There was a hubbub of congratulation (Mazzoltov, Mazzoltov, good luck), and a palsy of handshaking, when the contract was signed.  Remarks, grave and facetious, flew about in Yiddish, with phrases of Polish and Russian thrown in for auld lang syne, and cups and jugs were broken in reminder of the transiency of things mortal.  The Belcovitches had been saving up their already broken crockery for the occasion.  The hope was expressed that Mr. and Mrs. Belcovitch would live to see “rejoicings” on their other daughter, and to see their daughters’ daughters under the Chuppah, or wedding-canopy.

Becky’s hardened cheek blushed under the oppressive jocularity.  Everybody spoke Yiddish habitually at No. 1 Royal Street, except the younger generation, and that spoke it to the elder.

“I always said, no girl of mine should marry a Dutchman.”  It was a dominant thought of Mr. Belcovitch’s, and it rose spontaneously to his lips at this joyful moment.  Next to a Christian, a Dutch Jew stood lowest in the gradation of potential sons-in-law.  Spanish Jews, earliest arrivals by way of Holland, after the Restoration, are a class apart, and look down on the later imported Ashkenazim, embracing both Poles and Dutchmen in their impartial contempt.  But this does not prevent the Pole and the Dutchman from despising each other.  To a Dutch or Russian Jew, the “Pullack,” or Polish Jew, is a poor creature; and scarce anything can exceed the complacency with which the “Pullack” looks down upon the “Litvok” or Lithuanian, the degraded being whose Shibboleth is literally Sibboleth, and who says “ee” where rightly constituted persons say “oo.”  To mimic the mincing pronunciation of the “Litvok” affords the “Pullack” a sense of superiority almost equalling that possessed by the English Jew, whose mispronunciation of the Holy Tongue is his title to rank far above all foreign varieties.  Yet a vein of brotherhood runs beneath all these feelings of mutual superiority; like the cliqueism which draws together old clo’ dealers, though each gives fifty per cent, more than any other dealer in the trade.  The Dutch foregather in a district called “The Dutch Tenters;” they eat voraciously, and almost monopolize the ice-cream, hot pea, diamond-cutting, cucumber, herring, and cigar trades.  They are not so cute as the Russians.  Their women are distinguished from other women by the flaccidity of their bodices; some wear small woollen caps and sabots.  When Esther read in her school-books that the note of the Dutch character was cleanliness, she wondered.  She looked in vain for the scrupulously scoured floors and the shining caps and faces.  Only in the matter of tobacco-smoke did the Dutch people she knew live up to the geographical “Readers.”

German Jews gravitate to Polish and Russian; and French Jews mostly stay in France. Ici on ne parle pas Francais, is the only lingual certainty in the London Ghetto, which is a cosmopolitan quarter.