A VISIT TO HEBRON
The account of Hebron, given in this volume, must be read for what it was designed to be, an impressionist sketch. The history of the site, in so far as it has been written, must be sought in more technical books. As will be seen from several details, my visit was paid in the month of April, just before Passover. Things have altered in some particulars since I was there, but there has been no essential change in the past decade.
The Hebron Haram, or shrine over the Cave of Machpelah, is fully described in the "Cruise of H.M.S. Bacchante, 1879-1882," ii, pp. 595-619. (Compare "Survey of Western Palestine," iii, pp. 333-346; and the Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1882, pp. 197-214.) Colonel Conder's account narrates the experiences of the present King of England at the Haram in April, 1882. Dean Stanley had previously entered the Haram with King Edward VII, in January, 1862 (see Stanley's "Sermons in the East," 1863, pp. 141-169). A good note on the relation between these modern narratives and David Reubeni's (dating from the early part of the sixteenth century) was contributed by Canon Dalton to the Quarterly Statement, 1897, p. 53. A capital plan of the Haram is there printed.
Mr. Adler's account of his visit to Hebron will be found in his "Jews in Many Lands," pp. 104-111; he tells of his entry into the Haram on pp. 137-138.
M. Lucien Gautier's work referred to is his Souvenirs du Terre-Sainte (Lausanne, 1898). The description of glass-making appears on p. 53 of that work.
The somewhat startling identification of the Ramet el-Khalil, near Hebron, with the site of the altar built by Samuel in Ramah (I Sam. vii. 17) is justified at length in Mr. Shaw Caldecott's book "The Tabernacle, its History and Structure" (London, 1904).
THE SOLACE OF BOOKS (pp. 93-121)
The opening quotation is from the Ethical Will of Judah ibn Tibbon, the "father" of Jewish translators. The original is fully analyzed in an essay by the present writer, in the Jewish Quarterly Review, iii, 453. See also ibidem, p. 483. The Hebrew text was printed by Edelmann, and also by Steinschneider; by the latter at Berlin, 1852.
A writer much cited in this same essay, Richard of Bury, derived his name from his birthplace, Bury St. Edmunds. "He tells us himself in his 'Philobiblon' that he used his high offices of state as a means of collecting books. He let it be known that books were the most acceptable presents that could be made to him" ("Dictionary of National Biography," viii, 26). He was also a student of Hebrew, and collected grammars of that language. Altogether his "Philobiblon" is an "admirable exhibition of the temper of a book-lover." Written in the early part of the fourteenth century, the "Philobiblon" was first published, at Cologne, in 1473. The English edition cited in this essay is that published in the King's Classics (De la More Library, ed. I. Gollancz).
The citation from Montaigne is from his essay on the "Three Commerces" (bk. in, ch. iii). The same passages, in Florio's rendering, will be found in Mr. A.R. Waller's edition (Dent's Everyman's Library), in, pp. 48-50. Of the three "Commerces" (i.e. societies)—Men, Women, and Books—Montaigne proclaims that the commerce of books "is much more solid-sure and much more ours." I have claimed Montaigne as the great-grandson of a Spanish Jew on the authority of Mr. Waller (Introduction, p. vii).
The paragraphs on books from the "Book of the Pious," §§ 873-932, have been collected (and translated into English) by the Rev. Michael Adler, in an essay called "A Medieval Bookworm" (see The Bookworm, ii, 251).
The full title of Mr. Alexander Ireland's book—so much drawn upon in this
essay—is "The Book-Lover's Enchiridion, a Treasury of Thoughts on the
Solace and Companionship of Books, Gathered from the Writings of the
Greatest Thinkers, from Cicero, Petrarch, and Montaigne, to Carlyle,
Emerson, and Ruskin" (London and New York, 1894).
Mr. F.M. Nichols' edition of the "Letters of Erasmus" (1901) is the source of the quotation of one of that worthy's letters.
The final quotation comes from the Wisdom of Solomon, ch. vi. v. 12; ch. viii. vv. 2, 16; and ch. ix. v. 4. The "radiance" of Wisdom is, in ch. vii, 26, explained in the famous words, "For she is an effulgence from everlasting light, an unspotted mirror of the working of God, and an image of His goodness."