The Haj - Leon Uris [10]
These numbers were followed by ordinary Jews of a pioneering nature also taking flight from the horrors of Christian Europe. With the help of wealthy philanthropists this second wave established a number of farming villages. Their success was minimal, for to Jews, unable to own land in most countries, farming was a strange and unknown occupation.
The Ottoman court in Constantinople, later Istanbul, looked upon this new Jewish settlement of the Palestine district with favor, for it meant an infusion of money: more taxes to collect, more bribes to elicit. But the Jews brought some things with them that had been sorely lacking: tenacity, vitality, and a love and longing for the Promised Land. They came to this backwater Palestine district, which was neither fish nor fowl, neither Syrian nor Ottoman, neither Arab nor Jewish, but a no-man’s-land, hemorrhaging to death. The great return of the Jews represented a last thin thread of hope for them as well as for Palestine itself.
In the year 1882 Sarah and Samuel Asch emigrated from Romania with a group of other young people under the auspices of a foundation established by the Rothschild family. They went north into the Galilee and took over a settlement, Rosh Pinna, that had been abandoned by Hassidim who had been forced out by the Bedouin.
By using Arab guards and a great deal of Arab labor, Rosh Pinna held on but never fully prospered. The settlement teetered, hitting and missing with experimental crops, suffering from isolation and constant marauding. Baron Edmond de Rothschild sent experts from his French farms, but they failed because of an ill-conceived attempt to transplant a European type of peasantry.
In 1884 Sarah and Samuel had a son, one of the first Jewish children born in that part of the Galilee since ancient times. From the moment of his birth, Gideon Asch was to become the future.
After the turn of the century, on the heels of terrible and massive Russian and Polish pogroms, a new breed of Jews began finding their way to Palestine. They came out of the ghettos in organized groups, intensely bound to the ideal that only through personal sacrifice and Jewish labor could Palestine be redeemed.
Absentee Arab landowners were only too happy to dump useless acreage on them for outrageous prices. In the Valley of Jezreel, in the Galilee, on the Plains of Sharon, in the Valley of Ayalon, and on that ancient coastal route of the Via Maris dozens of collective Jewish settlements called kibbutzim took on the chore, and the sweet voice of springtime was once again heard in Palestine. The desolate, desperate land, whose fields had been raped, feudalized, and abandoned by Ottoman and Arab, were now being brought back to life. Festering malarial swamp, unmerciful rock, desert, and denuded earth gave way to carpets of green, and the energy of building was heard and millions of trees grew where none had grown for centuries. A blossoming of culture and progress erupted from Jerusalem. North of the ancient port of Jaffa a new Jewish city sprang out of the sand dunes: Tel Aviv, the Hill of Spring.
Their cleavage from the past brought on all kinds of changes for the Jews. An entire new social concept emerged from the kibbutz, where one came as close to complete communal living as could be humanly conceived. One of these changes was the concept that the Jews be able to defend themselves. In the beginning a small corps of Jewish horsemen roamed from settlement to settlement, putting down trouble. These were the watchmen, the Shomer. They took on the language, knew the habits, and often looked like Arabs themselves.
By 1900, when Gideon Asch was sixteen, he had become caught up in the new Jewish idealism and was among the Shomer protecting kibbutzim and other types of settlements in the Galilee.
Gideon first impressed the Bedouin by his ability as a horseman and enhanced his reputation by regularly beating the Bedouin champions in races and competitions.
He left the relative comforts of Rosh Pinna to live on the move. In the