In introducing to the general public a writer who has heretofore been
known chiefly among the people of his own race, his publishers may
perhaps be permitted to say a word. Rabbi Iliowizi is a Hebrew of pure
lineage, the son of a zealous member of the Chassidim, a Kabbalistic
sect numbering over half a million members in Russia, Roumania and
Gallicia, but rarely met with in this country. He passed his infancy
and boyhood in the Russian provinces of Minsk and Moghileff, and in
Roumania, growing to manhood and receiving his education at
Frankfort-on-the-Main, Berlin and Breslau, where he qualified himself
for a theological career. After six years of study in Germany, he
spent some four years more perfecting his training in modern languages
and in Arabic and Hebrew in London and Paris, under the auspices of
the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Alliance Israelite Universelle,
as a preparation to take charge of one of the outlying mission
stations maintained by these affiliated societies in the Orient, where
they support some fifty schools for the benefit of their oppressed
co-religionists. After a prolonged service in Morocco, engaged in the
educational work of the two societies, Mr. Iliowizi lived for a year
at Gibraltar, and then came to America to devote himself to the
ministry of the Jewish Church, and is now the spiritual head of a
large congregation of his own people.
Mr. Iliowizi has hitherto contributed principally to the literature of
his race, being known among Jews by several works; most widely,
perhaps, by a volume of stories of Russian life, under the title of
"In the Pale," recently published by the Jewish Publication Society of
America for its subscribers. In the series of Eastern tales,
comprising the present book, which appeals to a larger audience, he
has the special advantage, not only of a lengthened residence among
Eastern peoples, but that he is himself of an Oriental race, of a
heredity highly tinctured by the tenets of one of its most mystical
sects, and personally is of a strongly Semitic type of mind, tempered
by the maturing of his powers in the clear atmosphere of the New World
intellectual life. He has, therefore,--or ought to have,--exceptional
facilities for interpreting to the West the mind and heart of the
East.
Whoever has lived long in the Orient,--and Morocco is essentially
Eastern in its atmosphere, even if geographically it might possibly be
otherwise classed,--cannot but realize the subtle and inexpressible
influence that so strongly pervades its life, and which, often as it
has been spoken of, is so hard for the Occidental mind fully to
understand or appreciate. It is the "call of the East," as Mr.
Kipling happily puts it, and of which his British soldier sings in
such realistic fashion:
"An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year sodger tells;
'If you've 'eard the East a-callin', why you won't 'eed nothin' else.'
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells
An' the sunshine an' the palm trees an' the tinkly temple-bells!"
The mystery of the great desolate desert stretches, with their
overpowering solemnity of deadly silence, has from time immemorial
exercised a most powerful influence upon the imagination of those who
frequent them; and their optical illusions are often so curious and so
startling as to afford easy explanation of the legends of hidden and
phantom cities, such as are told here and elsewhere, and indeed of
much else beside. Stories similar to "Sheddad's Palace of Irem," and
that of the vanishing city of the Peri in "The Croesus of Yemen," are
frequently met with.
The gloominess of the mountain regions, especially that of the
Sinaitic Peninsula, has also had a profound influence in giving color
to the legendary lore of the middle Orient; and this combination of
desert and mountain influences perhaps largely accounts for what is
distinctively peculiar in the mysticism of the East, and for much that
will be found in this book.