The Weird Orient: Nine Mystic Tales

Transcriber's Note
This book contains some Hebrew text, e.g. קב״ה. If it does not display correctly, you may wish to adjust your browser or device settings.
BY HENRY ILIOWIZI Author of “In the Pale,” “Jewish Dreams and Realities,” etc.
PHILADELPHIA HENRY T. COATES AND COMPANY 1900
Copyright 1899 by HENRY ILIOWIZI. ——— All rights reserved. ——— ENTERED AT STATIONERS’ HALL, LONDON.


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.