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 Library of The Theological Seminary 
 PRINCETON : NEW JERSEY 
 C<S) 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 John Stuart Conning, D.D. 
 
 DSO109.T52 
 
 Tharaud, J er ome, 1874- 
 git pops Fu 
 
 Next year in Jerusalem 
 

 

 
NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2022 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 httos://archive.org/details/nextyearinjerusa0Othar 
 
NEXT YEARXIN 
 JERUSALEM 
 
 BY | 
 JEROME AND JEAN THARAUD 
 
 Translated by 
 MADELEINE BOYD 
 
 
 
 p 
 
 BONI ann LIVERIGHT 
 
 PUBLISHERS + 1925 bh NEw York 
 
Copyright, 1925, by 
 Bont & Lavericut, Inc. 
 
 
 
 Printed in the United States of America 
 
CHAPTER 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Tuer SACRED FIRE . 
 Toe WALL or WaAILING 
 
 . Tue Mosaut oF OMAR 
 . Tue PROPHET oF THE BOULE- 
 
 VARD 
 Tue Voices oF PALESTINE 
 
 . Tue First Lovers or ZIon . 
 . THE PIoNEERS oF ISRAEL . 
 
 . Tue Son oF JUDEA 
 
 . THe Story oF SARAH . 
 
 THe Lirrte Girt OF THE 
 GHETTO 
 
 107 
 117 
 131 
 177 
 
 205 
 

 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 

 
CHAPTER I 
 THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 WE went forward in the darkness under 
 the dim arches and between the high square 
 pillars, amid the mingled odors of mildew, 
 incense and tallow. The sound of my guide’s 
 stick, striking the flagstones heavily, directed 
 us through the gloom, which seemed to be 
 filled by a rumbling noise, deadened by the 
 heavy stone roof. I felt as if we were walk- 
 ing in the corridor of a Roman amphitheater 
 just before the beginning of a performance, 
 with the crowd grumbling impatiently above. 
 Then the tapping of the stick stopped and 
 everything became bigger, the arches, the 
 silence and the rumbling noise which was as 
 gloomy as the rest. A low door in the wall. 
 I slipped through behind my guide, and we 
 went up some very narrow stairs. Here and 
 there, on small landings, the sunlight 
 gleamed feebly through barred opening's cov- 
 
 C9] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 ered with spiders’ webs, showing dust that 
 had been accumulating for centuries. I could 
 hear the stick marking each step with that 
 fateful accent which a regular noise assumes 
 in the dark. Just like my hands on the mil- 
 dewed wall my spirit was feeling its way, it 
 made no difference where I was, nor what I 
 was thinking of, nor what I was going to see. 
 The stick stopped again. Silence. ‘Then 
 suddenly the air struck my face, and once 
 more I heard that rumbling noise, which I 
 had momentarily forgotten on that dark 
 staircase. 
 
 I found myself in a niche in the thickest 
 part of the wall. Through an opening in 
 the dome above my head a ray of the sun 
 blinded me as I entered. Beneath me lay a 
 deep, dark pit, from which the rumbling rose, 
 louder now, but as meaningless to me as be- 
 fore. There was no light except the one ray 
 which seemed to stop half-way down, lke 
 a bucket at the end of too short a rope. Grad- 
 ually my eyes became accustomed to the 
 darkness, and I saw a crowd of people 
 
 [107] 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 swarming around a small building. They 
 seemed to be carrying it on their shoulders, 
 this extraordinary structure, rectangular at 
 its base, half-way up shaped like a drum, 
 and at the top like a Chinese hat. ‘Tall can- 
 dles, rows of lamps, flower-pots of carved 
 wood and sacred images covered its walls, 
 crowded close to one another as in a shop. All 
 these things were cheap, faded, out-of-date 
 and gaudy at the same time. It seemed in- 
 credible that that dust-covered, vulgar tomb, 
 that barbaric work of an unskilled Mytilene 
 mason could be the Holy Sepulcher, the 
 Tomb of Christ! 
 
 All around it the crowd was shouting, thou- 
 sands of Greeks, Syrians, Egyptians, Arme- 
 nians, for the feast of the Sacred Fire which 
 is celebrated on Easter Saturday is not a Ro- 
 man feast, but an Orthodox one. On that 
 day, the divine fire comes down miraculously 
 from Heaven to light a lamp in the interior 
 of the tomb. Is it a return to the pagan 
 celebration of the solstice, rejoicing at the 
 departure of winter and the coming of 
 
 Ei 
 

 
 SNEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM: 
 
 spring? Or is it a symbol of Christ’s resur- 
 rection, conceived by an Oriental imagination? 
 The origins of the ceremony are obscure. The 
 Roman Church observed it for a while. Ur- 
 ban the Second believed or pretended to be- 
 lieve in the miracle—at any rate it helped 
 him to arouse enthusiasm for the Crusades, 
 —and many companions of Godefroy and 
 Baudouin saw the miracle with their own 
 eyes. But even then the miracle was inter- 
 mittent and the fire did not come down every 
 year. It stopped altogether after Jerusalem 
 was taken by Saladin. However, the Greek 
 Christians went on believing in it and now 
 an invisible Archangel brings the fire down 
 from Heaven every year for their benefit. 
 While waiting for the fire to appear the 
 crowd would shout the same phrase over and 
 over again in a monotonous Oriental rhythm, 
 then a new phrase would be started and taken 
 up with the same fervor, but in a different 
 rhythm. The two phrases would vie with 
 each other for a while, until one would con- 
 quer and impose its barbaric rhythm on the 
 
 [12] 
 
TOR OS A Cie he) iB Lite 
 
 multitude, only to be displaced in its turn by 
 another. 
 They would shout: 
 
 “Our faith is the only true faith! 
 The Jews are rascals!” 
 
 or: 
 “O Jews! Your feast is a Monkey’s 
 feast; 
 Ours is the Messiah’s.”’ 
 and again: 
 
 “The strangers here will leave on 
 Tuesday 
 
 With our best wishes for a happy 
 journey.” 
 
 I had heard similar shoutings in Morocco 
 at the sacred dances of Mohammedan so- 
 cieties, but it was surprising to find this 
 frenzy in front of Christ’s Tomb. Carried 
 away by the rhythm, the slowly moving bod- 
 ies gave an oscillation to this packed crowd, 
 in which no one could move independently. 
 
 Thousands of Russian pilgrims were miss- 
 
 [13] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 ing. Before the war they came to Jerusalem 
 every year for Holy Week and especially 
 for this Saturday. From the interior of Rus- 
 sia, on foot or by train, they went to Odessa, 
 and from there, crowded on ships, they were 
 carried to the Holy Land. Their long, rag- 
 ged processions, chanting prayers, went up to 
 Jerusalem to secure the great treasure, the 
 Holy Fire which protects Russian life. But 
 they have not come since 1914. The Holy 
 Fire has been almost extinguished for them 
 by war and revolution. Russia is not repre- 
 sented to-day at the Orthodox Feast. And 
 looking at the dense mob on which the Holy 
 Sepulcher seemed to be floating like an ark, 
 I wondered how all the Russians ever found 
 room! 
 
 The only empty space was the narrow alley 
 leading to the door of the Sepulcher. Be- 
 tween two lines of soldiers some English 
 officers walked up and down, indifferent to 
 all the excitement. Above the solid moving 
 mass, where the red fez of Egypt mixed with 
 the golden turbans of Damascus and Aleppo 
 
 Liat 
 

 
 THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 and the white tarboosh of the Kopts, a pleas- 
 ing sight rested my eyes, tired by the crowd’s 
 monotonous motion which made me feel sea- 
 sick. In the corners of the vast rotunda 
 boxes had been built with platforms and 
 planks, on two or three levels as in a theater. 
 In those boxes women dressed in their best 
 lay stretched on mattresses and cushions, 
 gossiping, peeling oranges and drinking 
 lemonade. Each one was like a picture by 
 Delacroix. I stopped looking at the dusty 
 Holy Sepulcher and at the mad mob, and 
 gazed instead at the wooden niche opposite 
 mine, occupied by a black-haired, black-eyed, 
 barefooted beauty, wearing a red-and-white 
 dress touched here and there with purple. 
 
 Suddenly there was a disturbance, created 
 by the young men of the town, who pushed 
 their way brutally through the crowd, bring- 
 ing with them a new phrase, a new rhythm 
 which quickly drove away the one which had 
 dominated a moment before: 
 
 “Hail, Blessed Virgin!” 
 [15 1 
 
SNEXTOYEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 It is customary for the Greek Patriarch to 
 give a very heavy baksheesh to the Moham- 
 medan authorities at the time of the festival. 
 Naturally the Mohammedans never find the 
 sum big enough and each year it is a pre- 
 text for interminable disputes. The arrival 
 of these youths showed that an agreement 
 had been reached and that the moment when 
 the Sacred Fire comes down was approach- 
 ing at last! In the small boxes the women 
 became animated, laid aside their oranges, 
 peanuts and pastries, applauded and shouted. 
 Down below the tumult redoubled. I saw 
 a Jewish member of the English police force 
 being put out, passed like a parcel from hand 
 to hand above the heads of the crowd while 
 every one tried to strike him and thousands 
 of voices repeated the chorus: 
 
 “The Jews are sad! The Jews are sad!’ 
 
 Over the tops of the heads—the only way to 
 get through the crowd—another man crawled 
 on all fours. He was a peacemaker, and 
 was trying to persuade the police not to put 
 
 D164 
 
 
 
LAE SACRED FIRE 
 
 out an Orthodox Christian who had been in- 
 sulting them. ‘Then a space was cleared in 
 the middle of the crowd and a giant began 
 to dance, carrying on his shoulders a man 
 with a stick in one hand and a package of tal- 
 low candles in the other. This increased the 
 delirium. The applause and the shouts grew 
 wilder. The man standing on the shoulders 
 of the giant chanted. in a full voice a phrase 
 to which he gave a frenzied rhythm by bran- 
 dishing his stick and his candles: 
 
 “The Messiah has come! 
 With his blood he has saved us. 
 We are joyful to-day 
 And the Jews are desolate!’’ 
 
 and the crowd repeated in a chorus: 
 
 ‘We are joyful to-day 
 And the Jews are desolate!”’ 
 
 In their private path, between the double 
 ranks of their soldiers, the English officers 
 went on walking to and fro, unbending, in- 
 
 Died 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 different, seemingly incapable of being inter- 
 ested in anything. 
 
 At that moment a man came along their 
 path wearing a morning suit and carrying his 
 straw hat in his hand. He was a rich Kopt 
 who had just bought the Sacred Fire at auc- 
 tion. When he goes back to his village he 
 will give the fire to his church and will be 
 held in great esteem by his countrymen. 
 Some Greek priests, their heads covered by 
 the round bonnet, put on him a surplice and 
 a charming cope of a forget-me-not blue with 
 gold edges. Near the Kopt stood a Syrian 
 who had also paid cash for the favor of light- 
 ing his candle from the Patriarch’s. He wore 
 an orange dalmatica with a green fringe over 
 which was thrown a wide golden scarf. The 
 Patriarch himself came next, a handsome old 
 man with a white beard. His dalmatica was 
 of sky-blue satin; from a necklace of precious 
 stones hung a cross scintillating on his chest; 
 another cross studded with diamonds crowned 
 his tiara of emeralds and sapphires and he 
 
 Lagat 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 carried a long crystal cane, two crossed gold- 
 en serpents forming its hook. About twenty 
 ecclesiastical dignitaries and a crowd of choir 
 boys in white surplices and red belts followed 
 him. A procession was formed. In front of 
 the Patriarch, two priests each carried a 
 cornucopia with thirty-three candles—thirty- 
 three, the number of years Christ lived. 
 Twelve banners preceded him, representing 
 the twelve apostles. A thirteenth one fol- 
 lowed him, Judas! The crowd was silent 
 now, and through the human mass which 
 opened as if by enchantment, the procession 
 went around the Holy Sepulcher three times 
 while an immense shout arose, the call for the 
 Sacred Fire: 
 
 “What is rightfully ours, 
 O God! Give it unto us!” 
 
 The Patriarch returned. His tiara, his 
 dalmatica and his stole were taken off, a white 
 handkerchief was tied round each of his 
 hands, the two cornucopias with the thirty- 
 
 D194 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 three candles were given to him. The crowd 
 was shouting: 
 
 “May God give prosperity to the 
 Greek convent! | 
 May God give victory to our 
 government!” 
 
 I closed my eyes for a moment. I tried 
 to imagine this noisy place when it was only 
 a lonely spot outside the walls, a small stony 
 field with a few olive-trees and, at one end, 
 the tomb which Joseph of Arimathea had had 
 prepared for himself, a tomb like hundreds of 
 others all around Jerusalem. But how could 
 I escape even for an instant from this hellish 
 noise, how could I believe that silence and 
 peace had ever existed here; that silence and 
 peace to which the owner of the field had 
 looked forward during his lifetime, thinking 
 of eternity? 
 
 I opened my eyes. The Patriarch, followed 
 by the Armenian bishop, went to the entrance 
 of the Holy Sepulcher and disappeared in 
 the Tomb. With blows of their fists the Eng- 
 
 [20 7 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 lish soldiers pushed back some fanatics who 
 tried to follow him. The noise was for- 
 midable. It seemed impossible that it could 
 grow any louder and yet suddenly it became 
 even more deafening. The miracle had taken 
 place. Through a hole in the wall the Patri- 
 arch held out to the crowd the Sacred Fire 
 just down from Heaven, brought by the 
 Archangel. Some one lit his candle from the 
 flame and the fire, as if in a clearing of dry 
 herbs, spread instantaneously over the multi- 
 tude as they all shook their thirty-three light- 
 ed candles. The bottom of the dark well was 
 a vast light—the women’s boxes seemed to be 
 ablaze. Some people, perched quite near the 
 cupola, pulled up with long ropes the candles 
 which were lighted for them down below. 
 The mildew which covered the walls looked 
 as if it had suddenly taken fire. The loud 
 noise of cymbals added to the din of the mal- 
 lets striking the iron sheets which are used 
 as bells by the Greeks. At the height of the 
 fire and the noise the Patriarch came out of 
 the Sepulcher, holding at arm’s length his 
 
 P41] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 two cornucopias, flaming like huge torches. 
 The little lane was invaded by the mob, but 
 the English officers made a way for him, as 
 brutally as if they were defending the man 
 who carries the ball in a football match. And 
 then, on the dusty roof of the Holy Sepul- 
 cher, in the midst of the ex-votos, lamps and 
 painted wooden flowers, an Armenian monk 
 jumped up and began an extravagant dance, 
 waving his candles about his bearded face, 
 and thus purifying himself in the Sacred 
 Fire. An English officer saw him and ap- 
 peared also on the Tomb, more out of place 
 there in his khaki uniform than the Armenian 
 dancer. As an Englishman his conception of 
 religious enthusiasm was, no doubt, different 
 from the Armenian’s! He collared the monk, 
 and with the gesture of Punch beating the 
 policeman pushed him down the stairs into 
 the throng where both of them disappeared. 
 
 Darkness reigned again. To avoid one of 
 those fires which have destroyed the church 
 many times in the course of centuries, the 
 policemen had ordered the candles to be put 
 
 [22] 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 out. Only a few survived, here and there, like 
 will-o’-the-wisps. A disgusting smell of bad 
 wax and smoke filled the basilica. In the re- 
 newed darkness, the Holy Sepulcher shone 
 with all its candles, all its lamps and above, 
 under the cupola, I saw the sun-ray again. 
 Meanwhile, the fire was flying on its way to 
 Bethlehem, to Hebron and to Nazareth. In 
 carriages and on horseback they were racing 
 to see who would bring the Holy Fire first to 
 their coreligionists. When the Russians used 
 to come, a ship under steam, waited for the 
 runner in Jaffa. As soon as the Sacred Fire 
 was aboard, she started on her journey. 
 Without a stop, she went to Odessa, where 
 thousands of people with small lanterns se- 
 cured the precious light, which they, in their 
 turn, distributed to all the icons of Russia. 
 The ceremony was at anend. I found my- 
 self lost again in the mysteries of the stair- 
 case. I reached the bottom and found my- 
 self among the crowd and the blown-out can- 
 dles. The ferruled stick of my gorgeously 
 dressed guide, who preceded me, opened the 
 
 [ 23 1 
 
MN a OAM AN GS Oo RN SS Bie Oe AT pd od Bs BY A 08 es 
 
 way easily. In the Orient, a stick with a 
 silver knob striking the ground authorita- 
 tively, a gold-embroidered coat and sky-blue 
 knickers will always bring about miracles. 
 Another stone staircase straighter than a lad- 
 der and we came out in sight of the sky, on 
 the roof of the basilica, and found ourselves 
 in the midst of another crowd, which in the 
 daylight appeared to be the transfiguration 
 of the somber crowd below. This crowd was 
 singing too, singing words with a savage 
 rhythm, which sounded like the breathing of 
 an Oriental holiday crowd. Some young men 
 armed with shields and curved sabers were 
 mimicking a war-dance, striking their shields 
 and twirling their sabers, while every one 
 around applauded rhythmically and followed 
 their gyrations enthusiastically. Gladiators’ 
 games on the roof of the great sanctuary of 
 Christian devotion! The pagan fire-festival 
 merged with the celebration of Christ’s resur- 
 rection was received by these people with the 
 same enthusiasm, the same games, the same 
 shouts which accompanied the festival of the 
 
 GAA 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 Sun God in ancient times. Nothing disap- 
 pears altogether, everything endures, even 
 though apparently changed. A God dies to 
 save men,to make them all brothers, and on 
 his tomb the sons of this earth can worship 
 him only with the outworn thoughts he came 
 to destroy! 
 
 The music and the shouting went on. The 
 four gladiators, excited by the colorful crowd, 
 continued their war-dance with a growing 
 exultation. The tall bonnets of the Greek 
 monks moved among the turbans and the fez. 
 Along the wall groups of women in bright- 
 colored dresses looked like branches of wis- 
 teria. F’rom the stone balcony surrounding 
 a neighboring minaret, some Mohammedan 
 women were looking at this Christian festi- 
 val, enjoying the games and applauding to 
 encourage the dancers. A sharp tinkling as 
 of innumerable small bells filled the air. 
 Could this noise come from invisible goats? 
 No, it was made by the sellers of orangeade, 
 rose-water or simply fresh water, who drew 
 attention to their cooling wares by striking 
 
 [ 25 1 
 

 
 TONE XT EA ON ee US 4 Ba? 
 
 copper goblets against each other. And all 
 the time, on the roads of Palestine, the small 
 flames lighted in the darkness of the Tomb 
 were being carried through the arid country- 
 side, over the blue rocks and the burning 
 sand. 
 
 What time was it? I did not know. An 
 hour from the pit of ages, an hour from the 
 oldest of the suns. One thing was certain, 
 that the dinner-bell at the hostelry of the 
 Assumptionist fathers had rung a long time 
 ago. But no dinner-bell could have made me 
 leave this extraordinary roof. I let myself 
 be carried along by the mob, through a laby- 
 rinth of cupolas, vaults and terraces, to the 
 inner recesses of a dark chapel where candles 
 had just been lighted from the Sacred Fire, 
 
 and there I came across some swarthy priests 
 who looked like sorcerers, brothers, I suppose, 
 of Balthasar, the Wise Man of the East. 
 Within these walls, where each Christian rite 
 has its sanctuary, this isolated chapel on the 
 roof was reserved for the Abyssinian church. 
 Just as I arrived in this cramped space the 
 
 ee 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 Abyssinians were celebrating in the open air 
 on the terrace above the chapel where Saint 
 Helen discovered the wood of the Real Cross. 
 The crowd was as dense here as everywhere 
 else; above it gilded banners floated, as if they 
 were hanging from the sky, and in the cor- 
 ner under a great tent, supported on one side 
 by the wall, and on the other by two poles, 
 I discovered the Abyssinian clergy. Seated 
 in a semicircle, the bearded priests, in satin 
 robes over which were thrown bright stoles, 
 were singing liturgies and chants unlike any- 
 thing I have ever heard in churches. In their 
 midst the Bishop was seated in an old velvet 
 armchair, holding in one hand a lighted can- 
 dle and in the other his priestly staff. A curly 
 beard whitened his cheeks and his chin. Bal- 
 thasar himself! In front of this assembly of 
 Wise Men of the East stood a drum, a long 
 and narrow drum. ‘The whole gathering 
 seemed to be in honor of this drum, which 
 stood like an ancient altar, surrounded by the 
 brightly dressed priests. 
 
 I stood there as charmed and surprised 
 
 pat] 
 
SNEXT YEARVIN JERUSALEM” 
 
 as I had been the day I stood in the market- 
 place of Marrakech, in front of the snake- 
 charmer or the story-teller. I was as fas- 
 cinated by them as I had been by the band of 
 negro musicians who, in the moonlight at a 
 crossroad at Rabat, had brought forth the 
 world of subterranean spirits. But the 
 Bishop had spied me standing beside my gor- 
 geous Kawa. He took me for an important 
 personage, signaled to me, left his armchair, 
 invited me to take his place, thrust his candle 
 into my hand and sat down modestly on a 
 chair beside me. I wondered if he also in- 
 tended to give me his priestly staff! Once I 
 entered a synagogue in Galicia when they 
 were celebrating the Feast of the Law. On 
 that day the Holy Scrolls in their velvet 
 sheaths with their silver bells are taken out 
 from the tabernacle. They are carried around 
 the synagogue to the singing of joyful hymns, 
 and how beautiful these hymns are, how di- 
 vinely joyful! To honor me (they had taken 
 me for a Jew) the beadle gave me one of the 
 Sacred Scrolls, and I can see myself still 
 
 [ 28 7 
 
THE SACRED FIRE 
 
 with my Thora on my arms, turning around 
 the almemar, while the crowd of Jews pressed 
 around me trying to touch the small bells and 
 kiss the holy fringes. . . . But this was a still 
 stranger experience, sitting on the throne of 
 an Abyssinian Bishop, worshipping the tall 
 drum together with the priests. Next, fol- 
 lowed by my swarthy clergy, holding the 
 enormous candle in my hand, I went around 
 the terrace, under a blinding light, behind the 
 golden banners, amid the shouts, the hurried 
 beatings of the drums, surrounded by the 
 smell of the tinkling censers swayed to and 
 fro by the dark officiants. It was nearly three 
 o'clock when the procession ended. The 
 Abyssinian and myself came back under the 
 tent, I thanked His Grace, gave him back his 
 candle and left the roof of the Holy Sepul- 
 cher; for as it was the Sabbath, I wanted to 
 see the Jews lamenting at the foot of the 
 Wall of Wailing, before the first star ap- 
 peared in the sky. 
 
 [297] 
 
AM RRM 
 \ aay Fallen 
 
 14 * Rd if 
 un Cay) pet Mops Ate 
 Hl oak aes 
 
 ane 
 
 \ 
 
 ma 
 ) trie 
 
 
 
THE WALL OF WAILING 
 

 
CHAPTER ITI 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 Tue Jewish quarter was only a stone’s 
 throw from the Holy Sepulcher. It seemed 
 deserted. Easter was near and, according 
 to custom, the Jews had painted a bluish 
 white the irregular fantastic walls of their 
 small houses, all of which are covered by small 
 domes, small stone caps very like the round 
 hats they wear. In those narrow stony 
 streets, with many vaults, stairs and sharp 
 turnings, silence reigned after the continual 
 noise which had filled my ears since early 
 morning; and what a silence! How restful 
 was this crumbling ghetto which looked quite 
 abandoned! ‘Titus, Bar-Kochba, the Proph- 
 ets, the Holy History, the corner of the 
 village church where I learned my catechism, 
 some very important moments of my life and 
 some very trivial ones came back to me, in 
 disorder, pell-mell, to disappear entirely, 
 
 [33] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM”? 
 
 leaving me free to enjoy the present and the 
 feeling that I was not a part of the long chain 
 of events which had taken place here. Sud- 
 denly a strange-looking person appeared 
 from one of the side-streets. He was dressed 
 from head to foot in a violet velvet garment, 
 the color of faded hyacinth; his colorless 
 beard harmonized with a bonnet of fawn fur, 
 and his dead-white skin, ivory-like, was as 
 faded as the velvet of his clothes. Then an- 
 other appeared, dressed in green, the green of 
 a three-hundred-year-old parrot. ‘Two more, 
 one in a cherry-colored caftan, the other 
 dressed in crimson velvet which looked as old 
 as Jerusalem itself. How strange they 
 seemed, dressed in velvet, centuries old, as old 
 as the sheaths of the Thora! I had never 
 seen such people outside of Venetian pictures. 
 The most brilliant as well as the most delicate 
 colorings, all the nuances and shades that | 
 shine in the “Marriage of Cana.” It was the 
 first time that Jewry appeared to me as a 
 fairy-tale. Seeing those Jews seeking the 
 light, I thought of all I had heard, at Bels, at 
 
 [ea] 
 

 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 
 
 Zadagora, about the old men who abandon 
 their country to come here to die and spend 
 eternity in the land of Jerusalem. Was it to 
 honor death that they had covered their old 
 bones with those charming velvets and silks? 
 A tall, dark Jew, dressed in his black Galician 
 gabardine, walked among those brilliant or 
 delightfully faded robes; he was as somber as 
 a candle-snuffer and as lugubrious as Poland 
 under a low winter sky. 
 
 In the blue-painted walls doors opened on 
 narrow passages or upon stairs leading down 
 to interior courts. All Jewish houses are 
 sunk in the ground in order to have more 
 space, but this side of the hill was so irregular 
 that often a court which seemed to be under- 
 ground opened straight on a narrow street. 
 Down below, I still received an impression of 
 seething humanity, an impression that Jewish 
 life always gives, and even Jewish death, as 
 in the old cemetery in Prague, where the 
 tombs climb one on top of the other, elbowing 
 each other just as the dead did while still 
 alive. But this humanity was full of amia- 
 
 [ 357] 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 bility, inviting me to come down, to look in, 
 to enter. The Easter coat of paint had hidden 
 for a little while the poverty of their dwell- 
 ings, but this momentary brightness only 
 made the smell of soured things more notice- 
 able, the same smell as that found in the hold 
 of a ship which I have always noticed in 
 the ghettos I have visited, as if a ghetto 
 itself were only an immense vessel of emi- 
 grants. In the depths of these deep courts 
 one often sees a small synagogue, walled in, 
 buried there, doubtless because it is written: 
 “T cry out to Thee, O God! from the depths!” 
 Dust, poverty and dirt reigns in those cav- 
 erns of piety. It is asif a horror of anything 
 beautiful, or even of anything agreeable, were 
 part of the Jewish worship. The only thing 
 that is beautiful, the curtain of embroidered 
 velvet which hides the cupboard of the Tho- 
 ras, adds to the lamentable impression by 
 drawing attention to its beauty. 
 
 I had thought that to find my way to the 
 Wall of Wailing I would only have to follow 
 the buttercup-colored Jew and the amaranth 
 
 Raga 
 

 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 one who went gesticulating side by side, and 
 that on a Saturday, at the end of a Sabbath 
 day, all the Jews in Jerusalem would be go- 
 ing to the Wall of Wailing. I followed them 
 at a respectful distance. What on earth were 
 they saying to each other? They walked, 
 stopped, gesticulated a little more, went on 
 their way. A conversation that one cannot 
 hear is always full of interest and mystery, 
 and I artlessly imagined that if I could un- 
 derstand them I would at once learn some- 
 thing about that silent quarter of theirs. I 
 followed them through the maze of those de- 
 scending streets, while other Jews went up, 
 brightly or somberly dressed. After all, all 
 the Jews of the ghetto were not going to 
 the Wall of Wailing. The two I had been 
 following entered a synagogue decorated with 
 frescoes where one could see lions, gazelles 
 and lyres hanging on weeping willows, about 
 a hundred figures from Titian and the Vero- 
 nese like those I had already met in the 
 street were shouting and rocking in the man- 
 ner of the Galician Jews. I asked in bad 
 
 P37 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 German where the Wall of Wailing was. No- 
 body understood my jargon and everybody 
 asked everybody else questions to try to guess 
 what I wanted to say. Instantly all the 
 prayers stopped as if they did not mean very 
 much to them. Instead of the All-Powerful 
 who, as I came upon the scene, had been the 
 center of interest, I suddenly became the ob- 
 ject of attention. Pleasure had come into 
 their lives, a happy diversion which must not 
 be missed. ‘These old men seeking eternity 
 were able to taste the joy of the passing mo- 
 ment and make the most of whatever it might 
 bring to them, and what fire, what vivacity, 
 what petulance were wasted on nothing at 
 all! That is the Jewish mind, always ready 
 to go from Heaven to earth without transi- 
 tion. I was surrounded by a circle of bright 
 eyes, which reminded me of those Russian 
 pictures in which one sees a sledge stopped in 
 the snow surrounded by wolves with shining 
 teeth and burning eyes. They all called out 
 to one another, each one evidently having his 
 own idea of what I wanted. The phrase that 
 
 [38 1] 
 

 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 I heard repeated that morning ad nauseam, 
 “The Jews are sad! The Jews are sad!’ is 
 not true. I saw them there, in their syna- 
 gogue, at the center of an isolated universe, 
 absolutely indifferent to what was going on 
 a few steps away at the Holy Sepulcher, as 
 far from Christ’s Tomb as if they were at 
 Bokhara or Cracow. This Holy Saturday 
 was a day like any other for them; they were 
 in their habitual mood, their love of life mixed 
 with their violent piety. All around me they 
 went on shouting at one another and I was 
 unable to understand a word of their Yiddish. 
 But what seemed to me more extraordinary 
 than anything else was that it did not occur 
 to one of those Jews that at that particular 
 hour on the Sabbath in Jerusalem I could 
 only want one thing, to go to the Wall which 
 ~ dominates their whole lives, the Wall which 
 they had come from afar to seek just as I 
 had myself. 
 
 How did I reach it? I cannot tell. No 
 one guided me there. I kept going on to- 
 
 Bovis 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 wards it, blindly feeling my way through nar- 
 row street after narrow street, and finally I 
 believed myself to be really lost between two 
 small stone walls about which a smell of 
 refuse lingered. Suddenly, as so often hap- 
 pens in those Oriental mazes, at a turning of 
 this passage leading apparently nowhere, I 
 saw some women seated in front of small 
 stalls and at the same time I heard a sound, 
 made, I soon discovered, by a thousand shrill 
 voices. Then I realized that at last I had 
 found what I was looking for, and that this 
 smelly, narrow way had taken me to the 
 legendary Wall, which millions and millions 
 of Jews have reached only through the path 
 of their dreams. 
 
 Here was the Wall, the great groaning, 
 the lamentation of Israel. The wailers were 
 there, a small crowd of undersized people, 
 hugging the ground, swaying, shouting and 
 lamenting at the foot of the high wall. Each 
 one groaned in his own way, without paying 
 any attention to his neighbor, letting himself 
 go, intent only on his own sorrow. I was not 
 
 [407 
 

 
 PHEW AL EL OF WALLING 
 
 
 
 surprised. I had expected something like it, 
 or rather, I knew all about it through my 
 experiences with the Galician Jews. As soon 
 as the scene had imprinted itself upon my 
 mind I saw that it could not be otherwise. 
 These people in the throes of prayer, more 
 anarchical than ever in their sorrow, crowded 
 into a scanty space between a small wall 
 made of mud and stones, just like the one I 
 had passed on my way, and the wall itself 
 made of enormous blocks of stone perfectly 
 balanced upon each other without any cement 
 to hold them together. The shiny, golden, 
 weather-beaten wall, greasy where foreheads, 
 lips and hands have been touching it through- 
 out the centuries, that collection of blocks 
 with nothing to break its monotony except 
 some plants growing on it here and there, 
 that bare and inflexible mass which has sur- 
 vived all the calamities which have bruised 
 Jerusalem since the beginning of time, that 
 wall represents the religion of Israel, bare, 
 simple, strong and abstract. Tradition has 
 it that those stones are a remnant of the 
 
 [41 J 
 
SMNBALT OVE AR ODUON JEROSALEM"% 
 
 foundations of Solomon’s Temple. Archeol- 
 ogists give other explanations. But why 
 bother about archeology? Whether the Wall 
 was built by Jewish hands or whether it was 
 built long before the Hebrews took posses- 
 sion of Judea, what does it matter? It sus- 
 tains something greater than Solomon’s pal- 
 ace, the undying hope of Israel that its de- 
 feat is not eternal, that its days of glory will 
 come back. 
 
 At the entrance of the passage the women, 
 draped in their flowered shawls, their heads 
 covered with handkerchiefs, were moaning 
 softly. I saw some who caressed the Wall 
 slowly and gently with their old hands, sob- 
 bing the while. A young girl was crying 
 bitterly, pillowing her pale face upon the 
 cold stone. Was it possible that any one 
 so young and charming as she could cry 
 over a dead stone, or over the idea, deader 
 still, of a temple ruined nearly two thousand 
 years ago? What was her sorrow? Why 
 did she despair? Was she trying to ward off 
 some unhappiness? I felt that those stones 
 
 [42 1 
 

 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 
 
 could do nothing for her, except help her to 
 cry. Carried away by the sorrow of their 
 mothers and sisters, the children were crying 
 too. Further away, with their prayer-scarves 
 on, their beards and their long noses bent 
 upon their psalm-books, the men in silk and 
 velvet and the men in black caftans were 
 moving about, bending down, getting up, el- 
 bowing their way nearer to the Wall, so that 
 they could rest their foreheads and _ their 
 hands on it, and read their prayers nearer to 
 it. I felt keenly the contrast between those 
 ancient stones which will last a long time yet 
 and all the old men who to-morrow, maybe 
 to-day, will lie down for eternity in the valley 
 of Josaphat. But after all they are eternal 
 themselves in their way. They have taken the 
 place of other old men, as old as they are, 
 who once prayed there and others exactly 
 alike will in turn replace them. Of their wild 
 sorrow how much is habit, how much real 
 emotion? I had been admiring one of the 
 Abrahams who was groaning louder than the 
 rest, one of those sad, old men whom the 
 
 [43] 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 Greeks had been mocking in the morning at 
 Christ’s Tomb. Suddenly he stopped to 
 scratch his shoulder where some insect was 
 biting him, then, relieved, he returned at once 
 to his accustomed gestures, his inextinguish- 
 able sorrow. 
 
 The passer-by happening upon this scene, 
 not knowing anything of the feelings which 
 animate this strange gathering, would only 
 see in this high Wall a ruin like many other 
 ruins on the Phenician coast, and all the 
 wailers would be only a picturesque and 
 mad mob such as one finds constantly in the 
 Orient. The gesticulations, the shouts, the 
 swayings, the phrases repeated eternally on 
 the same monotonous rhythm are the same. 
 But there is something more than in the dance 
 of a Mohammedan crowd on a square in Mo- 
 rocco, something great, the flame of a desire, 
 which, seen or unseen, lives in the heart of 
 Israel, expresses itself and increases in 
 front of this Wall. I had felt it, a long time 
 ago, in Galicia. Yes, in the imagination of 
 a Jew in Eastern Europe, the love of Zion 
 
 [44] 
 
THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 exists. The heart of the scattered people has 
 never ceased to sigh for the Holy City of 
 David! May we meet next year in Jeru- 
 salem! It is the hopeful wish they have 
 been repeating every year since the fall of 
 the Temple, every Easter, in all the places 
 in the world where Fate has thrown them. 
 The Occidental Jews may add some of the 
 bitter irony so natural to their race to this 
 wish thousands of years old; but in the ghet- 
 tos of Russia, Poland and Roumania, the 
 wish is full of sincerity, full of an astonish- 
 ingly strong hope! In the midst of the, 
 harshness of the Law and of the Talmud, in 
 small houses on the edge of a Carpathian tor- 
 rent, or on a plain in Poland, Jerusalem 
 raises its domes and its palaces with all the 
 radiant splendor that nostalgia can conceive. 
 Each morning, in their prayer, this appeal 
 goes up to the Lord: “Blow the trumpet of 
 our deliverance, O Lord God, set up our ban- 
 ner to assemble our scattered brethren, gather 
 them from the four corners of the earth, come 
 back full of loving-kindness to Thine own 
 
 E45] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 City of Zion and reign over it, as Thou hast 
 promised us. Build it up again and establish 
 it for ever. Be praised, O Lord, Thou wilt 
 set up Jerusalem again!” 
 
 In those Jewish settlements I had heard 
 many times how the miracle will take place. 
 The Messiah will appear mounted on a white 
 horse. As in ancient times the Red Sea di- 
 vided, so will the rivers divide in front of 
 the people of Israel. Bridges of cigarette- 
 paper more solid than those made of steel 
 will enable the Hebrews to pass over the 
 oceans as lightly as shadows, and a thousand 
 other miraculous details are told which 
 shorten the cold evenings of exile. It was an 
 ordinary occurrence to see there the old men 
 who had for sixty years and more cherished 
 their longing for Jerusalem, as shown in that 
 ancient wish, “Oh, to be next year in Jeru- 
 salem!” deciding to leave their relatives, their 
 friends, the villages where they spent their 
 lives, to go on this remarkable journey. 
 When old people are nearing their end they 
 often have the desire to be elsewhere, to go 
 
 [487 
 

 
 THE WALL OF WAILING 
 
 away, to flee, to escape the death which is 
 waiting for them. 
 
 But the old Hebrews who venture on the 
 road to Zion believe that dying in Palestine 
 makes eternal life certain. All the sacred 
 books say that four steps in the Land of their 
 Ancestors cleanse from all sins. Living in 
 the shadow of the walls of Zion brings as 
 many benefits from the Lord as fulfilling 
 rigorously the six hundred and thirteen com- 
 mandments. This journey also satisfies their 
 natural pride to an astonishing degree. A 
 poor cobbler out of work, a tailor who can no 
 longer see to sew, whose clients are leaving 
 him, all those who, because of their age, are 
 becoming public charges, become suddenly 
 people of importance when going to Jeru- 
 salem. In a single day they enter a holy 
 kingdom, they become ambassadors of their 
 villages; but this is not all; they become the 
 representatives of all Israel to the Almighty, 
 who listens with far more favor if the prayers 
 of the Jews come from his ruined ‘Temple! 
 Amid praises and blessings they leave Po- 
 
 Dar 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 Jand, Hungary and Russia, taking with them 
 only enough money for their journey, their 
 talliths, their phylacteries and prayer-books. 
 
 In Jerusalem, a pious man has no need to 
 worry about ways and means of living. Are 
 there not all the Jews in the world, who are 
 unable to leave the place of their exile, to 
 support the delegates of the scattered People, 
 the holy ambassadors who spend their days 
 sending Jewish prayers to the Lord God 
 from the foot of the Holy Hill where David 
 used to offer sacrifices unto the Lord? If 
 these old men were not there, crying at the 
 foot of the Wall, if, when by chance, the Lord 
 looked at His beloved Zion, which has been 
 abandoned to the pagans, if He did not see, 
 here and there, a Jew with an old beard, an 
 old hat, an old caftan, all the things that 
 soften His heart; if, for one day only, He 
 could say, “There is not one solitary Jew in 
 My beloved Zion, they have truly abandoned 
 Me,” calamities and plagues would befall 
 Israel. But the old men are there, wailing all 
 the time. Just as the angel held back Abra- 
 
 Dae 
 
einen ete on apace gape a 
 Ce AeA OF WAL ENG 
 
 
 
 ham’s knife from Isaac’s head, so their be- 
 loved presence softens the anger of the Lord 
 and prevents His arm from leaning too heay- 
 ily on His forgetful chosen people. Well 
 then! Since these old men of Israel assume 
 the task of appeasing Jehovah, of calming 
 His outraged spirit; since, thanks to their in- 
 tervention, unlimited blessings fall like 
 manna on all the scattered People, how can 
 they be expected to do anything, to lose a 
 single precious moment in the sordid business 
 of earning money? Women can have shops, 
 sell candles, ounces of sugar, corn or coal, 
 that is quite as it should be. Who cares what 
 the women do? The Lord God Himself 
 never cared. But the men, the men here, have 
 only to cry and moan; for the rest, they de- 
 pend upon Israel’s charity. 
 
 It may seem absurd that Moses’ people 
 have only been able to express their deep 
 poetic quality in this gathering of old men 
 and women who looked as if they were 
 dressed in the discarded costumes of some 
 bankrupt theater. But the most beautiful 
 
 [49] 
 
NaN ea Een Ak UR IN ae Se Oi aay a Te 
 
 thing I saw was that poverty. If Israel, rich 
 and powerful, had tried to do something mag- 
 nificent, it would have been banal. Is it not 
 greater and more in keeping with its destiny 
 that it should be represented in Zion by peo- 
 ple in rags and by beggars? ‘The Jew is here 
 as we see him in his hidden settlements in 
 Oriental Europe and in the poor quarters of — 
 London and New York. He would be de- 
 ceiving Jehovah once again if he tried to 
 make Him believe that he thinks only of Him 
 when success and wealth come. When Israel 
 is doing well it thinks very little about the 
 Lord. But it always appeals to Him when it 
 is poor and oppressed. In sending to the 
 Wall some of its poor members, it wants to 
 show God its pitiable state, to keep Him from 
 forgetting the promises of power arid happi- 
 ness which He made to them years and years 
 ago. | 
 I did not understand any of the prayers 
 which went up all around me with a growing 
 intensity as the evening approached, but they 
 probably said: “For two thousand years we 
 
 E50 
 
TOE AG Le O BO WaT ot NG 
 
 have been faithful to Thee, for two thousand 
 years we have loved Thee and had confidence 
 in Thee, O Lord, for two thousand years we 
 have appealed to these stones which have re- 
 mained cruelly silent. Surely that is some- 
 thing! Look! Our hearts have not changed! 
 Our thoughts always come back, O God, to 
 the hill where David saw Thine angel with his 
 shining sword. We mourn when we are far 
 from Thy house where we have worshipped 
 Thee. We ask Thee with tears and suppli- 
 cation to bring us back here soon. We la- 
 ment here because Thy Temple has been 
 destroyed and Thy Beautiful City lost.” 
 Behind this prayer, I detected the eternal 
 Jewish uneasiness, their dissatisfaction, their 
 desire to be something else, their appeal for 
 other temples, for ideal societies where the 
 whole of humanity would be ruled by them. 
 The strong hope of reigning over the uni- 
 verse that Israel has always had was ridicu- 
 lous and touching at the same time when ex- 
 pressed with such incongruous strength by 
 these poor samples of the scattered race. 
 
 Poi] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 After all, is not such deep despair the great- 
 est proof of faith? Underneath all this de- 
 spair, their complaints were full of happiness, 
 of the confidence the Chosen People have 
 in themselves, the sign by which we always 
 know them. One burst of the trumpets was 
 enough to pull down the walls of Jericho; 
 surely so many tears will end by rebuilding 
 the Holy City. 
 
 In front of the great, bare Wall, where 
 nothing rests the eyes, any kind of words are 
 of no avail. I said to myself that it was un- 
 likely that the Temple would rise up again 
 under my eyes to-night. I began to tire of 
 all the pious shoutings which had been filling 
 my ears since morning, with the most diverse 
 tongues, with the most diverse thoughts. I 
 had had enough for one day! The chanting 
 of the Orthodox Christians, the drum of the 
 Abyssinians, the wailing of the Jews! Some 
 wailers closed their prayer-books, separated 
 themselves from the mob and went away, — 
 satisfied to have moaned, to have fulfilled a 
 function of Israel. ‘The others went on, their 
 
 [52] 
 
THE VWACL OF “KhWALLIN G 
 
 moaning increased. Would the sight of the 
 evening star, late in making its appearance, 
 stop the fanatics? 
 
 I tried to reach the other end of the infernal 
 passage with the hope of finding a way which 
 would take me up above the Wall, to the 
 esplanade where the Temple once stood, 
 the Temple that the moaning voices were 
 beseeching the Lord to erect once more with 
 His own hands. I made my way through 
 the wailing crowd with difficulty. At last I 
 reached the end of the passage. But I might 
 have known that it would be impossible for a 
 wish, however humble, to have a chance of 
 being fulfilled in this place of eternal desola- 
 tion. The passage I had found was a blind 
 alley. I had to go back, I had to make my 
 way again through the lamenting mob. At 
 last I managed to get out of this extraor- 
 dinary place. One of the crouching women 
 offered me a small posy, made up of two 
 jasmine flowers and of some blades of grass 
 from the Wall. I wanted to give her some 
 pennies but she refused them. It was Sat- 
 
 Beep 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 urday and on a Saturday a Jew cannot give 
 or receive money. So on that day beggars 
 become givers in their turn and they give 
 away lemons and small posies. With my two 
 flowers in my hand, I went through the ruined 
 labyrinth, as evil-smelling as before, which I 
 had followed on my way to the Wall. But 
 this time it appeared in a new guise to me; 
 it was an ideal way to lead to the Wall of 
 Wailing, the poverty-stricken way which 
 leads to that impasse of misery, that cul-de- 
 sac of hope. 
 
 us dl 
 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
ete wet 
 AY sii a ROR T ed Ca 
 al ‘ $3, a ‘i 
 > v) ' j 
 SINC aM 
 
 Ret aay 
 f 
 
 a) 
 He fg 
 
 7 
 ‘#} 
 
 i’ Fi 
 
 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
 A LONG passage, already dark, as imposing 
 as a stone bridge, where, in spite of the night 
 which had begun to envelop it, I guessed at 
 small shops hiding in the wall, on the left 
 and the right, with windows through which 
 could be seen bright lights, small, moldy 
 patches and strange fragments of statuary 
 mixed with the vegetation that grows on 
 ruins. At the end, an open space, a golden 
 light, some olive and cypress trees, an empti- 
 ness hardly broken by the presence of small 
 buildings, kiosks, tombs, fountains—I could 
 not exactly see all that was there—a wide, 
 white staircase, shining softly in the twilight, 
 and above all that, on the spot where once 
 stood the Temple in which the angry God 
 of the Jews used to receive the blood of sac- 
 rifices, stands a kiosk of turquoises and dia- 
 monds, covered with green mosses, a kiosk 
 
 [ov 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 of changing colors, as bright as a blue-jay. 
 Taken by surprise I stopped on the dilapi- 
 dated steps, the prisoner of invisible spirits 
 dancing around me; I seemed to hear their 
 divine Jaughter. 
 
 Here, too, people were praying. This bril- 
 liant azure palace contains, besides its sculp- 
 tures and its mosaics, covered with multicol- 
 ored birds, the Sakra, the sacred rock on 
 which God stopped Abraham’s knife when 
 he was about to strike Isaac, and from which 
 Mohammed was brought into God’s pres- 
 ence. Through the open doors, under some 
 lamps, I could see the faithful bowing and 
 getting up with movements not unlike those 
 of the Jews, if gestures executed with seren- 
 ity and nobility can in any way recall those 
 performed in a frenzy. But the Mohamme- 
 dan prayer asks nothing from God. It is 
 simply a greeting to Him, just enough to 
 show that He is always present and that men’s 
 thoughts are still climbing the ladder of light 
 which has been standing there, between 
 heaven and earth, ever since Jacob’s time. 
 
 pe a 
 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
 I did not expect for a moment that in this 
 place, where the Tablets of the Law had stood, 
 with all that they signify, threats, punish- 
 ments, thwarted life, I would find the most 
 beautiful expression of the pure joy of living 
 that exists in the Orient, perhaps in the 
 world. In vain I kept trying to remember 
 that this was the threshing-ground which 
 David bought from Ornan for six hundred 
 pieces of gold, the site of the Jewish tragedy, 
 the place chosen by God, where the voice of 
 Jesus was heard—the charm of this delightful 
 spot drove all such thoughts away. What a 
 break with the past, which had been replaced 
 by a striving towards things that the Law had 
 tried to suppress. Just as a long troubled 
 human life finds a haven some day, so this 
 place had achieved a perfect peace. ‘Tired 
 of trying to attain the treasures stored up in 
 Heaven which are too hard to reach, its ad- 
 vice to the pilgrim is to love the pleasures of 
 this life, but to love them lightly, with the 
 lightness of the olive-branch, to renounce the 
 unattainable, too, in the way which the Orient 
 
 [59 
 
UNE YUE Ave DUN yd ie 20 SA, Foe 
 
 has of giving up when the path is hard, to be 
 resigned in the face of disappointments, to 
 be content with whatever happiness is with- 
 in easy reach. The lamentations at the Wall 
 of Wailing were still in my ears; by shutting 
 my eyes I could still see the tear-stained faces, 
 the backs bent by centuries of misery, the 
 long, inconsolable beards, the hands eager to 
 seize happiness but finding only hard and 
 smooth stones. 
 
 Here I was, a few steps above the lament- 
 ing old men, in a divine place, a paradise 
 where not one of them would have dared to 
 venture. ‘The Mohammedans would not per- 
 mit it, and the Jews themselves do not want 
 it, for by going up there, they walk in 
 the Holy of Holies which only the High 
 Priest has the right to enter. Brought from 
 so far away by their desire for Zion, they 
 come up against the Wall and remain in the 
 ditch to moan. And what are they asking, 
 O God! That the most beautiful spot in the 
 world (yes, a spot as beautiful as a dream) 
 should disappear, also like a dream, through 
 
 Bae 
 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
 a dreadful miracle. O God, do not listen to 
 them! Do not heed the prayers of your Jews! 
 Let them lament and moan; they live for it 
 and love doing it! Do not rebuild the Tem- 
 ple, do not allow any one to touch this en- 
 chanted place! ... 
 
 I walked around the high esplanade over 
 the dusty grass. On one side I could see the 
 mass of mildewed cupolas, yellowed here and 
 there by the rust of ages, and the old Jeru- 
 salem, looking like a herd of cattle going 
 down a hill; on the other, the rocky hill of 
 the Mount of Olives, and, further off, in the 
 distance, the bluish mountains, the Hills of 
 Moab, the Dead Sea and the Jordan valley. 
 But in this vast space, the imagination is oc- 
 cupied more with the sky than with the 
 earth. I saw the heavens filled with shining 
 ladders, on which angels went up and down, 
 their shining forms carried by cherubim; I 
 saw clouds where Jehovah appeared in the 
 lightning, shining swords, rains of manna; I 
 heard sounds of thunder and holy trumpets, 
 of threats and promises, pacts and solemn 
 
 p61] 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 engagements, denied and renewed many 
 times. Now the scene is empty, desolate, 
 forsaken of men and of God. 
 
 The night came and with a light finger 
 caused everything to disappear, just as time 
 has succeeded in suppressing any vestige of 
 the different ideas that have followed one an- 
 other in that place. This sacred spot, closed 
 in, is like an old palimpsest that men have 
 rubbed constantly only to begin writing on 
 it again. What has become of the dark room 
 where the Ark of the Covenant, the Tablets of 
 the Law, Aaron’s rod and the urn containing 
 the manna were kept. Not a single trace of 
 the Temple or of Solomon’s palace remains, 
 nor of the Antonia where St. Paul was impris- 
 oned, from which Roman soldiers watched 
 the turbulent Jews, always ready to create 
 disturbances. Not a trace is left of the Capi- 
 tol built by the Emperor Hadrian after the 
 revolt of Bar-Kochba and of Reb Akida. 
 Here and there the moon lends a certain 
 charm to some building lost among the olive- 
 trees, the columns and the dome of David’s 
 
 [ 62] 
 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
 tribunal that a chain seems to connect with 
 the sky, lovely porticoes whose sole purpose 
 is to imprison a little of the pale light under 
 their arches. Of course, it was the light which 
 prevented me from seeing the chain on which 
 the Angel Gabriel will hang his scales on the 
 Day of Judgment, and between the porti- 
 coes the thread, finer than life, sharper than 
 a sword, that the Believers will have to cross 
 as a supreme test before going to Paradise. 
 
 The beautiful mosque of precious stones 
 shone now with a soft green-and-blue ra- 
 diance. It seemed as if the air were still 
 impregnated with the perfume of the rose- 
 water that Saladin’s sister brought from 
 Aleppo on eighty camels to purify the place 
 which had been made into a church by the 
 Crusaders. ‘The ghostly porticoes and the 
 gray olive-trees were absorbed by the shad- 
 ows, as ghosts which are seen for an instant 
 and then disappear for ever. ‘The cypresses 
 awaited without uneasiness a night less dark 
 than their foliage. Then, I do not know why, 
 some dreadful demon came to me with the 
 
 [637 
 

 
 ts BN OT GY I A OR 2 By SAY Ai ES fie AY cay BL: BS BY ORLY Do 
 
 thought: “Is there, at the foot of the Wall, in 
 the blind alley, is there still a voice foolish 
 enough to ask for the destruction of all this?” 
 And I was foolish enough myself to try to 
 see whether it was so. Leaving this moon- 
 lit paradise, I went through the gloomy 
 labyrinth which led to the Wall. There was 
 no one to be seen in the Passage of Tears. 
 I went through it from one end to the other, 
 surprised that no sobs should come out from 
 those stones, for, after all, a wall that has 
 been warmed all day by the sun, gives forth 
 some heat long after the sun has disappeared ; 
 so why not tears? 
 
 It looked as if the Jews of Poland, Russia 
 and Roumania, the ghettos of Berlin, Lon- 
 don and New York, the Jewry of the world 
 in fact, had decided at last never to trouble 
 God any more. It was only then in that soli- 
 tude that the Wall looked sad. Eiverywhere 
 the Jews go they bring intense life. Their 
 howling despair is life, their frenzied lamen- 
 tations drive away sadness. But silence! a 
 silence such as invades a court when plaintiffs 
 
 [ 647 
 
THE MOSQUE OF OMAR 
 
 and defendants are gone! Beside me, in the 
 shadows, I smelt a fig-tree which had its root 
 in the Wall. No, the Wall was not abandoned 
 after all, Men had left it to itself for a mo- 
 ment, but the ancient Biblical tree was giving 
 forth its perfume into the darkness just as 
 the tiny light in front of the sanctuary was 
 carrying on, during the peace of the night, 
 the prayers that men had stopped uttering 
 for a little while. 
 
 or] 
 
a 
 
 (| 
 i 
 
 aN 
 
 ‘i ey 
 
 ¥ ad 
 
 
 
THE PROPHET OF THE 
 BOULEVARD 
 
\ t Ay ; ; | 
 ¥: * ’ ‘4 wie ‘hee i uy 
 
 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 Wuat had happened during the nizht? 
 Had God Tzebaoth brought another miracle 
 to pass? Could it be, that in one night He 
 had changed the old Jews belonging to past 
 ages that I had seen the day before, sobbing 
 at the Wall of Wailing, into young men 
 dressed in the American manner, with khaki 
 shirts, knickers, woolen stockings, alpine 
 shoes, with the silk neckerchiefs of the Boy 
 Scouts, big felt hats and revolvers in their 
 belts? And could the young women be 
 Jewesses, too, with their short skirts, their 
 sleeveless dresses and their hats covering their 
 bobbed hair? I knew them by their faces, 
 the young men and women that I met every- 
 where that morning. In the quarters of 
 the new Jerusalem there were also Jews, 
 but Jews of a new kind that I had never 
 seen before, more surprising to me in this 
 unexpected garb, than the caftaned Jewry 
 
 [697 
 
EN EXT OY BAR IN SP Eh OSA Dae 
 
 living in the narrow streets of the old Jeru- 
 salem. These are the haloutzim, the pioneers, 
 the Levites of the new Zion, who want to 
 bring back to the ancestral home the ancient 
 Kingdom of David, and while looking at 
 them I thought of the strange series of events 
 which had brought them here. 
 
 About the year 1895, one met in the cafés 
 on the boulevard where the journalists used 
 to gather, a man about forty years old, a 
 good-looking Semite with black eyes and an 
 Assyrian beard, who had nothing of the ghet- 
 to about him. His name was Herzl, Doctor 
 Theodore Herzl, correspondent in Paris of 
 the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna. He came 
 from Budapest and he was a Jew, if learn- 
 ing as a child a little Jewish history, a few 
 words of Hebrew and remembering some far- 
 away Easter evening or a Purim’s feast 
 make one a Jew. ‘The secondary school and 
 the university had carried away all that, and 
 if some traces of the Jew were left by that 
 time, traveling through Europe, meeting dif- 
 ferent people and mixing with different so- 
 
 por 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 cieties had wiped them out. From Paris, Dr. 
 Herzl sent political or literary articles to his 
 paper, or else he was writing light plays in 
 the boulevard manner, which were acted in 
 Vienna and Berlin. In brief, in the evening 
 between four and five, at the Café Napolli- 
 tain, he could sincerely believe himself to be 
 a real Parisian. 
 
 But he discovered one day that he was 
 deeply Jewish. The Dreyfus affair brought 
 home to him something he had forgotten, that 
 a Jew, however detached from the old cus- 
 toms, remains always, among the nations 
 where Fate obliges him to live, different from 
 other people, some one against whom the old 
 hatred is always ready to flare up. Should he 
 resign himself, disappear, become humble and 
 inconspicuous, or should he fight and pro- 
 test? To give in is cowardly and stupid! 
 But what is the use of protesting? ‘The 
 experience of centuries proved to him that it 
 was useless. There is a Jewish problem, and 
 nothing that has been done for the last two 
 thousand years has ever helped to solve it. 
 
 Pay 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 Violence and unfavorable laws have suc- 
 ceeded only in isolating Israel among the 
 other nations, keeping it always the same, 
 often against its own desire. By an unlucky 
 fatality, tolerance and emancipation give a 
 very different result from the one expected. 
 In any country where the Jews are freely 
 allowed the full play of their talents, their 
 success has always excited jealousy and ag- 
 gravated the hatred that it was supposed 
 would disappear with more liberal measures. 
 What can be done? What is the remedy for 
 this ancient illness of both Jews and Chris- 
 tians? Since the Jews are, among other peo- 
 ples, a kind of foreign growth which disturbs 
 the national life; since they themselves are not 
 perfectly at ease, because they feel in them- 
 selves something different, which cannot, 
 which will not disappear, the best thing is to 
 renounce for all time the hospitality of other 
 nations, to free them of an unwelcome race; 
 therefore, it would be best to find somewhere, 
 in Palestine or elsewhere, a place where the 
 scattered people could find, at last, peace, 
 
 [72 J 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 security and happiness; a country where they 
 could lead their own life, like the other races 
 of the world. Once more, the thing to do 
 was what Moses had done, bring the Chosen 
 People out of exile. But the task of the 
 Great Ancestor can be compared to the new 
 enterprise only as an old-fashionec opera can 
 be compared to a modern lyrical drama. 
 Herzl wanted to play the same melodies, but 
 with many more instruments, more flutes, 
 harps, violins, brasses. He wanted a new 
 stage-setting and more magnificent choruses, 
 and was carried away by his enthusiasm, very 
 astonishing! in a writer of farces (but passion 
 and irony can live quite peacefully in a Jew- 
 ish heart). He wrote a pamphlet of about one 
 hundred pages to show how he desired to 
 bring about the wholesale migration of his 
 race. 
 
 The role of Israel’s guide, which Moses as- 
 sumed in ancient times, would be held to-day 
 by a society of disinterested Jews, accus- 
 tomed to great undertakings, who would be 
 diplomats representing the Hebrew nation 
 
 Este 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 before the other nations and do all that was 
 necessary to obtain a territory. Another so- 
 ciety, quite different in character, chartered 
 like the English companies, would liquidate 
 the property of the emigrants in the countries 
 they left and thus those who left behind them 
 houses or estates would find, at the end of 
 the exodus, possessions to compensate them 
 for their loss. Work would be found for those 
 who had nothing. Naturally they would be 
 the first to go. They are excellent material, 
 the poor of Israel! No great enterprise suc- 
 ceeds unless it springs from a great despair. 
 They would be the pioneers, they would build 
 houses, start towns, make roads. ‘The bour- 
 geoisie would follow them, attracted by a life 
 of greater ease in a country full of hope. 
 
 But it is harrowing to leave the country, 
 even though an unfriendly one, to which one 
 is attached by many memories, made one’s 
 own through births and deaths. . Well, the 
 cradles could be taken away, and the tombs 
 have been abandoned before, in emigrating 
 from one inhospitable country to another. 
 
 Dia 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 The bitterness of the new exodus would be 
 taken care of, a long time beforehand, by 
 prayers and practical lectures, to prepare the 
 souls and bodies of the future emigrants for 
 their difficult enterprise. The departures 
 would take place in groups of families and 
 friends, having as their heads trusted men 
 elected by each group. ‘Thus, during the 
 long journey, they would go on living with 
 friends and that would help to drive home- 
 sickness away. The groups, being large 
 enough, would be able to charter whole trains, 
 whole boats. There would be only one class, 
 because on a sea-passage it is difficult to put 
 up with differences, and though the journey 
 would not be precisely a pleasure trip, every- 
 body would have to be humored. At their 
 destination the emigrants would be received, 
 not with wild cheering, but solemnly and so- 
 berly. ‘They would have so many trials and 
 labors in front of them. Then each one 
 would go to the place destined for him, and a 
 life forgotten for two thousand years would 
 begin again for the Jews, on Jewish soil, pro- 
 
 D7 1 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 tected by a new Jewish flag. It would not be 
 decorated with the lion of Judea, nor with 
 Aaron’s rod, nor with the seven-branched 
 candlestick, nor with any of the old emblems, 
 but it would bear on its silk the sign under 
 which a people born anew intends to con- 
 quer its home, seven gold stars, which in 
 Herzl’s mind symbolized seven working- 
 hours—one less than any other race. 
 
 The ancient Messianic feeling was at the 
 back of this plan, but it was hardly recogniz- 
 able, it was so much swamped by the argu- 
 ments of business men, sociologists and law- 
 yers. There was nothing in it of the old Jew- 
 ish misery, nothing of an appeal to Jehovah. 
 The great longing for the ancestral land, 
 which always dwells in Israel’s heart, became 
 a diplomatic matter, an enterprise of emigra- 
 tion, a banking transaction. What had been 
 for a long time only a desire of the soul, 
 a sentimental dream, became with Herzl a 
 workable measure. The return to a country 
 of their own became a burning question, 
 which was agitated in the newspapers and in 
 
 Dba 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 congresses of all kinds. He gave to a mysti- 
 cal thought the realistic touch, the touch of 
 earth which belongs to things humanly pos- 
 sible. Many Jews, especially the revolution- 
 ary Russian Jews, adhered willingly to the 
 new faith. It was much less dangerous than 
 the Revolution in Russia and yet it also 
 brought them some hope. 
 
 At that time I remember I was traveling 
 in Poland, discovering with intense astonish- 
 ment the very quaint life of Galician ghettos. 
 One evening, when I had just witnessed in 
 the small town of Bels one of those extraor- 
 dinary banquets at which all the Jews of the 
 place are gathered around the Miracle-W ork- 
 ing Rabbi, I was approached in the snow by a 
 very lanky, poverty-stricken looking young 
 man. Instead of the caftan, worn by every- 
 body, he was vaguely dressed in Kuropean 
 clothes, and vague was the French in which 
 he asked to have the great honor of exchang- 
 ing a few words with me. Shortly afterwards 
 I found myself with him in my room at the 
 inn, lighted by a single candle. 
 
 a ad 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 He said: “Sir, I have been observing you 
 for about a week. Here, as you know, we 
 have nothing else to do but to watch the peo- 
 ple who happen to be passing and, when there 
 are no strangers, to spy on one another. I 
 hesitated a long time before talking to you, 
 but I could not resist my impulse. You have 
 been spending a week among hypocrites and 
 madmen. The Miracle-Working Rabbi who 
 is the center of everything here is an execrable 
 man. He lives on our poverty and no one 
 resents it. Ah! if he were a scholar, it would 
 be a different matter, but he is an ignoramus, 
 who knows absolutely nothing, neither the 
 Law, the Talmud nor even the Kabbala, 
 which he thinks he knows. But he is a 
 miracle-monger. Some believe in them, oth- 
 ers pretend to believe in them. People are 
 living here on stupidity and les. I am 
 ashamed for the Jews. Everything you have 
 seen, Sir, must have disgusted you.” 
 
 That young man had approached the 
 wrong person. It is not every day that one 
 discovers a new world; the exaltation, fever, 
 
 Betdt 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 
 
 the bizarre mysticism, the library of Bibles, 
 Talmud and Zohar, the Miracle-Working 
 Rabbi with his blind eye and the beard of a 
 prophet, the pious feasts on Saturdays with 
 their songs and alcoholic breaths. Was this 
 interfering person trying to spoil all that for 
 me? 
 
 “If I understood you correctly, I gather 
 that you are not very happy in Bels; tell me, 
 where would you be happy?” 
 
 Then, for the first time, in that lost little 
 town, I heard the name of Dr. Herzl, and 
 evidently the young man had the same blind 
 admiration for him that the rest of the town 
 felt for the Miracle-Working Rabbi. With 
 the quickness of his race in seeing a dream as 
 an accomplished fact he saw himself already 
 in the Ancestors’ country, rebuilding the an- 
 cient Kingdom of David. I listened to him 
 amazed, because the enthusiasm he showed 
 for that idea appeared more extravagant to 
 me than anything I had seen in Bels. The 
 mystical appeal to everlasting Zion, the faith 
 in the Messiah who would some day unite all 
 
 p79 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 the scattered Jews in the New Temple, was 
 not unreasonable. It was a dream-possibility, 
 just like a very ancient custom, an old ex- 
 pression of desire, a sigh for the unattainable. 
 But how could any one believe seriously 
 that without Jehovah’s help unknown minis- 
 ters of Foreign Affairs and rich bankers were 
 going to bring to pass a miracle, the giving 
 of Palestine to the Jews? How was any one 
 to believe that Abdul Hamid, Commander of 
 the Faithful, would for a sum of money, how- 
 ever big, abandon Jerusalem where the 
 Mosque of Omar stands, the most sacred spot 
 in the world for Moslems, after Medina and 
 Mecca? How could any one believe that the 
 Christian nations would view favorably a 
 Jewish guard of honor around the Holy 
 Sepulcher? How could any one believe that — 
 the British government would accept in Pal- 
 estine triumphant Judaism, the effect of 
 which would be to increase the power and 
 the pride of the Jews remaining in Russia? 
 How could any one imagine that the Jews of 
 France, Germany, England or America, who 
 
 [ 807] 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 were sincerely attached to their adopted 
 countries, would be imprudent enough to 
 claim a new one? While the people of Bels, 
 with their sordid exaltation, appeared to me 
 to have found a sure way to happiness, I pit- 
 ied this excited young man, with his sublime 
 confidence in those chimerical hopes which 
 would not remain dreams. 
 
 It is always wrong, however, to throw 
 water on any enthusiasm. Outside, in the 
 holy town of Bels, there were plenty of sour 
 dispositions and enough mud and snow to 
 put a shadow on the heart of this poor 
 young man. I kept my thoughts to myself; 
 I let him go away with his treasure of hope, 
 clutching to his breast some greasy old He- 
 braic newspapers, where one could see photo- 
 graphs of Jews in morning-coats or business- 
 suits, who, in London, in America or else- 
 where were fighting for the Great Idea... . 
 
 The new Prophet of the Jews soon knew 
 all the tribulations which have been attached 
 from time immemorial to this old trade of 
 Israel. The Rabbis in charge of the congre- 
 
 [81] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 gations of Western Europe did not have 
 anything in common with this businesslike 
 Messiah, who led the life of a Gentile and had 
 the audacity to substitute himself for Tze- 
 baoth as the rebuilder of Jerusalem. ‘The 
 great Jewish bankers remained deaf to his 
 appeals. Neither Baron Hirsch, who favored 
 establishing colonies in Argentine, nor Baron 
 Edmund de Rothschild, who, at great ex- 
 pense to himself, kept up the Palestine col- 
 onies, intended to change their plans and fol- 
 low this new Moses. An anonymous group 
 donated some millions, but, considering the 
 immense amounts that are required in these 
 hard times for the humblest miracles, it was 
 a paltry sum indeed! Herzl could not hope 
 to buy back Palestine from the Commander 
 of the Faithful with baksheesh. He saw 
 Abdul Hamid twice. The first time Abdul 
 Hamid gave him the Order of Medjidie and 
 a diamond pin. The second time he was of- 
 fered the right of founding in Asia Minor 
 some scattered colonies without the privilege 
 of linking them together. Failure was in- 
 evitable. ‘The Viennese doctor began to see 
 
 [82] 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 
 
 that the political realism he was so proud of 
 was after all rather short-sighted. Luckily, 
 just at that time, Chamberlain, the English 
 Prime Minister, who had some drops of He- 
 brew blood in his veins, was visiting Uganda. 
 Seeing those deserted regions, he thought of 
 Dr. Herzl, whom he had met in London, and 
 of his great plan for the wholesale migration 
 of the Israelites. The British Government let 
 him know that England would be pleased to 
 have the Jews settle in Uganda. Of course, 
 East Africa was not Palestine, Uganda was 
 not Zion, but since the great exodus appeared 
 to be so far distant, might not a temporary 
 refuge be created, a place where the Chosen 
 People could experiment with self-govern- 
 ment and try their hand at agricultural life? 
 Herzl seized upon the idea, but alas! he had 
 forgotten what his Jews were like. I don’t 
 think he had ever understood that the en- 
 thusiasm he aroused among the intellectuals 
 of the ghettos had nothing to do with his 
 personality or even with his ideas, but was 
 due to the passionate longing which sweeps 
 Israel off its feet whenever Zion is mentioned. 
 
 [83] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 To the Jews of Poland, Roumania and Rus- 
 sia, Jerusalem was not an empty symbol, 
 the symbol of a state to be founded any- 
 where, but an actuality, the object of their 
 most cherished desires. In the congress which 
 he called annually at Basle, London or some 
 other large city, he proposed to those home- 
 sick people that instead they go to Uganda, 
 and was received with tears and lamentations. 
 He was betraying Jerusalem! Instead of 
 offering them the Kingdom of Light, he was 
 offering them a Kingdom of Night, on the 
 Dark Continent. The new Moses must have 
 spent some terrible hours with those corelig- 
 ionists of his, people of the ghettos whom he 
 had never learned to know either in Vienna 
 or in Paris! Such noise, such excitement, so 
 many hands, so many gestures, so much 
 stamping of feet, groaning and sobbing! 
 What a lot of hair-splitting, what a lot of 
 pish-posh! It is said that on his death-bed, 
 in his delirium, the unlucky Prophet saw 
 himself in the hands of those savage Jews and 
 bathed in a cold sweat he waved his hand 
 desperately in an attempt to silence them. 
 
 [84] 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 Herzl realized at last, better than he had 
 ever done before, the forces which had carried 
 him on, and he gave in to their fury. To calm 
 down this howling, gesticulating mob, he 
 swore a solemn oath: “May my hand dry up 
 if I forget thee, O Jerusalem!” And in 
 Uganda, the half-dozen English people who 
 were the population of the country, became 
 angry, too, at the thought of a Jewish inva- 
 sion and protested with petition after 
 petition, so that the British government soon 
 withdrew an offer which had pleased no one. 
 
 Herz] died after his failure. He was only 
 forty-four years of age, but prophets gain 
 nothing by becoming old. After his death 
 the agitation continued, aided by embittered 
 discussions in the newspapers and at the con- 
 gresses. Some, faithful to the idea that 
 Zionism was the only final solution of the 
 Jewish problem, refused to begin migration 
 to their ancestral land without having ob- 
 tained guarantees of their rights as citizens 
 of that land. They argued that without such 
 guarantees all the effort expended would 
 
 [ 85 | 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 only establish precariously a few thousand 
 subsidized colonists and failure would imperil 
 the complete liberation of Israel. Others 
 held, on the contrary, that the idea of recon- 
 structing a Jewish state in Jerusalem was an 
 impractical dream which ought to be aban- 
 doned. There were political reasons which 
 seemed to make it unlikely that it could ever 
 be fulfilled. “And even if Palestine were to 
 be given back to Israel? It would be mad- 
 ness to think that all the Jews in the world 
 could be taken there, for this rather barren 
 country could not feed many people and 
 moreover all the Jews would not go. The 
 thing to do was to assist the departure of 
 those who wanted to go, to add to the number 
 of settlements, to the institutions of all kinds, 
 to create, little by little around Jerusalem, — 
 centers of Jewish life which could have a 
 good influence on the Jews everywhere, and 
 perhaps later, when a great many emigrants 
 had taken root again on the land of David 
 and shown to the other nations what they 
 could do, then it would be time enough to 
 claim, in the name of the Jewish people, a 
 
 [86 J 
 
PROPHET VOR THE BOULEVARD 
 
 country of which they had proven themselves 
 worthy. 
 
 The moderate views carried the day and 
 the original idea of a separate State of Pales- 
 tine was shrinking to such modest propor- 
 tions that it was hardly recognizable, when 
 suddenly it regained the importance of its 
 earlier days. However sure Herzl was, with 
 the optimism of his race, that favorable cir- 
 cumstances would help his dreams, he could 
 hardly have conceived a new kind of deluge, 
 an upheaval of the world such as had never 
 before been seen, which would, in an almost 
 miraculous fashion, make his dreams come 
 true. : 
 
 From the beginning of the war, England, 
 France and Russia had been trying to decide 
 on a division of the loot, resulting from 
 the disruption of Turkey, the inevitable 
 result of the victory which they hoped for. 
 Who would get Palestine? According to 
 geography and history, this country was 
 part of Syria, which nobody at that time 
 thought of getting away from France. How- 
 
 [87] 
 
SUN ORD ee Ae DING SER OS AT ie D2" 
 
 ever, England could not view the prospect 
 of I’rance as her neighbor on the Egyptian 
 frontier without uneasiness. She desired to 
 create under her protection a mighty Arabic 
 Empire which would unite India to the 
 Mediterranean, and negotiations had already 
 been started with King Hussein with the 
 | promise that he would be the sovereign of 
 all Arabic-speaking countries. It was rather 
 difficult, though, brutally to keep France 
 away from the Holy Land which she had 
 been guarding since the time of Charle- 
 magne. The British government conceded 
 the severance of Palestine from Syria. It 
 would become a neutral country, adminis- 
 tered partly by the French and partly by the 
 English. That was only a first step. The 
 claims of the Zionists soon gave the English 
 a chance to eliminate the French altogether. 
 
 For some time before, the English had been 
 organizing propaganda on a large scale to 
 claim their right to a country which Israel 
 had never ceased to consider its own. In- 
 censed at the idea that the land of their 
 ancestors could become international, they 
 
 Esa 
 
PROPHET OF THE BOULEVARD 
 
 asked that it should become a Jewish country 
 under a British protectorate. The several 
 hundred or so people who make opinion in 
 London received this proposal favorably, 
 and they had the best reasons in the world 
 not to object to it. In the minds of all 
 Jews the world over, England soon assumed 
 the role of a disinterested Power intent on 
 setting right an injustice two thousand years 
 old. England profited greatly by that atti- 
 tude, for it is rather advantageous to have the 
 money and sympathy of Israel on one’s own 
 side. In a little while Mr. Balfour, Minister 
 of Foreign Affairs, was submitting to Lord 
 Rothschild a proclamation by which Palestine 
 was recognized as the ‘““National Home of the 
 Jewish people.” But the important London 
 Jews, Sir Philip Magnus, M.P., Mr. Cohen, 
 Chairman of the Jewish Board of Guardians, 
 Sir Moses Montefiore and others, who were 
 afraid that their love for their adopted country 
 might be doubted, protested against the word 
 “National.” The Foreign Office’s zeal for 
 Israel’s cause was greater than the zeal of the 
 Jews themselves, so the protest went un- 
 
 Reed 
 
mi ah NP ANN LY ONS BO CR ERNE AOL CAR GIN ID BY BT OR? Mok 
 
 heeded and, having secured President Wil- 
 son’s help and the assent of the French, 
 a little less enthusiastic than the English, on 
 the 2nd of November, 1917, the Foreign 
 Office sent to Lord Rothschild a new letter 
 whose official text in its diplomatic jargon 
 follows: “His Majesty’s Government looks 
 with favor on the establishment in Palestine 
 of a national home for the Jewish people, and 
 it will use its best efforts to facilitate the 
 realization of this object, it being clearly 
 understood that nothing will be done which 
 might be prejudicial in any way to the civil 
 and religious rights of non-Jewish communi- 
 ties living in Palestine, or to the rights and 
 political status enjoyed by the Jews in any 
 other countries.” 
 
 Two years later, at Cannes, the Allies 
 agreed to an English mandate for Palestine. 
 France was definitely excluded from the 
 Holy Land. The English had won the diffi- 
 cult game. The Jews were entitled to think 
 that they had won their game also, so from 
 Germany, Poland and Russia thousands of 
 them descended upon Jerusalem. 
 
 Verge 
 
THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 
 
' en 
 ve 
 LM a Ae 
 Pi 
 4 Li ie 
 
 OO vk 
 
 Nel 
 
 Tig alist 
 
 A aN ; aK 
 hae Ay if 
 an ey i yt 
 
 ay id 
 
 2 
 
 Fy Ree oh 
 
 ye Ate 
 
 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 
 
 THEIR coming pleased no one, neither the 
 Mohammedans nor the Christians, nor the 
 Jews already there. | 
 
 “Is our country a desert?” said the 
 Mohammedans. “Did Mr. Balfour miracu- 
 lously do away by one stroke of his pen with 
 the six hundred thousand Arabs who live 
 here? We also love this place where we have 
 been living for thirteen hundred years; Jeru- 
 salem is to us the Queen of Cities, one of the 
 four towns of Paradise, of which Mecca, 
 Medina and Damascus are the others, but of 
 all the sacred spots in the world it is the 
 nearest to Heaven. The people who live here 
 are neighbors of God and to die in Jerusalem 
 is to die in Paradise! The Jews pretend that 
 they are coming back to their own country, 
 because they were ejected by violence and 
 violence has never given rights to anybody. 
 
 Boon! 
 

 
 SON Ee Yuh ACEO DN eh Ee RG OWS ake ke de 
 
 But did they not settle here by right of con- 
 quest themselves? They came from Chaldea, 
 from the Euphrates Valley. Abraham him- 
 self was so much an alien in Canaan that he 
 sent a servant to Chaldea to find a wife 
 worthy of his son Isaac and the Bible is full 
 of the struggles of their kings to subdue the 
 country. We settled here in our turn. Why 
 should our conquest not give us as good a 
 right to the country as theirs? Do we claim 
 Andalusia because we maintained a splendid 
 civilization there for centuries?) Why perpe- 
 trate the great injustice of putting a dead 
 race where there is a living one? During the 
 whole duration of the War when we fought 
 beside the Allies, they held before us the idea 
 of a great Arabic Empire and now, as a re- 
 ward, they want to hand us over to the Jews! 
 That’s what it amounts to, isn’t it? ‘To be 
 obliged to receive these emigrants, to be 
 allowed to be their equals on our own terri- 
 tory, to have to endure the imposition of their 
 language upon us, it is true that it is not abso- 
 lute submission, but we won’t be our own 
 
 [947 
 
THE: VFOLCES! OF PALESTINE 
 
 masters any more. When these foreigners 
 coming from God knows where are here, two 
 or three hundred thousand of them, with their 
 resources and their cleverness, what will be- 
 come of us? We shall be their slaves, their 
 servants in our own country.” 
 
 And the Christians, too, have their say: 
 
 “For centuries we have been seeing Turk- 
 ish soldiers mounting guard at the Tomb of 
 Christ. Did the last Crusade take place to 
 put Jews in their places? If they come back 
 to the Holy Land filled with the same spirit 
 in which they condemned Jesus, to what ex- 
 tremes will their fanaticism carry them? 
 Shall we see them here, in the rebuilt Temple 
 sacrificing sheep, lambs and doves to Jeho- 
 vah? We do not know of any Messiah having 
 changed their Laws about that. If, as they 
 claim, Jehovah has ceased to interest them, 
 what can we expect from a faithless Judaism? 
 Humanity! Justice! We know to what vio- 
 lence these two words can lead and they call 
 them the essence of the Jewish spirit to-day. 
 
 [95 J 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 Believers or infidels, people who think they 
 have been persecuted for two thousand years 
 by Christian nations are apt to be tempted, 
 as soon as they are powerful enough, to take 
 their revenge in the place where their troubles 
 started. What will the Wandering Jew do 
 once he is back in Jerusalem, after his ardu- 
 ous journey?” 
 
 But of all these protests, the most surpris- 
 ing is certainly the one that comes from the 
 Wall of Wailing. Only yesterday I was ask- 
 ing myself: ‘“How can the modern J ews whom 
 one meets everywhere in the new Jerusalem, 
 with their flashy clothes and their haughty 
 airs, have anything in common with the pious 
 beggars of Israel, who have come here to 
 die?” I know now. I have heard the 
 ghetto’s lament! 
 
 I heard it in the quarter of the Jews from 
 Holland. This consists of an irregular court, 
 rather spacious, with very mangy grass and 
 a few dusty acacias, surrounded by squat 
 houses, unsafe stairs and worm-eaten bal- 
 
 he 7) 
 
Peete ODM ES! OR OP CO ke ST ITN E 
 
 conies. I was ushered into a room freshly 
 painted a bluish white, through whose narrow 
 barred window could be seen a tomb-covered 
 hill, sloping towards the valley of Josaphat. 
 It was the dwelling-place of Rabbi Sonnen- 
 feld, one of the old men whose thoughts are as 
 old as Jerusalem itself. How far one was in 
 his presence from the businesslike prophets 
 whose photographs adorn the Zionist papers, 
 who try to harmonize their vague Hebrew 
 ideals with the ones they have borrowed from 
 Western civilization! In his long, black caf- 
 tan, he was tall, thin, endless. His cheeks 
 were so white, that one could scarcely tell 
 where his long, white beard began. He had 
 the paleness of the chickens which the Jews 
 empty of all their blood and soak for a long 
 time in salted water before cooking. His 
 voice was flat and colorless, but his eyes had 
 kept the passionate light of youth, I mean, of 
 course, of ancient times. 
 
 Here was what he told me, as nearly as I 
 can repeat it. But how am I to describe to 
 you all the white tombstones, as I saw them 
 
 ial 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 myself through the narrow window? In the 
 luminous silence of the countryside, they 
 looked as if they were gliding over the hill 
 to listen to him!... 
 
 “We are thy slaves, O Lord! It is the Law 
 and the Law endureth for ever. On the day 
 when we Hebrews accepted that slavery, 
 our fate was irrevocably fixed. Both good 
 and evil come to us only from God! And 
 yet some madmen think they can take the 
 place of the Almighty and rebuild Jerusalem 
 with their own hands. Mr. Balfour is their 
 Messiah! But has this Mr. Balfour driven 
 out the Christians and the Mohammedans 
 from the country? Has he rebuilt the Tem- 
 ple, reinstalled the Holy of Holies, put up 
 the altar of the holocausts at the top of Mount 
 Moriah? Does he think he has done any- 
 thing when he allows a few Jews to settle in 
 Palestine? Did the pious among us wait for 
 his permission to come? Alas, the misfor- 
 tunes of centuries still burden the Holy City. 
 And another sorrow is added to the ancient 
 
 [98 4 
 
THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 
 
 sorrow,—new sins to the old sins of Israel! 
 These modern Jews, whose faces, clean-shaven 
 like pigs, are in themselves an offense to the 
 Lord, bring their impiety with them. They 
 open schools where every name is mentioned 
 except Jehovah’s. For ordinary conversa- 
 tion and for teaching their so-called knowl- 
 edge they use the sacred language of prayer, 
 and if they keep on they will soon teach 
 the asses to bray in Hebrew! The Town 
 would still be standing if the Sabbath had 
 been observed. But do they observe it? Do 
 we see them in the synagogues? Do they 
 come to lament at the foot of the Wall? 
 Now they intend to impose a tax on the un- 
 leavened bread we eat at Easter. But we 
 won't pay it. We won’t place ourselves in 
 their power. Blessed be the Lord God! He 
 delivered us from Pharaoh! He brought us 
 back from Babylon and captivity, He has 
 kept us intact in the midst of the Gentiles and 
 He will preserve us now from those Jews, 
 full of pride, who believe no longer in their 
 Lord’s promises, those Jews who come here 
 
 [997 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN VEROUSALEM, 
 
 not with the Talmud and the Thora, but with 
 the gospel of Karl Marx... .” 
 
 A light rosy flush had come to the cheeks 
 of the old man. In this pale old face, there 
 was still some blood which anger brought to 
 the surface. He pointed with his long bony 
 finger to the extraordinary landscape outside 
 the barred window and all the dead of cen- 
 turies buried in the valley of Josaphat. “The 
 Jews sleeping there waited all their lives for 
 the Messiah, we are also waiting for him and 
 others will wait after us, but Jerusalem will - 
 never be rebuilt by faithless Jews!” 
 
 And to all those voices and complaints 
 which come from the four corners of the 
 earth, the Wandering Jew answers, not with 
 the humility of the conquered, but with the 
 pride of a master returning home after two 
 thousand years’ absence: 
 
 “What does Palestine represent to a 
 reasonable mind? It is Israel’s native land, 
 the country where we created ideas worth 
 something to humanity as a whole. Since we 
 
 [ 100 7 
 
THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 
 
 have been driven out of it, we have occupied 
 it better by our tribulations and our desire 
 twenty centuries old than if all our people 
 had never ceased to live in it. Where are 
 our martyrs and our dead, we are asked? 
 We have given of our blood everywhere, but 
 always for other nations. The Arabs may 
 say that they have been here for thirteen hun- 
 dred years, but everything is the same as if 
 they had come yesterday. Uncultivated 
 land, a culture more sterile than the sand or 
 the rock, that’s all their occupation has given 
 the country. What have they made of Pales- 
 tine? What has the country of abundance 
 spoken of in the Bible become? We need all 
 our love to find in this Jezebel the beautiful 
 features of old! And yet the dear face re- 
 tains something of its former beauty. On the 
 Mediterranean Sea the best oats of the world 
 still grow around Gaza. The plain of Sharon 
 has its orange and almond trees and its vine- 
 yards still. At the foot of Nazareth, the 
 Esdrelon country still produces barley and 
 wheat! If the waters of ‘Tiberias were 
 
 [1017 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 cleverly utilized, why could not the Jordan 
 valley become a new Egypt? One can see 
 on the mountains of Judea, now so arid and 
 crumbling, the remains of a succession of 
 terraces, such as still exist on the hills of 
 Lebanon. We will build up those terraces 
 again, we will have hanging gardens once 
 more. We are the only ones who have 
 enough love for this country to be willing to 
 bury in the tired earth, the marshes and the 
 sand, the effort and the immense capital nec- 
 essary to bring it back to life. All over the 
 earth there are other countries, healthier and 
 richer, but for us Jews there is none so rich 
 or so healthy. Here work has an attraction 
 for us that it has nowhere else in the world. 
 In redeeming this country, it is our spirit, our 
 soul, we are going to resuscitate. Among the 
 Christian nations we were so busy trying to 
 make ourselves acceptable that we ceased be- 
 ing true Jews, we became instead odious to 
 others and unfaithful to ourselves. In the 
 ghettos of Russia we were more dead than 
 alive, tied down by stupid laws, which may 
 
 r 1027 
 
THE VOICES OF PALESTINE 
 
 have been useful long ago, but are senseless 
 to-day. Sonnenfeld’s time is past. It is 
 thanks to him and others like him, that we 
 have been made the miserable people you see 
 in the older Jerusalem. We will let the 
 Mohammedans and the Christians alone. 
 We do not come to bring back to life an out- 
 of-date Judaism. Not one of us would ever 
 think of insulting the Holy Sepulcher, or of 
 destroying the Mosque of Omar to build the 
 Temple in its place. Is there a Jew in his 
 right senses who would sacrifice oxen, lambs 
 and doves there? We have other things to 
 think about! The free genius of Israel does 
 not have its source somewhere in Heaven, at 
 the feet of Jehovah, but on the ground of 
 Palestine, in the hearts of the Jewish people. 
 We will recover this genius that we have lost 
 during our exile, we will become again, if we 
 can, the agricultural and pastoral people that 
 we once were.” 
 
 [1034 
 

 
THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 
 

 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 
 
 TuHosE rather declamatory Jews are not 
 the Firsts who came to Palestine to resume an 
 intimacy with the soil, which had been inter- 
 rupted for nearly two thousand years. 
 About forty years ago some Russian Jews, 
 terrified by the pogroms which followed the 
 assassination of Czar Alexander the Second, 
 came for refuge to this land of their eter- 
 nal hope. They were town-dwellers, intellec- 
 tuals and small merchants, carried away by 
 the romantic desire to lead on the Land of 
 their Ancestors the existence of the Hebrews 
 of long ago. They were called Choveve-Zion, 
 that is to say, the Lovers of Zion, or Bilou, a 
 word made out of the first letters of the five 
 Hebrew words which mean: Sons of Jacob, 
 let us go away together! The first-comers 
 settled down at Petah-Tikwah, the Door of 
 Hope, upon a marshy ground, in ruined 
 
 [107 7 
 
COUN CeO NY Te ar EIN Fie be oS OG de ee 
 
 buildings built some years before by Bul- 
 garian Jews who had been driven away by 
 fever. Some others bought an estate of 
 about six hundred acres which was named 
 Rishon-le-Zion, that is to say, the Firsts of 
 Zion. ‘There was no water there, the soil was 
 very stony and they had no money to bore 
 wells. Still others settled in Rosch-Pinah, 
 the Key Vault, between Safed and the Jor- 
 dan; others in Zichron-Jacob, the Remem- 
 brance of Jacob, at the foot of Mount 
 Carmel; others wandered about without 
 resources or shelter and everywhere the same 
 misfortunes dogged the steps_of these un- 
 lucky creatures who had had too much confi- 
 dence in their Bible. 
 
 Palestine was far from being the good 
 country flowing with milk and honey, wheat 
 and malt spoken of in the Scriptures, abound- 
 ing with manna from Heaven, of which one 
 can dream by a warm stove in Berditchev, or 
 in Kiev, or in the depths of a cellar during the 
 anguish of a pogrom. But has it ever been 
 a good country? A Jewish legend relates 
 
 [108 4 
 
THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 
 
 that when Jehovah showed Moses the Prom- 
 ised Land from Mount Nebo, on the other 
 side of Jordan—such a fantastic array of 
 inextricably mixed mountains, ash-colored, 
 without a tree or a plant, and the Jordan val- 
 ley which is nothing but sand and dry-caked 
 mud, left by the waters of the Dead Sea— 
 the Prophet who had just spent forty years 
 in the Wilderness uttered these words: 
 “Whither dost Thou lead us, O Lord?” And 
 to reassure him God showed him Jericho, with 
 its flowing spring and its motionless palms at 
 the foot of the naked mountains. Perhaps 
 that oasis was less barren than it is to-day, 
 but that poor little spot of green must have 
 seemed very insignificant to the aged shep- 
 herd of Israel, who had still fresh in his 
 memory the rich land of the Nile. The Bible 
 says that he died on that day on Mount Nebo, 
 and that the Lord struck him down because 
 of a sin committed forty years previously in 
 the Wilderness of Zen, when his confidence in 
 God had weakened before the murmurings of 
 his people. But I rather suspect that, when 
 
 [ 109 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 he saw a Promised Land which was itself a 
 Wilderness, his heart failed him and he died 
 from the shock. 
 
 Samaria and Galilee, that Moses could not 
 very well have seen from the top of Mount 
 Nebo, would have consoled him a little. 
 There, in the midst of a stony and arid land, 
 are found fields and orchards, places full of 
 an idyllic charm, where beast and man come 
 to drink of the same water and rest in the 
 same shade. Along the coast, among the 
 marshes, one occasionally sees charming 
 spots, but on the whole it is a country very 
 badly treated by nature and very much aban- 
 doned by man. And it is small, too, exceed- 
 ingly small, so small indeed, that one wonders 
 how all the grandiose names can fit such tiny 
 places. ... | 
 
 The unlucky Lovers of Zion had settled in 
 particularly unpleasant places. They had 
 spent all their money to buy the land. 
 Where were they to find the necessary re- 
 sources to cultivate the soil, to irrigate it, 
 to make the place healthy or at least livable? 
 
 [1107 
 
THE FIRST LOVERS OF ZION 
 
 
 
 Those who dwelt in Zichron-Jacob were 
 obliged to sell even their scrolls of the Thora! 
 Fever played havoc with these poor, weak 
 people who could not stand a climate to 
 which they were unaccustomed. Many died, 
 others went away, and the ones that were left 
 were about to disappear in their turn when 
 a miracle took place, just the same kind of 
 miracle one reads about in Persian tales, 
 which begin badly and end well, thanks to 
 some good genie who arrives just in the nick 
 of time. 
 
 Wherever you go in Palestine, you'll hear 
 the Baron mentioned. Which Baron? Well, 
 the only one who exists for Jews there, Baron 
 Edmund de Rothschild. He is a living magi- 
 cian, the good genie who took pity on their 
 distant misery and saved them from utter dis- 
 aster. Rishon-le-Zion, the Firsts of Zion, 
 were on their last legs and he took them under 
 his protection. Then came the turn of those 
 of Rosch-Pinah, those of Petah-Tikwah and 
 finally of all of them. The Key of the Vault, 
 
 tie 
 
“NEXT OY BAR IN FEROS AL bye’ 
 
 the Door of Hope, the Great Space, were all 
 too small to keep alive the families which were 
 crowding one another on the sand. All those 
 whose hopes were sinking sent their distress- 
 signals to him. Then he sent them money 
 and more money, for irrigating the sands, 
 for drying up the marshes, for boring wells, 
 making roads, planting trees and vines, for 
 buildings of all kinds, cellars, wine-cellars; 
 he had to bribe the Turks who had forbidden 
 all buildings, who would not even allow a 
 stable or a barn to go up, who had even 
 ordered the buildings already in existence 
 pulled down; he had to pay the taxes, to pay 
 the agricultural experts and the watchmen 
 who protected them from attack from the 
 Arab plunderers; to pay the Rabbis, the 
 teachers, the doctors, the chemists, all indis- 
 pensable to the Jews, who can’t get along 
 without teaching or remedies. 
 
 Some directors sent from Paris saw to 
 everything, provided all the needs of these 
 amateur colonists, paid all deficits and made 
 up for all the reverses, whether caused by 
 
 p12 7 
 
DAES PLES Die LOVERS OF 21 ON 
 
 nature or by men’s inexperience. After 
 some years, eucalyptus groves, vineyards, 
 plantations of lemon and orange trees sprang 
 up from the sands, agreeably surprising the 
 eye amid the barrenness of their surround- 
 ings. Among those green gardens lived a 
 small bourgeoisie, thanks to the Baron’s help, 
 just as in Jerusalem the beggars at the Wall 
 of Wailing live on Israel’s charity. The land 
 was cultivated by Arabs or by poor Jews 
 from Yemen who had become accustomed to 
 the heavy labor of the fields in their own 
 country. And all these peoples found it just 
 and reasonable that the munificence of their 
 distant patron should reward them for lead- 
 ing in the Land of their Ancestors this easy 
 life, which, they wrongly imagined, had been 
 the kind of life led by the ancient Hebrews. 
 
 For the last twenty years those colonies 
 which have let themselves be guided by the 
 shepherd’s crook of Baron de Rothschild, 
 have been conducting their affairs themselves. 
 But now, just as before, the Baron is still the 
 Providence to whom everybody turns in hard 
 
 [113 7 
 
CES Te AE NE Pe hes 0) Sha ee ae 
 
 times. All hands are held out to him if the 
 oranges sell badly, if the heat has turned the 
 wine into vinegar or if it is discovered sud- 
 denly that it would be wise to grow lemons 
 instead of oranges. Hardly a third of the 
 children born in the colonies remain there 
 and the others leave them without regrets to 
 take their chances elsewhere. One does not 
 know which to wonder at most, Baron de 
 Rothschild’s persistence in trying to create a 
 race of Jewish planters in Palestine or the 
 powerlessness of the Jews to change them- 
 selves into agriculturists. 
 
 c1144 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
ie ins 
 ike a 
 nM) Ase 
 
 ery 
 
 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 THE new pioneers of Israel despise the 
 people of the old colonies with all their hearts, 
 —those bourgeois, they say, the Baron’s 
 slaves, as the lamenters at the Wall are 
 Jehovah’s slaves! They do not want to lead 
 the lives of sad peasants bent over their work, 
 such as are seen in all the countries of Europe. 
 It is not to establish there the old forms of 
 Western civilization that the people most 
 passionately attached to equality and justice 
 come back to the Ancestral Land. Once 
 again Zion will give a Law, once again Israel 
 will create in the social and economic order 
 something comparable to what it once accom- 
 plished in the divine order. 
 
 All the ills the world suffers from come 
 from the old Roman idea that individual 
 property must be absolute and perpetual. 
 This detestable principle must be replaced by 
 
 p17 7 
 

 
 "NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM 
 
 another, a principle very old and yet very 
 new, of a purely Jewish inspiration. It is 
 said in the book of Leviticus: “And all the 
 Tithe of the land, is the Lord’s: it is holy 
 unto the Lord.” The Lord! the pioneers of 
 the new Zion have, I believe, ceased to believe 
 in Him. But they replace Jehovah by the 
 idea of the Jewish people, and in their new 
 Law, they interpret thus the text from the 
 Old Testament: “The land will not be sold 
 for ever, for it is mine, saith Israel.” 
 
 A fund, called the National Fund, made up 
 of contributions that come from the Jews all 
 over the world, buys back piece by piece the 
 sacred Land of their Ancestors. When an 
 emigrant wants some, the land is not sold to 
 him, but a temporary assignment is made. If 
 the newcomer has enough money, a lot is given 
 to him with a long lease-term, with the strict 
 understanding that he and his family alone 
 will work it without help from the natives. 
 He can also, if he wants to, join as a partner 
 one of the numerous communist colonies. 
 Some of them are completely communistic, 
 
 ris] 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 
 
 others are cooperative, others still adopt an in- 
 termediary plan, each family working on their 
 lot but all the families uniting to buy machin- 
 ery, seeds, cattle, etc.,and sharing all general 
 expenses. If the emigrant has no money, he 
 joins as a laborer a farm belonging to the 
 National Fund, where he receives besides his 
 daily pay a part of the benefits. He can also 
 find work in one of those battalions of work- 
 men organized in a military way—laborers in 
 the building trade, agricultural laborers, rail- 
 way laborers who go from place to place, 
 wherever their services are required. When 
 he has put some money by, he can, in his 
 turn, settle down on a farm. ‘Thus each 
 colonist is Israel’s farmer. The Jewish peo- 
 ple remain the only owners of the land. It 
 benefits by the increase of value given to 
 the land by the work of its farmers; it re- 
 serves for itself the right to raise its rents 
 in order to buy more land, and if a lot is 
 not cultivated, or is not well looked after, it 
 can take it back at the end of the lease. As 
 for the colonist he has the advantage of not 
 
 [1197 
 
TN Ee TO AR IN Sere SA Bev" 
 
 having to put up any money to get land and 
 of being able to use all the money he has 
 for improvements. The agricultural laborer 
 who gets a part of the benefits is not con- 
 demned all his life to live from day to day. 
 Just as, according to the ancient Law, the 
 Jewish slave could not be held in bondage 
 for more than seven years, through the force 
 of circumstances the proletariat will also free 
 itself. Thus Israel will rid itself at the same 
 time, or rather it believes it will, of the two 
 plagues of the world: capitalism and wages. 
 
 I have visited the colonies created by the 
 National Fund, from Jaffa to Jerusalem, 
 from Haifa to Tiberias, and I have met on 
 the roads many battalions of workmen. All 
 these people work hard, they make canals 
 for irrigation purposes, they plant trees, they 
 mend roads. In the evenings, they assemble 
 in their tents or their wooden shanties, to 
 discuss endlessly some political, social or 
 economic question, to listen to a lecture or to 
 go to some concert or some moving-picture. 
 
 [1207 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 Their life is hard and I don’t want to criti- 
 cize, but I got the impression that they 
 ought to be pitied, because they are, for 
 the most part, ill-suited to their work. You 
 will look in vain for one among them who 
 will say simply: “At home, I made caps 
 or cut shoe-leather.”” They always say with- 
 out fail, “I was a student at home.” If you 
 ask to see their diplomas, they have always 
 lost them or else they have been stolen from 
 them during their wanderings. <A. certain 
 brutality on many faces rather makes one 
 think that their memories are at fault, but 
 whether they have really studied at some 
 university or whether they were originally 
 tailors or shoemakers, they are all imbued 
 with the deplorable idea that intellectual gifts 
 are superior to all others, and that they are 
 doing something admirable by condescending 
 to work in the fields. 
 
 In other countries this exaltation of the 
 mind is the reason for the success of Israel, 
 but it is not wanted in this new land, which 
 requires muscular energy above everything 
 else. J must say that I don’t care for the 
 
 [1217 
 

 
 ONE AT AY eA TINA ad (Ee ke Oy 4 i Se Wada 
 
 shepherd who reads Tolstoy while looking 
 after his flock, the workman who carries un- 
 der his arm the poetry of some Viennese deca- 
 dent poet and the young girl who would 
 rather break stones along the roads than look 
 after a household, under the pretext of help- 
 ing Palestine much_bétter that way! Those 
 pioneers who carry with them moving-pic- 
 tures, pianos, lectures, literary evenings, just 
 as the Hebrews carried the Ark, do not in- 
 spire much confidence in their farming and 
 laboring abilities. Do they themselves feel 
 that way about it? Is it because of that, that 
 they all have such strained and sad expres- 
 sions? I have never seen either men or 
 women smile. But how can they be happy, 
 when they carry inside themselves the idea 
 that they are not like other people and that 
 all the world is looking at them! All these 
 social experiments of which those poor people 
 are so proud spread the mantle of Noah upon 
 a miserable reality. Whether they are or- 
 ganized in a communistic, a socialistic, co- 
 operative or patriarchal manner, they are 
 able to live only through help from the out- 
 
 [122] 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 side. Just like the old lamenters at the Wall, 
 they live on the alms of the whole of the 
 Jewish people. Not one of these colonies is 
 self-supporting. Each one of those halout- 
 zim is a luxury that Israel indulges in. 
 
 How far one is from the romantic imagin- 
 ings of Herzl! He could see the Jews all 
 over the world, filled with a holy joy, selling 
 their houses, winding up their businesses, 
 liquidating their capital, to come to Pales- 
 tine and find there the equivalent of what 
 they were leaving behind them. That moun- 
 tainous wave which was to shake the Jewish 
 world to its depths and bring all Israel by 
 an irresistible impulse to Judea, that wave 
 did not come. Not a Jew from Germany, 
 Italy, France, England or America, not one 
 of those Jews who, according to rumor, were 
 horrified at the thought of absorption by for- 
 eign nations, not one of those Jews has left 
 his adopted country to conquer Jerusalem. 
 The only people who have come are those who 
 have nothing to lose, Russians, Poles, Rouma- 
 nians, and even in Russia the enthusiasm has 
 cooled. Before the War, it was really the 
 
 r 123-7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 only country where life was made difficult 
 for the Jews, but since then there have been 
 many changes, and now in Russia they have 
 the same rights as everybody else. They have 
 even the unhoped-for happiness of having 
 within reach that to which they are so well 
 adapted, a revolution, and a revolution made 
 by themselves and for themselves! Why 
 should they try their social experiments in a 
 poverty-stricken country, when they can ex- 
 ercise their genius in a country full of re- 
 sources and peopled by a hundred million in- 
 habitants? So many of those who, in other 
 
 times, would have looked towards Palestine, 
 ~ see now only a poor country where, as Trot- 
 sky, a Jew himself, says, short-sighted people 
 are trying to resuscitate a narrow nationalism. 
 
 Neither did they get as much money as 
 they had hoped for. Enthusiastic Jews travel . 
 all over the world, to awake in Israel both 
 enthusiasm and generosity, but Israel is very 
 unaccountable, it is ardent and skeptical, it 
 is rich and poor, charitable but not deeply 
 generous. ‘They help one another willingly 
 from door to door, from house to house, but 
 
 [1247 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 when it comes to helping a great idea so re- 
 mote, purses and hearts alike are adamant. 
 There is no deep national feeling to make 
 them feel the need of reestablishing a home 
 in Palestine. Year in and year out a French 
 Jew gives about eighteen centimes, an Ital- 
 jan fifty, an English one less than two 
 franes. I do not know what the sum is in 
 America, but in spite of the great sums given 
 there, one must not have any illusions, for 
 when one thinks that there is a population of 
 four million Jews, the contributions per head 
 are really very small. In spite of oneself, 
 one cannot help thinking that this attempt to 
 transplant all the Jews in the world has cre- 
 ated much ado about nothing, since it has 
 only succeeded in creating, here and there, 
 those isolated communities of Jews, some of 
 which are already disintegrating. 
 
 The most enthusiastic Zionists do not hide 
 their disillusionment, but cannot resign them- 
 selves to the belief that, after all, all the Jews 
 of the world are not aflame with the purest 
 love of Zion, so that, instead of attributing 
 the failure of this great enterprise to Israel’s 
 
 [ 125 7 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 
 
 apathy, they throw all the responsibility on 
 British duplicity. How many times have I 
 heard these words: ‘“‘It is true, our rich co- 
 religionists in Europe and America have not 
 left their comforts and their businesses to 
 come to Jerusalem. We expected they 
 would, but frankly we never counted very 
 much on them. Thank God, we have enough 
 poor devils here to populate a country three 
 or four times as big as Palestine! If they 
 do not come in much greater numbers, the 
 English are to blame. ‘They said to us: 
 ‘Here is your country, your national home. 
 Enter, it is yours. ‘Then, when we came, 
 instead of opening the country freely to us, 
 they shut the door in our faces and let in 
 just enough of us to save theirs. About a 
 thousand a month, at the most, are allowed in. 
 That’s too few to do anything, but it is | 
 enough to make the Arabs hate us; to give 
 the English a good reason to occupy a coun- 
 try where everybody would be at everybody 
 else’s throat, if they were not there to police 
 it. Do you know the Jewish story? A Jew 
 arrives at an inn, the hostess asks him: ‘What 
 
 [ 126 J 
 
THE PIONEERS OF ISRAEL 
 
 do you want?—‘Well,’ he says, ‘a breaded 
 chop with potatoes.—‘I have no chops.’— 
 ‘Well, then, give me an omelet.—‘An ome- 
 let? I have no eggs. —‘Give me a herring.’— 
 “With an onion and some tea, you can’t die of 
 hunger.’ “Oh, you Jews, you want every- 
 thing, don’t you??—That’s our story in Pal- 
 estine. What is this national home that the 
 English have given us? Not even a dried 
 herring! With these two words, they have 
 excited our imagination, only too ready to 
 see the future in rosy colors, to the point of 
 delirium. ‘The word national fed our eternal 
 illusions, it seemed to give us a country, and 
 the word home was put there to reassure the 
 Arabs. To them they said: ‘A home is not 
 a state. What does it matter if the Jews 
 found a home in Palestine?’ We see to-day 
 that we have been the dupes of the English 
 and that under the cover of the righting of 
 a wrong two thousand years old, they set- 
 tled here to protect India and Egypt. But 
 what will become of us? Is it not an illusion 
 to bury work and money in a country which 
 probably never will be ours, and to use all 
 
 [1277 
 

 
 UG IVE TR i hoe WUE ING ke ed eee ave 
 
 our energy creating in Palestine a garden 
 for the Arabs and a military barrier for the 
 British Empire?” 
 
 Whether it is due to Israel’s indifference 
 or to the fear that its sacrifices will not 
 aid towards a Jewish State which appears 
 more and more problematical, the fact is, 
 there is no money. ‘The thirty thousand 
 Jews who have landed at Jaffa since the 
 Balfour Declaration find it hard to live. 
 Each boat which arrives with its contingent 
 of emigrants is a danger for the others and 
 tends to destroy the frail equilibrium which 
 has been established. In the first days of 
 enthusiasm, they went up to one another ask- 
 ing: “Have you got work?” To-day, the 
 question is, and it is asked ironically and 
 sadly: “Have you got a passport?” A pass- 
 port for a country more favorable to the suc- 
 cess of the Jews than sad Judea. A lot of 
 them have left and among those that re- 
 main, I wonder how many I would find, 
 if I went back there in ten years? 
 
 1287 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
a Ve 
 Aids Bh 
 i WAGE | 
 
 Cth eet 
 
 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 Burt the Jews in Jerusalem have accom- 
 plished a miracle. Hebrew is spoken every- 
 where, in the streets, in the schools, on the 
 roads, in the colonies, in the offices, in the 
 shops. It is really miraculous, for the old 
 language of the Bible had been dead for two 
 thousand years, as dead as the Jews sleeping 
 under the stones in the valley of Josaphat. 
 It was the language of prayer and of the 
 Holy Scriptures. All the children learned 
 how to read it from infancy, but no school- 
 master would have thought of trying to teach 
 his pupils to understand what they were re- 
 citing. What was the use of wasting time 
 on such futilities! The most important thing 
 was for the child to know, as quickly as pos- 
 sible, a chapter of the Bible by rote. The 
 schoolmaster himself, who could have recited 
 without hesitation, from beginning to end, 
 
 1317 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 the whole of the Thora, very often did not 
 know its meaning. It was not the least ex- 
 traordinary feature of the extraordinary 
 ghettos to hear, at all moments of the day, 
 in the houses or in the synagogues, for the 
 prayers and for the innumerable blessings, 
 by which all their life is ordered, those Hebraic 
 words which nobody understood. 
 
 I saw the first man to bring this dead 
 language out of the books, back to ordinary 
 use, some weeks before his death. His Rus- 
 sian name was Eliezer Lazarovitch Elianow; 
 his Hebrew name, Ben Y ehouda, that is to say, 
 Son of Judea. Here is the story of his life 
 as he told it to me, himself,—one of those 
 strange Jewish existences of which long pe- 
 riods seem to have belonged to other epochs; 
 a daily miracle of enthusiasm and poverty, 
 which through a thousand obstacles and vicis- 
 situdes has realized what appeared to be at 
 first an impossibility. 
 
 His childhood was spent in a Lithuanian 
 ghetto and up to his fifteenth year he led 
 
 [1327 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 the existence usual for the students of the 
 Talmud forty years ago in those small Jew- 
 ish universities called Yeshiva. Imagine, in 
 an isolated village, a house with a thatched 
 roof and there, grouped around some famous 
 Rabbi, twenty young men dressed in caftans, 
 with round hats and long curls falling on 
 their faces, discussing all day long a point 
 of the Talmud. Very often the text itself 
 was quite clear, but is there a clear text for 
 a Hebrew mind? Reb Hillel said, for ex- 
 ample: “As ye would that men should do 
 to you, do ye also likewise to them.” It 
 looks simple, but it is evident that Reb Hillel 
 wanted to say something else, because if that 
 was all he meant to say, where was his genius? 
 And Isaiah, the prophet of storms, could he 
 have said things that you and I could under- 
 stand immediately? Would God have poured 
 into his soul all the floods of Heaven and 
 earth to get out of his lips a small spring 
 of pure water? Those Rabbis were able to 
 make the most ordinary sayings incompre- 
 hensible. 
 
 138 4 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 They made everything difficult and they 
 always saw about ten different meanings in 
 a sentence, which obviously could have only 
 one. ‘They called to their rescue the host of 
 commentators who, for centuries, had worked 
 hard to solve that question; they were accus- 
 tomed to refuting one another and in the’end, 
 they, in turn, raised a magnificent edifice, a 
 sublime tower of David, a brilliant new solu- 
 tion which was interesting to them, only be- 
 cause it was absolutely different from any 
 they had considered previously. During the 
 lesson, any of the pupils had the right to 
 stop the Rabbi, to point out some weak point 
 in his logic. ‘They all crowded about him, 
 shouting in his ears in a frightful confusion, 
 for all they cared about was showing off. 
 They all answered together and in that small 
 space, covered with mouldy straw, which had 
 become the rendezvous of those extraordinary | 
 chatterers, those inimitable debaters, who for 
 ages have been seeking light in the darkness 
 and sunshine during the rainy weather, who 
 among them thought about hunger and cold? 
 
 [134] 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 Who would think about it, under that thatch 
 through which the night snow leaked as it 
 melted in the winter sun and fell in icy drops 
 on their delirious enthusiasm? 
 
 In those villages of Yeshiva it was an an- 
 cient custom and almost a duty for the Jews 
 to give hospitality to the students of the 
 Talmud. Each student took his midday meal 
 in the same house, sometimes for a week, a 
 month or six weeks and sometimes each day 
 at a different one. This was called making 
 a day, or simply a day. But a day was only 
 lunch and the evening’s dry bread was earned 
 in a very peculiar manner. Each Friday the 
 students left their school early to go begging 
 in the neighboring villages. Each had his 
 district, his begging territory which he visited 
 every week from dawn to sunset on Fridays. 
 He brought back from his journey enough to 
 buy his evening bread for the week and in 
 order to avoid being tempted by fresh 
 bread and not to eat too much during the 
 first days, they took good care to make seven 
 
 [135 7] 
 
IN EEE OE Te od INS he BeOS A Ee a 
 
 lines on the crust with chalk, a line for each 
 day. | 
 
 When Easter came they all went away for 
 about three weeks. Why? ‘To beg, of course. 
 Always to beg. To find enough to buy some 
 shirts, shoes, a caftan and books. They al- 
 ways chose to go to the poor synagogues 
 frequented by a few Jews, where the only 
 furnishings were four or five unsteady 
 benches, a barrel for ablutions, a tin candle- 
 stick and against the wall, the cupboard of 
 the Thora. ‘They made the unleavened bread, 
 their voices for singing the joyful hymns were 
 better than those of the ordinary cantor and 
 they preached sermons listened to with pleas- 
 ure by poor peasants not blasé about elo- 
 quence. ‘Then they went back to the shelter 
 of the thatch roof and their discussions began 
 again about the inexhaustible text. 
 
 The students and their Rabbis were the 
 only ones in the ghetto who knew Hebrew. 
 But as all the commentaries on the Biblical 
 text were made in Yiddish and it would have 
 been sacrilegious to use the sacred language 
 
 [136 7 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 even for religious teaching, it was a great 
 scandal, when here and there, in the ghetto, 
 young men well thought of in the Yeshiva, 
 began to take an interest in the old Hebraic 
 language for its own sake, learning its gram- 
 mar, appreciating its beauty and finally in 
 their audacity going as far as to use it for or- 
 dinary purposes. The Jew Mendelsohn had 
 outraged every decency in translating into 
 German the five books of Moses. As if it 
 were possible to take away from the Law the 
 sound that God gave it, without changing and 
 debasing it! A sin that was greater still was 
 to use in an ordinary manner the words used 
 by the Lord, those words that His mouth had 
 uttered, to make them fit things that the Lord 
 of the Jews was not interested in. The old 
 ghetto was getting worried, it called all those 
 young men Epicureans, making this word 
 mean all that poor humanity can conceive in 
 the way of vanity, sin and malice. The old 
 ghetto was partly right. This indiscreet 
 curiosity and this unheard-of carelessness 
 about abstract words were the tremors, the 
 
 [137 7 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 first signs of a desire for foreign knowledge, 
 of an aspiration, vague as yet, to escape from 
 the old discipline and the traditional science 
 centered altogether around the commentaries 
 of the Law. Through a very strange meet- 
 ing the taste for this language—asleep for 
 two thousand years—and the taste for new 
 thoughts were suddenly associated and 
 grew together as natural allies. Some 
 small newspapers written in Hebrew which 
 circulated under the caftan, began to 
 spread unknown venoms in far-away com- 
 munities. One day, a day not to be forgot- 
 ten, a novel, the first to be translated into 
 Hebrew, “The Mysteries of Paris,” suddenly 
 brought to the notice of austere Jewish life 
 the great prestige of Western civilization! 
 
 Eliezer Lazarovitch, who was short and 
 slight, with a yellow complexion, already the 
 prey of tuberculosis, was preaching one day 
 ina synagogue to some Jews gathered around 
 the almemar. ‘They all wore their greasy 
 caftans, their fur caps, their beards and their 
 
 [1384 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 curls. A stranger who did not wear the gab- 
 ardine, a Moscow merchant, on business in 
 the village, carried away by the eloquence 
 of the student, went up to him and offered 
 to take him into his house and to pay for his 
 education. He was one of those Jews who 
 admire Western culture and think they are 
 doing a worthy deed by rescuing from the 
 ghetto a promising boy to give him Russian 
 schooling. 
 
 In Moscow, Eliezer went to the Lycée. In 
 the evenings, after dinner, he gave Hebrew 
 lessons to Deborah, the eldest daughter of 
 the merchant, who was about his own age. 
 That went on for three or four years. One 
 day (it was in the spring of 1877) the mer- 
 chant, coming home, brought the news that 
 the Russians were going to fight the Turks 
 in order to help the Bulgarians. The whole 
 family was in favor of Turkey, but Eliezer 
 surprised them all by being violently in favor 
 of the Russians. “They are right to help 
 their brothers! We Jews never do that, that 
 is why we remain weak and scattered all over 
 
 [1397 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 the universe!” Everybody laughed at him 
 except Deborah. From that moment, the 
 other children made his life so unbearable 
 that he decided to go away. He confided 
 only in Deborah. She gave him some rubles 
 she had saved, then, when he crossed the 
 threshold for the last time, she put her hand 
 over his head, blessing him and saying good- 
 by: “God bless you, Eliezer, I'll come to you 
 whenever you call for me.” 
 
 He went on foot most of the time, stop- 
 ping at Warsaw, Lemberg and Berlin just 
 long enough to earn some money by giving 
 Hebrew lessons. It took him a year to reach 
 Paris. One day, in a barn, during this long 
 journey, his mission became plain to him 
 with a forcefulness that ideas often have in 
 Jewish minds where a Messianic dream lies 
 dormant. He would raise the old Hebraic 
 words from the dead, make Hebrew a living 
 language, he would discard along with the 
 gabardine and the fur cap, the awful Yiddish, 
 that jargon for second-hand dealers, made up 
 of odds and ends, a dialect only fit for slaves. 
 
 [1404 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 He would use the ancient language of the 
 Kings, the Prophets and the Judges and by 
 so doing, unite Israel again! . .. Every 
 thing seemed clear and simple to him, the 
 straw of the barn was shining and in com- 
 memoration of his resolution which was to 
 create a new life, in this poor barn without any 
 wise men, a Virgin or a star, he christened 
 himself, Ben Yehouda, son of Judea. 
 
 In Paris he found himself penniless. Then 
 a mysterious Pole appeared in his life, an 
 émigré of °48, who was dreaming of reviving 
 Poland as Ben Yehouda was dreaming of re- 
 viving Judea. ‘The Pole had taken a fancy to 
 this funny little Jew who dreamt the same 
 dream. Indeed they were as much alike in 
 their dreams as in their poverty. The clever 
 Pole knew Paris thoroughly and in moments 
 of distress he always found a place to which 
 they could invite themselves, and if no food 
 could be found, it was always easy to find 
 another kind of food, an ideal kind, in the 
 lecture rooms of the Collége de France, or in 
 the Chamber of Deputies, where the two 
 
 1417 
 
hl 4 OD. Gas A a a «ne As ee) ae Oo can Oi I Oe OR) a 
 
 friends would lunch on a speech of Gambetta. 
 
 It was no diet, of course, for a man with 
 tuberculosis. Ben Yehouda became ill, he 
 had to leave Paris for a warmer climate. 
 Where did the money come from for their 
 journey? The Pole looked after that. One 
 fine day they both arrived in Algiers. Al- 
 giers, Tunis, Carthage! On the top of the 
 hill where Dido settled at the head of a colony 
 of Phenicians from Tyre, the Son of Judea 
 dreamt to his heart’s content of the greatness 
 and spirit of enterprise of his Semite ances- 
 tors. He was thinking of going to Palestine, 
 where the editor of the Rose of Sharon, a 
 small weekly published in Hebrew, was offer- 
 ing him a fortune, a salary of twenty francs 
 amonth. Should he answer the call of Judea 
 and seize this golden opportunity? His heart 
 was for it, but the Pole was uneasy about 
 the life of poverty which Ben Yehouda would 
 find in Palestine and persuaded him to ask 
 first the advice of the man Ben Yehouda ad- 
 mired more than anybody else in the world, 
 
 [1424 
 
LEY SON eb FO Dh A 
 
 without ever having seen him, Smolensky, the 
 novelist of the ghetto. 
 
 I am sorry that I do not know Hebrew. 
 I have only read fragments, translated pages 
 of Smolensky’s famous novel, ““A Wanderer 
 Through Life’s Byways.” They have 
 stayed in my memory like the rays of light 
 Rembrandt suddenly projects into the shad- 
 ows of a synagogue. Such clear-sighted 
 glimpses of Jewish life! The page finished, 
 one is sorry to be in darkness once more, un- 
 able to accompany the hero whom he takes 
 from adventure to adventure through the un- 
 suspected misery and grandeur of the ghetto! 
 He had himself been an Epicurean, and it is 
 his own story that he tells all the time, the 
 story of the poor intellectual, who, in the great 
 disruption of ancient Jewish life in the midst 
 of the deepest poverty, looks for a plank to 
 cling to. He fled from the ghetto, exasper- 
 ated by its fanaticism, and wandered about 
 Europe, but the Occident failed him and he 
 discovered at last that the truth for a Jew ex- 
 
 [143 7 
 
Pd Ee Oh Ore GAL UE Ak IN ORL EO Ee OUT aS Al eke ns 
 
 ists only in Judaism and the Messianic ideal. 
 But what is the Messiah like? The old Jews 
 of the synagogue still see him as a divine 
 being enveloped in superstition and legend, 
 who will appear some day mounted on a 
 white horse, to bring Israel back to its home, 
 to see that justice is done. ‘To the Wanderer 
 who had found the Way, the Messianic idea 
 was not an empty dream nor the still unful- 
 filled hope of Heaven coming to the rescue. 
 It was an immediately realizable hope for the 
 moral and political resurrection of Israel, 
 which would become concrete as soon as the 
 Jews again became aware of their national 
 unity, through studying their language, their 
 religion and their social traditions. 
 
 Ben Yehouda found Smolensky in the mis- 
 erable room where he himself was printing 
 with a hand press his review, Haschabar 
 (Dawn), which gave such great hopes to the 
 unsatisfied in the ghetto. He kissed him 
 and told him of his plan of going to Pales- 
 tine. “You are mad!” cried Smolensky, “you 
 will be devoured there by lunatics and big- 
 
 [1447 
 
THE SON) OF JUDE A 
 
 ots!” He offered to keep him as a collabora- 
 tor to Dawn. That had been the Pole’s hope. 
 But a door opened, Deborah appeared! She 
 had also left her father’s roof and she was 
 ready to follow him to the end of the world, 
 that is to say, Jerusalem. They exchanged 
 the marriage rings at once. ‘Then the three 
 of them, the Son of Judea, Deborah and the 
 Pole, who could not reconcile himself to part- 
 ing from his companion, took a boat down the 
 Danube on their way to the City of Zion! 
 The Gates of Iron between Belgrade and 
 Orsova have seen many people pass, but they 
 have never seen any as romantic as these 
 three. In that journey on the river which 
 seems destined by nature to witness solemn 
 vows, Ben Yehouda declared solemnly to his 
 wife that from that moment he would speak 
 nothing but Hebrew to her. Although Deb- 
 orah knew only the few words he had taught 
 her, from that time on they always exchanged 
 their thoughts in that forgotten language, 
 which had been lost for centuries. In fact, 
 they were the only ones in the whole universe 
 
 [145 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 speaking it. They embarked on the Black 
 Sea. The crossing lasted twenty days, then 
 they traveled for twelve hours on donkeys 
 through sterile mountains full of marvelous 
 associations. Suddenly through the dust 
 which is always being blown about by the wind 
 in Palestine they saw the City of Eternal 
 Hope, with its indented walls, placed on a 
 stony plateau like a crown, but alas! only a 
 crown of thorns. 
 
 At that time, there were in Jerusalem about 
 twenty thousand Jews, crowded in a small 
 space, between the center of the town, the 
 Mohammedan bazaars and the garden of the 
 Armenian convent. It was an extraordinary 
 population, unlike any other in the world, 
 consisting chiefly of those old men who came 
 from everywhere, from Russia, Roumania, 
 Poland, to await the hour of their sleep in 
 the valley of Josaphat. Having gone in an 
 apotheosis, amid the cheers and the good 
 wishes of their assembled neighbors, they 
 found upon their arrival the eternal ghetto, 
 much more than that, their native one, be- 
 
 1467 
 
Die SON ORS! J U' DE A 
 
 cause they gathered together according to the 
 place, the town or the village from which they 
 came. Here those who came from Hungary, 
 Germany, Russia, Poland, Roumania, Aus- 
 tria, Caucasus and from Bokhara. ‘There 
 those who came from Tunisia, Morocco, 
 Egypt, Yemen, Salonica, Smyrna or Bagdad. 
 They were all small ghettos, all different and 
 yet they made two big families: the Jews from 
 the North and the Jews from the South. 
 Those from the North, the Ashkenazim, with 
 subtle and quick minds well versed in the Tal- 
 mud and the Law, very fanatical, untidy in 
 their appearance, spoke Yiddish; those from 
 the Mediterranean, the Sephardim, less 
 learned, less intellectual, more careful of their 
 appearance, with better manners and with 
 less fanaticism, spoke the Spanish patois that 
 the Jews banished from Spain in Isabella’s 
 time had brought with them. ‘The Ashkena- 
 zim and the Sephardim lived quite apart. 
 They did not pray together, they did not in- 
 termarry and they. would never eat with each 
 other, because they could not agree about the 
 
 p47 y 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 way of killing chickens. . . . As soon as they 
 arrived, all sought their own people and they 
 were happy to see relations, friends, to find 
 the life they thought they had left behind 
 them, the same dirt, the same poverty which 
 had eternally dogged their steps. But it is 
 sweet to find under foreign skies the customs 
 and the kind, of people that one had expected 
 to leave behind for ever. The most remarkable 
 thing was that those old men who had come 
 there to die found miraculously a renewal of 
 their youth! Did the air of Jerusalem awake 
 in them something of the Patriarch’s 
 strength? or must one believe the proverb 
 which says that long prayers preserve life? 
 In order to please Jehovah, who hates widow- 
 hood, many married, after a short stay, girls 
 of fourteen or fifteen. And the Lord be 
 praised, they had a posterity which added to 
 the Lord’s pride and to the poverty of the 
 town. 
 
 What enabled all these people to live was 
 the Holy Halouka, a fantastic institution 
 which, like everything else, is not a new de- 
 
 148 4 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 parture in Jerusalem. When Cyrus allowed 
 the Jews of Babylon to go back to Palestine 
 the same thing happened as has happened to- 
 day. Very few Jews accepted the favor ex- 
 tended to them. Exile is not always unprof- 
 itable. On the banks of the Euphrates the 
 captive Jews had not wasted time lamenting 
 under the willows; most of the exiles had done 
 very well in their businesses and they had no 
 desire to leave them to go back to Jerusalem. 
 The only ones who went back were the un- 
 successful ones, but the rich Jews of Babylon 
 acquired the habit of sending every year to 
 their poor coreligionists a sum of money to be 
 divided among them. It was called the 
 Halouka, and the custom has been kept up. 
 In all communities of Eastern Europe a tax 
 is raised for the support of the pious people 
 who live in Jerusalem. Each house has its 
 savings-box where, on every occasion—-happy 
 or unhappy—a coin is thrown in for the wail- 
 ers at the Wall. Once a year, alms-gatherers 
 come from Palestine to get the tax, to empty 
 the precious savings-boxes, bringing in ex- 
 
 [149 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 change some of the earth of Judea; a thread 
 that has gone round Rachel’s Tomb, or the 
 promise of a place in the Temple when re- 
 built. 
 
 These alms are not enough to enable the 
 beggars of Jerusalem to live, but, at least, it 
 prevents their dying. ‘They each get very 
 little of it. The journey to the Holy City 
 is long and a good deal of the money gets 
 lost on the way. For example, in Russia 
 the considerable sums given by Jewish charity 
 were first gathered by the Rabbi of Berdit- 
 chev, who passed them on to the Rabbi of 
 Zadagora. Those two personages, two dis- 
 tinguished Rabbis, each had a retinue and 
 lived on a grand scale. On Saturday, the 
 day of the ritual banquets, they always had 
 a hundred, sometimes two or three hundred 
 guests at their table. It was only natural 
 that they should keep some of the money 
 that went through their hands. Was it not 
 God’s will? Their secretaries were not rich 
 either and who would believe that the gather- 
 ers lived on nothing? When, at last, the 
 
 [ 1507 
 
CIN MO: RC IF 1) i A 
 
 money reached the City of Zion, it could not 
 be divided equally among everybody. ‘There 
 are ranks and castes even among: beggars, 
 there are noble beggars and common ones. 
 Could the grandson of a distinguished Rabbi 
 be treated in the same way as a man who 
 was a shoemaker in his village? 
 
 In Jerusalem, luckily, they have always 
 known the secret of how to live on nothing! 
 Except on Saturdays very few people in the 
 Lord’s city ever ate their fill. If everybody 
 had tried to, what would have happened? 
 Jerusalem’s ghetto would have disappeared 
 a long time ago from the Lord’s presence! 
 In their poverty, they helped one another. 
 Each one knew his neighbor’s poverty as well 
 as his own, they lent to one another a sauce- 
 pan of coal, a measure of flour, a little oil or 
 a little sugar, money, if there was any, and 
 everything was lent without receipt. Charity 
 was obligatory among those beggars. If 
 a hand were held out to them, they had to 
 give and to give something else besides a bless- 
 ing! But what is one to give when one has 
 
 [1517 
 
ONAN EXD WWE A SUES oh Lee OS a da Fe On 
 
 nothing? Is there another country in the 
 world where there exists such a touching and 
 bizarre thing as beggars’ money for beggars? 
 So that it could not be said that in the City 
 of the Lord a Jew had asked in vain from 
 another Jew; they had invented a money: 
 small squares of tin, worth about the tenth of 
 a half-penny, with which they could be gen- 
 erous. 
 
 The eternal lamentation dominated this 
 pious poverty. It is no exaggeration to say 
 that in Jerusalem, each day was a day of 
 mourning. The spring and the summer espe- 
 cially! For in those seasons favorable to 
 military expeditions, the city suffered from 
 many terrible disasters and the commemora- 
 tion of those ancient calamities made the 
 pleasantest seasons the saddest part of the 
 year. Between Easter and Pentecost, they 
 were in half-mourning, in remembrance of 
 the twenty-four thousand pupils of Reb 
 Akida massacred by the Romans. After the 
 seventeenth day of Tammuz, another period 
 of three weeks’ mourning, till Tische Beav. 
 
 [ 1527 
 
Pe AS GNG OB) JD BA 
 
 Then, a great lamentation in memory of the 
 destruction of the Temple by Titus. A 
 month before Rosh Hashana, a new explo- 
 sion of sorrow which gathered strength as 
 the terrible days of Yom Kippur approached. 
 In the middle of the night the shofar was 
 heard and the voice of the Shames shouting, 
 awoke everybody from their  slumbers: 
 “Awake, now is the hour. Go and worship 
 the Lord!’ In slippers, as it is written, and 
 with a lantern in their hands, the moribund 
 old men went through the narrow streets 
 where Arab urchins had scattered ground 
 glass. At the foot of the Wall or in the 
 synagogues, they could be heard uttering the 
 secular lamentation: “My heart groaneth 
 when I see every town proudly built on its hill 
 and the city of God lowered into the 
 abyss! ...” 
 
 There was no more washing, no more cut- 
 ting of hair, no giving in marriage, only a 
 continual fasting. At least it was good for 
 the slender resources of the ghetto. Every 
 place outside the walls seemed to the Jews to 
 
 [ 153] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 be full of ambushes and dangers, just as if Ti- 
 tus’ army were still encamping outside the 
 gates of the city. During that period of 
 mourning Jerusalem consisted only of the 
 Wall of Wailing and the vast burial ground, 
 which covers the hill, on the other side of 
 Kedron, with its tombs where the Jews found 
 their eternal rest after having prayed there 
 all their lives. They never went outside the 
 walls except on Saturday, the day of the 
 dead, to go and pray among the tombs. 
 There was once an old, blind man, who almost 
 every day had his son take him far away into 
 the country, telling him as they went: “Four 
 steps more, my child, on our Ancestors’ 
 ground, thus we shall please God!’ He was, 
 of course, thought to be eccentric. 
 
 In the town itself they seldom left the be- 
 loved quarter of the synagogues and their 
 blue-painted houses. Why should they go to 
 the impure quarters? What could they see 
 there? Nothing very agreeable! Maybe 
 Mohammedans, who up there, on the sacred 
 Esplanade, walked over the ground of the 
 
 1547 
 

 
 DEE SOO Na OR id LD EA 
 
 Holy of Holies, poisoning with their prayers 
 the place of David’s sacrifices, or maybe 
 Christians who made a god of the greatest 
 traitor among the Jews. 
 
 From time to time, some great Israelite 
 millionaires and philanthropists came there, 
 and the fanaticism and poverty touched their 
 hearts. With the pride of the Western Jew, 
 who does not pray or prays unostentatiously, 
 who washes and knows how to eat properly, 
 they were ashamed of this Jewry living in its 
 pious abjection, like Job on his manure-heap, 
 and wondered how the life of the ghetto could 
 be transformed and how those professional 
 beggars and lamentators could be made into 
 ordinary, decent people. One of them opened 
 a school; another imported weaving-machines 
 from England at enormous expense, with a 
 German engineer to show them how to use 
 them; another brought water to the town and 
 built better houses outside the walls; another 
 thought he could cause the old antagonism 
 between Ashkenazim and Sephardim to dis- 
 appear by giving them five pounds of sterling 
 
 [155] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 each time they intermarried. In spite of the 
 five pounds, Ashkenazim and Sephardim did 
 not marry; the weaving-machines were left 
 unassembled, their parts lying around in the 
 dust; nobody left the ghetto to live outside 
 the walls and as soon as a school was opened, 
 the shofar was sounded, anathema was ut- 
 tered against the director, the teachers and 
 the parents, who would send their children to 
 it, The utensils used for washing corpses 
 and the stretchers for the dead were brought 
 and laid outside the school. 
 
 Ben Yehouda arrived in this old ruin with 
 his new madness. He wanted to teach a new 
 tongue to people who hated each other, be- 
 cause they could not agree about the manner 
 of cleaning chickens; and people who loved 
 their Yiddish and their Spanish as the dia- 
 lects of their beloved pasts, he wanted to 
 unite by a superior conception of the Messiah! 
 What indignation, what scandal this sickly- 
 looking Jew created! He never spoke any- 
 thing but Hebrew everywhere he went and 
 
 [1567 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 no matter to whom he talked. They called 
 him a lunatic, children ran after him in the 
 streets, and in the synagogue there was al- 
 ways a furious fanatic ready to assemble the 
 faithful to the sound of the shofar and heap 
 curses on this impious person who degraded 
 the sacred tongue by using it in ordinary 
 speech. 
 
 He remained unperturbed, saying his 
 prayers, his forehead hidden by the tallith, 
 doing everything that pious people did. He 
 went out in the street with his head covered 
 by the black-and-white scarf worn by the real 
 devotees. It is true that after having lived a 
 long time with a Catholic Pole and after hav- 
 ing listened entranced to Gambetta, Jules 
 Ferry and Clemenceau, one can’t believe in 
 much. This Son of Judea believed only in the 
 miracle that words would make the He- 
 brews a nation again. When they drove him 
 out of one synagogue, he went to another. 
 Repulsed by the Ashkenazim, he went to the 
 Sephardim, then he abandoned altogether the 
 
 [1577 
 
CG OMT We CPO Te eal IN uly UR OP aS A io a 
 
 tallith and the phylacteries and gave up going 
 to the synagogues. 
 
 Poverty reigned at home. 'Twenty francs a 
 month to live on was very little even in Jeru- 
 salem where a chicken could be bought at 
 that time for four sous. Poor Deborah, ac- 
 customed to the ease of a well-to-do family 
 in Moscow, found herself suddenly plunged 
 into the hardest kind of Jewish life. And 
 things went rather badly with the Pole. When 
 he arrived, he stayed at a small hotel near the 
 Tower of David. What happened? Did he 
 fall in love with Deborah or was he jealous 
 because he was not any more the only one to 
 watch over Eliezer, or could he not bear life 
 any longer in this town of madmen? One 
 morning Ben Yehouda, going to see him as he 
 did every day found no one at home. The 
 enigmatic Pole had gone the day before, 
 leaving no address, and to this day no one 
 knows what became of him. Ben Yehouda’s 
 friend had disappeared, soon his money would 
 disappear too. The editor of The Rose of 
 Sharon could not keep this madman, who was 
 
 [158] 
 
De Se ONO Res UD) EA 
 
 ruining his paper, very much longer. He dis- 
 charged him. In this town to which the Son 
 of Judea had come in order to resurrect 
 a lost language, and among these people who 
 remained as deaf to his voice as the dead of 
 the Kedron valley, there remained only one 
 man interested in him, who would speak to 
 him without cursing him. His name was 
 Pines. He was a Lithuanian, a well-read 
 man himself who after long stays in France 
 and Germany had come lately to settle in 
 Palestine. He had written in Hebrew a 
 work famous among the intellectuals of the 
 ghetto, “The Children of My Mind,” in 
 which he defended traditional Judaism, 
 and on that point he did not resemble the 
 unbeliever, Ben Yehouda, but he found pleas- 
 ure in discussions with him in the desert of 
 Judea. 
 
 “You are wrong,” he said, “to rebel against 
 all the people here. The practices and rites 
 which excite your indignation are as neces- 
 sary to us as a wick to a candle. How do 
 you think Israel can continue to exist if it 
 
 p59 
 
SUN OUR ee Ake IN te ie OS) A Es 
 
 gives up its beliefs? A people who own their 
 own country can live without religion, but our 
 scattered people have only their adherence to 
 their faith to unite them. I love the Hebrew 
 language as much as you do, but do not make 
 it an instrument for our own destruction. 
 Don’t let us give up our souls for the pleasure 
 of enjoying the ancient Hebrew words. 
 Don’t let us deprive them of all the precious 
 meanings which make our greatness. ‘The 
 Hebrew you want us to speak would be a 
 language a hundred times more dead than it 
 is to-day, if when we use it constantly it 
 expresses no longer the thoughts and feelings 
 it has carried throughout the world.” 
 
 Ben Yehouda told his friend that for him 
 the religious spirit was not the whole of 
 Israel, but the passing form of a supple and 
 varied genius only waiting to express itself 
 with a new force till it had found its own 
 language and its own country again. Be- 
 tween these two men with such different 
 thoughts but with the same ideals that had 
 brought them both to Jerusalem, the discus- 
 
 [160] 
 

 
 Ly Eh Sas re INS OF FCT Ee A 
 
 
 
 sion went on interminably, just as formerly 
 they had argued ceaselessly in the Yeshivas of 
 Lithuania. 
 
 Deborah was going to be a mother and 
 good old Pines used to tell her when he found 
 her alone: “Deborah, as you are going to 
 have a child, try to persuade your husband 
 to let him learn a living language so that 
 he won’t be an idiot!” But the fanatic used 
 to answer: “Let him be an idiot! We'll 
 have another child! He shall speak He- 
 brew!’ The child was born, a boy, and he 
 had to be circumcised. Pines got a Sephar- 
 dim Rabbi to perform the operation, no Ash- 
 kenazim would have agreed to do it. When, 
 in accordance with the rites, the Rabbi asked: 
 “What name do you wish to give to your 
 son?” Ben Yehouda did not give one of those 
 good old Jewish names which, all through 
 life, bring luck to those who bear them, Abra- 
 ham, Jacob or Moses. Thinking of the new 
 race which would spring some day from the 
 old Hebraic tree, through the mysterious vir- 
 
 [1614] 
 
“NEAL Y BARING JEROSAL EM?’ 
 
 tue of the beloved language born again, he 
 invented a name which had never before been 
 heard in a synagogue: “Ithamar, that is to 
 say, Trunk of a Palm-Tree!” The godfather 
 nearly let the child drop from his arms! 
 
 Three years went by and it seemed as if 
 Jehovah Himself wanted to show His anger, 
 for the three-year-old Ithamar had not ut- 
 tered a word, neither in Hebrew nor in any 
 other language. Wise Pines used to say: 
 “Do speak to him in some other language but 
 Hebrew and maybe he will answer.” One 
 day when Deborah was telling Pines her sor- 
 rows and her fear that the Lord was trying to 
 chastise her husband because of his audacious 
 sacrileges by giving them a mute son, a billy- 
 goat went near the child. Ithamar, fright- 
 ened, ran to his mother at once shouting in 
 perfect Hebrew: “Mamma! Mamma!’ 
 Blessed goat of Israel! It was the first He- 
 brew word uttered by a child for centuries, as 
 a word of his mother tongue. ‘This word 
 being “mamma,” how could one help seeing a 
 symbol in it! 
 
 [162] 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 Five children followed the first. These 
 births and tuberculosis wore out Deborah. 
 Ben Yehouda was still fighting his co- 
 religionists. In his small paper, Glory, he 
 was attacking the Holy Halouka, shaming 
 the people of the ghetto because they lived 
 by begging. It was the breaking-point. The 
 madman could talk Hebrew with his family 
 if he liked, but to attack the charity which 
 enabled everybody to live! To represent the 
 pious people of the Wall, the wailers of the 
 Holy City, as lazy and unworthy of Israel’s 
 bounties! All the shofars sounded. In the 
 great mosque of Ashkenazim Jews, candles 
 wrapped in black cloth were lighted and the 
 antique formula of excommunication was 
 pronounced against this impious one, this 
 scorner of sacred usages. “Let Ben Yehouda 
 be excommunicated according to the judg- 
 ment of the Lord God in the two tribunals, 
 the higher one and the lower! Let calami- 
 ties fall upon him! May his house be inhab- 
 ited by dragons! May his star be hidden by 
 clouds and may it be full of anger and fury 
 
 [163 7 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 against him! Let his body be thrown to the 
 serpents, his gold and his silver taken away 
 from him. Let his wife be given to others 
 and let others lie with her! May he be 
 cursed through the mouths of Addirion and 
 Achtariel, Gabriel and Seraphie, Raphael 
 and Mecharetiel! May he fall and never rise 
 again! Let him not be buried in Israel’s 
 burying-ground! Let this excommunication 
 rest upon him and his descendants! But let 
 all Israel be blessed with the peace and bless- 
 ings of the Lord!” At the end of the cere- 
 mony the candles were put out to show that 
 the accursed was henceforth excluded from 
 the light of Heaven. 
 
 The next day, the excommunicated one 
 wrote in Glory an article beginning in this 
 way: “I am dead, but I still live!” His 
 wife threw herself at his feet, she felt death 
 coming. “Eliezer, please go and ask pardon, 
 because if you die you will be buried like a 
 donkey and so shall the children and myself!” 
 Once more Pines intervened. He obtained 
 from the Sephardim, who are a little more 
 
 [ 164] 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 open-minded, the concession that no anath- 
 ema should be pronounced against Ben Ye- 
 houda in their synagogue and this concession 
 made the last days of Deborah a little hap- 
 pier. She saw death coming and she was 
 asking herself in anguish what would happen 
 to her husband and her five children in the 
 midst of so much hatred when she was dead. 
 Then she had an idea, one of those ideas that 
 can come only to one in the depths of misery, 
 when there is nothing near to rely upon. ) 
 Deborah wrote to her mother to come from 
 Moscow. She came and was astonished to 
 discover the poverty that Deborah had man- 
 aged to hide from her and to find her daugh- 
 ter dying. That was not all, for, as a supreme 
 consolation, Deborah asked that her sister 
 should leave the family to come to Jerusalem 
 and marry her husband, the tubercular, the 
 accursed, to lead the kind of life which had 
 brought her, Deborah, to an early grave. 
 Her burial was a tragic affair, for except 
 for the devoted Pines, nobody followed the 
 coffin of the woman who spoke only Hebrew! 
 
 [165 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 On Mount Zion, at the turn of the road one 
 follows to go down to the valley of Josa- 
 phat, the place from where one can see the 
 Mount of Olives, an Ashkenazim mob which 
 had gathered there shouted that they would 
 not allow the body to proceed further, to pol- 
 Jute the holy burial ground of their dead. 
 They threw stones! Was poor Deborah go- 
 ing to have a donkey’s funeral, after all, as 
 she had feared? The frightened pallbearers 
 let their burden fall, and Ben Yehouda 
 thought for an instant that he would have to 
 retrace his steps and bury his dead in his own 
 ground. But some pitying Sephardim took 
 up the coffin and Pines calmed down the in- 
 furiated mob. ‘They stopped stoning the 
 coffin and the cortege was allowed to proceed 
 to the valley of Kedron. Under the burning 
 sun, amid the innumerable tombs, they went 
 up the hill and Deborah was buried in the 
 last grave, in a very remote corner, and 
 on her tombstone the Son of Judea placed 
 the following words which expressed his love 
 and his hope which did not yield even to 
 
 r 166 7 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 death: ‘To Deborah, the first mother of the 
 newly reborn Jewish people!” 
 
 Some months later, in Constantinople, 
 Ben Yehouda married Deborah’s sister. He 
 came back with her to Palestine and his mis- 
 eries began all over again. On the anniver- 
 sary of the Maccabees, he wrote an article 
 full of enthusiastic nationalism; in the name 
 of the glorious martyrs he asked that the 
 Ancestral Land be given back to its rightful 
 owners, the Jews. ‘This wish left the old 
 Jews of the ghetto absolutely indifferent; they 
 were satisfied with the Wall as long as they 
 were allowed to wail there, but they saw in 
 that article a chance of getting rid of a man 
 who offended them daily. They denounced 
 him to the Turks. It is not the first time 
 that the Jews of the synagogue have turned 
 to Pontius Pilate. ... Ben Yehouda was 
 condemned to fifteen years’ hard labor. ‘Two 
 policemen entered the room on the very day 
 his wife was having her first child and took 
 him to prison. He appealed, but in order to 
 
 [ 167 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 be allowed out while waiting for the sen- 
 tence, he had to secure bail for two hundred 
 pounds. Where was he to find anybody who 
 would put up two hundred pounds? ‘Twice 
 already the clerk of the court had asked: 
 “Who will go bail for Ben Yehouda?” with- 
 out any answer, when a pilgrim from Moroc- 
 co, who happened by chance to be there, de- 
 clared that he would go bail for him. He 
 did it out of pity, as he had never heard of 
 Ben Yehouda before. Just then the rain that 
 had been expected for three months began to 
 fall, and superstitious people, who in the 
 bottom of their hearts were sorry to have be- 
 trayed a member of their race to the Turks, 
 attributed this favor from Heaven to his 
 deliverance. 
 
 Blessed rain! All that happened at the 
 time when Theodore Herzl was sowing in 
 the world the idea that one could bring back 
 Israel’s unity through political means, that 
 unity which the Son of Judea was trying to 
 _ bring about by restoring the Hebrew lan- 
 guage and the Hebrew genius. The two 
 
 [168 4 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 movements were akin to each other. The 
 new Jewish people needed a language. 
 Would they be mad enough to give prefer- 
 ence to English, French or German, slighting 
 Hebrew? It was the same problem that they 
 had already faced when choosing a country. 
 Herzl would have accepted English as he 
 accepted Uganda because he had never really 
 belonged to the ghetto. The people who fol- 
 lowed him were more deeply imbued with 
 Jewish feeling and loved the language and 
 the country of their ancestors equally. ‘To 
 them, the Son of Judea, the madman of 
 Jerusalem, who was the first to speak only 
 Hebrew with his family, became a hero, the 
 hero of the resurrection of Israel. They 
 thought with gratitude of this man who, 
 through the worst tribulations, went on with 
 his immense undertaking to write a dictionary 
 of the Hebraic language—not a tomb of 
 words, but a building full of life, to house all 
 the modern ideas, feelings and other things 
 unknown in ancient times. 
 
 The old Jews of Jerusalem went on turn- 
 
 r 1694 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 ing away with the same horror as before from 
 the schools founded outside the walls by phi- 
 lanthropists from the Occident, but the people 
 who arrived in Palestine as the forerunners 
 of the scattered people sent their children 
 there. The most important one had been 
 founded a long time before by the Universal 
 Jewish Alliance and the teaching was given 
 there in French. In order to harm this school, 
 the Germans, in their turn, opened a school 
 and in order to draw pupils they announced 
 that all the teaching would be done in He- 
 brew, but when success followed they changed 
 their tactics, gave only one or two hours a 
 week to Hebrew and replaced it by German. 
 Then there was a revolt, the first revolt in 
 Jerusalem since Bar-Kochba and _ Reb- 
 Akida. It was a children’s revolt. Boys and 
 girls destroyed their copy-books and their 
 books and left the school in a riot, and as 
 this took place on the day of the Maccabees, 
 the rebellious schoolgirls brought to Ben Ye- 
 houda a beautiful seven-branched candlestick 
 
 [1707 
 
THE ISON ORY JO DEA 
 
 with its candles lighted, while outside the 
 boys sang Israel’s song of hope. 
 
 After this coup d'état, a very limited num- 
 ber of pupils went back to the Germans. 
 With the National Fund, purely Hebraic 
 schools were opened. ‘They have multiplied 
 since Balfour’s Declaration. In the same 
 Palestine where, forty years ago, the Son of 
 Judea, poor and tubercular, arrived full of 
 enthusiasm with the faithful Deborah and the 
 unfaithful Pole, everybody to-day speaks 
 Hebrew except the old men of the ghetto. It 
 is the official language of the country, to- 
 gether with Arabic and English. The first 
 gesture of the Zionists on the Ancestral Land 
 was to put up a symbol to this resurrection 
 of the Jewish mind and the Jewish language. 
 Up there on the Mount of Olives overlooking 
 the valley of Josaphat, the Mosque of Omar, 
 the Holy Sepulcher and all Jerusalem, they 
 have laid twelve stones—one for each tribe 
 of Israel—the twelve foundation-stones of 
 the First Hebrew University. 
 
 Ben Yehouda died recently. The death of 
 
 171 J 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 a poor tubercular Jew in Jerusalem and his 
 burial in the Kedron valley was an event 
 which created no stir in the world. The 
 newspaper that brought me the information 
 said that he was given a magnificent funeral. 
 I accompanied him in imagination along the 
 road followed once by poor Deborah. Did 
 his corpse feel anything when the place was 
 reached where the infuriated Ashkenazim 
 stoned her coffin? What did old Sonnenfeld 
 think when he saw, through the bars of his 
 window, a great crowd behind the Zionist 
 banners escorting to his tomb the accursed 
 one against whom he had so often sounded 
 his shofar? I saw him again, in his room, 
 the small, weak, dying man, surrounded by 
 the files and the indexes of his monumental 
 Dictionary, where every word of Hebrew has 
 its history, or its newly acquired pedigree re- 
 corded, Ben Yehouda being very like a chem- 
 ist who has just found a powerful explosive. 
 What will be the fate of those words raised 
 from the dead? What future is in store for 
 those old servants of Adonai? Will they be 
 
 [172] 
 
THE SON OF JUDEA 
 
 used to clothe in an oriental form the banal 
 thoughts of Western civilization? Or will 
 they be used to teach new truths and shall we 
 see because of them a renewal of the genius 
 of the Prophets? Will they give a voice to 
 the Jews all over the world or will they sim- 
 ply be the means of imprisoning them in a 
 spiritual ghetto, narrower than the old one? 
 Will this new kind of powder, word powder, 
 upset the universe, or will it be only the wet 
 fuse of useless fireworks? 
 
 [1737 
 

 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
4 + Pi tas 
 iy ee as i 
 
 Pe ‘ " ; 
 
 Pe) es ae ae 
 ne eas ’ 
 Vireo my 
 
 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 Tuis drama has for its setting the most 
 romantic spot in the world. I went there, one 
 morning, from Haifa, over a road running 
 through a narrow plain lying between the sea 
 and the mountain-range of Mount Carmel. 
 The drive in a, carriage lasts one hour. Part 
 of the time a rocky cliff makes a kind of wall 
 along the seacoast and hides the Mediterra- 
 nean; then one comes upon a breach in the cliff 
 itself, Just wide enough for two horsemen. 
 Once through this pass, one is separated from 
 the sea only by a narrow stretch of low and 
 marshy land. There on a rocky peninsula, 
 one can see the remains of one of those 
 Frankish forts, which from Mount Moab 
 down to the Mediterranean, from the Taurus 
 to Mount Sinai, are the remnants of the great 
 defeat which the Occident suffered in these 
 parts. It is the fort of Athlit which is pro- 
 
 Curry 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 tected by a small inlet, where the vessels of 
 the Crusaders once found shelter. In Syria, 
 in Tripoli, in Markhab, on Kalaat el Hoson 
 and even on the river Euphrates, I have seen 
 much more awe-inspiring ruins than this 
 Frankish fort that I saw from an aeroplane, 
 so isolated, so forsaken and the name of which 
 I can’t even recall. What gives more melan- 
 choly grandeur to this ruin of Athlit than to 
 any other castle of the Holy Land is the 
 thought that these lofty ruined walls saw the 
 supreme moment of the Kingdom of Jeru- 
 salem. The last Frankish knight embarked 
 here after one hundred years of strife carry- 
 ing away with him the bitterness of wasted 
 effort. 
 
 It happened seven centuries ago and since 
 then nothing has happened in this ruin except 
 the falling of stones, the slow disintegration 
 of everything, the smothering of the past 
 under parasitic plants and the trivial events 
 which from birth to death ‘(both included) 
 fill the existence of some Bedouin families 
 camped with their goats and asses in those 
 
 r178 J 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 parts haunted with memories of the distant 
 past. Nothing, that is, until the story of 
 Sarah. 
 
 On the other side of the cliff, just opposite 
 the breach made in the rock, the breach being 
 like the gate of a rampart, a long drive bor- 
 dered with palm-trees can be seen, very much 
 like those one sees on the Cdte d’ Azur lead- 
 ing to some beautiful house. Palm-trees are 
 rarely seen in Palestine and in the naked 
 plain this beautiful drive, looking as if it 
 belonged to some casino, is quite out of keep- 
 ing with its surroundings. It leads to a very 
 simple-looking house, some outhouses and 
 an artesian well with its wheel. It is all de- 
 serted, abandoned. The impassibility of the 
 ruin of Athlit, its indifference to everything 
 that has happened since its adventure of long 
 ago, is replaced here by a very human 
 sadness, as if it had hardly recovered yet from 
 some terrible blow. ‘The doors, the closed 
 windows, some agricultural implements which 
 are rusting under an outhouse, the well 
 where a pail is still hanging at the end of the 
 
 [1794 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 rope, the wheel at the top of its shaft, which 
 begins turning with a slight creaking—there 
 is a strangeness and everywhere there is an 
 uneasy, uncanny silence about that ordinary- 
 looking house at the end of its pretentious 
 drive, the kind of silence that surrounds the 
 events that took place there. 
 
 Before the war an agricultural engineer 
 called Aaron Aronsohn lived there. The 
 Aronsohn family belonged to a group of 
 Roumanian Jews who had settled in Palestine 
 about fifty years ago. Their beginnings had 
 been very difficult. A Roumanian company 
 had bought from Samarin two to three hun- | 
 dred acres of land, half of which was plow- 
 ing-land and the remainder for vineyards and 
 olive-trees. The locality was healthy, about 
 three hundred and sixty feet above sea-level, 
 in a very agreeable spot from where on one 
 side the Mediterranean could be seen, and, 
 on the other, the rich plain which rises slowly 
 to the mountain-range of Mount Carmel. 
 There was room for about twenty families. 
 Sixty arrived, about one hundred and twenty- 
 
 [ 180] 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 
 
 five people who soon found themselves 
 stranded, without money, the funds of the 
 company having been just enough to pay for 
 the land and the journey. ‘There was no 
 place where they could house themselves, just 
 a few wooden huts and the greater part of the 
 emigrants had to stay in Haifa in extreme 
 poverty. Some of them, more robust than 
 the rest, settled in Samarin. They were for 
 the most part drivers of coaches, ruined by 
 the building of railways, who had from time 
 to time done some work for landowners, so 
 they had acquired some experience in culti- 
 vating the land. Their efforts did not accom- 
 plish much and like all the colonists who were 
 settling in Palestine at that time they were 
 on the point of going under when the Baron 
 Edmund de Rothschild came to their rescue. 
 He adopted the people of Samarin as he had 
 adopted many others. From that moment 
 the colony, which had changed its name for 
 the more harmonious one of Zichron-Jacob, 
 Jacob’s Remembrance, had led a sheltered 
 and uneventful existence, the peaceful life 
 
 [ 181 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 of the Rothschild’s foundations. To-day, 
 Zichron-Jacob, with its beautiful view, its 
 three thousand acres of land and its comfort- 
 able villas, is really an agreeable spot, “a 
 small Switzerland,” as the J ews there call it, 
 though, of course, they are as prone to exag- 
 gerate as the people of Marseilles. 
 
 The Aronsohns were typical of those first 
 emigrants. They led quietly the life of the 
 bourgeois, a thing that always exasperates 
 the modern Jews of Palestine. The head of 
 the family had four children: Aaron and 
 Alexander, Sarah and Rebecca. He never 
 dreamed of making peasants out of his sons 
 and Aaron was sent to France, to the agricul- 
 tural institute of Montpellier. He came back 
 with his diploma of an engineer. While in 
 Jerusalem Ben Yehouda was fighting to make 
 his race accept Hebrew as their every-day 
 language, Aaron Aronsohm was going round 
 the country studying the fauna and the flora 
 of Palestine, its resources of every kind and 
 the means by which the country could be re- 
 vived if some day it were given back to its 
 
 [ 182 7 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 rightful owners. He was a small man, his 
 face as square as his body, clean-shaven, 
 sunburnt, with untidy red hair falling all 
 over his forehead, very thick-lipped, heavy- 
 jowled, with teeth on which dentists had en- 
 crusted a lot of gold, hairy hands, in short, a 
 red bull. He was intellectually energetic, 
 full of confidence in himself, very dogmatic, 
 rather sarcastic and with a natural bent for 
 advertising and bluff. In the course of his 
 travels through the Hauran, he found a plant 
 which he called wild wheat. He thought that 
 by cultivating it the food resources of the 
 world could be enormously increased. He left 
 Palestine at once to introduce his remarkable 
 wheat to all the capitals of Europe. The 
 botanists of Berlin and Paris were not very 
 enthusiastic about his find. He went to 
 America where it is easier to make an impres- 
 sion. ‘There he interested in his plans some 
 Jews who gave him enough money to create 
 in Palestine an experimental farm. That 
 was the origin of the trial-station, the Station, 
 as it was called, the place that I saw in the 
 
 [183] 
 
ee 
 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM?’ 
 
 plain of Athlit as dead and as desolate as the 
 old Frankish fort. 
 
 Some years before the war, a young man 
 of a very different stamp joined him there. 
 He was, like Aronsohn, a Palestinian Jew, 
 born on one of the Baron’s colonies. Absalom 
 Feinberg had also gone to France to perfect 
 his education but the resemblance stopped 
 there. He was very unsettled, very much 
 attracted by literature and philosophy, filled 
 with an ardor which had not yet found an 
 outlet. What is truth? On what basis should 
 he build his life? Such were the thoughts 
 which in 1906 filled his mind in the streets of 
 Paris, while he was seeking the Absolute. 
 Catholicism attracted and repelled him at the 
 same time. A Frenchman, a friend of his, 
 used to say to him: “Pray, my dear Absalom, 
 and you'll find God!” He told him this in a 
 garden of a Paris suburb and Feinberg went 
 down on his knees on the gravel and began 
 invoking Christ with the fervor of an Ortho- 
 dox Greek calling for the Sacred Fire or 
 
 [184] 
 
RHR OSLORY) OF SARAH 
 
 any of the Jews at the Wall of Wailing. But 
 after half an hour, God having not revealed 
 Himself, Feinberg stopped praying, his 
 knees ached and he was sadly disillusioned. 
 He dreamt also of going to America and 
 becoming immensely rich so that he could 
 press the power of money into service for his 
 dreams. In the end, he did not become a 
 Catholic, he did not go to America, he simply 
 went back to Palestine. At the Station he 
 became Aaron Aronsohn’s secretary and 
 shortly after that he became engaged to the 
 youngest sister, Rebecca. The life he led in 
 that out-of-the-way place, occupied with 
 things so unlike his tastes, must have ap- 
 peared very miserable to him after all the 
 high hopes he had entertained. Yet, the 
 reason why he should be alive, which he had 
 been seeking in vain in the streets of Paris, 
 was given to him, in that lost corner, at the 
 foot of the wheel of the artesian well, at the 
 end of the drive of palm-trees. 
 
 The idea that Palestine should belong to 
 the Jews formed an integral part of Absa- 
 
 [ 185 J 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 lom’s being, but that idea had hitherto been 
 too dependent upon the chances of inter- 
 national politics to attract and hold his atten- 
 tion. The War changed his point of view. 
 By proclaiming that they were fighting for 
 oppressed nationalities, the Allies seemed to 
 have done away with such unimportant things 
 as political difficulties. Henceforth, it ap- 
 peared, success did not depend upon the 
 precarious good-will of foreign governments 
 but solely upon Israel’s faith and energy. 
 As it was a question of sacrifice and devotion, 
 he gave himself entirely to the cause. | 
 
 But he could not serve the cause in the soli- 
 tude of Athlit. Feinberg left the Station, 
 succeeded in reaching Kgypt and proposed to 
 the English authorities there that they organ- 
 ize in Palestine a secret service. ‘They agreed 
 and he went back to Athlit. But weeks and 
 months passed while Aaron and he watched 
 in vain from the Station for the English boat 
 which was to communicate with them by 
 means of prearranged signals. ‘Then they 
 both decided to disguise themselves as 
 
 r 186 7 
 

 
 THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 Bedouins, to go through the Sinai desert on 
 camels and through the lines to Cairo. They 
 started. The Turks arrested them and they 
 were brought to Djemal, Governor of Syria. 
 Aronsohn, who knew him, took the adventure 
 as a joke and with his usual self-assurance 
 told him that he was just going through the 
 desert in order to investigate certain swarms 
 of locusts which had been brought to his 
 notice. Djemal did not suspect him. This 
 young Turk, hard and suspicious and very 
 intelligent, let himself be imposed upon by 
 the scientific reputation of the agricultural 
 expert. He freed the two friends and shortly 
 after gave Aronsohn permission to go to Ger- 
 many where he was to pursue his researches. 
 This journey had been planned to enable 
 them to reestablish communication with 
 Egypt. From Berlin, Aronsohn went to 
 Copenhagen and embarked on a Scandina- 
 vian vessel for America. In the North Sea 
 the boat was searched by an English man-of- 
 war. Aronsohn was arrested as a subject of 
 an enemy nation, was taken to London and 
 
 [187] 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 there he established his identity, enlisted in 
 the British army and was sent to the Egyp- 
 tian front. 
 
 This odyssey had lasted about seven or 
 eight months. In Athlit, Feinberg was 
 beginning to lose patience and was thinking 
 of trying again his unlucky attempt of the 
 year before. He confided his ambition to 
 Sarah Aronsohn, the elder sister of his fiancée, 
 Rebecca, Rebecca being in London where 
 the War had caught her unawares. Sarah was 
 a woman about thirty years old who had 
 married, in Constantinople, a Bulgarian Jew. 
 She had not been able to get on with this 
 coarse-grained man and had come back to her 
 father and to the colony of Zichron-Jacob 
 where she had always lived. She tried to dis- 
 suade Absalom from such an enterprise, re- 
 minding him of the dangers of the road he 
 would have to follow, the hanging that would 
 be his fate if he were caught again, pointing 
 out that he was endangering all the Jews in 
 Palestine if the Turks found out that a Jew 
 was conspiring against them and finally talk- 
 
 [188 7 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 ing of the sorrow of Rebecca if anything 
 should happen to him. Absalom persisted in 
 his idea and, accompanied by a friend, a boy 
 called Lichansky, he started again over the 
 dangerous roads. 
 
 They crossed the desert without mishap 
 and were in sight of the British lines when a 
 patrol of Bedouins and Turks signaled to 
 them to stop. Instead of obeying they in- 
 creased the pace of their mounts. The Turks 
 pursued them, firing the while. Absalom fell, 
 mortally wounded. His companion was 
 struck by three bullets, but was able to 
 remain in the saddle and to reach the first 
 English post. He was carried to Cairo and 
 it was there that Aronsohn who had just ar- 
 rived found him in a hospital. They agreed 
 on means of communication. As soon as he 
 was on his feet again Lichansky went back 
 to Palestine on an English boat which left 
 him at night in the small bay of Athlit. 
 
 Then a terrible life began for Sarah 
 Aronsohn, for now that Absalom was dead, 
 she assumed the responsibility of going on 
 
 [189] 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 with his work, securing information and con- 
 veying it to the English: “My heart is always 
 trembling,” she wrote in a letter I saw, “be- 
 cause we are doing perilous work and are 
 always in danger. It is difficult for me to 
 write about our misfortune (she was thinking 
 of Absalom’s death) it is so great and there 
 is no consolation. Our dear one gave his 
 blood, he gave his life for a sacred cause. But 
 the sacrifice is too great, even if we succeed 
 and if Israel’s redemption rewards our ef- 
 forts, even then I won’t be consoled. If our 
 friend were alive still and if he had heard 
 that the Allies were ready to give Palestine 
 back to us, how happy he would have been! 
 We have this happiness and it was he who 
 ran all the risks. Here I am, taking part in 
 the work, I am not afraid of danger, I am as 
 hard as iron. Sometimes I feel like an inor- 
 ganic force, otherwise how could I bear such 
 a sacrifice? I am going on with what our 
 dear one began and I’ll have my revenge, a 
 great revenge on both the savages of the 
 wilderness and on the savages of the cities.” 
 
 r 190 4 
 
Pde SOR Ys OBS A RATT 
 
 Urged by Aronsohn, from time to time the 
 English sent a ship to lie off Athlit. A canoe 
 would leave it at night and land on the beach, 
 at the foot of the ruined fort of the Crusaders. 
 People hiding among the rocks would watch 
 for its arrival to give the sailors the informa- 
 tion gathered by Sarah and her companions, 
 but the ship did not always arrive when due. 
 Sarah used to despair: “This is the fifth 
 night,” she wrote to her brother, “that our 
 men have gone out and waited till morning 
 without any results. They come back dis- 
 heartened, irritated, discouraged. ‘To risk 
 one’s life is hard enough, but to risk it for 
 nothing is worse. We spend a lot of energy 
 and money to get news and they are not on 
 time. To go to the bay is not easy, for, as you 
 know, it is courting death. The English do 
 not come, they are afraid of risking their men. 
 When they send a canoe they have hardly 
 touched shore when they leave, and yet we 
 expose our men for whole nights. I am mis- 
 erable when I see them coming back after 
 useless waiting! One fear haunts me, is the 
 
 [191] 
 
t 
 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 thing worth while? Will our people really 
 receive something in return for the lives we 
 put in jeopardy by helping the English? 
 You know that we expose to danger not only 
 our heads but a lot of others, those of the 
 whole population, in fact....’ As her brother 
 had been sending her soap and some toilet 
 accessories, since he knew they had none, she 
 begged him not to do it again. “Our people 
 do not risk their lives for such frivolities. 
 Please send me a revolver.” 
 
 Time went on. ‘The English army en- 
 camped in front of Gaza for months and 
 months without attacking, in spite of Sarah’s 
 , reports which showed that the Turkish army 
 was completely demoralized and incapable 
 of withstanding the shock of an attack. From 
 day to day, the situation was becoming more 
 and more desperate. Djemal knew that a 
 band of spies was at work in Palestine and in 
 his violent anger when he learned that Aron- 
 sohn had abused his confidence threatened all 
 the Jews. So that was the way they acted, 
 those people that Turkey had always made 
 
 [1927 
 
TAIT) ihe Oe ee Olde) mia te A ED 
 
 welcome, who had found shelter with her 
 when they were being massacred elsewhere. 
 And Aaron Aronsohn who had pretended to 
 be his friend, to whom he had given a pass- 
 port and who had gone over to the English! 
 .. In the first flush of his anger he wanted 
 to put to the sword all the Jews in the coun- 
 try, Just as Titus had done, and he was the 
 kind of man to put his threat into effect if he 
 had not been afraid that he would have the 
 opinion of the whole world against him. 
 But the Jews, who up to that time had led 
 a peaceful existence, having been able to es- 
 cape requisitions and military service by 
 giving baksheesh, were now less fortunate. 
 In the towns and in the country, the ancient 
 dread of the pogroms, that they thought had 
 been left behind for ever when they aban- 
 doned Russia, reappeared very much more 
 quickly than it had stopped. The Jews 
 knew that the Aronsohns’ house was head- 
 quarters for the spies and they had a grudge 
 against them because of the risk they made 
 everybody run. Sarah felt the hostility 
 
 [193 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 everywhere around her and she knew that 
 some day she might be betrayed by her own 
 people. Luckily for her, the English were 
 going to attack, but would they do it soon 
 enough? Each day, each hour that went by 
 increased the danger. “Not one second is to 
 be lost,” she wrote to her brother. “They 
 must come before September 27th. Who 
 knows whether they will find me alive then? 
 The situation is becoming worse and worse. 
 Our Jews themselves are the cause of my 
 uneasiness. ‘They are all indignant and 
 frightened. It may be possible that they 
 are ready to betray us to Djemal. Please 
 have pity upon us, act quickly, come soon, do 
 not abandon us... .” 
 
 During this period of agonized waiting 
 the Feast of Succoth arrived. This feast 
 commemorates the period when the He- 
 brews were wandering in the wilderness 
 before entering the Land of Canaan and is 
 one of the rare occasions on which Israel lets 
 itself be joyful. In those blissful days, sad 
 Jerusalem itself, the city where one hears 
 
 p94 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 only lamentations from one end of the year 
 to the other, forgets its sorrow and takes on 
 an air of something like gayety. Bedouin 
 women bring from the country branches of 
 green oak and cypresses. With sheets and 
 branches they improvise in the yards of the 
 houses huts decorated with paper flowers, 
 lemons, citrons and Jaffa oranges. For a 
 week people stay there, drinking and danc- 
 ing. On the eighth day of the festival, the 
 day of the Feast of the Law, the reading of 
 the books of Moses in the synagogues reaches 
 the end, the next day they begin reading them 
 again from the beginning. So that the days 
 of Succoth symbolize for the Jews the re- 
 newal of life centering around the ancient 
 Prophet who had led his people according to 
 the wishes of God, through all their time of 
 stress, to leave them only on the day when 
 the gates of their new country were opened 
 for them.... 
 
 In the village of Zichron-Jacob the houses 
 were decorated and according to custom the 
 young people were dancing under the foliage. 
 
 [1954 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 What could the thoughts of Sarah have been 
 while she listened to the sounds of the violin? 
 Would the Allied troops decide at last to 
 attack to-day or to-morrow? Was the long 
 wandering of Israel through the wilderness 
 drawing to its close? Just as long ago in 
 the time of Moses, Palestine was given to the 
 ancient Hebrews, would a new Palestine be 
 given to the renascent Hebrew people? Was 
 this feast of Succoth to mark the end of 
 the long exile? Was the sacrifice of Absalom 
 going to have its reward?... 
 
 Sarah was standing at her door with some 
 young girls, when the violins suddenly 
 stopped. The approach of the Kaimakam of 
 Nazareth and some Turkish troops had been 
 discovered. All the young men disappeared 
 in the orchards, since not one of them had 
 complied with the military regulations. The 
 girls around Sarah were frightened. She 
 alone was quite calm and reassured her 
 friends, yet she knew quite well why the sol- 
 diers were coming. In a few seconds the 
 village was surrounded. ‘The Kaimakam dis- 
 
 [ 196 7 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 mounted in front of Aronsohn’s house. He 
 asked for Lichansky and Sarah answered 
 that he was not thero. 
 
 The soldiers searched the house and finding 
 no one seized Sarah’s father, made him lie 
 on the ground, tied his hands and feet to two 
 guns, forced Sarah and her younger brother 
 Alexander to hold him down and began whip- 
 ping him. ‘The old man moaned. Then 
 Sarah became afraid, afraid that he might 
 speak. “Father,” she said to him, “remember 
 that you have only a few years to live. 
 Die honorably!” The old man answered 
 through his moans: “Faithless one, to speak 
 to me thus!” The next day it was Sarah’s 
 turn. For five days, each morning, the sol- 
 diers came for her, took her to a house they 
 had commandeered and as she refused to 
 answer their questions, tied her to the door, 
 whipped her, pulled her nails and applied 
 burning bricks to her chest and her feet. 
 Then, through the empty street, they would 
 bring her back to her house to repeat the same 
 proceedings the next day. She was doubt- 
 
 [197 7 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 less still hoping that an advance of the Eng- 
 lish army might miraculously save her. But 
 on the sixth day she learned that the Kaima- 
 kam had given orders to have her transferred 
 to Nazareth with the other suspects and she 
 abandoned all hope. While she was alone for 
 an instant in her room, she wrote to one of 
 her family: 
 
 “If the Turks leave the workmen of the 
 Station at liberty, see that they go on with the 
 work. Let them use the wheat and the barley 
 that we still have and give them thirty francs 
 a month. If they are forbidden to work, 
 give them each fifty francs and let them go. 
 Tell my brothers to avenge me. No pity for 
 those bandits, they have had none for me. I 
 have not the strength to bear my sufferings 
 and the martyrdom they force upon me any 
 longer. I would rather kill myself than let 
 them ill-treat me with their dirty hands. 
 They want to send me to Damascus, where 
 they will certainly hang me. Luckily I have 
 a small revolver, (the one probably that her 
 brother had sent her). I don’t want them 
 
 [198 7 
 
TA SLORY OF SARAH 
 
 
 
 to have the use of my body. My sorrow is 
 especially unendurable when they strike my 
 father. But it will be in vain that they’ll try 
 all their cruelty upon us. We won’t talk. 
 Remember that we died courageously with- 
 out saying a word. What do our sufferings 
 matter! We have sacrificed ourselves, but we 
 have saved the population and liberated the 
 country. Don’t pay any attention to gossips 
 and scandalmongers. I have worked for one 
 thing only: the betterment of my people. 
 Try to go to the mountains as soon as the 
 soldiers are gone. Goto X , tell him, Kill 
 yourself, don’t surrender. Here they are.... 
 
 
 
 I can’t write any more.” 
 
 The Turks were already there. She asked 
 them to let her go for a second to her dress- 
 ing-room. She shut the door behind her and 
 almost at the same instant a shot was heard 
 followed by the noise of a body falling. The 
 soldiers broke the door. ‘They found her 
 bathed in blood but breathing still. The bul- 
 let having entered through her mouth had 
 come out through the neck. The doctor of 
 
 1997 
 
PON OT YEA Te NG sd ee he Oh, Sd ee ee 
 
 the colony, an old friend of the Aronsohns, 
 was called in. Sarah asked him to do noth- 
 ing, to let her die. The officers who came to 
 see her, struck by her courage, promised not 
 to torment her any more. Her agony lasted 
 three days. Her limbs were paralyzed but 
 her head was clear. Her only fear was lest 
 she might let some name escape in her delir- 
 ium. She was longing for death, and, when 
 she felt it near, “All right,” she said, “now 
 there is nothing more to be feared.” On the 
 last day of Succoth, on the day of the Feast 
 of the Law, she left the land of Israel. 
 
 Some days later the English army attacked 
 the German and Turkish army, which 
 retreated without any fighting. They en- 
 tered Jerusalem, they freed the whole of Pal- 
 estine without firing a single shot. Mean- 
 while, in Damascus, Lichansky had been 
 hanged. Three of his companions who had 
 been arrested with him profited by the dis- 
 order caused by the approach of the Allies 
 to escape to the mountains tied to one another 
 and to the officer who was guarding them. 
 
 As for Aaron Aronsohn he also met a 
 
 [ 2007 
 
THE STORY OF SARAH 
 
 tragic death. A short while after the Armi- 
 stice had been signed, he returned to London 
 and began traveling frequently between 
 London and Paris to give the Peace Confer- 
 ence the information they needed about 
 Palestine. It was while he was on one of 
 these missions, that he crashed to the ground 
 near Boulogne, in the aeroplane which car- 
 ried him. 
 
 Such is the story of Sarah and her com- 
 panions. In Palestine they do not talk about 
 it willingly. When I approached that sub- 
 ject I felt a veil between the person I was 
 talking to and myself. Perhaps they have 
 not forgotten the dangers they went through. 
 Danger has always made a strong impres- 
 sion upon the Jews. Perhaps they feel, too, 
 that the Turks who had welcomed them in 
 their distress deserved better treatment, and 
 that over this drama of Athlit there hangs a 
 shadow which, in spite of Absalom’s and 
 Sarah’s sacrifice, will always prevent it from 
 becoming one of those events which a whole 
 nation, moved by pity and admiration, may 
 incorporate into its tradition. 
 
 [201 4 
 
on i a 
 
 4 
 # 
 
 
 
THE LITTLE GIRL OF 
 THE GHETTO 
 
¥ 
 
 4 ae 
 
 V4) Le ihe cy ‘y “ital . nh Sad on : nat 4 , 
 uy DA +e ie Th F i Sy te aa ea! s 
 
 ; ‘ . et) : A yy a ey Py ie ° i wl 
 Peet Cols anon ; Abana fe ate ese he 
 aa te beatae eee Une oy 
 
 3 
 
 Fe ed SEES ad 3 
 
 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 
 
 WHEN I went back to Jerusalem the door- 
 man of the convent of Notre Dame de 
 France gave me a card on which was written: 
 “Jacok Birnbaum, once your pupil, salutes 
 you, Monsieur le Professeur. I shall come 
 back to-morrow.” 
 
 Jacob Birnbaum! That name took me 
 back twenty years to a time when I was a 
 lecturer in the University of Budapest. 
 To tell the truth, explaining La Fontaine or 
 the “Neveu de Rameau” to foreign minds is 
 truly an idiotic idea. My students, Hun- 
 garians or Jews, were about my age, and we 
 lived as comrades. Very often after the lec- 
 ture we used to continue our discussion in 
 one of those cafés, very ostentatiously luxuri- 
 ous, where all Central Europeans try to es- 
 cape from boredom, read the newspapers and 
 gladly merge their individual existences in 
 
 [ 205 7 
 
“NEXT YR AR OUN Ud Tn O'S Abeer 
 
 the collective one. At the same time, in the 
 great plain, between the Danube and the 
 Tisza, the flocks of sheep and herds of horses 
 stop wandering in the pastures and flock to- 
 gether under the protection of the watch- 
 dogs. In the capital of this pastoral country, 
 the herds of men, urged on by the same deep 
 instinct, avoid the evening solitude by seek- 
 ing shelter in the cafés, under the protection 
 of their shepherds, the waiters. 
 
 Birnbaum, who, before coming to Buda- 
 pest, had led for some years the beggar’s life 
 of a student of a Yeshiva, was a member of 
 the small band which I took with me to con- 
 tinue the work of the University more agree- 
 ably, in front of a glass of Pilsener. I had 
 not seen him since that far-distant time but 
 I had often thought about him, because he 
 was the first to reveal to me an extraordinary 
 universe in Jewish life, the picturesqueness 
 and mystery of which captivated my imagi- 
 nation at once. Here, in Jerusalem itself, 
 in the valley of Josaphat, I had often won- 
 dered if among all those tombstones there 
 
 [ 206 7 
 
LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 
 
 was one which marked the resting-place of 
 his grandfather, the only one of those innu- 
 merable dead of whom I knew something. 
 Jacob Birnbaum had told me so many stories 
 about the astonishing old man, amid the noise 
 of the cymbals and the violins of the Tziganes! 
 During his lifetime he had been one of those 
 old men who study only the Talmud and 
 Zohar, who spend their days and a good part 
 of their nights exploring these far countries 
 of logic and imagination in which so many 
 Jews find happiness. Only once had he left 
 his small village to go to Budapest, and 
 there, for the first time, he had seen some- 
 thing which was not a village; houses with 
 several floors, iron bridges on the river, streets 
 lighted at night, a railway and many other 
 strange sights. Then this untiring reader of 
 the most ancient thoughts, who had spent 
 thousands and thousands of hours upon the 
 fantastic problems discussed for centuries by 
 the Jewry of the Orient, surprised by all 
 those new things and comparing the Chris- 
 tians’ activity with his own, had made this 
 
 [207 7 
 
“NEXT YEAROIN JERUSALEM" 
 
 superb comment: “They have been working, 
 too!” But driving at once from his mind the 
 thought of those inventions, useless because 
 they were profane, he had gone back to the 
 Talmud and the Zohar. ‘Then, one day, the 
 longing of all of his race for Palestine had 
 seized him, the ancient desire to die in the 
 Ancestors’ Land. In the words of a Hebrew 
 poet, he wished to go and breathe the breath 
 of life in the air of Jerusalem, the perfume of 
 myrrh in its dust and to drink the honey of 
 its waters. He left everything, his room, his 
 small table, the synagogue to which he had 
 gone every day for sixty years, his daughter, 
 his son-in-law and his grandchildren. For 
 more than a year they had no news from him. 
 What was the use of writing a letter? What 
 was there to tell? What could he say that 
 would not be superfluous? Could a man like 
 him find time to waste on such unimportant 
 cares, the time when he was busy praying for 
 all the Jews? .. . At last one of the alms- 
 gatherers brought the news that he had mar- 
 ried a girl of fourteen, exceedingly beautiful 
 
 [ 208 7 
 

 
 ET La em Cn Reiss | OUT TER: tee Ge A Fa UPe' O 
 
 (like everything else in Jerusalem) and that 
 his wife had given him a child. All the fam- 
 ily had rejoiced and in the money-box that 
 hung on the wall, they had thrown some 
 kreutzers for the Holy Halouka. 
 
 The next day Jacob Birnbaum appeared at 
 my hotel. I had been expecting to see one of 
 those poor men who live with difficulty by 
 teaching and it took me some time to recog- 
 nize in this man, still unhealthy-looking, it is 
 true, but very comfortably clad, the poor boy 
 I had known. 
 
 “Well, you see,” he said to me, as naturally 
 as if our conversations had never stopped (so 
 much so, that I thought I heard behind his 
 voice the cymbals and the violins of the Tzi- 
 ganes), “you see, I went on begging. We be- 
 gin begging when we are children; it is that 
 way with us Jews, and as a matter of fact, 
 it is that way with everybody. I went to 
 America and once there a great deal was 
 given to me. I could, if I wished, make all 
 the Rabbis of the Carpathians millionaires. 
 
 [ 209 7 
 
WNEAT YEAR IN JERUSALEM" 
 
 I could give to all the Yeshivas gold-lettered 
 Talmuds, but I will do nothing of the sort. 
 The school of poverty would be ruined for 
 ever and I would certainly destroy the most 
 beautiful secret of Israel... .” 
 
 He had made a large fortune very quickly, 
 a thing that always astonishes us Europeans, 
 seeming to be only luck as in fairy-tales. 
 Without going into details, this is the way 
 he explained his success: ‘How did I make 
 it? I don’t know myself. I did this and I 
 did that. If I were to give you a list of all 
 the enterprises I have gone into and a long 
 and detailed recital of all the businesses I 
 have had a hand in, or rather which have had 
 a hand on me, it would mean nothing. Suc- 
 cess is not any easier to explain than failure 
 or unhappiness. I am rather inclined to be- 
 lieve that fate became tired of buffeting me. 
 I resisted so hard, I never gave in to misfor- 
 tune, I struggled and always came back 
 again, even under the most difficult cireum- 
 stances. You know, Monsieur le Professeur 
 (he still gave me this title which once upon 
 
 [ 210 7 
 

 
 LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 
 
 a time had meant a great deal to him, but 
 which now must have been in his eyes a very 
 modest title indeed), that, no offense to you, 
 the lessons of the Yeshiva have been much 
 more useful to me than the tragedies of Ra- 
 cine on which you lectured at the University. 
 You see, I have always remained a Talmud 
 student, a hair-splitter, clever at finding the 
 strong and the weak points of an argument. 
 Well-made syllogisms will always rule the 
 world. Add a little madness, a bit of the 
 moon which with us Hebrews is always some- 
 where in our brains, to reward us, or maybe 
 to punish us, for having looked so often up to 
 her in the evenings of Neomenie. That’s the 
 thing that enables us to go into ventures that 
 the good sense or rather the short-sightedness 
 of other people makes them avoid. We Jews 
 belong to two planets, the earth and the 
 moon. Weare skeptical and enthusiastic, we 
 don’t believe in anything and we always hope 
 for something, a dollar, a woman, a rise in 
 gasoline, the return to Jerusalem, universal 
 
 E211] 
 
a 
 CONEXPT YEAR IN JERUSALEM, 
 
 
 
 revolution, in other words, in what we call the 
 Messiah. ...” 
 
 Like all the other Jews all over the world 
 he became very much excited when he read 
 the Balfour Declaration; he became a Child 
 of the Moon as he said himself. Newt year 
 in Jerusalem! The old wish repeated each 
 Easter had hitherto been expressed without 
 much hope that it would ever be fulfilled. 
 Yet now one had to believe in it, since it had 
 come to pass! He had come here to see for 
 himself, to get acquainted with the miracle. 
 To what extent had this very practical mind 
 been carried away by the dream of seeing all 
 the Jews of the world settle in Palestine? He 
 had believed in it for a moment, because he 
 came back to that idea several times, speak- 
 ing with an indescribable tone of irony and 
 bitterness: “It is astonishing how we Jews, 
 intelligent as a rule (though that side of us is 
 always exaggerated and some of our real 
 qualities are never even mentioned!), become 
 stupid when it is a question of Judea.” I 
 think that deep down in himself, he had, in 
 
 212] 
 
EE Di eA ee GR pet on Gia Fe 142 O 
 
 coming to Jerusalem, yielded to the ancient 
 desire of Zion, given in to the same attraction 
 which took his grandfather and many other 
 Jews before him to the Holy City. He could 
 see it himself, not without sadness, because 
 to-day, his illusions, if he ever had had any, 
 were quite gone. No, he was not one of those 
 exalted Jews, who, from morning till night, 
 had tried to convince me that Palestine was 
 a new Eldorado; that all the Jews are born 
 farmers and herdsmen; that the existence led 
 by the Jewish colonies is idyllic and that the 
 haloutzim are in the universe an unknown 
 and beautiful type of men. As it went along 
 begging, Zionism was not, after all, the beg- 
 gar full of hope, the beautiful wandering 
 idea that deserves passionate devotion. 
 “How difficult it is,’ he remarked to me, on 
 one occasion, “to make intelligent use of one 
 dollar or a million!’ He had, once for all, 
 decided that the thing was not worth while, 
 and when I met him he was only interested 
 in trying, in the old ghetto, to hear once again 
 
 [213] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 the ancestral voices and to revive the memo- 
 ries of his youth, 
 
 And now he was going to do as his grand- 
 father had done some thirty years before. I 
 was mistaken. His story was not quite the 
 same, because, by marrying a girl of fourteen, 
 his grandfather had only obeyed the law of 
 Jerusalem which forbids celibacy and I am 
 sure that he had never worried about the 
 beauty or the ugliness of the girl. Jacob 
 Birnbaum had fallen in love, of all places in 
 the world, in Jerusalem, where people’s 
 thoughts don’t usually seem to turn to love! 
 Fallen in love, perhaps that is an exaggera- 
 tion. He had the most tender feelings for a 
 — girl about fifteen years old, one of the numer- 
 ous relatives that he owed to the favor with 
 which God had looked upon the household of 
 his grandfather. He kept his incognito so 
 that he would not be annoyed by them, but 
 sometimes he was tempted to claim the rela- 
 tionship and to ask the family to let him have 
 the child. “Tl take her to Cleveland,” he 
 said to me, “there her life would be very 
 
 [2147 
 
Diet hi Ol Wn be Ga Birla 0 
 
 different from the one she leads here. The 
 only trouble is that I wonder whether I have 
 a real affection for this little girl or if I am 
 carried away by the thought of all I could do 
 for her. There must be something wrong in 
 my case, because while thinking about all 
 sorts of romantic possibilities, I am nearly 
 sure that, in the end, I won’t take her away 
 with me.... Do you know, God must enjoy 
 Himself greatly when He refrains from 
 changing suddenly the conditions of human 
 beings! Secondly (this way of putting his 
 arguments was habitual and made me recog- 
 nize in him the student of the Yeshiva), this 
 child of Jerusalem transplanted to America 
 might lose all her charm. There she would be 
 just one more little Jewess with Paris gowns 
 and pearls around her neck. In a few weeks 
 she would be as insupportably vain as all the 
 women there. I think the best thing for her 
 is to stay here. I don’t want to take away 
 from Jehovah the task of directing the lives 
 of His creatures. .. .” 
 
 And as he spoke his steps would take him 
 
 [2157 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 towards the blue-painted house around which 
 he let his thoughts dwell complacently. We 
 would look into the court and occasionally 
 see a rather ordinary-looking child, whose sole 
 interest for me lay in the dreams, of which, 
 unknown to her, she was the object and which 
 could in one day change the course of her 
 whole life. 
 
 Birnbaum and I used to walk all the time 
 in the old Jewish quarter, up and down 
 through those narrow echoing streets, whose 
 surprises were now familiar to me. We 
 would vie with each other in trying to dis- 
 cover some new synagogue, buried like a 
 treasure in its subterranean court. We used 
 to go to the Wall of Wailing and I could no 
 longer understand how on the day of my 
 arrival I had been able to think as I did: 
 “What pleasure can one find down here, 
 when up there, on the esplanade, around the 
 Mosque of Omar, one can find a paradise!” 
 I used to go up there often, to walk on the 
 wide flagstoned or moss-covered expanse, 
 thinking I would spend the whole morning 
 
 [2167 
 
LETRD ES GLE LV OP UT AE GH TT O 
 
 feasting my eyes on this pleasant sight, that 
 chance had made so perfect, those fountains 
 where no water flows, those sun-caressed steps 
 where one can always see some strayed 
 babouche, those cypresses and the mosque 
 where men’s prayers seem to have been trans- 
 formed into rubies, into emeralds, into a bril- 
 liance ignorant of sorrow and death. ‘The 
 reverie that men pursue there does not last 
 long, for mystery is lacking. ‘There is no 
 depth to Islam’s thought. It is a morality 
 fit for Bedouins only. How flat the Koran 
 seems when compared with the Old Testa- 
 ment and the Gospel! This very precious 
 landscape becomes very boring, in spite of 
 Scheherezade dancing behind the veil of 
 prayers! It seems as if one’s shadow were 
 lost, the feeling we Occidentals have of a cer- 
 tain responsibility which keeps our mind 
 clear and straight. It may be a kind of mad- 
 ness to regret such a burden, to ask for 
 shadows and sadness in this place of light, 
 but what can be done about it? Carefully, 
 taking small steps, I cross the esplanade, go 
 
 27] 
 
ONES DY Boa TN Tm RO Sd Gg ee 
 
 down the steps I mounted so light-heartedly 
 a moment ago, I follow the alley of yew-trees, 
 then I pass under the great vault and go 
 through the maze of narrow streets of the 
 ghetto with as much ease as an old Jew from 
 Bels or Zadagora. 
 
 I do not like poverty and there everything 
 is miserably poor, but this is no ordinary pov- 
 erty; it occupies and feeds the mind, yet leaves 
 it always unsatisfied, unlike that noble insen- 
 sitive beauty that I have just left behind up 
 there, that beauty, so sure of itself that even 
 dreams can add nothing to it. 
 
 As we went along Jacob Birnbaum would 
 go on with his thoughts, sometimes communi- 
 cating them to me with an air of being dis- 
 gusted even with his own ideas. He always 
 came back to this: “What reason have we, 
 we Israelites, to think that the air of this 
 country will miraculously give us an extraor- 
 dinary genius which could not flourish ex- 
 cept on the Land of our Ancestors? Thank 
 God we have not had to remain in Palestine 
 to remain intelligent. The Jews of Babylon 
 
 [2187] 
 
LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 
 
 
 
 have been as famous as Jerusalem’s and in 
 exile we always have given some great men 
 to the world. Now they want to make us 
 believe that in lieu of a Jewish State we can 
 create here an intellectual center from which 
 the Hebrew spirit will radiate to all Jewry. 
 What is the Hebrew spirit? I can recognize 
 it in old Sonnenfeld, in an old Rabbi of the 
 Carpathian Mountains, much more than in 
 these modern Jews, who bring with them I 
 don’t know what kind of Slavic soul, preten- 
 tious, expansive, agitated, incapable of seeing 
 reality as it really is. In this ancient Jeru- 
 salem they are killing something purely Jew- 
 ish, really unique in the world, and what are 
 they going to put in its place? Have you 
 ever been to Tel Aviv?...” 
 
 Of course, I had been to Tel Aviv. Itisa 
 small town outside Jaffa’s gates. On the sea- 
 side, it possesses straight promenades bor- 
 dered with eucalyptuses. It has a casino, too, 
 some cinemas and villas where the Zionists 
 who have come to build up a new world here 
 have imitated the most ordinary watering- 
 
 [219] 
 
“NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 places. This town, the first built by them- 
 selves on the sea-front, this window on the 
 open sea, this sea-breeze, this opening upon 
 the universe, create in them a touching exalta- 
 tion. Although it lies flat on the sand they 
 have called it, in their oriental enthusiasm, 
 Tel Aviv, that is to say, the Hill of Spring, 
 and Tel Aviv is dearer to their hearts than 
 the old Jerusalem. Jerusalem represents the 
 old thoughts, and too many Jews, according 
 to them, are still its victims. It is the town 
 of the Commandments, of the oppressive let- 
 ter of the Law that ties one down to the 
 past. It is the town of the Wall, of the eyes 
 turned towards Jehovah, of the Jews who 
 expect to get everything from Heaven, the 
 impossible, the miraculous. It is the town 
 to which one comes to die. Tel Aviv, on the 
 contrary, is a place where, God be praised, 
 nothing is expected from the Messiah, and 
 the inhabitants expect to find their happiness 
 in the eucalyptuses, in the electric light and 
 English comfort. 
 
 —‘Well,” Jacob Birnbaum used to say, 
 
 [2207 
 

 
 Lite EP eGi ie DOR Dae Gai e Te? O 
 
 “I would rather have Jerusalem than Tel 
 Aviv. I love its ghetto, its poverty, its beg- 
 ging population, pursuing their ancient 
 dream, a dream that you can think absurd 
 or magnificent, just as you please. There I 
 recognize myself, I find my soul, the breath 
 of my life, the real Jewish spirit... .” 
 
 I left Jerusalem for a while to go to Syria, 
 leaving Jacob Birnbaum to his problems. 
 When I came back he had gone. They told 
 me at his hotel that he had gone back to 
 America. Had he gone alone? Had he 
 claimed his family and taken back with him 
 the little Jewess, of whom it would be diffi- 
 cult to say whether she occupied more his 
 heart or his mind? Both hypotheses seemed 
 plausible and if I had had to make a wager I 
 would not have known which one to choose. 
 
 I went at once to the narrow street that we 
 had gone through together so often. I saw 
 no one in the courtyard. I went downstairs 
 and through the wide-open door, Surrepti- 
 tiously I looked into the one room that con- 
 
 [2217 
 

 
 “NEXT YEAR IN JERUSALEM” 
 
 stituted the family dwelling. ‘The girl was 
 still there. 
 
 After all, there were great divergences be- 
 tween grandfather and grandson in spite of 
 deep affinities. The old man would not have 
 hesitated; he would have married the girl. 
 Then, I thought that by not pulling this leaf 
 from the tree of the ghetto, Jacob Birnbaum 
 had revealed himself to be more like his 
 grandfather than if he had taken her with 
 him to America. I went on with my walk 
 through the hilly streets where I could have 
 gone with my eyes shut, thinking: “He came 
 here full of hope and he went away disillu- 
 sioned. Should I pity him? Maybe not. 
 With the whole of Israel, he believed for a 
 while in the dreams of Dr. Herzl and he was 
 right to believe in them. But is there any- 
 thing in the world worth any enthusiasm, any 
 desire? It is a mad idea to want to bring all 
 the Jewry of the universe into this poverty- 
 stricken country. It will be very difficult to 
 enable even two or three hundred thousand 
 Jews to live here. The Jews will go on lead- 
 
 [2227 
 
LITTLE GIRL OF THE GHETTO 
 
 ing among other nations their adventurous 
 lives to-day just as they did yesterday. They 
 can’t be absorbed by them, the blood of their 
 race is too strong, but they can’t do without 
 other races either, because is there anywhere 
 in the world a place where they would, if they 
 were all together, find the profits of all kinds 
 that scattering through the universe has 
 brought them? Wherever they are, they 
 always carry in their heart the love of Zion. 
 This nostalgic desire, this aspiration that 
 they can’t and don’t want to satisfy, this 
 struggle between realities and dreams makes 
 Jewish history a drama unique in the world. 
 It has lasted since the beginning of time. 
 There seems to be no end to it—and it is this 
 struggle which gives Jewish history its poetic 
 grandeur.” 
 
 THE END 
 

 
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