Part 11

He is visible only to women or men of the poorest class, and obstinately refuses to let his face be seen by any man above the rank of a fellah or peasant. Indeed, his own disciples who visit him are only allowed a glimpse of his august back, and in retiring from that they have to back out with their faces towards it. I have seen a lady who has been honoured with an interview, during which he said nothing beyond giving her his blessing, and after about three minutes motioned to her to retire. She describes him as a man of probably about seventy years of age, but much younger-looking, as he dyes both his hair and his beard black, but of a very mild and benevolent cast of countenance. He lives at a villa in the plain, about two miles beyond Acre, which he has rented from a Syrian gentleman of my acquaintance, who tells me that once or twice he has seen him walking in his garden, but that he always turns away so that his face shall not be seen. Indeed, the most profound secrecy is maintained in regard to him and the religious tenets of his sect.

Not long ago, however, public curiosity was gratified, for one of his Persian followers stabbed another for having been unworthy of some religious trust, and the great man himself was summoned as a witness.

“Will you tell the court who and what you are?” was the first question put.

“I will begin,” he replied, “by telling you who I am not. I am not a camel driver”—this was an allusion to the Prophet Mohammed—“nor am I the son of a carpenter”—this in allusion to Christ. “This is as much as I can tell you to-day. If you will now let me retire, I will tell you to-morrow who I am.”

Upon this promise he was let go; but the morrow never came. With an enormous bribe he had in the interval purchased an exemption from all further attendance at court.

That his wealth is fabulous may be gathered from the fact that not long since a Persian emir or prince, possessing large estates, came and offered them all, if in return he would only allow him to fill his water-jars. The offer was considered worthy of acceptance, and the emir is at this moment a gardener in the grounds which I saw over the wall of my friend's villa. This is only one instance of the devotion with which he is regarded, and of the honours which are paid to him: indeed, when we remember that he is believed to possess the attributes of Deity, this is not to be wondered at. Meantime his disciples are patiently waiting for his turn to come, which will be on the last day, when his divine character will be recognized by unbelievers.

AN ANCIENT JEWISH COMMUNITY.

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.

DOMESTIC LIFE AMONG THE SYRIANS.

Haifa, March 1, 1884.—The ordinary tourists in Palestine who write books of their experience have so little opportunity of knowing the conditions which surround the daily life of a resident in a small country town, that a few details of domestic existence here, as contrasted with those of more civilized countries, may not be uninteresting. As a general rule, the foreigner who comes to a native town to settle down as a permanent inhabitant finds himself compelled more or less to adopt the manners and customs of the richer class of Syrians, which gives him an opportunity of becoming acquainted with their home life. Some of these are wealthy merchants or large landed proprietors, with incomes varying from $5000 to $15,000, though a man whose yearly revenue reached the latter amount, of which he would not spend half, would be considered a millionaire, and few small towns can boast of so great a capitalist. As, owing to the march of civilization, the richer classes have of late years taken to travel and the study of languages, persons occupying this position generally speak either French or Italian, have visited Paris, Constantinople, or Alexandria, and have a thin varnish of European civilization overlaying their native barbarism.

The rich families of the Syrian aristocracy are almost invariably Christians, but they have only recently shaken off the manners of their Mohammedan neighbours and conquerors. The women associate far more freely than they used to do with the men. They now no longer cover their faces, and although they still wear the “fustan,” or white winding-sheet, which serves as cloak and head-dress in one, it nearly always conceals a dress of European make, while, instead of bare feet thrust into slippers, they have Paris bottines and stockings. The men of this class also dress in European garments, wearing, however, the red fez cap.

The domestic arrangements of a family of this description are by no means so refined in character as the external aspect of the house and its proprietor, when he is taking his exercise on a gorgeously caparisoned Arab horse, would suggest. If we are on sufficiently intimate terms with him to stay as a guest in his house, we find that his pretty wife, with her Paris dress and dainty chaussure, walks about in the privacy of the domestic home with bare, or at best stockinged, feet, thrust into high wooden pattens, with which she clatters over the handsome marble hall that forms the central chamber of the house, slipping out her feet and leaving the pattens at the door of any of the rooms she may be about to enter. She wears a loose morning-wrapper, which she is not particular about buttoning, but in this respect she is outdone by sundry dishevelled maid-servants, who also clatter about the house in pattens and in light garments that seem to require very little fastening in front. As for the husband, who, when he called upon you, might have come off the boulevards of Paris, barring always the red cap, he has now reverted absolutely into the Oriental. He wears a long white and not unbecoming garment that reaches from his throat to his heels, and his feet are thrust into red slippers. As he sips his matutinal cup of coffee and smokes his first narghileh of the day, there is nothing about him to remind you that he knows a word of any other language than Arabic, or has ever worn any other costume than that of his Eastern ancestors. He is sitting in his own little den, with his feet tucked under him on the divan which runs around the room, and with his wife in close proximity, her feet tucked under her, and also smoking a narghileh and sipping coffee.

Yet, if you call upon this worthy couple as a distinguished foreigner, in the afternoon, accompanied by your wife, and are not on intimate terms, you are received in a room which they never enter, except upon such state occasions, by the same gentleman, in a perfectly fitting black frock-coat and trousers, varnished boots, and a white waistcoat, and by the same lady, in a dress which has been made in Paris.

The furniture consists of massive tables with marble tops, and handsome arm-chairs and couches covered with costly satins. The walls are resplendent with gilt mirrors and with heavy hanging curtains. The floors are covered with rich carpets. There is a three-hundred-dollar piano, on which the lady never plays; and there are pictures, of which the frames are more artistic than the subjects—the whole having the air of a show repository of some sort. Indeed, if your host is at all taken by surprise, the first thing he does is to open all the shutters, as, except upon such occasions, the apartment is one of silent and absolute gloom. He has a guest-chamber, also furnished after a civilized style, in which he puts you, if you are going to stay with him, and he has so far adopted civilized habits that he sleeps on a bed himself, and not on mats on the floor, like his forefathers. His dinner is served on a table, which is spread as he has seen it spread in the houses of foreigners, but he retains the native cooking, the huge pillaw of rice, the chicken stew with rich and greasy gravy, the lamb stuffed with pistachio nuts, the leben or sour milk, the indescribable sweet dishes, crisp, sticky, and nutty, the delicious preserves of citrons, dates, and figs, the flat bread and the goat cheese, and the wine of the country.

Altogether, he gives you plenty to eat, drink, and smoke, but his conversational powers and ideas are limited, which is not to be wondered at, considering that there is not a book in the house. He tells you that the house cost him $9000, which does not seem likely to be an exaggeration when we look at the handsome marble floors and staircase, massive arches, and the extent of ground which is covered by spacious halls and ample courts.

The kitchen and offices, if you have the curiosity to look into them, are filthy in the extreme, and the process of cooking the dinner, performed by a slovenly female, had better not be too closely examined. His domestic establishment probably consists of four women and two or three men who look after the stables, in which are three or four handsome horses, and a garden requiring constant attention. He has no wheeled vehicle, for there are no roads. The women rarely take any other exercise than that of waddling on gossiping visits to each other, when their conversation turns entirely on domestic subjects, on the marital traits of their respective husbands, on congratulations on the arrival of children, if they are boys, and condolences if they are girls, and on hopeful speculation and encouragement if there are none at all; for of all misfortunes which can befall a Syrian lady, to be childless is the greatest. If there are grown-up daughters they are carefully protected from intimacy with young men, and marriages are arranged by the parents. The chances of making a good match depend more on the amount of the marriage-settlement than on their looks. If the family happens to be a large one it is not uncommon to see a young lady who has been brought up in what, in Syria, is considered luxury, married to some poor and distant connection, whose family live in the humblest manner. In such a case the contrast is greater than can be imagined in our country. She is transferred from the palatial residence I have described to a one-storied house which probably does not consist of more than two rooms, and where her husband's family live in the old style. Here she is received, perhaps, by his mother and sister, with whom she is to live; who wear the pure native costume; who have never had a shoe or stocking on in their lives; who sleep on mats on the floor, for there are no bedsteads; who partake of their meals squatting on their heels, for there are no chairs or tables; and who eat with their fingers, for there are no knives and forks.