I
Outside the walls of Jerusalem, on the bleak roadless way to the Mount
of Olives, within sight of the domes and minarets of the sacred city,
and looking towards the mosque of Omar--arrogantly a-glitter on the
site of Solomon's Temple--there perches among black, barren rocks a
colony of Arabian Jews from Yemen.
These all but cave-dwellers, grimy caftaned figures, with swarthy
faces, coal-black ringlets, and hungry eyes, have for sole public
treasure a synagogue, consisting of a small room, furnished only with
an Ark, and bare even of seats.
In this room a Scribe of to-day, humblest in Israel, yet with the gift
of vision, stood turning over the few old books that lay about,
strange flotsam and jetsam of the great world-currents that have
drifted Israel to and fro. And to him bending over a copy of the
mystic _Zohar_,--that thirteenth century Cabalistic classic, forged in
Chaldaic by a Jew of Spain, which paved the way for the Turkish
Messiah--was brought a little child.
A little boy in his father's arms, his image in miniature, with a
miniature grimy caftan and miniature coal-black ringlets beneath his
little black skull-cap. A human curiosity brought to interest the
stranger and increase his _bakhshísh_.
For lo! the little boy had six fingers on his right hand! The child
held it shyly clenched, but the father forcibly parted the fingers to
exhibit them.
And the child lifted up his voice and wept bitterly.
And so, often in after days when the Scribe thought of Jerusalem, it
was not of what he had been told he would think; not of Prophets and
Angels and Crusaders--only of the crying of that little six-fingered
Jewish child, washed by the great tides of human history on to the
black rocks near the foot of the Mount of Olives.