The Book of Delight and Other Papers

I >> Israel Abrahams >> The Book of Delight and Other Papers

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I should say that, before starting on my round, I had to secure the
attendance of soldiers. Not that it was necessary, but they utilize
Baedeker's assertion, that the people are savage, to get fees out of
visitors--a cunning manner of turning the enemy's libels to profitable
account. I hired two soldiers, but one by one others joined my train, so
that by the time my tour was over, I had a whole regiment of guardians, all
demanding baksheesh. I would only deal with the leader, a ragged warrior
with two daggers, a sword, and a rifle. "How much?" I asked. "We usually
ask a napoleon (_i.e._ 20 francs) for an escort, but we will charge you
only ten francs." I turned to the doctor and asked him, "How much?" "Give
them a beslik between them," he said. A beslik is only five pence. I
offered it in trepidation, but the sum satisfied the whole gang, who
thanked me profusely.

First I visited the prison, a sort of open air cage, in which about a dozen
men were smoking cigarettes. The prison was much nicer than the Mohammedan
school close by. This was a small overcrowded room, with no window in it,
the little boys sitting on the ground, swaying with a sleepy chant. The
teacher's only function was represented by his huge cane, which he plied
often and skilfully. Outside the door was a barber shaving a pilgrim's
head. The pilgrim was a Muslim, going on the Haj to Mecca. These pilgrims
are looked on with mingled feelings; their piety is admired, but also
distrusted. A local saying is, "If thy neighbor has been on the Haj, beware
of him; if he has been twice, have no dealings with him; if he has been
thrice, move into another street." After the pilgrim, I passed a number of
blind weavers, working before large wooden frames.

But now for the Jewish quarter. This is entered by a low wooden door, at
which we had to knock and then stoop to get in. The Jews are no longer
forced to have this door, but they retain it voluntarily. Having got in, we
were in a street so dark that we could not see a foot before us, but we
kept moving, and soon came to a slightly better place, where the sun crept
through in fitful gleams. The oldest synagogue was entered first. Its
flooring was of marble squares, its roof vaulted, and its Ark looked north
towards Jerusalem. There were, as so often in the East, two Arks; when one
is too small, they do not enlarge it, but build another. The Sefardic
Talmud Torah is a small room without window or ventilation, the only light
and air enter by the door. The children were huddled together on an
elevated wooden platform. They could read Hebrew fluently, and most of them
spoke Arabic. The German children speak Yiddish; the custom of using Hebrew
as a living language has not spread here so much as in Jaffa and the
colonies. The Beth ha-Midrash for older children was a little better
equipped; it had a stone floor, but the pupils reclined on couches round
the walls. They learn very little of what we should call secular subjects.
I examined the store of manuscripts, but Professor Schechter had been
before me, and there was nothing left but modern Cabbalistic literature.
The other synagogue is small, and very bare of ornament. The Rabbi was
seated there, "learning," with great Tefillin and Tallith on--a fine,
simple, benevolent soul. To my surprise he spoke English, and turned out to
be none other than Rachmim Joseph Franco, who, as long ago as 1851, when
the earthquake devastated the Jewish quarter, had been sent from Rhodes to
collect relief funds. He was very ailing, and I could not have a long
conversation with him, but he told me that he had known my father, who was
then a boy, in London. Then I entered a typical Jewish dwelling of the
poor. It consisted of a single room, opening on to the dark street, and had
a tiny barred window at the other side. On the left was a broad bed, on the
right a rude cooking stove and a big water pitcher. There was nothing else
in the room, except a deep stagnant mud pool, which filled the centre of
the floor.

Next door they were baking Matzoth in an oven fed by a wood fire. It was a
few days before Passover. The Matzoth were coarse, and had none of the
little holes with which we are familiar. So through streets within streets,
dirt within dirt, room over room, in hopeless intricacy. Then we were
brought to a standstill, a man was coming down the street with a bundle of
wood, and we had to wait till he had gone by, the streets being too narrow
for two persons to pass each other. Another street was impassable for a
different reason, there was quite a river of flowing mud, knee deep. I
asked for a boat, but a man standing by hoisted me on his shoulders, and
carried me across, himself wading through it with the same unconcern as the
boys and girls were wallowing in it, playing and amusing themselves. How
alike children are all the world over!

And yet, with it all, Hebron is a healthy place. There is little of the
intermittent fever prevalent in other parts of Palestine; illness is
common, but not in a bad form. Jerusalem is far more unhealthy, because of
the lack of water. But the Jews of Hebron are miserably poor. How they live
is a mystery. They are not allowed to own land, even if they could acquire
it. There was once a little business to be done in lending money to the
Arabs, but as the Government refuses to help in the collection of debts,
this trade is not flourishing, and a good thing, too. There are, of course,
some industries. First there is the wine. I saw nothing of the vintage, as
my visit was in the spring, but I tasted the product and found it good. The
Arab vine-owners sell the grapes to Jews, who extract the juice. Still
there is room for enterprise here, and it is regrettable that few seem to
think of Hebron when planning the regeneration of Judea. True, I should
regret the loss of primitiveness here, as I said at the outset, but when
the lives of men are concerned, esthetics must go to the wall. The Jewish
quarter was enlarged in 1875, but it is still inadequate. The Society
Lemaan Zion has done a little to introduce modern education, but neither
the Alliance nor the Anglo-Jewish Association has a school here. Lack of
means prevents the necessary efforts from being made. Most deplorable is
the fact connected with the hospital. In a beautiful sunlit road above the
mosque, amid olive groves, is the Jewish hospital, ready for use,
well-built, but though the very beds were there when T saw it, no patients
could be received, as there were no funds. The Jewish doctor was doing a
wonderful work. He had exiled himself from civilized life, as we Westerns
understand it; his children had no school to which to go; he felt himself
stagnating, without intellectual intercourse with his equals, yet active,
kindly, uncomplaining--one of those everyday martyrs whom one meets so
often among the Jews of Judea, men who day by day see their ambitions
vanishing under the weight of a crushing duty. It was sad to see how he
lingered over the farewell when I left him. I said that his house had
seemed an oasis in the desert to me, that I could never forget the time
spent with him. "And what of me?" he answered. "Your visit has been an
oasis in the desert to me, but you go and the desert remains." Surely, the
saddest thing in life is this feeling that one's own uninteresting,
commonplace self should mean so much to others. I call it sad, because so
few of us realize what we may mean to others, being so absorbed in our
selfish thought of what others mean to us.

There are two industries in Hebron besides the vintage. It supplies most of
the skin-bottles used in Judea, and a good deal of glassware, including
lamps, is manufactured there. The Hebron tannery is a picturesque place,
but no Jews are employed in it. Each bottle is made from an entire
goat-skin, from which only the head and feet are removed. The lower
extremities are sewn up, and the neck is drawn together to form the neck of
the water bottle. Some trade is also done here in wool, which the Arabs
bring in and sell at the market held every Friday. In ancient times the
sheep used in the Temple sacrifices were obtained from Hebron. Besides the
tannery, the glass factories are worth a visit. The one which I saw was in
a cavern, lit only by the glow of the central furnace. Seated round the
hearth (I am following Gautier's faithful description of the scene) and
served by two or three boys, were about ten workmen, making many-colored
bracelets and glass rings, which varied in size from small finger rings to
circlets through which you could easily put your arm. The workmen are
provided with two metal rods and a pair of small tongs, and they ply these
primitive instruments with wonderful dexterity. They work very hard, at
least fifteen hours a day, for five days a week.

This is one of the curiosities of the East. Either the men there are
loafers, or they work with extraordinary vigor. There is nothing between
doing too much and doing nothing. The same thing strikes one at Jaffa. The
porters who carry your baggage from the landing stage to the steamer do
more work than three English dock laborers. They carry terrific weights.
When a family moves, a porter carries all the furniture on his back. Yet
side by side with these overworked men, Jaffa is crowded with idlers, who
do absolutely nothing. Such are the contrasts of the surprising Orient.

Many of the beads and rosaries taken to Europe by pious pilgrims are made
in Hebron, just as the mother of pearl relics come chiefly from Bethlehem,
where are made also the tobacco-jars of Dead Sea stone. Hebron does a fair
trade with the Bedouins, but on the whole it is quite unprogressive. At
first sight this may seem rather an unpleasant fact for lovers of peace.
Hebron has for many centuries been absolutely free from the ravages of war,
yet it stagnates. Peace is clearly not enough for progress. As the
Rabbinical phrase well puts it, "Peace is the vessel which holds all other
good"--without peace this other good is spilt, but peace is after all the
containing vessel, not the content of happiness.

I have left out, in the preceding narrative, the visit paid to the Haram
erected over the Cave of Machpelah. The mosque is an imposing structure,
and rises above the houses on the hill to the left as you enter from
Jerusalem. The walls of the enclosure and of the mosque are from time to
time whitewashed, so that the general appearance is somewhat dazzling. It
has already been mentioned that certain repairs were effected in 1894-5.
The work was done by the lads of the Technical School in Jerusalem; they
made an iron gate for Joseph's tomb,--the Moslems believe that Joseph is
buried in Hebron,--and they made one gate for Abraham's tomb, one gate and
three window gratings for Isaac's tomb, and one gate and two window
gratings for Rebekah's tomb. This iron work, it is satisfactory to
remember, was rendered possible by the splendid machinery sent out to the
school from London by the Anglo-Jewish Association. The ordinary Jewish
visitor is not allowed to enter the enclosure at all. I was stopped at the
steps, where the custodian audaciously demanded a tip for not letting me
in. The tombs within are not the real tombs of the Patriarchs; they are
merely late erections over the spots where the Patriarchs lie buried.

No one has ever doubted that Machpelah is actually at this site, but the
building is, of course, not Patriarchal in age. The enclosure is as old as
the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem. It belongs to the age of Herod; we see the
same cyclopean stones, with the same surface draftings as at Jerusalem. Why
Herod built this edifice seems clear. Hebron was the centre of Idumean
influence, and Herod was an Idumean. He had a family interest in the place,
and hence sought to beautify it. No Jew or Christian can enter the
enclosure except by special irade; even Sir Moses Montefiore was refused
the privilege. Rather, one should say, the Moslem authorities wished to let
Sir Moses in, but they were prevented by the mob from carrying out their
amiable intentions. The late English King Edward VII and the present King
George V were privileged to enter the structure. Mr. Elkan Adler got in at
the time when the _Alliance_ workmen were repairing the gates, but there is
nothing to see of any interest. No one within historical times has
penetrated below the mosque, to the cavern itself. We still do not know
whether it is called Machpelah because the Cave is double vertically or
double horizontally.

The outside is much more interesting than the inside. Half way up the steps
leading into the mosque, there is a small hole or window at which many Jews
pray, and into which, it is said, all sorts of things, including letters to
the Patriarchs, are thrown, especially by women. In the Middle Ages, they
spread at this hole a tender calf, some venison pasties, and some red
pottage, every day, in honor of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the food was
eaten by the poor. It is commonly reported, though I failed to obtain any
local confirmation of the assertion, that the Jews still write their names
and their requests on strips of paper and thrust them into this hole. The
Moslems let down a lamp through the hole, and also cast money into it,
which is afterwards picked up by little boys as it is required for the
purposes of the mosque and for repairing the numerous tombs of prophets and
saints with which Hebron abounds. If you were to believe the local
traditions, no corpses were left for other cemeteries. The truth is that
much obscurity exists as to the identity even of modern tombs, for Hebron
preserves its old custom, and none of the Jewish tombs to this day bear
epitaphs. What a mass of posthumous hypocrisy would the world be spared if
the Hebron custom were prevalent everywhere! But it is obvious that the
method lends itself to inventiveness, and as the tombs are unnamed, local
guides tell you anything they choose about them, and you do not believe
them even when they are speaking the truth.

There is only one other fact to tell about the Cave. The Moslems have a
curious dread of Isaac and Rebekah, they regard the other Patriarchs as
kindly disposed, but Isaac is irritable, and Rebekah malicious. It is told
of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt, he who "feared neither man nor devil," that when
he was let down into the Cave by a rope, he surprised Rebekah in the act of
combing her hair. She resented the intrusion, and gave him so severe a box
on the ears that he fell down in a fit, and could be rescued alive only
with much difficulty. It is with equal difficulty that one can depart, with
any reverence left, from the mass of legend and childishness with which one
is crushed in such places. One escapes with the thought of the real
Abraham, his glorious service to humanity, his lifelong devotion to the
making of souls, to the spread of the knowledge of God. One recalls the
Abraham who, in the Jewish tradition, is the type of unselfishness, of
watchfulness on behalf of his descendants, the marks of whose genuine
relationship to the Patriarch are a generous eye and a humble spirit. As
one turns from Hebron, full of such happy memories, one forms the resolve
not to rely solely on an appeal to the Patriarch's merits, but to strive to
do something oneself for the Jewish cause, and thus fulfil the poet's
lines,

Thus shalt thou plant a garden round the tomb,
Where golden hopes may flower, and fruits immortal bloom.

THE SOLACE OF BOOKS

In the year 1190, Judah ibn Tibbon, a famous Provencal Jew, who had
migrated to Southern France from Granada, wrote in Hebrew as follows to his
son:

"Avoid bad society: make thy books thy companions. Let thy bookcases and
shelves be thy gardens and pleasure grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows
therein; gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. If thy soul be
satiate and weary, change from garden to garden, from furrow to furrow,
from scene to scene. Then shall thy desire renew itself, and thy soul be
rich with manifold delight."

In this beautiful comparison of a library to a garden, there is one point
missing. The perfection of enjoyment is reached when the library, or at
least a portable part of it, is actually carried into the garden. When
Lightfoot was residing at Ashley (Staffordshire), he followed this course,
as we know from a letter of his biographer. "There he built himself a small
house in the midst of a garden, containing two rooms below, viz. a study
and a withdrawing room, and a lodging chamber above; and there he studied
hard, and laid the foundations of his Rabbinic learning, and took great
delight, lodging there often, though [quaintly adds John Stype] he was then
a married man." Montaigne, whose great-grandfather, be it recalled, was a
Spanish Jew, did not possess a library built in the open air, but he had
the next best thing. He used the top story of a tower, whence, says he, "I
behold under me my garden."

In ancient Athens, philosophers thought out their grandest ideas walking up
and down their groves. Nature sobers us. "When I behold Thy heavens, the
work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained; what
is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest
him?" But if nature sobers, she also consoles. As the Psalmist continues:
"Thou hast made him but little lower than the angels, and crownest him with
glory and honor. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of Thy
hands; Thou hast put all things under his feet." Face to face with nature,
man realizes that he is greater than she. "On earth there is nothing great
but man, in man there is nothing great but mind." So, no doubt, the
Athenian sages gained courage as well as modesty from the contact of mind
with nature. And not they only, for our own Jewish treasure, the Mishnah,
grew up, if not literally, at least metaphorically, in the open air, in the
vineyard of Jamnia. Standing in the sordid little village which to-day
occupies the site of ancient Jamnia, with the sea close at hand and the
plain of Sharon and the Judean lowlands at my feet, I could see Rabbi
Jochanan ben Zakkai and his comrades pacing to and fro, pondering those
great thoughts which live among us now, though the authors of them have
been in their graves for eighteen centuries.

It is curious how often this habit of movement goes with thinking.
Montaigne says: "Every place of retirement requires a Walk. My thoughts
sleep if I sit still; my Fancy does not go by itself, as it goes when my
Legs move it." What Montaigne seems to mean is that we love rhythm. Body
and mind must move together in harmony. So it is with the Mohammedan over
the Koran, and the Rabbi over the Talmud. Jews sway at prayer for the same
reason. Movement of the body is not a mere mannerism; it is part of the
emotion, like the instrumental accompaniment to a song. The child cons his
lesson moving; we foolishly call it "fidgeting." The child is never
receptive unless also active. But there is another of Montaigne's feelings,
with which I have no sympathy. He loved to think when on the move, but his
walk must be solitary. "'Tis here," he says of his library, "I am in my
kingdom, and I endeavor to make myself an absolute monarch. So I sequester
this one corner from all society--conjugal, filial, civil." This is a
detestable habit. It is the acme of selfishness, to shut yourself up with
your books. To write over your study door "Let no one enter here!" is to
proclaim your work divorced from life. Montaigne gloried in the
inaccessibility of his asylum. His house was perched upon an "overpeering
hillock," so that in any part of it--still more in the round room of the
tower--he could "the better seclude myself from company, and keep
encroachers from me." Yet some may work best when there are others beside
them. From the book the reader turns to the child that prattles near, and
realizes how much more the child can ask than the book can answer. The
presence of the young living soul corrects the vanity of the dead old
pedant. Books are most solacing when the limitations of bookish wisdom are
perceived. "Literature," said Matthew Arnold, "is a criticism of life."
This is true, despite the objections of Saintsbury, but I venture to add
that "life is a criticism of literature."

Now, I am not going to convert a paper on the Solace of Books into a paper
in dispraise of books. I shall not be so untrue to my theme. But I give
fair warning that I shall make no attempt to scale the height or sound the
depth of the intellectual phases of this great subject. I invite my reader
only to dally desultorily on the gentler slopes of sentiment.

One of the most comforting qualities of books has been well expressed by
Richard of Bury in his famous Philobiblon, written in 1344. This is an
exquisite little volume on the Love of Books, which Mr. Israel Gollancz has
now edited in an exquisite edition, attainable for the sum of one shilling.
"How safely," says Richard, "we lay bare the poverty of human ignorance to
books, without feeling any shame."

Then he goes on to describe books as those silent teachers who "instruct us
without rods or stripes; without taunts or anger; without gifts or money;
who are not asleep when we approach them, and do not deny us when we
question them; who do not chide us when we err, or laugh at us if we are
ignorant."

It is Richard of Bury's last phrase that I find so solacing. No one is ever
ashamed of turning to a book, but many hesitate to admit their ignorance to
an interlocutor. Your dictionary, your encyclopedia, and your other books,
are the recipients of many a silent confession of nescience which you would
never dream of making auricular. You go to these "golden pots in which
manna is stored," and extract food exactly to your passing taste, without
needing to admit, as Esau did to Jacob, that you are hungry unto death.
This comparison of books to food is of itself solacing, for there is always
something attractive in metaphors drawn from the delights of the table. The
metaphor is very old.

"Open thy mouth," said the Lord to Ezekiel, "and eat that which I give
thee. And when I looked, a hand was put forth unto me, and, lo, a scroll of
a book was therein.... Then I did eat it, and it was in my mouth as honey
for sweetness."

What a quaint use does Richard of Bury make of this very passage!
Addressing the clergy, he says "Eat the book with Ezekiel, that the belly
of your memory may be sweetened within, and thus, as with the panther
refreshed, to whose breath all beasts and cattle long to approach, the
sweet savor of the spices it has eaten may shed a perfume without."

Willing enough would I be to devote the whole of my paper to Richard of
Bury. I must, however, content myself with one other noble extract, which,
I hope, will whet my reader's appetite for more: "Moses, the gentlest of
men, teaches us to make bookcases most neatly, wherein they [books] may be
protected from any injury. Take, he says, this book of the Law and put it
in the side of the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God. O fitting
place and appropriate for a library, which was made of imperishable shittim
[i.e. acacia] wood, and was covered within and without with gold."

Still we must not push this idea of costly bookcases too far. Judah the
Pious wrote in the twelfth century, "Books were made for use, not to be
hidden away." This reminds me that Richard of Bury is not the only medieval
book-lover with whom we might spend a pleasant evening. Judah ben Samuel
Sir Leon, surnamed the Pious, whom I have just quoted, wrote the "Book of
the Pious" in Hebrew, in 1190, and it has many excellent paragraphs about
books. Judah's subject is, however, the care of books rather than the
solace derivable from them. Still, he comes into my theme, for few people
can have enjoyed books more than he. He had no selfish love for them: he
not only possessed books, he lent them. He was a very prince of
book-lenders, for he did not object if the borrowers of his books re-lent
them in their turn. So, on dying, he advised his sons to lend his books
even to an enemy (par. 876). "If a father dies," he says elsewhere (par.
919), "and leaves a dog and a book to his sons, one shall not say to the
other, You take the dog, and I'll take the book," as though the two were
comparable in value. Poor, primitive Judah the Pious! We wiser moderns
should never dream of making the comparison between a dog and a book, but
for the opposite reason. Judah shrank from equalling a book to a dog, but
we know better than to undervalue a dog so far as to compare it with a
book. The kennel costs more than the bookcase, and love of dogs is a higher
solace than love of books. To those who think thus, what more convincing
condemnation of books could be formulated than the phrase coined by Gilbert
de Porre in praise of his library, "It is a garden of immortal fruits,
without dog or dragon."

I meant to part with Richard of Bury, but I must ask permission to revert
to him. Some of the delight he felt in books arose from his preference of
reading to oral intercourse. "The truth in speech perishes with the sound:
it is patent to the ear only and eludes the sight: begins and perishes as
it were in a breath." Personally I share this view, and I believe firmly
that the written word brings more pleasure than the spoken word.

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