Such extended journeys could not be accomplished without paying the price. Thus, after the survey of Samaria, Carmel, and Sharon, operations had to be suspended for a time, simply because the party had reached the limit of endurance. “The fatigue of the campaign had been very great. My eyes were quite pink all over, with the effects of the glare of white chalk, my clothes were in rags, my boots had no soles. The men were no better off, and the horses also were all much exhausted, suffering from soreback, due to the grass diet.” But the spirit was stronger than the flesh. “The rest soon restored our energies, and autumn found us once more impatient to be in the fields.”
Thence Conder was off to Damascus, Baalbek and Hermon, away from Palestine itself. The ascent of the 9,000 feet of mount Hermon was begun at 10.30 a. m., and at 2 o’clock the summit was reached. But we must pass over the glowing description of the panorama that unfolded itself to the gaze of the explorers. After three months in the north, tents were struck, and the party marched out of their pleasant mountain-camp, bound for Jerusalem and the hills of Judah. Of the many pen-pictures which Conder draws, we will stay only to regard one—the description of Bethar, where Bar Cochba made his great effort at recovering Jewish independence (about the year 135 of the present era). Conder locates the fortress at the modern village Bittîr (at which there is now a railway station). It is about thirty-five miles from the sea, and about five from Jerusalem. “On every side, except the south, it is surrounded by deep and rugged gorges, and it is supplied with fresh water from a spring above the village. On the north the position would have been impregnable, as steep cliffs rise from the bottom of the ravine, upon which the houses are perched. The name (Bittîr) exactly represents the Hebrew (Bethar), and the distances agree with those noticed by Eusebius and the Talmud. Nor must the curious title be forgotten, which is applied to a shapeless mass of ruin on the hill, immediately west of Bittîr, for the name Khurbet el Yehûd—Ruin of the Jews—may be well thought to hand down traditionally among the natives of the neighbourhood the memory of the great catastrophe of Bethar.” Whether this place is the true site of Bar Cochba’s Bethar may be seriously questioned, but no other view can claim to be more certain. “The site of Bethar must still be considered doubtful,” says that good authority, S. Krauss, who himself is inclined to the theory which places the fortress much further north, near Sepphoris.
We should like to linger over the rest of Conder’s journey, but the few lines that remain must be devoted to his final remarks. Conder, it must ever be remembered, was one of the first to dispute the then current belief that the Holy Land had lost its old character for fertility, and that changes in climate had induced an irreparable barrenness. He maintained in particular that the supposed dearth of water had been much exaggerated by recent tourists. “With respect to the annual rainfall, it is only necessary to note that, with the old cisterns cleaned and mended, and the beautiful tanks and aqueducts repaired, the ordinary fall would be quite sufficient for the wants of the inhabitants and for irrigation.” (Here, too, recent events have effected an agreeable transformation.) And, in general “the change in productiveness which has really occurred in Palestine, is due to decay of cultivation, to decrease of population, and to bad government. It is Man and not Nature, who has ruined the good land in which was ‘no lack,’ and it is, therefore, within the power of human industry to restore the old country to its old condition of agricultural prosperity.” Construct roads, raise irrigation works, promote afforestation—those were the measures Conder suggested, after the three strenuous years of his survey (1872 to 1875). Such optimistic opinions are now quite common; and, we may hope, are tending towards realization, if only men’s hopes are not set too high. But let us not forget that among the first moderns to formulate such opinions, on the basis of exact knowledge, was the author of Tent Work in Palestine.
KALISCH’S “PATH AND GOAL”
Of Marcus Kalisch’s learned commentaries on the Bible it has been truly said that they are a thorough summary of all that had been written on the subject up to the date when those commentaries were published. He not only knew everything, but he had assimilated it. Nor was it only his learning that placed him among the first among the Jewish scholars of the second part of the nineteenth century. He was original as well; that he “anticipated Wellhausen,” more than one has declared of him, as they have declared of others before Kalisch.
Learning and originality make a fairly strong instrument for drawing out the truth. But another strand is needed to compose the threefold cord that shall not easily be broken. This, too, Kalisch had at his command. It is the strand of sentiment. In his more orthodox days when he produced his Exodus (1855), and in his more rationalistic period when he gave to the world his Balaam and his Jonah (1887-8)—at all stages of his activity he was never the mere philologist. Like Sheridan’s character, he was a man of sentiment; but unlike Joseph Surface, his sentiment was genuine. He was, to put the same truth in other words, an expounder of ideas as well as a critic of words.
It should have surprised no one to meet Kalisch in any situation where the qualities above defined could be exercised. Yet some of those who only thought of him as the Hebrew grammarian must have opened their eyes when the fact was brought to their notice that within a couple of years of printing his Genesis (1858) he issued a small volume on Oliver Goldsmith. In 1860 he spoke the substance of this volume as “two lectures delivered to a village audience.” The theme was treated by him with considerable learning, but with an even more considerable good feeling. I remember particularly two or three sentences in this book. “Forgive his faults, but do not forget them” is one—I quote from memory and may not be verbally exact. Forgiveness not only differs from forgetfulness, but, humanely considered, the two things are scarcely consistent. You really can only forgive when you remember—all that the man was whom you are judging. Another sentence that I recall is this: “You will find Goldsmith’s life again in his writings, and his writings in his life.” This is a notable conception, not original to Kalisch. But the turn he gives to it seems to me quite fresh. Goldsmith, he asserts, was a great writer and—despite the faults aforementioned—a good man. “You see his goodness in his writings and his greatness in his life”—a brilliant epigram, but also a neat description of the ideal man of letters.
But how came it that Marcus Kalisch, a German and a Jew, was addressing village audiences in England at all? Born in Pomerania in 1828, he had come to England fresh from the Universities of Berlin and Halle. Like so many others of various nationalities and creeds, he had played a generous part in the 1848 affair, and felt unsafe after its suppression. Nathan Marcus Adler had settled in London in 1845. The refugee found an asylum with the new chief rabbi: Kalisch served the latter as secretary for five years. His former employer must have felt fairly uncomfortable when Kalisch’s Leviticus appeared (1867-72), for this was a pretty thorough departure from the old-fashioned standpoint. Kalisch, of course, was not without honor in his own community. He had a real, though not an undiscriminating, admirer in the late A. L. Green. We still, however, seem rather far off from solving the riddle: how came Kalisch to be talking to English village audiences on Oliver Goldsmith or on any other subject? The answer is given with the names of the villages. They were Aston Clinton and Mentmore in the county of Buckinghamshire—places long associated with the country homes of the Rothschilds. In 1853 Kalisch was appointed tutor to the sons of Baron Lionel de Rothschild. From that date until Kalisch’s death, in 1885, there was no break in the cordial relations between the Rothschilds and the scholar. They provided the leisure, and he provided the capacity to make worthy use of it. Countless are the honorable incidents in the Rothschild record, but there is none on which a Jewish writer more loves to dwell than on the association of the family with the author of Path and Goal.
The scene of that work is Cordova Lodge, the house of Gabriel de Mondoza, situated in one of the northern suburbs of London. It was “an unpretending structure of moderate dimensions, but adorned with consummate taste and judgment.” The further description of the house rather reminds one of Disraeli’s creations. And this Lodge, “a veritable rus in urbe,” with its Greek busts and “modest conservatories”—there is not lacking even “a diminutive farm”—was, we are told, so located and ordered as to afford “an atmosphere of calm cheerfulness, inviting the mind at once to concentration and intercommunion.” The owner, in whose abode Kalisch represents his characters as gathered, was descended from a distinguished family of Spanish Jews, who had come from Holland to England during Cromwell’s protectorate. His mother was a German, “of an essentially artistic nature.” From his father he derived his love for the Bible, from his mother his admiration for the Classics; and doubtful as to which to prefer, “he clung the more firmly to both, and laboured to weld the conceptions of the Scriptures and of Hellenism into one homogeneous design.”
His house was the habitual meeting-place for many native and foreign guests, and during the International Exhibition a specially representative group are found at Cordova Lodge, conducting a “discussion of the elements of civilisation and the conditions of happiness.” This discussion is the substance of the volume entitled Path and Goal. Such symposia go back to Plato, but it was W. H. Mallock who, with his New Republic, re-popularized the genre in England. This appeared in 1877; Kalisch’s Path and Goal followed it in 1880. The disputants in the latter work include Christians of all degrees of high and low Churchiness; a naturalist and a Hellenist; a Reform and an Orthodox Rabbi; a Parsee and a Mohammedan; a Brahman and a Buddhist. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this gathering is Kalisch’s recognition of the importance of the Eastern religions. Sometimes, indeed, those who try to prefigure the future of the world’s religion take account of Islam. But very few remember the beliefs and institutions of India. The learning with which Kalisch discusses the Indian systems would be amazing were one not prepared for it by previous knowledge of his encyclopedic acquirements.