영어로 읽는 고전 _ 이스라엘 쟁윌의 거지의 왕
이스라엘 쟁윌의 《거지들의 왕: 기담과 환상 이야기》는 1894년에 출판된 피카레스크 소설이다. 19세기 전환기의 영국을 배경으로, 재치와 귀족적 자존심으로 '슈노러의 왕'이라는 칭호를 얻은 세파르디 유대인 마나세 부에노 바르질라이 아제베도 다 코스타의 교활한 모험을 따라간다. 아슈케나지 유대인 조수와 함께 마나세는 런던의 유대인 공동체를 누비며, 자선의 전통을 교묘하게 이용하여 구걸을 하나의 예술로 승화시키고, 구걸하는 자가 오히려 주인이 되는 전도된 세계를 만들어낸다.
Classics Read in English _ The King of Schnorrers: Grotesques and Fantasies by Israel Zangwill
There are beggars, and then there is Manasseh Bueno Barzillai Azevedo da Costa — a man whose name alone takes longer to pronounce than most people spend asking for alms.
Israel Zangwill's The King of Schnorrers, published in 1894, is a picaresque marvel set in the Jewish quarters of turn-of-the-century London. Its protagonist is not merely a beggar; he is a philosopher of begging, a virtuoso of entitlement, a Sephardi Jew of impeccable lineage who regards charity not as a humiliation to be endured but as a tribute to be collected — with dignity, with ceremony, and with the unshakable conviction that the giver should feel honored by the transaction.
Accompanied by an Ashkenazi sidekick whose reverence for Manasseh borders on bewilderment, the King moves through London's Jewish community like a grandee touring his estates. He does not plead; he bestows the privilege of generosity upon those fortunate enough to cross his path. Every encounter becomes a performance, every donation a negotiation in which the donor somehow ends up feeling indebted.
What makes the novel extraordinary is the way Zangwill inverts the entire moral architecture of charity. In Manasseh's hands, schnorring — the Yiddish art of brazen, unapologetic begging — is stripped of its shame and elevated to a kind of aristocratic sport. The beggar becomes the master, the benefactor becomes the servant, and the traditions of communal obligation that hold the Jewish world together are turned inside out with such dazzling wit that the reader is never quite sure whether to laugh, applaud, or check their own pockets.
Beneath the comedy, however, lies something sharper: a profound meditation on pride, power, and the thin line between those who give and those who take — and the unsettling possibility that the line was never where we thought it was.
Among the contents
In the days when Lord George Gordon became a Jew, and was suspected of insanity; when, out of respect for the prophecies, England denied her Jews every civic right except that of paying taxes; when the Gentleman's Magazine had ill words for the infidel alien; when Jewish marriages were invalid and bequests for Hebrew colleges void; when a prophet prophesying Primrose Day would have been set in the stocks, though Pitt inclined his private ear to Benjamin Goldsmid's views on the foreign loans—in those days, when Tevele Schiff was Rabbi in Israel, and Dr. de Falk, the Master of the Tetragrammaton, saint and Cabbalistic conjuror, flourished in Wellclose Square, and the composer of "The Death of Nelson" was a choir-boy in the Great Synagogue; Joseph Grobstock, pillar of the same, emerged one afternoon into the spring sunshine at the fag-end of the departing stream of worshippers. In his hand was a large canvas bag, and in his eye a twinkle.
There had been a special service of prayer and thanksgiving for the happy restoration of his Majesty's health, and the cantor had interceded tunefully with Providence on behalf of Royal George and "our most amiable Queen, Charlotte."
