Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine

by Laurence Oliphant

The villages here are small, few, and far between, and there is room for a large population; but the most tempting land of all is the tract between Umm-el-Fahm and the sea, where the oak-trees which are scattered over the pastures and cornfields attain a large growth, and the country presents the appearance of an immense park. From an artistic point of view the woods and the farm lands are so combined as to form the most perfectly diversified scenery, just where the rolling hills slope gently down into the plain of Sharon. It was across this country that our road lay to Cæsarea, which was our objective point, first, through the thick copse of the upper valleys, and so out upon the park-like uplands, where the whole population was out in the fields gathering the crops, which strings of camels were conveying to the village threshing-floors. Here and there was a money-lender from Acre or Beyrout, squatting under an umbrella, to see that the peasantry did not rob him of his share. This is a busy time with these gentry, who are the bloodsuckers of the fellahin, to whom they advance money at exorbitant rates of interest, while the latter, in revenge, resort to every conceivable device to conceal from them the real extent of the crop, and to make the proportion coming to them as small as possible.

At one village called Arareh I found three old Roman arches, a fine fragment of a column, and some rock-cut tombs, which seem hitherto to have escaped observation. The remains indicate that it must have been a place of considerable importance, but I have not yet been able to identify it. The plain of Sharon, where we struck it, is being by degrees brought into cultivation, partly by colonists, Circassian and Bosnian, and partly by native capitalists. The peasantry themselves are rapidly losing all proprietorship in the soil, unable to contend against the exactions of the government tax-gatherer, on the one hand, and of the usurious money-lender, on the other; but while they are yearly becoming more impoverished and dependent, the wealth of the country is steadily increasing, and its development must follow as a matter of course, though, in accordance with the tendencies of modern civilization, it will be at the expense of the masses.

I went to lunch with the largest of these local magnates. He was a Turk, and spoke Turkish in preference to Arabic. He had, as may be supposed, little sympathy with the Arab peasantry, who were practically his serfs, and their condition was by no means improved by their lands having fallen into his hands. On the other hand, they never would have introduced the civilized iron ploughs with which he was bringing land into cultivation. His farm-house was a large, straggling, isolated building, which stood on a hillock in the plain, with extensive outhouses and dependencies, not unlike the residence of a Southern planter, while, curiously enough, a large proportion of his farm hands consisted of African negroes located in a village hard by—but he had none of the lavish hospitality which characterized the landed proprietors of the South.

A ride of an hour over a part of the plain which, from the peculiar quality of its soil, is exclusively devoted to the growth of water-melons, hitherto the sole export of the little haven of Cæsarea, brought me to that spot. Although the remains of the old port have been used as a harbour for coasting craft, these ruins have not been inhabited since they were evacuated by the crusaders at the end of the thirteenth century. Indeed, there is a curious prediction connected with them, to the effect that the rebuilding of a town here would immediately precede a great disaster to Islam. It has been in consequence of this, as I have understood, that while villages have sprung up on all the other crusading ruins on the coast, this one alone has remained untenanted. However this may be, the spell is broken now, for about six months ago the first instalment of a band of refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina arrived here, having been allotted this ruin and the lands surrounding it by the government, as the nucleus of a new colony.

Apart from the great interest which these extensive ruins must ever have from an antiquarian point of view, I was anxious to visit Cæsarea to judge for myself of the prospects of this embryo colony, and make personal acquaintance with this new and interesting class of immigrants. Moreover, as the new town is to be built upon the ruins of the old, it was evident that I should never have another chance of seeing what these were like. They have already during the last twenty years served as a quarry from whence the magnificent building-stones, cut originally by Herod the Great when he built the town, have been transported in thousands of boat-loads to Acre and Jaffa. The ruins have therefore lost much of the pristine grandeur which is described in the records of travellers in the early part of the present century. In a few years more they will probably have disappeared altogether. The subterranean treasures, whatever they may be, will, however, remain untouched, and the Schliemann of a future age will find here the traces of five successive epochs of civilization. On the top he will find the ruins of the stone houses of the Bosnians and Herzegovinians, now in process of erection; below them the foundations of the great Crusading fortress, and below them again the remains of the first Mohammedan period; beneath them, traces of the Byzantine period, and, at the bottom, the tessellated pavements, the fragments of carved marble, the statuary, and the coins of the Roman period.

Meantime it is a singular fact that the strip of coast from Haifa to Cæsarea seems to have become a centre of influx of colonists and strangers of the most diverse races. The new immigrants to Cæsarea are Slavs. Some of them speak a little Turkish. Arabic is an unknown tongue to them, which they are learning. Their own language is a Slav dialect. When the troubles in the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina first broke out, which led to the Russo-Turkish war, a howl of indignation went up from the philanthropists on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially from the Radical party in England, against the Turkish government, for its persecution of the Slav population of the Danubian provinces. Nor do I think that the general public have yet realized the fact that of these Slavs more than half were Moslem, and that the Turkish government was not persecuting them more than it was persecuting any other of its subjects, but that the persecutors of the Slav peasantry, who were Christian, were the Slav aristocracy, who were Moslem. It was, in fact, not a question of an oppressed nationality, but a strictly agrarian question between people of the same race. When it was settled by handing over the provinces to Austria, the Slav-Moslem aristocracy, finding themselves in their turn persecuted by their former peasants and the Christian power which protected them, migrated to the more congenial rule of the sultan. So the curious spectacle is presented of a Slav population migrating from Austrian rule to Asia, in order to be under a Moslem government.

Close beside the new Bosnian colony there are planted in the plain of Sharon two or three colonies of Circassians. These are the people who committed the Bulgarian atrocities. The irony of fate has now placed them within three or four miles of colonists belonging to the very race they massacred. They, too, fleeing from government by Christians, have sought refuge under the sheltering wing of the sultan, where, I regret to say, as I described in a former letter, they still indulge in their predatory propensities. In immediate proximity to them are the black tents of a tribe of Turcomans. They belong to the old Seljuk stock, and the cradle of their tribe gave birth to the present rulers of the Turkish Empire. They have been here for about three hundred years, and have forgotten the Turkish language, but a few months ago a new migration arrived from the mountains of Mesopotamia. These nomads spoke nothing but Turkish, and hoped to find a warm welcome from their old tribesmen on the plain of Sharon. In this they were disappointed, and they have now, to my disgust, pitched their tents on some of the spurs of Carmel, where their great hairy camels and their own baggy breeches contrast curiously with the camels and costumes of the Bedouins with whom we are familiar.

Besides the Slavs, the Circassians, and the Turcomans, we have the Jewish colony of Zimmarin, distant about ten miles from Cæsarea; the German colony at Haifa, and the Druse villages on Carmel, making, with the Bedouins, the negroes, and the native fellahin, no fewer than nine different races engaged in the cultivation of the soil in this neighbourhood.

[CÆSAREA.]

Daliet-el-Carmel, Oct. 2.—The habit of tourists of visiting only those spots in Palestine called holy places, or to which some striking Biblical association is attached, causes them to neglect ruins of the highest historical interest, and which are often as well worth seeing from a picturesque as from an archæological point of view. They make an effort to go to Nazareth, which differs in no respect from an ordinary Syrian town, and which does not boast a single object of antiquarian interest, while they omit from their programme, because it is not included in the books, a ruin like Cæsarea, a city unsurpassed for grandeur and magnificence by anything in Palestine when Herod raised it to the dignity of a metropolis, and the scene of many important events, both Biblical and historical. Here Peter baptized the first Gentile convert to Christianity; here Philip lived with his four daughters, engaged in missionary work; here Paul preached before Felix, and “almost persuaded” Agrippa to become a Christian. It was in the theatre, the remains of which are still to be seen, that Herod made his oration to the multitude when “the angel of the Lord smote him, and he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost.” It was in the streets of Cæsarea that, on the occasion of a quarrel between the Greek and Jewish population, twenty thousand Jews were massacred. Here the celebrated historians Eusebius and Procopius were born, and here was found, when the city was taken by the crusaders, the hexagonal vase of green crystal which was supposed to contain the Holy Grail.