“Will you tell the court who and what you are?” was the first question put.
“I will begin,” he replied, “by telling you who I am not. I am not a camel driver”—this was an allusion to the Prophet Mohammed—“nor am I the son of a carpenter”—this in allusion to Christ. “This is as much as I can tell you to-day. If you will now let me retire, I will tell you to-morrow who I am.”
Upon this promise he was let go; but the morrow never came. With an enormous bribe he had in the interval purchased an exemption from all further attendance at court.
That his wealth is fabulous may be gathered from the fact that not long since a Persian emir or prince, possessing large estates, came and offered them all, if in return he would only allow him to fill his water-jars. The offer was considered worthy of acceptance, and the emir is at this moment a gardener in the grounds which I saw over the wall of my friend's villa. This is only one instance of the devotion with which he is regarded, and of the honours which are paid to him: indeed, when we remember that he is believed to possess the attributes of Deity, this is not to be wondered at. Meantime his disciples are patiently waiting for his turn to come, which will be on the last day, when his divine character will be recognized by unbelievers.
[AN ANCIENT JEWISH COMMUNITY.]
Haifa, Nov. 25.—In one of the most remote and secluded valleys in the mountains of northern Galilee lies a village, the small population of which possesses an interest altogether unique. As I looked down upon it from the precipitous and dangerous path by means of which I was skirting the flank of the mountain, I thought I had rarely seen a spot of such ideal beauty. It was an oasis, not actually in a desert—for the rocky mountain ranges were covered with wild herbage—but in a savage wilderness of desolation, in the midst of which the village nestled in a forest of orange, almond, fig, and pomegranate trees, the tiny rills of water by which they were irrigated glistening like silver threads in the sunlight, and the yellow crops beyond contrasting with the dull green of the hill verdure, long deprived of water, and the gray rocks which reared their craggy pinnacles above it.
The name of this village was Bukeia. I had heard vaguely of the existence of a spot in Galilee where a community of Jews lived who claimed to be the descendants of families who had tilled the land in this same locality prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent dispersion of the race; as it had never been suspected that any remnant of the nation had clung to the soil of their fathers from time immemorial, and as it is certain that this is the only remnant that has, I took some trouble to ascertain the name of the village, and felt that it was worth a pilgrimage to visit it. Although hitherto unknown to Europeans and tourists, it has been for many years a spot much frequented by the Jews of Safed and Tiberias, and this summer especially, when the cholera panic prevailed in the country, there was a perfect rush of the wealthier Jews and rabbis of those towns to its pure air and bracing climate. In a small way it is a sort of Jewish sanatorium.
But the village does not consist altogether of Jews. In fact, they form the minority of the population, which is composed of eighty Druse, forty Greek-Christian, and twenty Jewish families, the latter numbering about one hundred and twenty souls in all. Refusing the invitation of the Druse and Christian sheiks to accept their hospitality, I listened rather to the solicitations of the elderly Hebrew who eagerly placed his house at my disposal, and was the patriarch of his coreligionists, his local title being, like those of the heads of the other communities, that of sheik. His house was a stone erection with a court-yard, and contained a single large room, which, as is common in Arab houses, afforded eating and sleeping accommodation for the whole family. On this occasion it soon became crowded to excess.
First appeared the Druse sheik, with white turban, and composed and dignified bearing. Then the sheik of the Christians, a man in no way to be distinguished from the ordinary type of native fellahin; then the Greek priest, in his high, round-topped black hat and long black coat, reaching nearly to his feet; then the Jewish rabbi, who officiates at the synagogue, in flowing Eastern robe; then some village notables of all three religions, who all squatted on mats, forming a semicircle, of which my friends and I were the centre, and which involved a large demand upon our host for coffee, for on these occasions it is a great breach of politeness not to furnish all the uninvited guests who flock in to see distinguished strangers with that invariable beverage. When one or two Moslems, who were temporary visitors to the village, dropped in from curiosity, I could not fail to be struck with the singular ethnological and theological compound by which I was surrounded. Here, in these Christian and Moslem peasants, were the descendants of those ancient Canaanites whom the conquering Jews failed to drive out of the country during the entire period of their occupation of it, though they doubtless served their conquerors as hewers of wood and drawers of water, and as farm-servants generally; for the result of the most recent and exhaustive research proves, I think, incontestably that the fellahin of Palestine, taken as a whole, are the modern representatives of those old tribes which the Israelites found settled in the country, such as the Canaanites, Hivites, Jebusites, Amorites, Philistines, Edomites. In what proportion these various tribes are now represented, whether they were preceded by a still older autochthonous population, namely, the Anakim, Horites, and so forth, are questions which have so far been beyond the reach of scientific research. But though this race, or rather conglomeration of races, which may be designated for want of a better by the vague title of pre-Israelite, still survives beneath the Mohammedan or Christian exterior, it has not remained uninfluenced during the lapse of centuries by the many events and circumstances that have happened in Palestine.
Each successive change in the social and political condition of the country has more or less affected it in various ways, and we must not be surprised when studying the fellahin at finding Jewish, Hellenic, Rabbinic, Christian, and Mussulman reminiscences mingled pell-mell, and in the quaintest combinations, with traits which may bring us back to the most remote and obscure periods of pre-Israelite existence. Indeed, for anything one could say to the contrary, the Christian fellahin of this village, though they had resisted the proselytizing efforts of the Saracen conquest in the sixth century, may, before they were converted to Christianity, have worshipped the gods of the Græco-Roman period; before that they may have been Jews, for there can be little question that the aboriginal population, to some extent, adopted the Jewish faith after the conquest, and before that were worshippers of the Syro-Phœnician deities, Baal and Ashtaroth. They may in those old times, when Jewish power was supreme, have been in this very village the servants of the ancestors of these very Jews who now share its land with them, as they had, according to their traditions, done from the most ancient period; and this means, in a country where genealogies are preserved for centuries upon centuries, a very long time ago. I have a friend at Haifa who says he can trace his ancestry back to the crusades, when his family was resident at the old town of the same name; and, as a grotesque illustration of their pretensions, a story is told of a Bedouin sheik who, being asked whether he was descended from Abraham, said that he could trace further back, and that, in fact, Abraham was not a sheik of a very good family.