Exodus - Leon Uris [124]
... and they trudged on with heavy hearts. The seeds of the past were all around them. They passed Mount Gilboa where Saul and Jonathan fell in battle and where Gideon lies—and they passed Bethel and Jericho——
As they moved into the hills of Judea their spirits rose again! The ancient terraces still stood from the time when hundreds of thousands of Jews took richness from the earth. There was no richness left, the hills were eroded, but the elation of the Rabinsky brothers could not be dimmed as they ascended higher and higher and higher.
Arriving at the peak of the ridges, Jossi and Yakov saw the City of David!
Jerusalem! Heart of their hearts—dream of their dreams! In that second all the years of privation and all the bitterness and suffering were erased.
They entered the old walled city through the Damascus Gate and wended their way through the narrow streets and bazaars to the mighty Hurva Synagogue.
“If only Father were with us now,” Jossi whispered.
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem ...” Yakov prayed the lament of the captives.
From the synagogue they went to the one remaining wall of their great ancient temple. It stood on the site of the Mosque of Omar, the Dome of the Rock. This wall was the holiest place in all Jewry.
When at last they sought hospitality from the Jews they lost their illusions. The Jews in Jerusalem were Hasidim, ultra-Orthodox fanatics whose interpretations of the Laws were so strict they could be lived up to only by complete withdrawal from the civilized world. Even in the Pale these groups had separated themselves from the rest of the ghetto.
For the first time since they left Zhitomir, Jossi and Yakov were refused the hospitality of a Jewish home. The Jerusalem Jews did not like the Bilus, and the Lovers of Zion were berated for their ungodlike ideas.
The boys then saw themselves as intruders in their own land. They walked away from Jerusalem shrouded in sadness—down from the hills of Judea toward the port of Jaffa.
This ancient port, which had been in constant use since Phoenician times, was another version of Beirut, Aleppo, or Tripoli—narrow alleys, filth, degradation. However, there were a few Jewish settlements nearby at Rishon le Zion, Rehovot, and Petah Tikva. In Jaffa itself there was some of Jewish commerce as well as an agency for Jewish immigrants. Here they learned the full story. There were but five thousand Jews in the entire Palestine Province of the Ottoman Empire. Most of these were ancients who lived in study and prayer in the four holy cities of Safed, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tiberias. The dozen or so agricultural colonies established by Jews were all in dire straits. They were kept going through the philanthropy of wealthy European Jews, the Barons de Hirsch, Rothschild, and the Swiss multimillionaire De Schumann. Much of the idealism of the Bilus had disappeared. It was one thing to speak of rebuilding the House of Jacob from a cellar in the Pale—it was another to face the realities of the hardships and the complete disintegration that had befallen Palestine. The Bilus were all inexperienced in agriculture. The philanthropists sent over experts to help them, but it was a matter of using cheap Arab labor and settling on two or three crops for export: olives, grapes, and citrus. No attempt at self-labor had been tried nor were there attempts to balance the agriculture. The Jews, in fact, had become overseers.
Both the Arabs and the ruling Turks stole from the Jews mercilessly. Crops were taxed to the limit—there were all sorts of restrictive stumbling blocks. The roving bands of Bedouins looked upon the Jews as “Children of Death” because of their refusal to defend themselves.
There were, however, a few hundred Jewish boys like the Rabinsky brothers who stayed around Jaffa, and these kept the spark of the Bilu movement alive. They talked night after night in the Arab cafés. The task of regenerating this miserable land seemed nearly impossible, but it could be done if there were only more Jews with a fighting