag and tie wigs; gloves and stockings; even silk and satin gowns not worn for many a year.
Past noon, past one, it was time to be walking back, west from the hulks or east from the Strand, many of the hawkers crowned now with two or three hats, their sacks heavy; but never so full that they wouldn’t opportunistically stop a likely cove in a coffee house or even on the street if they thought they might be willing to part with an item or two. From all over town, from Limehouse and Leicester Fields, from Tottenham Court Road and Gray’s Inn, the army of the multi-hatted Jews converged single-mindedly on one place as if bent on pilgrimage: Rag Fair. It was nothing more than a yard at the end of Rosemary Lane (now Royal Mint Street, the continuation of Cable Street) on the Whitechapel side of the Tower. But it had become one of the sights of the city. Tourists came to marvel and be elbowed, ignored or robbed of their handkerchiefs by small boys trained to spot the bright ‘Kingsmen’ insufficiently tucked away in a coat pocket. Fagin’s little crew was not, in fact, a fiction. At ‘full business’ times, between three and five in the winter, four and six in the summer, Rag Fair was jammed with more than a thousand old-clothes people who had emptied their sacks, usually in piles on a patch of the ground covered with a piece of linen or blanket. On the perimeter were the specialists, operating from fixed stalls or shops, dealing in wigs or glasses, watches or hats. But most of the cramped space was a rowdy bazaar, a theatre of shouted cries, jabbing fingers, exchanges of odd bits and pieces; of insults and accusations which often enough turned riotous, prompting yet another petition from the neighbours to the magistrates to have Rag Fair closed down. Quiet came to Rag Fair only on Friday nights and Saturdays, for unlike the better-off Jews who couldn’t quite keep away from Exchange Alley even after Sabbath services, the rag-trade men loved and respected their Shabbes: its loaves and its fish; its candles and watery wine; its songs and the children who had a week’s grime washed off them.
It was only in the first decade of the nineteenth century that the carnival of schmatters was superseded by an Old Clothes Exchange, created by the enterprising Lewis Isaacs, one of London’s first true Jewish businessmen beyond the City money folk. With a shrewd eye Isaacs bought the entirety of Phillips Buildings in Houndsditch, between Cutler Street and White Street, enclosed it on four sides with a hoarding and a little awning to protect against bad weather. He charged a halfpenny as entrance fee which ensured that only the serious ‘forestallers’ – the middle men – would get admitted, and rows of chairs and benches were set in the middle of the enclosure for their convenience. Around the perimeter, sellers of pies, fried fish and ale did good business (for those not fussy about keeping kosher) while the trades were going on.
One thing did not much change with the mutation of Rag Fair into the Old Clothes Exchange: the difficulty of distinguishing what was lawfully come by from what was not. Few of the buyers bothered to ask, though the Old Bailey Sessions papers involve buyers coming to forestallers as if they thought they were fences, looking expressly for items they knew to have been illicitly acquired, and being sent on their way with expressions of shocked distaste. Such upstanding characters were probably not the majority. Most of London knew Rag Fair was a place where Monday’s buyer would be Tuesday’s receiver. And there were brazenly famous receivers like Mrs Sherwood of Bowl Yard or Isaiah Judah, on whom hands could never be laid for lack of proof of the origins of Kingsmen or an array of rings and watches. In the days of both Rag Fair and the Old Clothes Exchange, there was a thriving export trade on to Europe and even further afield to North Africa, America and the Caribbean (one almost certainly tainted by the slave trade). Linens, shawls, scarves could be in and out before anything much could be done about them. Another woman forestaller admitted that the time between the rag men buying and selling on again was around five minutes.44
Where there were receivers there would always be more sinister and violent takers to supply them. And they were not above preying on their own people. Sometimes they snatched the boxes from high-end hawkers, who had themselves been supplied from shifty sources. Abraham Davis, whose box was stolen in 1778, listed a movable treasure trove as its contents, including sixty-eight watches, thirty gold rings, another thirty gold buckles (for shirt and shoe and coat), and silver items galore.45 Many of the accusations levelled at Jews as a whole, especially that of silver coin-clipping, were recycled stereotypes from medieval anti-Semitism. It was a common charge, for instance, that unwitting customers buying in Rag Fair would get short-changed in clipped coin. But there was undoubtedly a subculture of Jewish criminals at work in the City and East End (alongside and often in competition with an Irish one). Every so often a spectacular crime would rebound badly on the whole community, and the guardians were sufficiently nervous about this for Moses Hart and Naphtali Franks to pass on information about suspected Jewish criminals to Sir John Fielding, the ubiquitous magistrate of Bow Street. It was to Fielding in 1771 that Daniel Isaacs, one of a gang of Jewish robbers (most of them hailing from Holland), confessed his bad conscience about a burglary in Chelsea that had gone wrong. Isaacs turned King’s evidence in the hope that once he had admitted his part and helped catch the criminals, the Duke’s Place charitable overseers would see their way to offering him some monetary assistance. Not surprisingly he was disappointed.
The case gripped London, not least because the gang leader was a wicked Jewish doctor, Levi Weil, who had qualified in medicine at Leiden University but had found his true vocation robbing houses in England along with his brother Asher. In the late spring of 1771, one of the Weil gang cased the house of a widow, Mrs Hutchins, on the King’s Road, getting inside on the spurious pretext of seeking someone supposedly known by the householder. It was a warm June night. The gang lurked for a bit around the Chelsea gardens before making their way to the Hutchins house, forcing a way in, tying up the servants, throwing petticoats over a maid’s face so she would not see theirs, then demanding valuables. One of the manservants got free, at which point a panicky melee broke out during which the bold servant was fatally shot along with one of the maids, while the brothers Weil took sixty-four guineas and a watch from the terrified widow who watched her house servants die. After Isaacs spilled the beans to Fielding the malefactors were arrested and, following a sensational trial in December 1771, catnip for the crime-hungry press, the brothers Weil and two others were hanged. A huge crowd showed up, including a number of Jews. Unlike the practices of the Newgate chaplains, the rabbis who had attended on the prisoners during confinement (and who had excommunicated them in shul) were not present at the end. This was all good criminal theatre but at the conclusion of the trial there had already been an astonishing moment when, after pronouncing the sentences, the presiding recorder went out of his way to congratulate all the Jews (even the criminal informer Isaacs) for their public-spirited collaboration with the authorities, and expressed the hope ‘that no person would stigmatise a whole nation on account of a few villains’.46 Best of British to that.
It wouldn’t have taken much for Dan Mendoza to have ended up swinging from a Tyburn rope. As a young man out of work he was asked to transport ‘different sorts of merchandise from the coast and that I was to be furnished with an excellent horse for that purpose … Immediately upon my engaging on it I was informed I was lured for the purpose of escorting smuggled property and was likewise told that I should be expected to guard and protect (even at the hazard of my life) whatever might happen to be entrusted to my care.’47 But he wasn’t going to touch that sort of thing, not with a bargepole, not least because he knew he was not always in complete control of his alarming strength, although he swore he was never merciless. And indeed when he saw Humphreys, beaten to a bloody mess in their third and last bout, he made sure, as was noticed, of letting the vanquished foe keep a little of his dignity, rather than, as was often his habit, treating him to a display of visible scorn. It was hard to say which Mendoza would show up on any given day: the ferocious bruiser or the Jewish paladin. His boiling point was low, the force of his hammering hands overwhelming, and his aim selected with deadly calculation. Mendoza’s extraordinary The Art of Boxing, first published at the height of his spectacular career when he was just twenty-four, explained to the novice with clinical precision (he was as much doctor as professor) the effects that different blows would work on the adversary’s anatomy. A punch between the brows would bring on temporary blindness; one beneath the left ear would flood the brain with blood, causing a kind of seizure; a hard knock at the temples, the ‘stunner’, could be literally lethal; one on ‘the short ribs’ or kidneys would ‘put him into the greatest torture and for a time a cripple’ along with an ‘instant discharge of urine’ soaking the breeches, always a useful psychological blow against the opponent. A punch landing hard in the pit of the stomach, the solar plexus, would trigger an explosion of bloody vomiting, but should one be unlucky enough to receive one of those (and they were a Humphreys speciality) it had been shown that the severity could be avoided by bending the thorax down over the stomach while inhaling deeply.48
At the very beginning of The Art of Boxing, Mendoza made it clear that all this practical advice was not just meant for professional or even amateur pugilists, but for the citizenry at large in a dangerous urban world. He specifically referred to his work as the ‘art of self-defence’, and other than the late-seventeenth-century Dutch manual of the wrestler Nicolas Petter, illustrated by Romeyn de Hooghe, Mendoza’s is the first such book to present itself in this way. The practice of ‘pitched battles’, he writes – that is, organised bouts of bare-knuckle – has been accused of ‘bordering on brutality and black-guardism’, but this is to misunderstand its true aim which is the safety and self-respect of all citizens.
It must be confessed … that knowledge of the science is both useful and necessary to every man of spirit for no other reason [than] to protect himself when insulted … to a man even of the most harmless disposition an acquaintance with the art cannot fail to be serviceable as it enables him to walk the streets with an idea of security and if he does not choose to resent an insult he has the satisfaction of reflecting that it is in his power.49
It was, of course, a particular population of London that Mendoza had in mind as being especially vulnerable to verbal and physical abuse: his own. Though nowhere in his boxing manual does he specifically single out the Jews as most in need of both the resolution and the ‘art’ of fighting back against the verbal and physical assault to which they were daily subjected, it is plain from the stories of his young life related in the memoirs that this was the formative experience that made Mendoza not just a fighter but an instructor of the defenceless and the vulnerable. No Jew before him anywhere since the writers of the Books of the Maccabees had done this. From his father, he says, he learned the difference between ‘true and false courage’, and the difference between mere bullying and proper self-defence. No one held ‘the character of a bravado or quarrelsome man in greater abhorrence’; but
whenever I returned home with a black eye or any external mark of violence my father never failed to enquire strictly into the cause and would reprove me severely when it appeared I had involved myself wantonly in a quarrel, but on the other hand if he found I had acted only in self-defence or any justifiable motive he would freely forgive me and declare he would never exert his parental authority to prevent me from standing in my own self-defence when unjustly assailed.50
As a young lad he was already getting into trouble early and often, but equally no one felt more keenly the need for Jews to stand up against intimidation. In one respect Mendoza was not so different from the philosophical counter-punchers Menasseh ben Israel and Moses Mendelssohn in understanding the experience of Jews to have application beyond themselves to the rest of humanity. When Mendoza claimed that the qualities he was championing (in his case ‘spirited’ self-defence and the capacity to counter-attack), while essential for his own kind, were by extension essential for the practice of citizenship, it was akin to Mendelssohn’s belief that tolerant diversity, while Good for Jews, was also best for the world at large.
Mendoza may not have been a weekly regular at Bevis Marks, although as a matter of fact we don’t know that he wasn’t. His father and mother, from a modest but not impoverished Sephardi family, were in all likelihood observant since they made sure to send Daniel to a Jewish school, almost certainly the Free School founded by Moses Hart, where he learned Hebrew and studied the religious texts. But his memoirs make clear that he also learned good English along with other ‘modern’ subjects like mathematics. This mixed education was crucial to his rise to fame since it enabled Mendoza to enter the world of non-Jews on his own terms and with great confidence; in fact, with the shrewd mastery of expression that is apparent on every page of his books. Whether he stayed within the fold or not there was no time in his life when Mendoza was not acutely conscious of his Jewishness; indeed his entire public and professional identity, his determination to school other young Jews in his art, was built round it, and in this respect he was the very model and forerunner of the unapologetic, non-rabbinical Jew, more usually located in the writing of deists. No one beyond a small circle of the learned would have paid much attention to their utterances. But everyone in Britain from the king at Windsor to the bruisers of Bermondsey knew about Mendoza the Jew.
Right from the start there was something about Daniel that made the unsuspecting have a go at him – perhaps the broad-shouldered cockiness on the little boy – and his apprenticeship was a procession of lessons dished out to overgrown bullies: first the son of a master glazier to whom he had been apprenticed after his bar mitzvah; then, when he was working for a local greengrocer, the neighbourhood toughs who made a habit of insulting the woman of the family shop ‘on account of her Jewish religion’.51 Having a go at the Jews was not a good idea when the Jew in question was little Mendoza. On one occasion between his many jobs (tea merchant, confectioner, tobacconist), Daniel went with a cousin to Northampton where he’d been told the job prospects might be brighter. Walking from a pub towards the town they ran into the local bully who announced that he ‘hated to see such fellows strolling about the place’ and that ‘It was a pity we were not sent to Jerusalem’.52 After the inevitable ‘set-to’ in which the loudmouth came off worst despite being Northampton’s best knuckle fighter, the adversary’s father actually sought Daniel out (or so Mendoza tells us) to congratulate him for administering the discipline to his unruly boy that he himself had failed to deliver. The two lads were ordered to make it up and did so with a shake of their hands. Now that everyone was such good mates, the Northampton father offered his house for free board and lodging to the two Jewish cousins for as long as they wanted to stay. Too good to be true? Probably.
One of these early brawls changed Mendoza’s life. He was working for a tea merchant in Whitechapel and when a porter delivered a consignment from the docks, Daniel offered him the usual pint of ale and a tip for his labours. Normally that’s how it went. But for whatever reasons this particular porter took offence, spurned the beer, demanded more money and carried on so threateningly that the sixteen-year-old Dan decided to take him on. They stripped off and set to it outside where a ring was chalked on the street, and though as usual the lad was overmatched in size, years and bulk, he delivered a thrashing to the rash offender. A crowd had gathered. Among them, by chance it seems, was the handsome, powerfully built Richard Humphreys, at that time England’s paragon of pugilistic grace, force and elegance, billed as THE GENTLEMAN BOXER, a cut above the raw-knuckled run of ex-soldiers, sailors, stevedores and labourers who made up much of the fighting fraternity.53 But Humphreys was also a shrewd manager of his own career and he recognised star quality when he saw it; the potential for theatre; for box office. So even before he had seen Mendoza box he offered himself as his impromptu second for the fight. The sixteen-year-old battered the bigger lug into submission; dancing about, his body low to the ground; making himself an elusive target; catching every blow of his opponent with his arm and dishing it back with a pell-mell rain of punches. With every minute of the street fight that passed, Humphreys was more and more convinced that he was looking at the future; that there was something prodigious in the offing. He smelled spectacle; he smelled money.
It was not yet time to move in on the boy, who carved his way through a procession of slow heavies, often sailors and dockyard men looking for a brawl. It didn’t always work out as Mendoza expected. There was the time near St Katharine Docks when he and his friends came on a fight between two women, shrieking and spitting while they clawed at each other’s eyes, a crowd of men jeering and cheering. ‘I was never fond of seeing contests of this sort and therefore endeavoured ineffectually to reconcile them.’54 The intervention failed so Mendoza put money on one of the Amazons and won. The loser’s boyfriend, a sailor, was unhappy about this so a second fight ensued. Days later Mendoza was waylaid by a gang, seeking to avenge the losing girl and her companion, and doing it with cudgels. Beaten unconscious, Mendoza was left for dead. The battering only quickened his appetite and his fearlessness was becoming talked about from the Kent Road to Shepherd’s Bush and among the Fancy from Brighton to Bristol. Humphreys sought him out again. Flattered – and how could he not be? – Mendoza let himself be adopted; instructed, trained, patronised. There was still some uncertainty in Mendoza’s mind whether this was a choice profession. There had been Jewish fighters, especially among the London Sephardim, known to the public in years gone by. Boxiana described ‘Isaac Mousha’ (whose real name I suspect must have been Smouha) and Abraham da Costa taking on the formidable Jack ‘the Plasterer’ Lamb in the 1750s but both coming off worse. Inevitably there were sniggers at the defeat of the ‘Tribe of Israel’. ‘They were most terribly disappointed in not finding the LAMB quite so tender as they imagin’d, by his proving what they did not like – a prime piece of pork!’55
Mendoza would not be such a convenient amusement: the comically adventurous Jew laid low. Humphreys would be his promoter and teacher. They sparred. Bouts that would draw the public and money were arranged, the biggest with the famously brutal Tom Tyne. Mendoza lost but thereafter would have no trouble in arranging contests for twenty, thirty guineas, the beginning of serious prize money.
It was during the preparations for another fight that things went awry between mentor and protégé. Humphreys had arranged for Mendoza to train at a house in Epping Forest belonging to a friend of his. But it quickly became apparent to Mendoza that the house was a brothel and the streak of bourgeois self-righteousness that was never far from the surface was outraged at the insult, however inadvertent. Mendoza exited in a fit of mortification and it was now Humphreys’ turn to take offence, not least because, separated from his star protégé, he forfeited money due to him as Mendoza’s promoter. So the little Jew Boy thought he could go it on his own, did he? A good thrashing would teach him otherwise. If need be he would administer it himself. It is the oldest story in sport and this time it was true.
They ran into each other, whether by chance or calculation, at the Roebuck in Aldgate. In front of the drinkers, many of whom were also his followers and fans, Humphreys called Mendoza out. ‘After using very scurrilous and abusive language he seized me by the collar and tore my shirt with great violence.’ The Roebuck was a Humphreys pub and Mendoza knew better than to try and settle things on the spot. He told his sometime friend and new enemy that ‘though I did not choose to resent the insult just then’ – ‘resent’ being the boxers’ code word for turning offence into a physical encounter – ‘he might be assured that I should not readily forget it and that I doubted not that the time would come when I would be requited’.56
Humphreys waited for Mendoza to bite off more than he could chew; assuming surrogates would administer the chastening on his behalf. It never happened. A fight was arranged at Barnet racecourse against the second most famous and formidable boxer in England after Humphreys himself: ‘Butcher’ Martin of Bath. It took Mendoza twenty-six minutes to finish the Butcher off. Not long before, Humphreys had needed an hour and three-quarters to do the same job. Worse still, as a result of the famous victory over the Butcher of Bath, Mendoza was a thousand pounds to the good and the lord of the latest entourage following their dark-horse hero in a long line of horses and carriage, the hoi polloi bringing up the rear, roaring ‘Mendoza, Mendoza, Mendoza forever!’ The cult of the fighting Jew had started, the most unlikely enthusiasm of Regency England.
For Dick Humphreys, this was embarrassing, intolerable. The only thing which could stop Mendoza in his tracks would be a defeat at his own hands; more than a conquest, a lesson, to the presumptuous little Jew. Overtures between the two sides took the form of bloody skirmishes between the rival camps of supporters. War broke out in the London streets, fairs and pleasure gardens. Bludgeons and whip handles were in action; broken heads and bloody noses, stompings by the docks. His public visibility had made Mendoza a little heady with fame but it also exposed him to real danger. Strolling with his heavily pregnant wife in Vauxhall Gardens one evening, he was surrounded by twenty of Tom Tyne’s men (working for Humphreys), carried off and locked in a room. He escaped by dropping through a window to find his wife sitting on a bench, unmolested but terrified and tearful. She begged Dan to stop fighting and, moved by her entreaties, he promised to make an end of pugilism – once, that is, the business with Humphreys was settled. There was no retreating from the challenge. The two men traded insults, aired to keep the public interest stirred up. Why, sir, you have been taking liberties with my name, Humphreys said to Mendoza in one such encounter at another inn. (Mendoza was sure Humphreys was deliberately dogging his footsteps to provoke public arguments.) Why, sir, the same might be said of you, and if you should wish to settle matters between us here and now I am at your disposal. A ring was drawn in the innyard; the two stripped, set to it, and in a few minutes Mendoza had closed one of Humphreys’ eyes. But this was knockabout, a warm-up for the hacks. The real pitched battle was yet to come.
Whether he sought the attention or not (and most likely he did), Mendoza remained on view, day and night. His boxing academy at Capel Court, the first of its kind, became famous. Merchants, the gentry and nobility, even men from the legal profession lined up to be instructed in the manly art of self-defence which for the first time became a popular obsession; violence made civic. Mendoza sparred for money in theatres (until he was stopped as being in infringement of regulations governing the stage), and gave exhibitions and lectures, featuring the assumed boxing styles of different champions of past and present (including Humphreys). But then he went into serious training along the lines recommended in his manual. The Mendoza diet was precise and rigorous: daily workouts but never to the point of exhaustion. Regularity rather than intensity was the goal; the augmentation of strength and stamina but never at the expense of quickness, so walks rather than runs; cold baths and dry rub-downs. Breakfasts were to be light: rennet whey not tea; a glass of wine diluted with water. For supper, stewed veal and rice or ‘well-fed fowls’ boiled to a jelly in the evening; a glass of hock afterwards; nothing that would lie too heavily on the stomach; no spiritous liquors; chocolate rather than coffee; no salt; rusks rather than bread; a dab of hard white butter with a toasted biscuit. Think tactics; practise them. Always look the opposition full in the eye; judge his reach and his body language so that it would tell you the direction of his blows and his choice of targets. Only take your eyes off his when you made a feint and wanted to deceive him as to the choice of hits.57 Keep moving. Keep him off balance. Walk don’t run. Keep moving.
Odiham in Hampshire was the venue in January 1788. All England knew about it and all the enthusiasts of the Fancy made sure to be there: dukes, knights of the shire, City aldermen, monied merchants. It had been raining hard the previous day and the stage was still perilously wet. But the downpour had given over as if providence was watching too. The drama of the moment was irresistible. Humphreys was fair flower of English manhood; the living embodiment that gentility was not to be confused with social rank; that it was a matter of character, the testimonials of which were written in the form of a fine body. Matched against the gallant was the swarthy Jew whose victories drew on the better qualities of his people: ingenuity, artfulness, lively energy. Perhaps even his famous ‘bottom’ – the resilience and fortitude to come back from a severe blow and return it with interest – might be said to be a quality of the race in general, for how else had they managed to survive the poundings of the centuries? Mendoza gloried in all this. His second, his bottle holder and his chosen umpire were all Jews: Mr Jacobs, Mr Isaacs and a Mr Moravia. To immense cheering, Humphreys climbed onto the raised stage, a literally glittering figure since his stockings were spangled with gold thread. There never was such a beautiful pugilist. Mendoza, Boxiana recalled, opted for understatement, merely showing a ‘neat appearance’. The heavy money was all on Humphreys, but as the rounds went past and none of the champion’s famous blows seemed to be doing much damage to the Jew, the odds began to shift and with them the bets. The slippery surface of the stage made each of them occasionally unsteady, Humphreys being the wobblier. At the twenty-minute mark (each round was a minute), Humphreys complained about the tightness of his glamorous hose, especially where they packed into his slippers, and stopped to change them ‘into plain worsted hose’. According to Mendoza this was a ruse for him to catch his wind, the change taking a full forty seconds longer than the rules permitted. A ‘levelling’ blow by Mendoza was then caught by one of Humphreys’ seconds right at the edge of the ring. Two fouls then, which by Mendoza’s lights should have given him the verdict. Instead he did what he would have counselled his pupils never to do: allowed his passions to sway his strategy. Impatiently he attempted to throw Humphreys, perhaps with a lethal cross-buttock move. Sensing he could catch Mendoza off balance, Humphreys held on to the stage rails with an iron grip, and threw the thrower. Mendoza landed on his head. Worse, a violent pain shot through his ‘loins’. An ankle was sprained or worse. Standing up was beyond him. This one was over. Humphreys lost no time writing to one of his patrons who had been unable to be there in person: ‘I have done the Jew and am in good health.’
Mendoza had lost the battle but not the war, especially not the publicity battle. Knowing that there would be at least one return match (Humphreys seemed eager for it), a Mendoza industry got to work. An image of the two men fists up – the Gent and the Jew – was everywhere in the England of 1788. Dan-like characters showed up on stage at Covent Garden and Drury Lane; Dicky-Dan ballads were the rage, especially those crowing over the fall of the presumptuous Hebrew. The Hebrews themselves were all on fire for their new Maccabee.
But he was hurt and in low spirits after the death of his only child. His groin injury was slow in mending and training for the rematch had to go easy. He was also prudent enough not to force it. His sensible reticence gave Humphreys – who understood that their contests had now gone beyond the confines of the usual crowd of sportsmen and following to become something of a national obsession – the chance to stir the publicity pot with a little public baiting. Immediately after the fight, still incensed at the disallowed fouls, Mendoza had taken to the press, in particular The World, to restate his version of the fight.58 Humphreys instantly responded, taunting Mendoza with sour grapes, sore loser and the rest, and implying that the injuries he used to postpone the rematch were the pathetic whining of a cowardly malingerer. Mendoza’s publication of a letter from his surgeon – a doctor’s note – opened him to further ribaldry. Of Mendoza’s injury, Humphreys teased, ‘why there were people who swore they saw three bones come out … the disorder moved gradually to his hips from whence lest it should be mistaken for a rheumatic complaint, it settled with most excruciating pain in the loins where I am aware it may abide for as long as he finds convenient’.59
Six months after the first fight, in July 1788 Humphreys made an unannounced appearance at Mendoza’s gym during a sparring session, parking himself prominently at a seat by the ring along with his usual entourage of supporters. Mendoza, who was dressed in mourning black for the recent death of his only child, played the gentlemanly part, courteously thanking Humphreys for honouring his establishment with his presence. But then Humphreys climbed into the ring and mocked Mendoza in front of his own people for running or limping away from the rematch. Mendoza joined him. Now they were sparring but with their mouths.
MENDOZA: You cannot suppose Mr Humphreys that I am afraid of you.
HUMPHREYS: You seem to feel some palpitation.
MENDOZA: YOU, sir, seem unwilling to engage with several persons who wished to fight you.
HUMPHREYS: That is not the question. I wish to fight no one but yourself.60
Despite his reputation for impetuousness, Mendoza refused to be goaded into a premature bout. He took his time. Gradually his fitness came back. A recuperative diet – rusks and rennet and stewed veal – helped. The quality was now paying attention. A patron emerged: Sir Thomas Apreece, himself a bit of a boxer, and there was solicitous interest from a trio of royal dukes, Cambridge, Cumberland and York, all of whom had been to the synagogue, appropriately in Duke’s Place.
On 6 May 1789, while the Estates General at Versailles were beginning the end of the Ancien Régime, a revolution of the ring unfolded in England. The place was Stilton in Huntingdonshire, in the park of one of Mendoza’s new and passionate supporters among the quality: Henry Thornton. Interest in the grudge return was so immense that a custom-built arena had been constructed to take the audience of thousands, all of whom had paid the princely sum of half a guinea to be present at the fight of the century. Rows of terraced bleachers had been raised to accommodate the throng. Given how the previous fight had gone, the odds and the big bets were all on Humphreys to repeat his victory, but this time they shifted more quickly and more decisively to the Jew. For after a few rounds it was shockingly apparent that he was giving the Gentleman a lesson in pugilism; especially in that ‘neat stopping’ for which boxing history would remember him: the Jew who caught the blows. The harder Humphreys punched with round and straight blows, the more exactly Mendoza took them on his arm, striking back with a punishing volley of counter-blows everywhere but especially to that handsome face of his opponent which was turning into a bloody mess. Everyone watching knew they were witnessing the end of one reign and the beginning of another.
In the twenty-second round Humphreys ‘dropped’. The rules were that if a boxer did so without a blow touching him, the fight was judged to be lost. Mendoza’s corner cried as much. But raising himself again, Humphreys insisted he had received a blow and that the fight must go on. Humphreys’ corner taunted their opponents with claiming a hitless foul in order to avoid fighting on. Furious, Mendoza’s corner insisted their man should not resume fighting; that he had already won the day. The altercation of the corners became so fierce that it threatened to turn into a by-fight. But Dan himself wanted no shadow of dispute to hang over this bout as it had over the last, and declared himself ready to set to. They went at it for another thirty minutes before Humphreys dropped again without being touched, and this time his corner did not contest the verdict. Victory belonged to the Jew. Later, in his memoirs, Mendoza remembered the wild carousing long into the night at the Bull Inn, then on to a second party, and finally, and with a note of self-mockery, the whole gang, looking for the house of a Mr Newbury, their host, got lost, stumbled into a farmyard and fell into a pit ‘filled with dung’, the kind of comedy most sporting heroes would generally omit. But then Mendoza was, as England came to acknowledge, generally a good sport.
Now that Humphreys and Mendoza had each won a fight, a third was to settle things once and for all. It was arranged for 29 September 1790, at Doncaster. A great and menacing upheaval had broken out on the other side of the Channel, but it became a commonplace of the writing of that time to insist that no British eyes or ears paid the revolution in France much heed for they were all on Humphreys and Mendoza. The location was the yard of an inn beside the Don, bordered on one side by the buildings and on the other by the river. The bankside was railed off by palings but hundreds had been ferried over by local boatmen and in no time at all the palings had been made short work of. Other locals had moored their vessels on the river, and for a price made the spars available for punters to sit aloft in prime viewing positions like so many perching crows.
By this time Humphreys knew that his only chance of winning was by landing one of his incomparably punishing blows in the early going, followed by a hit to the mark of the stomach. But Mendoza’s famous bottom was on display, taking what was given and returning with savage force. As early as the third round he knocked Humphreys clean down. In the fifth, Humphreys got in one of the shattering stomachers for which he was famous, but Mendoza took it and returned a blinding facer. Round after round they went at it, ever more brutally, Humphreys almost blind with injuries around his eyes, his nose broken, lacerations over his face, upper lip split in two, still slugging on. Mendoza just waited for the draining fatigue to do his work for him, and as Humphreys stumbled and dropped and dropped and staggered, would gently hold him up like a wounded comrade on the battlefield; a gesture everyone noticed had something of generosity and something of contempt mixed in. At length Mendoza laid Dick Humphreys on the floor of the ring as though he were putting a child to sleep.
This of course did not stop some of the writing about the fight turning from scorn at the feebleness of Jews to distaste for the ‘hardness of the Jew’s heart’. Others said and wrote that while the plan had gone to science over grace, it was the latter which transfigured the true hero, vanquished though he was. For his own part, in the memoirs at least, Mendoza paid tribute, as he now could, to his archrival and erstwhile teacher, that throughout their contentions he had acted honourably (which was not always how he had felt at the time).
As is so often the case, the repeated trials of strength exhausted both parties. Humphreys never thought to face Mendoza again. And though he seemed in the prime of his powers, and went on to defeat the new up-and-comer William Warr twice in a row, it was evident that the prolonged epic of the Humphreys battles had taken a toll on the victor. In 1795 he was matched with John Jackson for two hundred guineas apiece. Notoriously, when they were closing, Jackson seized Mendoza by his pride and joy, the long locks of his curly mane, and held them fast while smashing facer after facer at him ‘till he fell to the ground’.61 By this time he was doing his best to fulfil his promise to his wife by finding other less directly bruising ways to exploit his prowess. There were more theatrical exhibitions in which Mendoza illustrated the techniques and styles of champions past and present along with a hired sparring partner, engaging in sham bouts and concluding with a drum roll by assuming his own famous posture. His self-defence academy moved into its own theatre, the Lyceum on the Strand. His boxing pupils – a number of them Jewish, like ‘Dutch’ Sam Elias, and ‘Ikey’ who bore his nickname of ‘Ikey the Pig’ in relatively good humour – got their initial instructions. Another, who was not a pupil but very much a disciple of the Mendoza style, Elisha Crabbe, became known in his turn as ‘The Jew’, got as far as a big prize match at Horton Moor with his mentor’s old adversary and enemy Tom Tyne, but lost. Typically it was said that ‘the Jew proved the most showy fighter but Tyne did the most execution’.62
Mendoza himself was now part of show business, going on tour with the Astley circus, almost certainly in the company of Jemmy Decastro and even taking up acting with a professional stage company for a while. There were exhibition tours to Dublin and Edinburgh, Manchester, East Anglia and the West Country, Exeter, Plymouth, Bristol. The whole of Britain wanted to see the wonder who was ‘not the Jew that Shakespeare drew’. For despite allusions to his exoticism and his exercises in cunning like the Mendoza chop (stopping this side of unsporting), none of the accounts of Mendoza made him appear some sort of shifty alien on the edge of proper British society. The king himself and the whole royal family believed him the personification of exactly the kind of patriotic manliness much in demand as Britain girded itself, uncertainly, to a trial of arms with revolutionary France. According to Mendoza, on a visit to Windsor, before the informal conversation with the royal party ended, George III making many ‘ingenious observations’ about pugilism, the Princess Royal asked the famous fighter whether he might let her little boy strike him so that he might always be able to say he had landed a punch on the great Mendoza, a request Daniel smilingly granted. History does not record whether he got a stomacher to the mark or not, but if he did, he is likely to have doubled up in mock agony to make the little prince laugh.
Into his thirties the myth began to leave the man behind. Mendoza was as bad at business as he had been formidable in the ring. He accumulated debts and, his championship star fading, found it impossible to meet the creditors, and so, with ten children to support, he landed three times in the King’s Bench Prison, sometimes at his own request to avoid the loss of his property. He tried the life of a publican, owning and running the Admiral Nelson in Whitechapel; then when that failed as warrant server for the sheriff; and enforcer of the ‘New Price’ tickets at Drury Lane, which had triggered riots of indignation among the supporters of the cheaper ‘Old Price’. Recognising Mendoza, the Old Price rioters started to sound off again about The Jews.
Every so often he came out of retirement for the odd fight. There was a relentless, slogging encounter at Grinstead Green in Kent in 1806 with Harry Lee, a veteran like himself. They had a full fifty rounds, the valiant, half-dead Lee refusing to give up and drop. Assuming this was a farewell fight for both pugilists, a number of the new champions like Henry ‘Hen’ Pearce (known as the Game Chicken) and John Gulley attended thinking it was the last chance they would have to appreciate the great man’s style. In a sense they were right for when, shockingly, Mendoza at the age of fifty-six had one last slog in 1820 with an old foe, Tom Owen, the grudge match was barely more than a curiosity.
This was enough. Writing his memoirs, Mendoza had a chance to relive the thrilling epic of his rise from obscurity to the days of the great gladiatorial matches with Humphreys. Gentleman Dick went into the coaling business and settled down to a peaceful and relatively prosperous middle age. Daniel ended his days in his seventies in the same place he had begun – the stretch of Jewish London from Whitechapel to Bethnal Green – and was buried in the Portuguese cemetery on the Mile End Road. At some point the remains of a number of bodies were reinterred on a site in Essex, but the Sephardi burial ground, now in the front courtyard of Queen Mary’s College, bears a plaque with his name.
He had changed, though not completely and not forever (no mortal could do that), the ingrained prejudices the British had about Jews, even if many who previously had sneered at the cowardice and feebleness of commercial and learned Jews now began to dislike them for their brute force in what they claimed to be ‘self-defence’. Pierce Egan was more perceptively generous when he stressed that what was so striking about Daniel Mendoza was not just the string of victories but ‘the manner’ in which they were obtained. ‘Prejudice frequently distorts the mind, that, unfortunately, good actions are passed over without even common respect; more especially when they appear in any person who may chance to be of a different persuasion or colour.’ (Black boxers like Tom Molineaux were about to follow the Jews into the ring.) ‘Mendoza in being a Jew, did not stand in so favourable a point of view respecting the wishes of the multitude towards his success, as his brave opponent … but truth riseth superior to all things and the humanity of Mendoza was conspicuous throughout the fight.’63
Mendoza was pleased to have himself described as an honourable man since a strong element in his entire adventure was to show his countrymen that a Jew could be a ‘manly’ Briton too; that the image many had of the craven, feeble, untrustworthy Jew was wide of the mark. Britain was the only country where the sport had become a professional pursuit and a mass audience pleaser, and Mendoza saw himself as a specimen of pure patriotic virility: one of the few heroes for whom the king and the Prince of Wales could share an admiration. ‘I trust it will not be imputed to vanity,’ he wrote in the preface to his memoirs, ‘but I cannot refrain from asking, was curiosity ever more ardently excited, or the general feeling of the nation ever more interested by any public exhibition than by the contests between Mr Humphreys and myself?’64 Let the French have their doubtful slaughters. He was the best of the British, and still every bit Mendoza the Jew.
In Britain, institutions moved slower than attitudes. The next attempt to emancipate the Jews, following the success of the Catholic bill in 1829, would fail. Another two decades would remain before they could stand and be admitted to Parliament. While Mendoza still lived, the opportunities were narrower. The articulate, hotly anti-rabbinical Isaac D’Israeli thought it best for his bright son Benjamin to be baptised if he wanted to get ahead, though making it clear the boy should never forget his origins – and nor did he. Meyer Cohen came to the same conclusion and renamed himself after his Christian wife’s maiden name and so became Francis Palgrave, the great founder-custodian of the Public Record Office and thus the keeper of the memory of British history (his son anthologised the Golden Treasury which defined the English poetic tradition for millions of readers). The two Goldsmids, Benjamin and Abraham, in separate moments of financial disaster, exited that world by hanging themselves in their fine houses by the Thames, while another name altogether, Rothschild from the Frankfurt Judengasse, rose to take their place by the Exchange.
But something had happened between Christian Britain and the Jews; something unlike a connection made anywhere else, even in liberally tolerant America. What that something eventually turned out to be would change the history of the world.