Haifa, Nov. 25.—In one of the most remote and secluded valleys in the
mountains of northern Galilee lies a village, the small population of
which possesses an interest altogether unique. As I looked down upon it
from the precipitous and dangerous path by means of which I was skirting
the flank of the mountain, I thought I had rarely seen a spot of such
ideal beauty. It was an oasis, not actually in a desert—for the rocky
mountain ranges were covered with wild herbage—but in a savage
wilderness of desolation, in the midst of which the village nestled in a
forest of orange, almond, fig, and pomegranate trees, the tiny rills of
water by which they were irrigated glistening like silver threads in the
sunlight, and the yellow crops beyond contrasting with the dull green of
the hill verdure, long deprived of water, and the gray rocks which
reared their craggy pinnacles above it.
The name of this village was Bukeia. I had heard vaguely of the
existence of a spot in Galilee where a community of Jews lived who
claimed to be the descendants of families who had tilled the land in
this same locality prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the
subsequent dispersion of the race; as it had never been suspected that
any remnant of the nation had clung to the soil of their fathers from
time immemorial, and as it is certain that this is the only remnant that
has, I took some trouble to ascertain the name of the village, and felt
that it was worth a pilgrimage to visit it. Although hitherto unknown to
Europeans and tourists, it has been for many years a spot much
frequented by the Jews of Safed and Tiberias, and this summer
especially, when the cholera panic prevailed in the country, there was a
perfect rush of the wealthier Jews and rabbis of those towns to its pure
air and bracing climate. In a small way it is a sort of Jewish
sanatorium.
But the village does not consist altogether of Jews. In fact, they form
the minority of the population, which is composed of eighty Druse, forty
Greek-Christian, and twenty Jewish families, the latter numbering about
one hundred and twenty souls in all. Refusing the invitation of the
Druse and Christian sheiks to accept their hospitality, I listened
rather to the solicitations of the elderly Hebrew who eagerly placed his
house at my disposal, and was the patriarch of his coreligionists, his
local title being, like those of the heads of the other communities,
that of sheik. His house was a stone erection with a court-yard, and
contained a single large room, which, as is common in Arab houses,
afforded eating and sleeping accommodation for the whole family. On this
occasion it soon became crowded to excess.
First appeared the Druse sheik, with white turban, and composed and
dignified bearing. Then the sheik of the Christians, a man in no way to
be distinguished from the ordinary type of native fellahin; then the
Greek priest, in his high, round-topped black hat and long black coat,
reaching nearly to his feet; then the Jewish rabbi, who officiates at
the synagogue, in flowing Eastern robe; then some village notables of
all three religions, who all squatted on mats, forming a semicircle, of
which my friends and I were the centre, and which involved a large
demand upon our host for coffee, for on these occasions it is a great
breach of politeness not to furnish all the uninvited guests who flock
in to see distinguished strangers with that invariable beverage. When
one or two Moslems, who were temporary visitors to the village, dropped
in from curiosity, I could not fail to be struck with the singular
ethnological and theological compound by which I was surrounded. Here,
in these Christian and Moslem peasants, were the descendants of those
ancient Canaanites whom the conquering Jews failed to drive out of the
country during the entire period of their occupation of it, though they
doubtless served their conquerors as hewers of wood and drawers of
water, and as farm-servants generally; for the result of the most recent
and exhaustive research proves, I think, incontestably that the fellahin
of Palestine, taken as a whole, are the modern representatives of those
old tribes which the Israelites found settled in the country, such as
the Canaanites, Hivites, Jebusites, Amorites, Philistines, Edomites. In
what proportion these various tribes are now represented, whether they
were preceded by a still older autochthonous population, namely, the
Anakim, Horites, and so forth, are questions which have so far been
beyond the reach of scientific research. But though this race, or rather
conglomeration of races, which may be designated for want of a better by
the vague title of pre-Israelite, still survives beneath the Mohammedan
or Christian exterior, it has not remained uninfluenced during the lapse
of centuries by the many events and circumstances that have happened in
Palestine.
Each successive change in the social and political condition of the
country has more or less affected it in various ways, and we must not be
surprised when studying the fellahin at finding Jewish, Hellenic,
Rabbinic, Christian, and Mussulman reminiscences mingled pell-mell, and
in the quaintest combinations, with traits which may bring us back to
the most remote and obscure periods of pre-Israelite existence. Indeed,
for anything one could say to the contrary, the Christian fellahin of
this village, though they had resisted the proselytizing efforts of the
Saracen conquest in the sixth century, may, before they were converted
to Christianity, have worshipped the gods of the Græco-Roman period;
before that they may have been Jews, for there can be little question
that the aboriginal population, to some extent, adopted the Jewish faith
after the conquest, and before that were worshippers of the
Syro-Phœnician deities, Baal and Ashtaroth. They may in those old times,
when Jewish power was supreme, have been in this very village the
servants of the ancestors of these very Jews who now share its land with
them, as they had, according to their traditions, done from the most
ancient period; and this means, in a country where genealogies are
preserved for centuries upon centuries, a very long time ago. I have a
friend at Haifa who says he can trace his ancestry back to the crusades,
when his family was resident at the old town of the same name; and, as a
grotesque illustration of their pretensions, a story is told of a
Bedouin sheik who, being asked whether he was descended from Abraham,
said that he could trace further back, and that, in fact, Abraham was
not a sheik of a very good family.
The only really modern intruders in the group by which I was surrounded
were the Druses, who only settled in the village about three hundred
years ago, and whose origin prior to nine hundred years ago, when we
know that they were settled at Aleppo, is rather obscure; but it is
generally believed that they were originally a tribe inhabiting the
province of Yemen. Here, too, in this small group of Arabic-speaking
people, were represented four of the most widely divergent religions.
There were the two Moslems, whose ancestors, probably, prior to the
conquest of Palestine by the Saracens, had been Christians, but had then
adopted the faith of the Prophet. There was the priest of the Greek
Church, still clinging to the dogmas which he inherited from the first
Christians—the descendant, possibly, of one who had actually listened to
the words of Christ and his disciples, in the country which their
posterity has never left. And indeed it is a curious reflection in
looking at these fellahin to think that they may be the direct
descendants of some of those thousands who were influenced at the time
by the teaching which has since swayed the moral sentiment of civilized
humanity. Then there were the Jews—the only group of Jews existing in
the world whose ancestors have clung to the soil ever since that
Teacher's tragic death, and whose fathers may have shared in the general
hostility to him at the time—representing still the faith which was the
repository of the highest moral teaching prior to Christianity, prior to
Mohammedanism. Lastly, there were the Druses, in whose esoteric religion
is to be found the most extraordinary confusion of metaphysical notions,
gnostic and pagan, the outcome of a mystical interweaving of ideas
derived from the most divergent faiths, with a Magian or Zoroastrian
basis, upon which Hindoo and Buddhist, Jewish and Platonic, Christian
and Moslem dogmas have been successively grafted, forming a system so
recondite and abstruse that only the initiated can comprehend it, if
indeed they can.
Such were the mixed religious and race conditions by which I was
surrounded, and I was much struck by the apparent tolerance and
amiability with which all the members of these different religions
regarded each other. The Jewish rabbi told me privately that he much
preferred Druses to Christians; but he lived on good terms with all. And
when I went to see the synagogue the Greek priest strolled round with
me, and the rabbi returned the compliment by accompanying us when I went
to visit the little Greek church. Meantime, the Hebrew sheik had
summoned all the Jewish population, and they came trooping in to perform
the usual Eastern salutation of kissing the hand. Old men and maidens,
young men and married women and children, I saw them all, nor, so far as
dress and facial type were concerned, was it possible to distinguish
them from the fellahin of the country generally. These twenty families
seemed all to have descended from one stock, they all had the same name,
Cohen, and they have never intermarried either with the people of the
country or even with other Jews. I afterwards had some conversation with
the Christian and Druse sheiks in regard to them. They said that
formerly more of the village lands belonged to them, but owing to the
wars, pestilences, and other misfortunes which had overtaken the country
at various times, their property had become diminished; indeed, there
can be little doubt that the Druses themselves, when Fakr Eddin
conquered this part of the country, appropriated some of it; so that
now, so far as their worldly circumstances go, the Jews are badly off.
Nevertheless they do not complain, and are skilful, hard-working, and
persevering agriculturists, to my mind more deserving of sympathy than
many of their coreligionists who have come to settle in the country as
colonists, depending more upon the assistance which they derive from
without than upon their own efforts. The experience and example of their
coreligionists at Bukeia would make the neighbourhood of that place a
desirable locality for a colony.
From Bukeia I followed a northwesterly direction, by a most picturesque
mountain path, and in a few hours reached the romantically situated town
of Tershiha, where I was most hospitably entertained by the Cadi, a
dignified Arab gentleman of a true old Oriental type which is now
becoming rare. This place contains about two thousand inhabitants. They
are nearly all the adherents of a certain sheik, Ali el-Mograbi, a
Moslem reformer, who emigrated to this place from the north of Africa
many years ago, and whose preaching has been attended with remarkable
success. As his fame grew he moved to Acre, where he exercises an
extraordinary influence. The tenets of the sect of which he is the head
are kept a profound secret, though there is nothing to distinguish the
worship of the initiated from that of any ordinary sect of howling
dervishes, to the outside observer, except the sparing use of the name
of Mohammed. It is said, however, that their views are latitudinarian,
and, that, so far from being exclusive or fanatic, are rather in the
sense of extreme toleration for other religions. Whatever be the nature
of their heterodoxy, it is not now interfered with. Indeed, it is hinted
that the sheik counts among his followers some of the most highly placed
officials in the empire, and there can be little doubt that his
doctrines are spreading rapidly among Moslems, while even Christians
have joined the society. A large new mosque is now in progress of
erection at Haifa. The sheik himself, whose acquaintance I made
subsequently, is now a very old man, regarded with the most extreme
veneration by his followers, and the results of his teaching prove that
he must be endowed with gifts of a very high order.