In The Levant 15

In The Levant 15

But the birds sang sweetly in the garden, the flowers of spring were

blooming, and, hemmed in by the high wall, we had some moments of solemn

peace, broken only by the sound of a Moslem darabooka drum throbbing

near at hand. Desecrated as this spot is, and made cheap by the petty

creations of superstition, one cannot but feel the awful significance

of the place, and the weight of history crowding upon him, where battles

raged for a thousand years, and where the greatest victory of all was

won when Christ commanded Peter to put up his sword. Near here Titus

formed his columns which stormed the walls and captured the heroic city

after its houses, and all this valley itself, were filled with Jewish

dead; but all this is as nothing to the event of that awful night when

the servants of the high-priest led away the unresisting Lord.

 

It is this event, and not any other, that puts an immeasurable gulf

between this and all other cities, and perhaps this difference is more

felt the farther one is from Jerusalem. The visitor expects too much; he

is unreasonably impatient of the contrast between the mean appearance of

the theatre and the great events that have been enacted on it; perhaps

he is not prepared for the ignorance, the cupidity, the credulity,

the audacious impostures under Christian names, on the spot where

Christianity was born.

 

When one has exhausted the stock sights of Jerusalem, it is probably the

dullest, least entertaining city of the Orient; I mean, in itself, for

its pilgrims and its religious fêtes, in the spring of the year, offer

always some novelties to the sight-seer; and, besides, there is a

certain melancholy pleasure to be derived from roaming about outside

the walls, enveloped in a historic illusion that colors and clothes the

nakedness of the landscape.

 

The chief business of the city and the region seems to be the

manufacture of religious playthings for the large children who come

here. If there is any factory of relics here I did not see it. Nor do I

know whether the true cross has still the power of growing, which it

had in the fourth century, to renew itself under the constant demand for

pieces of it. I did not go to see the place where the tree grew of which

it was made; the exact spot is shown in a Greek convent about a mile

and a half west of the city. The tree is said to have been planted by

Abraham and Noah. This is evidently an error; it may have been planted

by Adam and watered by Noah.

 

There is not much trade in antiquities in the city; the shops offer

little to tempt the curiosity-hunter. Copper coins of the Roman period

abound, and are constantly turned up in the fields outside the city,

most of them battered and defaced beyond recognition. Jewish mites are

plenty enough, but the silver shekel would be rare if the ingenious Jews

did not keep counterfeits on hand. The tourist is waited on at his

hotel by a few patient and sleek sharks with cases of cheap jewelry

and doubtful antiques, and if he seeks the shops of the gold and silver

bazaars he will find little more. I will not say that he will not now

and then pick up a piece of old pottery that has made the journey

from Central Asia, or chance upon a singular stone with a talismanic

inscription. The hope that he may do so carries the traveller through

a great many Eastern slums. The chief shops, however, are those of

trinkets manufactured for the pilgrims, of olive-wood, ivory, bone,

camels' teeth, and all manner of nuts and seeds. There are more than

fifty sorts of beads, strung for profane use or arranged for rosaries,

and some of them have pathetic names, like "Job's tears." Jerusalem is

entitled to be called the City of Beads.

 

There is considerable activity in Jewish objects that are old and rather

unclean; and I think I discovered something like an attempt to make a

"corner" in phylacteries, that is, in old ones, for the new are made in

excess of the demand. If a person desires to carry home a phylactery

to exhibit to his Sunday school, in illustration of the religion of the

Jews, he wants one that has been a long time in use. I do not suppose it

possible that the education of any other person is as deficient as mine

was in the matter of these ornamental aids in worship. But if there

is one, this description is for him: the phylactery, common size, is a

leathern box about an inch and a half square, with two narrow straps

of leather, about three feet long, sewed to the bottom corners. The

box contains a parchment roll of sacred writing. When the worshipper

performs his devotions in the synagogue, he binds one of the

phylacteries about his left arm and the other about his head, so that

the little box has something of the appearance of a leathern horn

sprouting out of his forehead. Phylacteries are worn only in the

synagogue, and in this respect differ from the greasy leathern talismans

of the Nubians, which contain scraps from the Koran, and are never taken

off. Whatever significance the phylactery once had to the Jew it

seems now to have lost, since he is willing to make it an article of

merchandise. Perhaps it is poverty that compels him also to sell his

ancient scriptures; parchment rolls of favorite books, such as Esther,

that are some centuries old, are occasionally to be bought, and new

rolls, deceitfully doctored into an appearance of antiquity, are offered

freely.

 

A few years ago the antiquarian world was put into a ferment by what

was called the "Shoepira collection," a large quantity of clay

pottery,--gods, votive offerings, images, jars, and other vessels,--with

inscriptions in unknown characters, which was said to have been dug up

in the land of Moab, beyond the Jordan, and was expected to throw great

light upon certain passages of Jewish history, and especially upon

the religion of the heathen who occupied Palestine at the time of

the conquest. The collection was sent to Berlin; some eminent German

_savans_ pronounced it genuine; nearly all the English scholars branded

it as an impudent imposture. Two collections of the articles have

been sent to Berlin, where they are stored out of sight of the public

generally, and Mr. Shoepira has made a third collection, which he still

retains.

 

Mr. Shoepira is a Hebrew antiquarian and bookseller, of somewhat

eccentric manners, but an enthusiast. He makes the impression of a

man who believes in his discoveries, and it is generally thought in

Jerusalem that if his collection is a forgery, he himself is imposed on.

The account which he gives of the places where the images and utensils

were found is anything but clear or definite. We are required to believe

that they have been dug up in caves at night and by stealth, and at the

peril of the lives of the discoverers, and that it is not safe to visit

these caves in the daytime on account of the Bedaween. The fresh-baked

appearance of some of the articles is admitted, and it is said that it

was necessary to roast them to prevent their crumbling when exposed to

the air. Our theory in regard to these singular objects is that a few of

those first shown were actually discovered, and that all the remainder

have been made in imitation of them. Of the characters (or alphabet)

of the inscriptions, Mr. Schepira says he has determined twenty-three;

sixteen of these are Phoenician, and the others, his critics say, are

meaningless. All the objects are exceedingly rude and devoid of the

slightest art; the images are many of them indecent; the jars are clumsy

in shape, but the inscriptions are put on with some skill. The figures

are supposed to have been votive offerings, and the jars either memorial

or sepulchral urns.

 

The hideous collection appeared to me _sui generis_, although some of

the images resemble the rudest of those called Phoenician which General

di Cesnola unearthed in Cyprus. Without merit, they seem to belong to a

rude age rather than to be the inartistic product of this age. That is,

supposing them to be forgeries, I cannot see how these figures could be

conceived by a modern man, who was capable of inventing a fraud of this

sort. He would have devised something better, at least something less

simple, something that would have somewhere betrayed a little modern

knowledge and feeling. All the objects have the same barbarous tone,

a kind of character that is distinct from their rudeness, and the same

images and designs are repeated over and over again. This gives color

to the theory that a few genuine pieces of Moabite pottery were found,

which gave the idea for a large manufacture of them. And yet, there are

people who see these things, and visit all the holy places, and then go

away and lament that there are no manufactories in Jerusalem.

 

Jerusalem attracts while it repels; and both it and all Palestine

exercise a spell out of all proportion to the consideration they had in

the ancient world. The student of the mere facts of history, especially

if his studies were made in Jerusalem itself, would be at a loss to

account for the place that the Holy City occupies in the thought of the

modern world, and the importance attached to the history of the handful

of people who made themselves a home in this rocky country. The Hebrew

nation itself, during the little time it was a nation, did not play

a part in Oriental affairs at all commensurate with its posthumous

reputation. It was not one of the great kingdoms of antiquity, and

in that theatre of war and conquest which spread from Ethiopia to the

Caspian Sea, it was scarcely an appreciable force in the great drama.

 

The country the Hebrews occupied was small; they never conquered

or occupied the whole of the Promised Land, which extended from the

Mediterranean Sea to the Arabian plain, from Hamath to Sinai. Their

territory in actual possession reached only from Dan to Beersheba. The

coast they never subdued; the Philistines, who came from Crete and grew

to be a great people in the plain, held the lower portion of Palestine

on the sea, and the Phoenicians the upper. Except during a brief period

in their history, the Jews were confined to the hill-country. Only

during the latter part of the reign of David and two thirds of that of

Solomon did the Jewish kingdom take on the proportions of a great state.

David extended the Israelitish power from the Gulf of Akaba to the

Euphrates; Damascus paid him tribute; he occupied the cities of his

old enemies, the Philistines, but the kingdom of Tyre, still in the

possession of Hiram, marked the limit of Jewish sway in that direction.

This period of territorial consequence was indeed brief. Before Solomon

was in his grave, the conquests bequeathed to him by his father began

to slip from his hand. The life of the Israelites as a united nation, as

anything but discordant and warring tribes, after the death of Joshua,

is all included in the reigns of David and Solomon,--perhaps sixty or

seventy years.

 

The Israelites were essentially highlanders. Some one has noticed their

resemblance to the Scotch Highlanders in modes of warfare. In fighting

they aimed to occupy the heights. They descended into the plain

reluctantly; they made occasional forays into the lowlands, but their

hills were their strength, as the Psalmist said; and they found security

among their crags and secluded glens from the agitations which shook the

great empires of the Eastern world. Invasions, retreats, pursuits, the

advance of devouring hosts or the flight of panic-stricken masses, for

a long time passed by their ridge of country on either side, along the

Mediterranean or through the land of Moab. They were out of the track

of Oriental commerce as well as of war. So removed were they from

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