Israel Zangwill was a prominent Anglo-Jewish writer of the early years of this century, enjoying great popularity with some of his comic stories of ’Whitechapel Ghetto’ (East London) life. He is still remembered for this book and for his Children of the Ghetto, which is interesting, if a little florid for today’s taste.

King of the Schnorrers though is pure delight and also gives an interesting picture of London’s Jewish community in the Eighteenth century. The protagonist and Schnorrer-King is a magnificent Sephardi ’gentleman beggar’ (beggar is Schnorrer in Yiddish) Manasseh Bueno Barzollai Azevedo da Costa. The book is made up of a series of delicious running jokes, the main one being how a beggar, a Schnorrer, manages to completely dominate, even humiliate all his social betters and charitable benefactors. One sees how schnorring is not quite the same thing as begging — it implies not so much pleading for pity but the joyous, intelligent extraction of money or goods from the person who is ’schnorred’.

Manasseh Bueno Barzollai Azevedo da Costa successfully conducts his schnorring through the constant application of his gigantic chutzpah, helped to an extent by the lordly Sephardi* manner he directs at Ashkenazi* Jews.

In fact a running joke of The King of Schnorrers is the Sephardi community and their rather grand leaders. Zangwill shows us a kind of Jewish community rather different from the more democratic (and disunited) Ashkenazi one of immigrants from Germany, Poland and Russia that began to outnumber the Sephardis at the time Zangwill describes.

As every Schnorrer knows there is an awful lot of psychology in schnorring and Zangwill uses the opportunity of this book to display his grasp of human nature in an enjoyable and amusing way, so that The King of Schnorrers has a value that transcends the fast-receding time in which it was written. It is a worthy piece of the humorous Anglo-Jewish tradition of Bernard Kops, Peter Sellers, Chaim Bermant, Alexei Sayle etc etc.

’"Den de Synagogue allows me a little extra for announcing de dead."

In those primitive times, when a Jewish newspaper was undreamt of, the day’s obituary was published by a peripatetic Schnorrer :

"Who’s dead to-day?"

"So-and-so ben So-and-so — funeral on such a day — mourning service at such an hour," the Schnorrer would reply, and the enquirer would piously put something into the "byx" as it was called. The collection was handed over to the Holy Society — in other words, the Burial Society.’ p68