Palestine

by C. R. Conder

The feeling that is left on the mind by constant and lengthy communion with such a peasantry is not easy to describe; they are “as sheep having no shepherd,” even as in the ancient days. What heart could fail to pity them in their weakness and ignorance, tortured by want, by debt, and by disease; cruelly ground down by robbers and taskmasters; torn from their homes to fight in Balkan snows, and left to find their way back without money or aid? I believe that in the minds of the present Sultan and of the present Khedive a real compassion for these poor creatures exists, though neither is able much to help them. The gratitude expressed for very little kindness, and the good feeling excited by common acts of justice among them, I shall not forget. There is but one state more miserable than that in which they usually live, and that is their condition in time of war. Whoever wins, whoever is covered with decorations, the poor at least are certain to suffer. I have seen them so suffer in Egypt in a campaign carried out by civilised and merciful Englishmen, but I have only heard from them what they underwent in the horrors of the great struggle with Russia in 1877. At Gibeon I found a young Sheikh who alone had made his way back out of all the conscripts taken from the village; and the peasantry in 1881 were forced to sell themselves and their families into practical slavery to foreign merchants, so ruined were they by the war. The horrible revenge that they took in a village, and on a European whom I well knew, cannot here be told. It is one of the many things beneath the surface which one learns by living long in a country, and which cannot be appreciated by the visitor of a season.

As regards race and language, enough has been said; and as regards religion, I have striven to show that the faith of mosques and Mollahs is hardly more in sympathy with peasant superstition than it is with the scepticism of Moslem philosophers. It was not, however, only with the peasantry that our work brought us in contact. I have conversed with men who traced their lineage from the companions of Omar, and with respectable merchants and learned doctors, as well as with Fellahin. The first step to a genuine understanding with such men is that there shall be no pretence on your part. The Oriental sees through such things more quickly than the European. He despises an affectation of consent on your part, and pays you in your own coin. Even as the home-made vest of an unhappy European disguised as a Syrian Christian was seen beneath his jubbeh, and as his blue eyes betrayed him while his speech did not, so the would-be Oriental Englishman deceives himself when he thinks he is gaining ground with Moslems. In his own colours he is accepted on his merits, and may claim such acquaintance as may exist between Moslem and Christian; but the Korân forbids the making of a Christian intimacy (v. 56). “Take not Jew or Christian,” says the Prophet, “for a friend.”

Few men could be more respected or more worthy of respect than the famous Abd-el-Kader, whose acquaintance I was honoured by making. Strict and stern as was his creed, countless Christians owed their lives to his influence in the massacres of 1860. With him I would contrast my so-called friend the Sheikh of the Jerusalem Haram. He belonged to the new school, which prophesies smooth things, and cries peace where there is no peace. A milder-mannered man I never met. He went out of his way to propose that he should start excavations for us near the mosque, and that he should let us see down into the Well of Souls. He never meant a word he said. I never believed him; and I knew his object was merely to get money on promises never to be fulfilled. Finding exactly where I wanted to excavate, he used to see no difficulty in the way. The next time I went to the Haram, a huge mound of earth had arisen before the walled-up archway which he promised to open. It was the stupidity of the Pasha, he explained (a Christian and an educated man), and he was still anxious to do something else. He could smatter a little English, and could ask for a copy of the Gospels. From such a man I could fancy the words to come easily that “Moslems and Christians were just the same;” but among all Muhammadans of Syria I despised no one else so heartily.

It is not the Moslem only who takes the measure of your foot in the East. I have heard the dragoman, who is so obsequious and respectful, describe the peculiarities of his convoy in their absence with considerable humour. There have been well-known prelates of Oriental Churches whose “printing-press funds” have not been visibly devoted to the benefit of their flocks. As long as the Turk is thought to be stupid and the Eastern believed to be eager for our teaching, he possesses the great advantage of being undervalued. The Turks have not allowed railways to be made, but they have adopted the electric telegraph; they have stopped explorations, but they are careful to collect antiquities having a saleable value. The Syrians have not adopted hard hats or French bonnets, but they buy lucifer-matches, and they use guns and gunpowder. They, like the Caffres, have keenly observed the manners of Europe, and have adopted only what seemed to them practical improvements. It is difficult to convey the results of experience in words. We go out to other countries supposing that we can carry all before us. We come home after a time to doubt whether in all respects our civilisation is superior to that of peoples who in Asia were the heirs of an ancient culture when we were painted with woad. If we are ignorant at first of the manners and beliefs of Eastern lands, the shock to our prejudices must be very great; but I cannot believe that long acquaintance with Moslem life can fail to dispel the charm of our first contact with the dignity and courtesy of the East.

There is another important question bound up with Palestine exploration on which a few words may be here permitted, namely, the relation which it bears to the study of the Bible. There is hardly a historic chapter which I was not able to read with the scene of the events recorded before my eyes; there is not a poetic line in the Old Testament which is not more vividly brought home by a memory of Eastern scenery and life. The conditions under which we study the Bible at home are most peculiar. We read it in translation, and in a country which has little or nothing in common with the home of Hebrew prophets or of Galilean disciples. We learn, as a rule, hardly a word of the original language, and while we never feel that Dante or Goethe are known to those who read translations and who have never been in Italy or in Germany, we regard the Bible as intelligible to every reader. Not that the translation is other than the most wonderful in existence—except Luther’s—and not that Englishmen were ignorant of the Holy Land in the days when it was first rendered from the original. Queen Elizabeth had her fleet on the Euphrates and her consuls in the Levant; Maundrell was chaplain at Aleppo in 1697, and addressed the record of his travels to the Bishop of Rochester. Not, again, that such familiar names as those of the roebuck and the fallow-deer are misnomers, or that “green pastures” are unknown in Palestine, but because the average reader who has not seen the East cannot but colour that which he reads with the colouring of familiar scenes.

It is not only the uncritical reader to whom this applies: the literary critic is no better off. I have studied much that has been written by Colenso, by Ewald, by Kuenen, and by Wellhausen; but there is perhaps only one critic of eminence to whom the East is familiar, and in whose eyes the antiquarian discoveries of explorers seem to have primary value, namely, Renan; and the tone of those authors who write without practical and long experience of the East at once betrays their deficiency. Their criticism smells of the lamp, not of the desert; and the arguments which seem so strong in their eyes have often little force in those of an Oriental traveller.

It has always been the fate of genius to be criticised by narrower minds. The Book of Job, for instance, is a work which cannot be truly appreciated anywhere but in the desert. It breathes the desert air, it tells of desert beasts and plants, of the pastoral patriarch with his flocks and herds, of the Chaldean raiders from the east, of the whirlwind, the frost, and the stars. Here you read of the broom still burned for charcoal—“sharp arrows of the mighty with coals of juniper.” In Job you hear the poet speak of the “eyelids of the dawn.” “The ghosts tremble beneath the waters, even the inhabitants thereof.” The stork and the ostrich, the wild ass and the ibex on the cliffs, are familiar to his memory. Of his critics he asks a question which may puzzle them yet: “Knowest thou the time when the wild goats of the rock bring forth? or canst thou mark when the hinds do calve? Canst thou number the months that they fulfil? or knowest thou the time when they bring forth?” Even after criticising the language and dividing out the “documents,” I fear it is to the Arab hunter that the most learned Hebraist in England must go for the answer.

The Song of Solomon is another Hebrew book which is equally full of Eastern colour. The vineyards of Lebanon, the secret places in the “stairs” of the rocks where the wild dove hides, the roes on the mountains, are among its images. Over the Moab plateau you may see the dawn stretching her wings as Joel beheld her, and from the mountains of Judah you may see her sinking in the “uttermost parts of the sea,” as the Psalmist describes. Surely in the days of a “modern theory of the Pentateuch,” it is not amiss that we should at times be reminded that the Hebrews knew better their own land, and even their own history, than strangers in a remote and very different clime, in the midst of a very different civilisation and theory of life, and at a time separated by some twenty-five centuries from that which is studied.

Every fact that is collected in the East serves better to explain the Bible and more and more to control critical views. Surely those who write of “peasant proprietors” in Solomon’s days cannot be aware that individual property in agricultural land has never been an Eastern tenure. As in India, in Russia, or among Bechuana tribes, so also in Palestine to the present day, the lands are held on “village tenure.” If Isaiah’s writings were ever circulated as “broad-sheets,” I would ask who read them in a country where only a few scribes here and there had acquired the great art of writing?

The tenth chapter of Genesis has been put on one side, as though unworthy of scientific notice, by those who have assumed that there was only one stock and only one language in Syria and Chaldea. Now that the monuments tell us of other races and other languages, its distinctions become valuable, and serve to guide scientific research; while the full elucidation of its geography has only been attained by the painful travels of explorers. In this way, also, we are now able to restore, bit by bit, the topography of Palestine as described in the Bible. It is found easy to recognise the most important towns, to trace the borders of the tribes, and to explain the scene of David’s wanderings or of Gideon’s pursuit. In the peasant’s mouth you may still hear the old language almost unchanged, with its terse idiom, its vigorous wording, and its naturally religious tone. It is not the language of the grammatical pedant that comes from his lips, but the mother-tongue of earlier days.