PART I
1
The Hebrew Bible is the main influence on Western literature on poverty and the poor.1 No extant literature from the ancient world – in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Far East, or the Greco-Roman empire – placed more importance upon social welfare and the duty of the better-off toward the poor. The Bible subverts the social order: it is ‘a highly incendiary document’ – ‘political dynamite’.2 It turns the social structure on its head, creating a champagne glass of salvation of which the pious poor have the most and the impious rich have the least, the first are last and the last first. The Bible reverses the generally low status of the poor in the ancient world by associating poverty with holiness. In the Bible, the poor are never blamed for their poverty or linked with crime and deceit.3 The Bible has no ‘wicked poor’ (mauvais pauvre), as in Hugo’s Les Misérables, no fake or ‘sturdy’ beggars or ‘welfare scroungers’, not even the ghost of a suspicion of fraud and law-breaking among the poor, of the poor as sociopaths, malingerers, and parasites who attach themselves selfishly to a community and drain it. Which historical circumstances made such an outlook possible?
Biblical law and poetry seek to help the poor: the agricultural laws and customs – the wisdom of centuries of practical experience – were continually germane to largely agricultural European societies until the Industrial Revolution, and even to some extent after; and biblical poetry too, the Psalms above all, inspired a daily struggle to limit distress of the poor. Much of the Bible sees life through the eyes of the poor. The biblical Hebrew word tzedakah, in its combined meaning of ‘charity’ and ‘justice’, itself implies empathy with the poor. The popular appeal of the Bible in largely impoverished societies lies in its persistent relevance to and support of the poor.
The Bible, when it had authority in all social strata and all periods in life, was often exploited by the ruling powers to instill subservience. Yet its content – especially once made clear in the explosion of vernacular translations after the invention of printing in the 15th century – teaches equality, charity, and love for one’s neighbor, and the questioning of human authority, Church and state. Biblical influence spread in the 16th century as the Reformation spread, when prolonged European warfare and population growth increased the numbers of the poor, and the rise of capitalism widened the gap between rich and poor.4 Even as secular education grew as part of the modern state after 1789, the Bible and its humanitarian poor laws remained for most Europeans the blueprint of life.
Yet, in many ways, biblical teachings were incompatible with social and political circumstances centuries and millennia later. The Bible was created by a people often threatened and overrun, exiled and pauperized; their aristocracy and priesthood defeated and destroyed; their lives hung in doubt. The Bible was edited with the perspective of an exiled people that sees its exile as a divinely inflicted national punishment, among other things, for injustice against the poor, and its hope of return in justice for the poor: ‘Jerusalem shall be redeemed in justice’ (Isaiah 1: 27). This was not the perspective of most European countries that accepted the authority of the Bible. The Bible preserved the residual faith and solidarity of a broken, exiled people. Yet it was adopted by many nations with power and territory, two thousand years later. The Bible insists upon unqualified sympathy for the poor; Poor Law legislation of the late-medieval world of emerging European secular states tends to abandon this sympathy by insultingly challenging the needs of the poor, to weed out the lazy. It ignores the biblical view that the poor are blessed as they are closer to God. In the Bible, charity is an absolute good, the yardstick of a Godly society. The Bible nowhere justifies the underlying premise of parliamentary Poor Law: that charity is easily abused, encouraging laziness among the working classes and an anti-work mentality, demoralizing them and making them useless to society, chronically dependent on aid, welfare scroungers. The Bible idealizes and dignifies the poor and elevates the act of giving into a divine act. Poor Law, in contrast, reacts to the poor as a political threat: as their distress increases, they form a potential menace to society. Biblical poor law is consecration; parliamentary Poor Law is rationalization and regulation. Uniquely in ancient literature, in the Bible the poor are loved.
Vernacular Scripture, the Reformation, and the poor
As the Hebrew Bible was a turning point in the history of the poor in the ancient land of Israel and in the Jewish diaspora, the Bible in a host of vernacular translations was a turning point in the literary depiction of the European poor from the Renaissance on. Translation and publication of the vernacular Bible was at first an act of heresy, a crime like witchcraft, punishable by death. As soon as translation made clear the content of the Bible to the common people, it undermined traditional Church authority. The medieval Church treated Scripture as being in its control. The Latin Vulgate, with supreme religious authority, blinded the ignorant masses who could not read it. The vernacular, not the classical languages, was theirs. As dissent grew among impoverished Europeans in the early 16th century, vernacular Bible translation spread among the common people, particularly Tyndale’s English and Luther’s German translation. The Reformation, with its ideology of ‘Scripture alone’, spurred further vernacular Bible translations accessible to all. European languages were transformed, leading to a generally higher literary standard than previously, and affecting the depiction of the lower classes in European literature. The Reformation encouraged people to think for themselves – ‘To stand enquiring right’, as John Donne put it – and spurred popular literacy. They could now read (or hear read) the translated Bible on their own and make up their own minds about it, and they could judge their own lives by it. Vernacular Bibles encouraged literacy in Catholic as well as Protestant countries, stimulating the growth of schools and encouraging literacy in a broad cross-section of society, reaching, as Erasmus enthused, ‘the farmer, the tailor, the stonemason, prostitutes, pimps, and Turks’.5
Vernacular translations of the Hebrew Bible had consequences far beyond what was imagined at the time. Translation stimulated debate not just over theological issues but also over political and social questions, including government authority, social stratification, and rights of the poor. The common people could now understand without clerical intermediaries that the Bible does not unconditionally sanction the ‘divine right of kings’, and that it is committed to helping the poor; perhaps most important is that the Bible has faith in the abilities of the poor, for even slaves are capable of gaining freedom, accepting their own laws, and creating and governing their own independent state. The Bible encouraged the poor to struggle for a better world, and the rich to help them in this aim. At the same time, the non-biblical association of the poor with immorality and vagabondage was not without advantage to them: for example, trade schools were established to make good and useful Christians out of poor children, teaching them to read and write and preparing them for a trade.6
As a vital part of a humanist education, the vernacular Bible was open to critical study. Resultant theological debate leading to comparative critical Bible editions helped create a climate for secular scientific investigation – including theories of nation-building and social reform – and for secular education. The vernacular Bible hastened the advent of the secular state. It transformed European attitudes toward poverty as well as the self-image of the poor. The growth of rational thinking based on empirical proof encouraged new secular perspectives on poverty and Poor Law legislation. Sixteenth-century Poor Law can be seen on one level as part of the process of desacralization of poverty and almsgiving anticipating the secular welfare state – and an increasingly secular literature. The Reformation gave these socio-economic changes theological justification. The notion of capitalist development as freedom7 might be applied to the revolutionary literary creativity that accompanied these socio-political, economic, and religious upheavals as capitalist Europe expanded in the 16th century. The Reformation, led by Martin Luther, riding the new technology of printing, changed the lives of the poor and the social perception of the poor and charity. Lutheranism contested biblical reverence for poverty and the poor, presenting instead a split view: (1) a traditional positive image of the poor as equal to the rich in God’s eyes and, through faith, masters of their own fate; (2) a negative image of the poor as being deficient in faith – as their poverty testified they were – and subject to divine punishment. To the Hebrew prophets, faith was personal: ‘The righteous shall live by his faith’ (Habakkuk 2: 4). Luther revived this idea of per solam fidem and rejected the hierarchical Catholic Church and the notion that without the sacraments and the priesthood salvation was beyond reach. He restored the biblical ideals of the equality of all, from popes to paupers, in the eyes of God; and that salvation was based on faith alone. The ‘Priesthood of all Believers’ included rich and poor, high and low, educated and illiterate. Faith alone, and God’s grace, determined success and failure in life.
The revolutionary shift to the vernacular – in the German states, in Luther’s powerful translation of the Five Books of Moses – meant that the individual, rich or poor, could experience Scripture directly. The vernacular Bible empowered the poor, giving them a rich literary picture of a world in which slaves, the poorest of the poor, emerge from slavery, accept their own divinely granted laws, and create an independent state. The same social forces behind capitalism and free enterprise could empower the poor to change their lives. Yet, Luther’s doctrine of Justification by Faith, and the Calvinist valuation of the economic virtues – and even of usury – favored the prosperous. The poverty of the poor could be seen as a punitive withholding of God’s grace. The poor made themselves poor by failing to control their vices, such as laziness, gambling, or drunkenness. They were consequently to be judged harshly.8 The Reformation thus created, as Max Weber famously observed, a powerful incentive for capitalist success, to signify divine grace, as well as the basis for punitive Poor Law and a goad for the poor to take responsibility for their lives and struggle against their poverty. These contradictory socio-psychological, religious, and political forces affected the lives of the poor for centuries, in social attitudes, legislation, and literature. To what extent did the more positive, biblical view of the poor prevail in European literature?
Biblical poor law and European literature
Familiarity with biblical laws on the poor could be assumed among writers until the modern age. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which dates from the same time as the English Poor Law of 1598, the shepherd Silvius expresses his love for the shepherdess Phebe in agricultural imagery of poverty and gleaning, echoing biblical poor law:
So holy and so perfect is my love,
And I in such a poverty of grace,
That I shall think it a most plenteous crop
To glean the broken ears after the man
That the main harvest reaps. Loose now and then
A scatt’red smile, and that I’ll live upon.
(III v 99–104)
Shakespeare, his roots in the settled rural world of Warwickshire, evidently knew the biblical law that farmers must leave the poor and the stranger the corners of their fields and the ears of corn which drop at reaping as well as grapes left on the vine or fallen at picking-time (Leviticus ch. 19): Phebe’s smiles are a ‘plenteous crop’ gleaned by Silvius in his love for her. Many in Shakespeare’s first audiences in the 1590s would have known this biblical law; some, having lived in the countryside where famine was frequent, might even have been its beneficiaries.
Keats, in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, written a decade and a half before the New Poor Law of 1834, alludes to the scene in the Book of Ruth in which the poor are allowed to glean in the fields. He could still count on his readers, living at the last moment before industry overtook agriculture, to know what he heard in the song of the nightingale
that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
For centuries, the biblical spirit persisted in traditional attitudes toward the poor, as the historian Dorothy Marshall wrote: ‘Most farmers allowed poor women to glean in the fields once the crop had been carried. It was a custom as old as the story of Naomi and Ruth.’9
The poor laws in the Hebrew Bible transformed the sense of being outcast into universal sympathy. In these laws, a society is judged by its compassion and care for the poor and downtrodden, the widow, orphan, and stranger. The Bible created two precedents for secular Western legislation and literature on the poor: (1) they are entitled to aid from those better off;10 (2) they are morally stronger than the rich, whose wealth threatens to harden the heart against good deeds and the truth of faith. Among key passages illustrating these principles, which influenced Christian and Muslim views of charity, are the following:
Six years plant seeds and gather the produce and on the seventh year leave the land alone for the poor to eat the produce thereof.
(Exodus 23: 10–11)11
When you reap, do not cut the corner of your field, nor gather the ears of corn which drop at the time of reaping. Do not pick the leftover grapes, nor gather the grapes which fall at picking-time. Leave them for the poor and the stranger.
(Leviticus 19: 9–10)
If your brother becomes poor, you must support him as though he were a stranger or settler, and allow him to live with you. Take no interest from him, and you will fear the Lord, and your brother will live with you … If your brother becomes poor and is sold to you as a slave, you must let him go at the Jubilee.
(Leviticus 25: 35f.)
Every three years you should pile one tenth of your harvest by the gate. And the Levite, as he has no land, and the stranger, and the orphan, and the widow shall come and eat and be satisfied … After six years, creditors must write off debts … there shall be no needy person among you … you must not be hard-hearted and tight-fisted, but lend your poor brother what he needs. Don’t let the mean thought cross your mind that the seventh year is near, don’t be stingy; you must not give your brother nothing. He will cry against you to God, and you will have a sin. You must give him, and don’t feel bad when you do because God will bless you in everything you do. For the poor shall never cease from the land. Therefore I command you: open your hand to your brother, to your poor in your land.
(Deuteronomy 14: 28–15: 11)
No man may take millstones as a pledge, for he takes the man’s source of livelihood … When you lend something to your fellow man you must not enter his house to take his pledge. You must stand outside and the man will fetch the pledge out to you. And if he is poor and gives his garment as a pledge, you must not keep the garment overnight. You must return the garment before sunset so that he can sleep in it, and he will bless you, and it will be righteousness (tzedakah) before the Lord your God.
(Deuteronomy 24: 6, 10–13)
These and other biblical laws protecting the poor derived from a world of small farms in the Land of Israel, land chronically short of water, whose productivity was disrupted or destroyed at least once every few years by drought, crop disease and failure, plague, famine, or war. As periodic uncontrollable agricultural catastrophe was normal in Europe until modern times, it was possible for Europeans to identify with the living world of the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible sanctions methods used by the poor to survive, such as taking part of a neighboring crop and gleaning leftovers from the harvest. Biblical law converts otherwise criminal acts into a communal partnership in which the well-off fulfill a cherished divine commandment and the poor are granted what is theirs by right. The power of biblical poor law to help the poor survive hardship is implicit in Hugo’s Les Misérables: the story begins in 1796, when the French Church was banned, it no longer gave charity to the poor, and biblical poor law no longer applied.12 The peasant Jean Valjean, desperate to feed his sister’s family, steals a loaf of bread. He is branded a criminal by the French penal code and imprisoned for 19 years. In a charitable Christian society, this turn of events was less likely than in a secular revolutionary state whose survival was uncertain.13
The Bible and Western views on poverty
The Bible remained the single main influence on perceptions of poverty in Western literature, even as the secular state emerged after the French Revolution. The divine fiat in Jewish and Christian Scripture rang though the ages, in the pulpits and at home, to do justice to the poor, to provide for them, and preserve their human dignity, with the view unique in ancient civilization of the equality in God’s eyes of all human beings – created ‘in God’s image’ (Genesis 1: 27). Classical literature could justify a stricter policy toward the poor – Aristotle, for example, regarded slaves as ‘animated tools’ – but the Bible continued to be a guiding force to Christians, whatever their denomination.14 Christian Europe experienced its history – including the trials of drought and famine, disease and hunger, war and scarcity – in terms of biblical typologies: what happened now had its model in the biblical world. Kings and queens, rich and poor, had a designated place and role. There was the same struggle of good and evil. Idolatry, powerfully condemned in the Bible, always had odious modern counterparts among those accused of oppressing or failing to help the poor.15
Until the 18th century, Europe was still a Bible-based, agricultural continent with farming methods largely unchanged since biblical times. Consequently, the Bible had an immediacy which dimmed as industry and urbanization spread, forcing men to seek their destiny and find their station ‘not in the hand of God but in their own hands’.16 Until the modern age, the Bible was unusual as it was read (or heard) and preserved mostly by the poor. The Hebrew Book of Psalms, recited in daily worship and cited in sermons and homiletic texts and, later, in philosophical and governmental documents, was noted for its sympathy for the poor. Charity in the Bible is imitatio dei: God deals justly with the widow and orphan, and loves the stranger, providing him with bread and clothes (Deuteronomy 10: 18); humans should do the same. The laws of charity apply to non-Jews, as illustrated in the Book of Ruth,17 and even to enemies: ‘If your enemy is hungry, give him bread. If he is thirsty, give him water … and the Lord will reward you’ (Proverbs 25: 21, 22). The Israelites, being ex-slaves, should love the stranger: ‘You know the soul of the stranger … You shall love the stranger for you were slaves in Egypt’.18 In fact, all human beings are ‘strangers’, temporary inhabitants on this earth, owning nothing permanently.19 Biblical poetry and law agree there is no private ownership: in song, ‘the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof’; and in law, the land must not be sold in perpetuity, ‘for the land is Mine and you are strangers and sojourners with me’.20 Possession of worldly goods, land, silver and gold is brief. Those who fail to pay their tithes are in effect robbing God (Malachi 3: 8). Everything in the end belongs to God alone: ‘mine is the whole earth’, ‘mine is the silver, and mine is the gold’.21 Human possession of the land is conditional upon observance of the law, in which the better-off have responsibility for the poor. The Hebrew prophets demand justice for society’s unfortunates:
Woe to those who make bad laws,
who write injustice
to twist law from the poor,
rob them of their rights –
widows their prey, orphans their spoil!
Give your bread to the hungry.
Take the poor into your home.
Clothe the naked.
Don’t ignore them, your own flesh.
(Isaiah 10: 1–2; 58: 7)
Failure to fulfill responsibility to the poor leads to national disaster (e.g. Amos ch. 6); and among reasons for the Babylonian exile is the oppression of the poor and the stranger (Ezekiel 22: 29).
Even so, the Hebrew Bible is not devoid of sympathy for wealth and the rich, in contrast with the Greek Bible which spurns wealth and condemns the rich. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is it suggested, as in the Greek Bible,22 that the rich man should give all he has to the poor, or that he will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. Job, whose cruel punishment by God leads his comforters to suspect – foreshadowing Calvinist attitudes to social failure two millennia later – that he must have sinned, insists in his defence that poverty is the human condition, not a punishment for sin. In one of the few passages in pre-modern literature describing the reality of homelessness and despair (and a likely influence on King Lear), Job declares that the poor, like himself, are abandoned by God, without cause:
The poor come out of hiding
to scavenge the dry land for their young.
They reap in fields not theirs.
They glean in the vineyards of the wicked.
They lie all night naked, exposed to the cold.
Drenched by mountain rain,
they hug the rock for shelter …
In their hunger, they clutch at the sheaves.
From terraced olive trees they squeeze oil.
Thirstily they tread the grapes.
The dying groan in town, the sick cry for help,
but God is deaf to them …
(24: 2–8, 10–12)23
As these poor suffer without cause, so Job does too: he insists his wealth did not corrupt him. He used it righteously (as God recognizes in the end). He treated his servants as equals in the eyes of God, he fed and clothed the poor:
I was eyes to the blind,
feet for the lame
father to the needy,
crutch for the stranger …
When was I unjust to my servants,
male or female,
when they quarrelled with me –
for how could I then answer
when God called me to account?
Did He not make us all in the womb?
Did I not help the poor?
Did I let the widow weep in vain?
Never did I eat alone
but shared my crust with the fatherless.
Never did I let a man die
for want of clothing.
No, I warmed him with the fleece of my lambs,
and his body blessed me.
(29: 16; 31: 13–20)24
Biblical views on the poor were adapted by the early Judaeo-Christians to Christianity and, later, by Islam, which follows the Judaeo-Christian tradition in its emphasis on charity as a divine imperative. The result was a raising of the status of the poor: biblical messianic hope was linked to the poor; in Zachariah (9: 9) the Messiah is ‘a poor man riding on a donkey’; in the Talmud, similarly, the Messiah is a diseased beggar by the gates of Rome, awaiting the divine call to redeem the world.25 In other words, any beggar could be the Messiah – a belief which became part of Jewish folklore until the 20th century – it is alluded to in Ansky’s play, The Dybbuk, written during World War I – and helps to account in modern times for the attraction of socialism to many assimilated Jews who had lost faith in their religion.26
The Bible-based notion of superiority of the poor man over the rich man is affirmed also in Yiddish schnorrer jokes, which Freud was fond of telling, in Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). A schnorrer is a species of beggar, and in one of the best-known schnorrer jokes, set in pre-1914 Paris, a schnorrer tries countless times to see Baron Rothschild. Finally he stands outside Rothschild’s mansion and screams, ‘My family is starving to death and Rothschild refuses to see me!’ Rothschild tells his servants to let the man in and personally gives the schnorrer 30 francs. ‘Here you are, but let me tell you that if you hadn’t created such a scene I would have given you 60 francs.’ The schnorrer replies: ‘My dear Baron, I don’t give you advice about banking, so don’t you give me advice about schnorring.’27 This is of course a masterclass in chutzpah! The schnorrer is Rothschild’s superior, for what can Rothschild give him? Only money. What he has to offer Rothschild is far more valuable: a place in the World to Come! This joke reflects a sociological reality in Jewish culture and history – the high value attached to the poor in Scripture and tradition, in customs which in modern times are more honored in the breach than the observance.
The Bible and Christian views of the poor
Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity diverge in their attitudes toward the poor. With the destruction of the Jewish state in 70 ce and the failure of the Bar-Kokhba revolt of 132–5 ce, rabbinic Judaism had the messianic stuffing knocked out of it. The surviving Jews were left with the ‘four cubits of Torah’28 as comfort and guide to life which, however painful, had to be lived with faith and hope, according to the Law. For Christians, in contrast, the messianic age was at hand, and the end of history: the visions of the Hebrew prophets would be fulfilled, the sufferings of the poor were at an end. The early Christians extolled the poor and condemned the rich, true to the biblical spirit; and true also to the rabbinic principle of giving, without investigation before or after, to those who claimed to be hungry.29 The survival of the defeated Jews and of Judaism depended on their willingness to accommodate themselves and be useful to Rome. To some extent they followed the Roman view (which in fact was nothing new in human history) that wealth and the wealthy were superior to poverty and the poor. As we have seen, post-biblical Jewish legal texts consider the possibility of deceit in taking advantage of poor law. In contrast, in the Bible there are no free-riders; and this gives the (undoubtedly false) impression that in the biblical era poor law was rarely, if ever, abused.30 This is the view in Christian Scripture, which never finds fault with the poor but follows the biblical tradition that the poor must be treated with utmost respect and unquestioning consideration.
Poverty was from the start part of the fabric of Christianity. Jesus, a poor man, penniless, with ‘nowhere to lay his head’ (Matthew 8: 20; 17: 27), starts his ministry in a Nazareth synagogue reading from the section of the book of Isaiah which describes the hope of return of the Babylonian exiles after the destruction of the kingdom of Judah (586 bce) and the conquest of Babylonia by the Persians (539 bce). This text had much relevance in Jesus’ own age, in the land of Israel under Roman rule, in the early 1st century ce:
The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
for he anointed me to bring the poor good news.
He sent me to heal the broken-hearted,
to set captives free, and let them see again.
(Isaiah 61: 1–2)31
Of this Hebrew passage Jesus declares, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4: 18, 21). Early Christians took up the image of tormented humanity in Isaiah as a prediction of the coming of Jesus, and hope for the wretched of the earth:
He looked like nothing, formless as a plant
poking up in the desert,
despised, grief-stricken, marked with illness …
Men turned their eyes away.
We thought he was plagued, tormented, God-stricken.
Yet he bore our sickness, suffered our pain.
He was the victim of our sins.
We were healed because he suffered …
(Isaiah 53: 2–4)32
Jesus blesses the poor, ‘for yours is the kingdom of God’ (Luke 6: 20) and exhorts his followers, ‘Give to him who begs from you’ (Matthew 5: 42). As in the Hebrew Bible, all are equal in the eyes of God (Acts 17: 26), but the poor have the final advantage when the ‘great gulf’ will separate them from the rich in the World to Come: only they will enter the Kingdom of Heaven (Luke 16: 25–6). In the Gospels, real poverty is not material poverty but failure to invest in the Kingdom of Heaven, with faith and good deeds. As in Isaiah (58: 1–9), the essence of worship is to do good to those who suffer:
… for I was hungry and you gave me food,
I was thirsty and you gave me drink,
I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
I was naked and you clothed me,
I was sick and you visited me,
I was in prison and you came to me.
(Matthew 25: 35–6)33
In its high valuation of the poor, Christian Scripture follows the Hebrew Bible, but its low view of the rich is uncompromising, and subversive of the class structure of the Roman empire. Jesus, following the Hebrew Book of Proverbs (11: 16), links wealth with ruthlessness and sin: ‘it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven’ (Matthew 18: 24);34 the rich have cause to weep the curse of wealth (James 5: 1–3); and in the story of the poor man, Lazarus, and the rich man who neglects him, it is Lazarus who in the World to Come is welcomed to ‘Abraham’s bosom’ while the rich man suffers the torments of hell (Luke 16).35 Following Malachi (3: 8), to give to the poor is to give to God; to deny the poor charity is to deprive God of what is rightfully his and to suffer eternal fire (Matthew 25: 31–46).36 Despite recognition of ever-present poverty (‘the poor shall never cease from the land’), the Church was ideologically determined to fight poverty with the ultimate aim of eradicating it (‘there shall be no needy person among you’).37 The egalitarian Christian religious community is ‘the legacy of Judaism’.38 The Christian ideal is summed up in an inscription on the south porch of the 15th-century Bourges Cathedral exhorting sinners to save themselves from hellfire by giving alms to the poor: ‘By means of the good and alms/ That each man does and gives to them,/ They will receive the glory of Heaven.’39
The Bible and the common people
Biblical sympathy for the poor and for suffering humanity penetrated very deep into Western literature, in Langland, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Hardy, among many others. European literature constantly articulates an already eloquent biblical ideology of concern for the poor and outrage at injustice. Langland in the late 14th-century poem, Piers Plowman, gives a moving portrait of the poor who live like prisoners, in hovels, burdened by rent and hungry children, working constantly to feed and clothe them, ashamed to beg: ‘It would be a charity to help them, so burdened,/ to comfort these peasants, with the lame and the blind.’ Shakespeare communicates this sympathy in King Lear, where the former king rejected by his daughters is reduced to the conditions of a beggar huddling exposed at night on a stormy heath; and he sees finally how vulnerable his subjects are: ‘I have ta’en too little care of this!’40 In Paradise Lost, the last words addressed to Adam and Eve by the angel Michael before their exile from paradise echo I Corinthians 13:
… only add
Deeds to thy knowledge, answerable, add faith,
Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love,
By name to come called Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far.
(XII 581–7)
In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), until the 20th century the most widely read book in English after the Bible, Jesus loves poor pilgrims in search of grace, he has stripped himself of glory for the poor and has ‘made many pilgrims princes though by nature they were beggars born, and their original had been the dunghill’.41 Several prominent 18th-century writers, as we shall see in Chapter 4, were strongly sympathetic to the poor: these included Fielding, Goldsmith, Cowper, and Johnson. Wordsworth follows the earlier poets in his Bible-based feeling for the poor: ‘the extremes of poverty and riches have a necessary tendency to corrupt the human heart’.42 In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, begun at a time of increasing poverty in England, Wordsworth describes his visit to France in 1792 where he passed a cold and hungry child on the road.43 To undo such injustice, he felt, the Revolution was necessary. Even after the Revolution, Western literature depicting the poor often finds its deepest echoes in the Bible, generally a source of inspiration, insight and hope. Yet, biblical references also highlight Christian inadequacies in poor relief. The Church cannot arrest Margaret’s Job-like slide to poverty in the north of England in the 1790s, in Wordsworth’s Margaret, or The Ruined Cottage (1797):
Many of the rich
Sank down as in a dream among the poor
And of the poor did many cease to be
And their place knew them not.44
Tales of Christian goodness with the magical force of fairy tales also expose the hypocrisy and failure of religious ideals in Western civilization. Scrooge in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1845) is a convert from miserliness to philanthropy: the Dutch tiles of Scrooge’s fireplace are illustrated with scenes from the Bible, in prophetic admonition against his heartlessness. In Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), Christianity is a ‘humbug’ if it ignores the poor. Les Misérables (1862) restores the elevated view of the poor in Christian tradition, by which charity and goodness improbably win out. When the Bishop of Digne, affectionately known as ‘Bienvenu’, tells the broken convict Jean Valjean that far from being an impoverished outcast and criminal he is his ‘brother’, he is following the Torah (e.g. Leviticus 25: 35). As a man of God, the humble Bienvenu is grateful for the privilege of presenting Valjean with the silver Valjean has himself stolen – as charity, which in any case belongs to him, as a poor man45 – and saving him from prison. His lovingkindness (hesed) transforms Valjean and brings out his qualities of greatness. The Bishop persists in seeing Jean Valjean, the convict who has just emerged from 19 years in jail, as man capable of higher achievement and spiritual greatness, precisely because he is among the poor. And, of course, it turns out that the Bishop is right. Yet, Jean Valjean is not a typical convict, nor the Bishop a typical cleric.
Clergymen-poets such as George Crabbe (‘Ellen Orford’, ‘Peter Grimes’) or Gerard Manley Hopkins (‘Harry Ploughman’, ‘Felix Randal the Farrier’) have insight into the lives of the poor, part of their calling. Most 19th-century writers on the poor had a Christian upbringing, and even if they abandoned Christianity, they did not abandon the poor. In Gaskell’s Mary Barton, the Bible is the essential subtext in the story of the Manchester factory laborers c. 1840, exploited, malnourished, tormented by the exigencies of industrialism, little better than slaves. The Bible is, somewhat grotesquely, central in the life of Félicité, a poor country girl in early 19th-century Normandy, in Flaubert’s ‘A Simple Heart’ (Un Coeur Simple, 1877):
She went about in rags, shivering with cold, used to lie flat on the ground to drink water out of the ponds, would be beaten for no reason at all, and was finally turned out of the house for stealing thirty sous, a theft of which she was innocent.46
Félicité works all her life as a humble servant and nursemaid in the village of Pont-l’Évêque. When she takes the children to church, she is deeply moved by the Bible stories depicted in the stained-glass windows and by the priest’s sermon: ‘she wept as she listened to the story of the Passion. Why had they crucified him, when He loved children, fed the multitudes, healed the blind, and had chosen out of humility to be born among the poor, on the litter of a stable?’47
For poor folk such as Félicité – perhaps for all even in a God-less world – the Bible gave hope and comfort, and a reminder that they were special; Flaubert’s story can be read as a secularized form of biblical sympathy for the poor.48
Even Zola in Germinal, with its powerful socialist thrust and its portrayal of the uselessness of the French Church – Maheu’s wife pleads with the local priest, Father Joire, passing by on the street for her starving family, ‘But he did not stop’49 – acknowledges the power of Christianity in the meeting held by the striking miners in the local forest. Étienne, the strike leader, repeats the burning words of revolutionaries such as Proudhon, Marx, and Bakunin that the poor will inherit the earth, and his listeners forget their hunger as the dream takes hold: ‘A religious fervor lifted them towards the heavens, with an urgency that inspired the early Christians to hope that the reign of justice was about to materialize.’50 And indeed, when the miners are driven to strike and, in the throes of starvation, they and their families riot and destroy many of the mines, a new vicar, Father Ranvier, arrives and defends them. He blames the bourgeoisie for the catastrophe by abandoning the fraternal tenets of Christianity, seeking a life of pleasure and luxury, and creating ‘a cursed place of injustice’. God is on the side of the poor. As the rich have failed in their Christian duty to protect the poor, Father Ranvier thunders against them prophet-like in church, their wealth will be taken from them, to be redistributed among the humble of the earth. He brings this message to the Maheus, starving in their hut – not the food and coal they need – as their crippled child lies dying: that justice would triumph, the cruel masters would be deposed, the iniquitous rich would be destroyed, and the workers, led by the Church, would come into their joyous kingdom. In his words, the tormented La Maheude hears echoes of Étienne’s voice, the snake-oil purveyed by both, yet both fanatically sincere, their vision of justice – leaving aside competing Christian and socialist ideologies – remains compelling.
In Victorian England, too, the Church-based agricultural way of life survived, especially in the south which was far less affected by industry and factories than in the north, and where workers had fewer alternatives to working the land. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), one of the last European writers to describe the Bible as part of the rhythm of daily life among laborers, portrays the most intimate feelings of his characters through the Bible. Tess in Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) finds biblical words for her ecstasy at leaving her improvident family and starting work as a dairymaid far from home. As she walks to her new life across the rolling Dorset hills, the magnificent Benedicite, also based on the Psalms, comes naturally to her: ‘O ye sun and moon … O ye Stars … ye Green Things upon the Earth … ye Fowls of the Air … Beasts and Cattle … Children of Men … bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him for ever!’ (ch. 16). In depicting Tess’s qualities, Hardy, despite his pessimism, is true to the biblical spirit of the rural south. The clergyman’s renegade son, Angel Clare, in love with Tess, feels for her a mingling of biblical equality and Victorian progress, as ‘a woman enjoying her precious life – a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself’ (ch. 25). Yet, the zest for life and spiritual intensity of common people in Hardy’s works is rarely found in his depiction of Christianity itself, which by the late 19th century, when Tess of the D’Urbervilles was published, was in decline. Its officials were largely helpless to prevent the miserable fate of their impoverished parishioners.
In late 19th-century Russia as well, the Bible kept its authority, though in unexpected, even un-Christian ways. In ‘Peasants’ (1897), Chekhov describes a Russian village in which the Church seems to have retreated from its traditional role in helping the poor, but the Bible, independently of the Church, is much loved. The peasants, though illiterate, own a heavy old copy of the Gospels, and Sasha, a ten-year-old girl who has lived in Moscow and learned to read, reads to them amid their squalor as her mother, Olga, listens with pride: ‘“And flee into Egypt … and be thou there until I bring thee word …” At this “bring thee word” Olga broke down and wept’ (ch. 3). Likewise, the illiterate migrants in Depression America in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939) share a love of the Bible as guide and consolation, regardless of the failure of religious institutions to improve their lives. Steinbeck adapts the biblical ideal of collective responsibility into a humanistic-socialist belief in a world soul to which all belong.51 He takes from the Bible inspiration to unify the poor against the oppression of the rich, and the imagery of wrath driving the poor to change their conditions. While biblical authority largely survived among the impoverished European masses from 1789 to 1939, much literature of this period – by Dickens, Zola, Upton Sinclair, and Orwell, among others – is critical of Church institutions for their perceived failure to deal adequately with the problems of the poor.52
* * * *
The Bible in translation was and, in developing countries, remains the main cultural ally of the poor. It is the ideological basis for the notion of the social obligation to help the poor, for a society is judged by its care of the less fortunate. In its high ideals toward the poor, the Hebrew Bible sets itself up for betrayal. It is father to ideologies that protect the poor and therefore father, too, to ideologies that fail the poor. How did medieval Church doctrine become split in the perception of the poor? How was Bible-based love of the poor transformed to cynical suspicion and legislative suppression? How did the secular capitalist state contest, rationalize, and limit the traditional entitlement of the poor? The next chapter explores these questions.
Notes
1 ‘To try to understand the literature, philosophy, art, politics and society of the centuries from the sixteenth to the early twentieth without knowledge of the Bible is to be crippled’ (Daniell 2003: 3). For a book-length account of the influence of the Hebrew Bible on the depiction of poverty and the poor in literature, see Aberbach (2018).
2 Hobsbawm (1962: 263); Brewer (1977: 51).
3 The Mishna (codified c. 200 ce) discusses cases of those who take charity who do not need it and those who feign disability (Peah 8: 9). The Mishna, however, has no tractate on poor relief. It seems that the first general Jewish codification of poor law is by Maimonides (Hilkhot Matnot Aniyim) in his 12th-century Mishneh Torah (Twersky 1980: 291).
4 On the economic transformation in the Middle Ages as reflected in literature, see Chapter 2.
5 Wright (2001: 199).
6 On trade schools for the poor in England and France from the 16th century onward, see Ariès (1962: 303f.).
7 On capitalism as freedom, see Sen (1999).
8 ‘A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this’ (Tawney 1977: 265).
9 Marshall (1982: 74).
10 On entitlement as the key in the problem of modern poverty, see Sen (1999); on the centrality of justice, see Rawls (1999), and on justice in literature, see Nussbaum (1995).
11 For parallels to biblical laws and customs on the poor in ancient near eastern literature, see Pritchard (2011: 246ff., 352).
12 On Les Misérables in the context of French policies toward the poor after 1789, see pp. 137–8.
13 Similarly, the accusation later in Les Misérables that the peasant Champmathieu (who is mistaken for Jean Valjean) is guilty under revolutionary French law of having stolen fallen fruit is unlikely to have been made under biblical law.
14 On differences in Jewish and Graeco-Roman views of poverty and the poor, see Aberbach (2018). On elements of incompatibility of biblical teachings with social and political circumstances centuries and millennia later, see p. 26.
15 Monotheist scripture is united in its teachings on the poor: in the Koran (7th century ce) true piety is expressed in charity to society’s unfortunates, the widow and orphan, the destitute, the vagrant beggar and slave (e.g. 2: 172). Again following the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the Koran emphasizes charity as a God-given commandment, the gateway to paradise and – again, in contrast with European Poor Law - does not conceive of a class of parasitic poor toward whom almsgiving is unjustified.
16 Bronowski (1972: 5).
17 Over a millennium after the time of the Book of Ruth, the Talmud states that the biblical poor laws were applied also to non-Jews (Gittin 59b, 61a).
18 Exodus (23: 9), Deuteronomy (10: 19).
19 The abuse of the stranger (ger, pl. gerim) evidently contributed also to the split of the kingdom in the slave revolt against Rehoboam: strangers registered as such in the time of David – the number given is 153,600 – were reportedly forced by Solomon to work on his building projects (2 Chronicles 2: 16–17).
20 Psalms (24: 1), Leviticus (25: 23).
21 Exodus (19: 5), Haggai (2: 8).
22 Matthew (19: 21), Mark (10:21) and Luke (18: 22). See p. 50.
23 On the book of Job and King Lear, see Aberbach (1979).
24 The good rich man appears also in the Apocrypha (Sirach 31: 8–11).
25 Sanhedrin 98a. On the idea of the poor as ‘God’s emissaries’, see Braudel (1994: 327).
26 Ansky, in The Dybbuk (1917), refers to the folk belief that tragedy followed when the poor were treated unjustly.
27 For a delightful elaboration of schnorrer jokes, see Zangwill’s comic novel The King of Schnorrers (1895), set in late 18th-century London.
28 Berakhot 8a.
29 Bava Batra 9a. John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople after the conversion of the Roman empire to Christianity in the 4th century ce, taught that poverty is donum dei, and he preached indiscriminate charity (Scott 2012: 6).
30 Leviticus (23: 26) forbids the poor from bagging grapes and cutting corn with a sickle: these laws are unlikely to have been purely theoretical, but the Bible gives no instances of misbehavior on the part of the poor.
31 The precursor to modern human rights, Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566), draws on Isaiah in his sermon of Montesino, ‘a voice cries in the wilderness’. On Las Casas, see Gustavo Gutiérrez, In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ. Las Casas, however, sought to protect the indigenous American population from Spanish exploitation by importing African slaves (MacCulloch 2009: 692), replacing one injustice with another.
32 The association of sickness with sin and the ‘wrath of God’ (e.g. Numbers 17: 11), rather than with poor sanitation and diet – and, therefore, the tendency in Christian Europe to shackle the poor to sin – continued until the 19th century.
33 This passage in Matthew (25: 35–6) is seen by some Christian theologians (e.g. Augustine) as the image of the true Christian: a beggar of God among beggars whose poverty and suffering, like that of Jesus on the cross, testifies to the presence of God. The idea that a poor man bears the stamp of Jesus, whose poverty glorifies poverty, is described memorably by the 17th-century clergymen-poets, John Donne – ‘through Thy poor birth, where first Thou/ Glorifi’st poverty’ (‘A Litany’ xviii) – and George Herbert: ‘Man is God’s image; but a poor man is/ Christ’s stamp to boot’ (The Church Porch 64). On the tradition that the Messiah will be a poor man, see p. 33.
34 On negative views on wealth in the Hebrew Bible, see pp. 31–2. On the literary tradition of attacks on the worship of money and possessions, see Kahan (2010).
35 The rise of capitalism seemed to undermine the view of the superiority of the poor. In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber observes that the medieval glorification of apostolic poverty, though true to the biblical spirit, was an obstacle to capitalism. Protestantism on one level represented an attempt to justify the attainment of wealth not for its own sake but in a calling, accidentally, as a sign of divine blessing and a responsibility to do good. Gospel-based Evangelical Christianity aimed to restore the biblical superiority of the poor: ‘the rich were in greater spiritual danger than the poor, more subject to temptations and so more liable to damnation’ (Hilton 1988: 102–3). John Wesley and other Evangelical Christians followed the Bible in associating wealth with a decline in faith.
36 On the idea in the Hebrew Bible that to deprive the poor of their rights was to rob God, see p. 31.
37 The contradictory passages are from Deuteronomy (15: 4, 11). See p. 8.
38 See Brown (1971: 66).
39 Mollat (1986: 263).
40 Langland (1967: 104). On Piers Plowman in its medieval context, see pp. 46–7. On King Lear in the context of Elizabethan Poor Law, see Chapter 3.
41 Bunyan (1976: 86). On Bunyan, see pp. 75–6, 78. Bunyan’s allegorical images are recalled as late as the Beveridge Report of 1942, which led in 1948 to the creation of the National Health Service in Great Britain. Beveridge does not portray welfare as charity given to the poor in a Christian spirit but, rather, as a socially approved means to obtain freedom – a freedom that must be won, not given or forced – from ‘five evils’: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor, and Idleness (1942: 170, 172). The poor are not blamed for their poverty – in wartime particularly, blame would have been out of place – but Beveridge recommends that they be given responsibility to use welfare not to become dependent on but independent from the state.
42 From Wordsworth’s unpublished reply to an anti-revolutionary sermon of the Bishop of Llandaff in 1793; see Gill (1989: 71–3).
43 The Prelude (1850 edn, IX 519–24). See p. 119.
44 The allusion in this passage is to Psalms 103:16, repeated in the Book of Job 7: 10. See p. 116.
45 Compare Avot 3: 8: ‘Give Him what is His, for you and yours are His.’
46 Flaubert (1986: 19).
47 Ibid., 29.
48 Nineteenth- and early 20th-century fiction includes other striking examples of servants who represent goodness, whether or not associated with Christian charity: e.g. Balzac’s Nanon, Dickens’ Peggoty, Turgenev’s Lukeria, and Proust’s Françoise.
49 Zola (1998: 262).
50 Ibid., 284.
51 On The Grapes of Wrath, see Chapter 10. Post-1945 literature of developing countries – e.g. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. (1974) and Lispector’s The Hour of the Star (1977) – continue to describe the poor with biblical reverence, though the ‘holy poor’ as a literary theme vanishes in the more affluent developed countries. See the Appendix.
52 Similarly, Eastern European Jewish writers, notably Mendele Mocher Sefarim, depict the grinding poverty of the Jewish masses as a critique of Judaism and particularly the failure of rabbinic leadership to adapt to the modern world. See Chapter 7.