THE JEW IN JERUSALEM.
One of the most interesting evenings I spent in Jerusalem was in
listening to a lecture by Dr. Wheeler, of the English Hospital in the
city, who is now seeking to build a hospital for the Jews there. He is
also, I believe, connected with the London Society which is seeking to
bring over the Jew to the knowledge of the Messiah, a task by no means
easy, as the conviction of the Jew—that the promised Messiah is yet to
come—is not easily to be dispelled. I came over with a converted Jew—a
clergyman in London. His parents, who were wealthy, lived in Jerusalem.
In order to become a Christian he had to sacrifice all his worldly
prospects, and aroused such bitter enmity on the part of his relatives
that, though he had made the journey for the sake of seeing his dying
mother, he almost despaired of an interview, and had to wait five days
before his object was achieved.
But to return to Dr. Wheeler. He has been at work in Jerusalem eleven
years, and his knowledge of the state of the Jews is profound. The Jews,
he told us, in Palestine may be roughly divided into four classes: The
Ashkenazim, comprising the fair-haired, sallow German Jew, the Russian,
Polish, American, etc., who speak Yiddish, and enjoy the protection of
the consuls of the countries to which they belong; the Sephardim, or
Spanish Jews, many of whom still wear the black turban imposed on them by
the mad Caliph Halim; the Gemenites, who have only recently come to the
land—they are dark, and wear their hair in side-curls; and the Karaites,
a sect which sprang up about the eighth century. These reject the Talmud
and deny the authority of the Oral Law; they are few in number, and have
but one small synagogue; the orthodox religious Jews have no religious
intercourse with them, and regard them as heretics. The Ashkenazim adapt
themselves to any costume. The Sephardim all wear the dignified and
beautiful Oriental costume. All unite in wearing the love-locks. As to
the women, they all dress in Oriental costume, and wear their heads
covered. On the Sabbath they are all dressed in their best. Charms are
worn on the heads and foreheads and necks of young children, and a sprig
of green is worn also as a charm against the evil eye. The Rabbis
generally wear long flowing robes, trimmed with fur, and also a turban.
Specially-appointed Rabbis see that the food is properly prepared, as
everything must be _kosha_, or legally clean. Milk must not be taken
before or after meat. No Christian food on any account may be consumed;
even eggs cooked in Christian pots are refused. Only Jewish wine may be
drunk, and if a bottle of it is only touched by a Christian it becomes
unclean. The social and religious life of the Jew is identical. The
birth of a son causes great rejoicing, and improves the social status of
the mother. Circumcision on the eighth day, if the child is strong
enough, is a holy festival. After eighteen all Jews are expected to
marry. Although facilities of divorce are large, they are not often
resorted to.
One is struck, said Dr. Wheeler, in living among Jews, with the fact that
religion amongst them is not only a creed or an act of observance, but
that it pervades every relationship and dominates every phase of life.
The Sabbath is the pivot round which family life moves. It is a day of
real rejoicing, accompanied by a complete suspension of work. It begins
with the cup of blessing, of wine mixed with water, of which all partake.
The Sabbath lamp is lit. No burial is allowed on that day. No
phylacteries are worn while the Cohenites give the Aaronic blessing—‘The
Lord bless thee and keep thee,’ etc. Visiting the sick has great merit.
According to the Talmud, eleven visits to the sick will release a soul
from Gehenna. All are enjoined to follow funerals, and to pay honour to
the remains of the dead. After death the body is allowed to remain
awhile unburied. The creed of the Jew is as ancient as the beginning of
history. With it are connected the triumphs and struggles and defeats of
ages. What strange and opposite feelings has the name of Jew created!
What appalling deeds have been perpetrated in connection with his name!
The Jew is in every sense, as Dr. Wheeler eloquently told us, the marvel
of history—the wonder of the ages—the anomaly of nations. So it has been
for upwards of 4,000 years. He is Heaven’s great witness on earth of
earth’s righteous King in heaven. Nations have risen and fallen. Mighty
empires have crumbled to decay. Assyria, Greece, Carthage, where are
they? Yet the Jew—scattered, despised, persecuted, and trampled under
foot—has never disappeared. Nay, more, he has risen to be a light and
guide to the nations; and many are the statesmen and artists and
philosophers who have had Jewish blood in their veins. And yet, say
certain good people, the Jews are under a curse. Well, perhaps they
are—when poor. Poor people, it seems to me, are under a curse all the
world over. To the Jews, Jerusalem is the one holy city, and here they
come to die and be buried in its sacred soil. Wealthy Jews in all parts
of the world give freely for charity and for charitable purposes, and it
is this wealth that brings so many poor Jews to Jerusalem. By these
benefactors Jewish children are educated gratuitously. They have three
synagogues, all very ancient, and the beautiful pale-green dome of one of
them is a conspicuous feature in the view of Jerusalem from the Mount of
Olives. Jews, because they persecuted the Christ, are not allowed to
pass before the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They are also still
rigorously excluded from the Moslem sanctuary, where it is said stood
King Solomon’s Temple in all its glory, though Christians have been
admitted of late years to this jealously-guarded spot, containing as it
does the Dome of the Rock—a very precious spot in Moslem eyes. Alas!
everywhere the Jew in Jerusalem has to come in contact with ‘the pig of a
Turk,’ as he contemptuously calls him. I wonder the wealthy Jews do not
buy Jerusalem or Palestine itself of the Sultan, who, however, does all
he can to keep the Jews from returning there to live and die.
Notwithstanding the place it fills in the world’s history, the country is
a small one. As it is, the Jews in Jerusalem have the greater part of
the trade of the city in their hands. They own the shops and the cabs,
and their numbers increase every day, very much, as I have said, against
the wishes of the Sultan himself.
It is an awful history, that of the Jew in Jerusalem, of incessant revolt
on the part of the people, of incessant conquest and massacre on the part
of the sanguinary conquerors. Again and again the Jew seemed on the
brink of extermination. Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus, Titus, Hadrian,
successively exerted their utmost power to extinguish, not merely the
political existence of the State, but even the separate being of the
people. Hadrian, to annihilate for ever, writes Dean Milman, all hopes
of the restoration of the Jewish kingdom, accomplished his plan of
founding a new city on the site of Jerusalem, peopled by a colony of
foreigners. The city was called Ælia Capitolina: Ælia after the prænomen
of the Emperor, Capitolina as dedicated to the Jupiter of the Capitol.
An edict was published to prevent any Jew from entering the new city
under pain of death, or approaching its environs even at a distance so as
to contemplate its sacred height. More effectually to keep them away,
the image of a swine was placed over the gate leading to Bethlehem. The
more peaceful Christians were permitted to establish themselves within
the walls, and Ælia became the seat of a flourishing church and
bishopric. At a later period Julian the Apostate—as the ecclesiastical
writers term one of the noblest men who ever wore the imperial
purple—embraced the extraordinary design of rebuilding the Temple of
Jerusalem. In a public epistle to the nation or community of the Jews,
he pities their misfortunes, condemns their oppressors, praises their
constancy, declares himself their gracious protector, and hopes, after
his return from the Persian war, he may be permitted to pay his grateful
vows to the Almighty in the holy city of Jerusalem. The Jews from every
part of the world gave freely to assist this pious enterprise. According
to the Christian writers, Heaven interfered, and the Temple was left
unbuilt. This glorious deliverance was speedily improved by the pious
art of the clergy of Jerusalem and the active credulity of the Christian
world. It is evident, as Gibbon remarks, the restoration of the Jewish
Temple was secretly connected with the ruin of the Christian Church, a
Church for which Julian had little love. From the confessions of Jerome
himself, Jerusalem seemed saturated with every form of vice and crime.
They tell me the Jew is blind because he is waiting for the coming
Messiah, but, I ask, are we not all waiting for a coming Messiah? And
the sooner He comes the better for all of us, Jew and Gentile alike. If
the Jew is waiting for a coming Messiah, that is surely to his
credit—that he remains true to the teaching of his fathers—and shows him
to be no more blind than those of us who piously await the dawn of a
millennium, which, according to all human appearances, seems as far off
as ever. When the Turkish Empire breaks up, it will be no easy matter
how to settle in whose hands Jerusalem shall be placed. There may be a
terrible fight about the Holy City yet.
It is now the fashion for everyone to rush to Jerusalem. At one time to
go there required no little expenditure of money, and time, and trouble.
An excursion-steamer takes you there for a trifle compared with the
expense of the journey only a few years ago. You land at Jaffa, take the
train to Jerusalem, and in due time find yourself outside the Jaffa Gate,
guarded by Turkish soldiers. Amidst a dirty, many-coloured mob of
donkeys, camels, and people, exhausted by the heat, suffocated by the
dust, and bewildered by the noise, you are at the Holy City, as lying
superstition terms it. It certainly is not Jerusalem the golden, but is
very much the reverse. Its smells are indescribable, and to drink its
water is death. Your first wonder is why David and Solomon should ever
have made it a royal residence at all. It is a city set upon a hill, but
it is dominated by hills all round, where no verdure is seen, and where
the black goat alone finds a scanty existence. Climb one of these hills,
and you look down on the gray, stony city, surrounded by a high wall,
over which rise minarets, and mosques, and church spires in wild
confusion. There is nothing to charm the eye there. Enter through one
of the gates, and you are still more disappointed. You wander in
hopeless confusion, shut in on all sides by lofty buildings, with no
windows to speak of, only here and there a door; or you plunge into a
street with a dark awning, which serves as a bazaar, with shops of all
kinds around, where so dense is the crowd that it is with difficulty you
make your way. Poverty seems to be the prevailing characteristic of the
place. Even the shops fail to attract.
Money is the one thing Jerusalem sucks in as a thirsty soul does water
when it comes, and many well-meaning people find there a living prepared
for them who would otherwise have to starve. As to the real state of the
people you never hear a word. The Turkish tax-gatherer may grind them
down. The wild Bedouin of the desert may come and take what the
tax-gatherer has left. But you hear nothing of that, and the daily topic
of conversation among the European settlers is the repetition of dogma
and the fulfilment of prophecy. It is not till you have cleared out,
taken the rail to Jaffa, and sail along the blue waters of the
Mediterranean, that you get rid of the nightmare, have done with cant,
and once more breathe free.
The fact is, the Holy City is one gigantic fraud. All we know is that
there Christ lived and laboured and suffered and died. Not a stone
remains of the Jerusalem over whose impending fate He shed bitter tears.
The cunning of an interested priesthood has done all the rest, from the
discovery of the true cross by the mother of Constantine, to the holy
fire which is seen at Easter by a panting, perspiring crowd in the Church
of the Holy Sepulchre. The town itself covers an area of more than 209
acres, of which thirty-five are occupied by the Haram-esh-Sherif. The
remaining space is occupied by Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews.
The Greek Church is the strongest branch of the Christians in Jerusalem,
having eighteen monasteries, with schools, churches, a hospital, hospice,
and a printing press. The Russian church on the Mount of Olives is the
grandest ecclesiastical building in the city of the modern type. The
Roman Catholics have fine churches, monasteries, and convents. The
Armenian Patriarch resides in his convent between the Jaffa and Zion
gates. The Latins, Abyssinians, and Copts are also well represented.
The Knights Templars of the Holy Sepulchre, a Roman Catholic body under
the patronage of the Emperor of Austria, have a fine convent just outside
the walls. Priests, and nuns, and sisters of mercy, and devotees, meet
you at every turn.
One ought to go to Jerusalem if only to see what priests can build up on
small foundations, and to what length superstition can be carried, even
in what are termed days of light and progress. In this respect the Turk
is as great a sinner as the Christian, and tells you how at the
resurrection the risen will have to cross the Valley of Jehosaphat by a
bridge of the Prophet’s hair, from which the wicked will fall straight to
Gehenna, while to the righteous heaven, with its houris, will open its
diamond gates. You see in Jerusalem what you see nowhere else, a city
built up by religion, true or false.
In a letter from the Rev. Ben Oliel to a friend, he says:
‘You want to know what is (1) the actual population of Jerusalem; (2)
the Jewish population in it; and (3) the number of Jews in all
Palestine.
‘The Turkish Government, like that of other lands, has its
statistical “bureau”—office; but whatever may be its success in the
European provinces of the empire, here in Asia its computations are
believed to be imperfect, unreliable, and mainly guesswork. The
conscription and consequent tax for exemption from military service
operate against it. The heads of the several religious
communities—Turkish or Moslem, Jewish, Latin, Greek, Armenian, Copt,
Maronite, Melchite, etc.—who co-operate in the census, have powerful
motives to frustrate exactitude, for it means a larger annual
taxation, for which they are made responsible; and, apart from this,
the inhabitants have strong prejudices against being numbered.
Therefore, all estimates of population are merely approximate, and
nothing more.
‘A young Jew of the highest family in this city, who is employed in
offices of trust in the Pasha’s court and has access to official
records, a convert of this mission, who confessed his faith in the
Lord Jesus on October 27, tells me that in official circles the
population of Jerusalem, including its suburbs—Bethlehem, Bethany,
the Mount of Olives, etc.—is now computed at 100,000, of which 60,000
are believed to be Jews; and he declares my estimate of the general
population of Jerusalem and its immediate suburbs at from 65,000 to
70,000, and the Jewish at about 40,000, to be far too low. He is
custodian of the roll of the Sephardim poor—widows, orphans, blind
and decrepit old men and their families—amounting to 7,000 souls,
that have to be provided for regularly; and yet the Ashkenazim
constitute the majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem now,
and they have a roll of poor as large proportionately. He says the
Sephardim pay £1,000 annually for exemption from military service,
and the Ashkenazim £1,250, which, at the rate of two _medjidis_ per
head, represents 5,625 men of the age liable to service. Jewish
families are prolific, and must therefore be calculated at seven
rather than five per family, and if one in each family is liable to
service, the result is 39,375 souls. But this has reference to the
Jewish _rayahs_—Turkish subjects; whereas there is a large admixture
of those under Russian, Austrian, German, etc., protection, who are
free from taxation, military or other. By such a process of
reasoning his estimate of 60,000 Jews for Jerusalem is almost proved
mathematically.
‘I have before me Luncz’s First Hebrew Almanack for the Jewish year
1895–96, an interesting compilation; it gives the population of
Jerusalem thus: “Number of inhabitants 45,420, of which Jews 28,112
(viz., Ashkenazim 15,074, Sephardim 7,900, Mughrabim 2,420, Gurgis
670, Bucharis 530, Tamanites 1,288, Persians 230); Moslems 8,560;
Christians 8,748 (viz., Armenians 695, Greeks 4,625, Abyssinians 105,
Syrians 23, Protestants 645, Catholics or Latins 2,530, Copts 125).”
He does not say so, but he can only mean the population _inside the
walls_.’
As an illustration of the difficulties awaiting the Jew who is led to
renounce Judaism, I quote from a convert’s letter a few particulars:
‘I will briefly say that I commenced the journey of life in Jerusalem
as son of one of the first Jewish families that found their way back
to the fatherland. According to the custom of our people, my dear
mother sent me to school when I was only two. I sat at the feet of
our Rabbi school-teachers until I was twelve; then I studied the
Rabbis’ commentaries and had an Arab tutor. At thirteen years of age
I entered the Seraya, or Government House of Jerusalem. I studied to
be an Arabic and Turkish scribe, and attended the Jewish school to
learn French.
‘In the Government House there are three judges appointed to
represent respectively the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem citizens.
My uncle is the Jewish judge. At sixteen I became one of the scribes
of the Chief Justice, and two years ago his assistant secretary.
‘When I used to visit Jaffa I heard about Mr. Ben Oliel from many
Jews who frequented his house for discussion and study of God’s Word.
In 1890 he came up to Jerusalem, and at last I met him. The first
time that I called upon him I was in company with my father, my uncle
the judge, the son of the Chief Rabbi, and another Rabbi, one of the
judges of the Jewish Court.
‘The Chief Rabbi appoints twelve judges, who each serve a term of
three months every year, and every dispute between Jews must first be
brought before them, and, if needs be, is referred by them to the
Turkish Court.’
In time the writer became a Christian and was baptized. He adds:
‘It was my desire to get the training that would make me a good
Christian teacher, but I could not travel without a passport, and
could not get this except through the application of my father, who,
instead, gave strict orders that no passport should be made for me.
After a year of vain endeavour, I was able to persuade a friend who
was in the office where they are written, on the score of friendship,
to give me a _tishcara_, or local passport, which, however, he did
not dare to record; off in the country it served me well. My plan
was to start on a trip through the country and seize any opportunity
that might offer of getting to Egypt. I started from the Damascus
Gate, my faithful horse being my only companion. We travelled first
to Nablous, the ancient Sichem, and finding that the Samaritans were
soon to keep their passover, I waited to see their celebrated
sacrifice. Each family took a lamb, and they went out and pitched
their tents on Mount Gerizim before the tomb of Sichem, the son of
Hamor, whom they hold in great reverence, and camped out there for
eight days. On the first day their high-priest sacrificed a lamb for
each family, and every day he himself mixed the unleavened cakes.
Leaving Nablous, I struck across country till I came to an Arab
village on the Jordan, and then followed its course until I came to
Tiberias. Along this part of the country many of the villagers knew
me, and wherever I was acquainted they entertained me freely with
their proverbial hospitality. At one Bedouin encampment they
insisted on roasting an entire sheep. This they did in a very
primitive fashion. They dug a ditch in the earth, and made fire
within it until it was very hot, and then, removing the fire, they
laid the lamb, well seasoned, on the hot ashes, and then buried it
for a couple of hours. It then made a very savoury dish, of which we
all partook, dipping into the same dish.
‘Tiberias is one of the four sacred cities of the Jews, and there I
found a large number residing. It is also a favourite resort because
of its hot springs of healing qualities. I had left Jerusalem almost
ill, and so was very glad to take a course of baths here.
‘From Tiberias I journeyed towards Nazareth, and visited the Tomb of
Jethro, near the horns of Hassau, where probably our Lord preached
His wondrous Sermon on the Mount. At Nazareth I was hospitably
entertained at the Latin Convent, and a priest showed me all the
sights of the town. Next day 400 or 500 French pilgrims arrived, and
I shared their entertainment.
‘After three days I resumed my journey, with the intention of
embarking at Haifa and passing on to Egypt without being seen at
Jaffa.’
And in due time the writer made his escape, and was welcomed in America,
mainly owing to the assistance of Mr. Ben Oliel, who had been the means
of his conversion.