Bible and Sword (22 page)

Another popular book was
Two Journeys to Jerusalem
, published in 1704 by Nathaniel Crouch, editor of a series of penny histories that Dr. Johnson called “very proper to allure backward readers.” The book contained, in addition to the travel diaries, some “Memorable remarks upon the Ancient and Modern state of the Jewish Nation,” Samuel Brett’s account of the Jews’ Council in Hungary, an account of the “Wonderful Delusion” of the Jews by Sabbatai Zevi, and a report of the Council’s debate on Manasseh ben Israel’s proposal in 1655. One of the two journeys was the “strange and true” adventures of Henry Timberlake already mentioned (Chapter VI); the other was a reprint of the travels of fourteen Englishmen in 1669, which had first appeared in 1683. The whole collection seems to have had a steady audience, for it kept on being reissued, once even in a Welsh translation, at various times over the next hundred years, with a final edition in 1796.

Crouch, who himself wrote the “Memorable Remarks” under the name Robert Burton, plunges into the problem that puzzled generations of writers on Palestine: how so barren a country could ever have supported the busy, prosperous population of Biblical, Roman, and Byzantine times. In our own day, when the White Paper cut Jewish immigration on the pretense that the land could not support any more people, the same problem under the awesome name of “economic absorptive capacity” produced endless debates in Parliament. But Burton (or Crouch), writing two hundred years before it was necessary to worry about appeasing the Arabs or about a “political upper limit,” approached the question in the realistic spirit of his time. Assuming a revival of the careful cultivation practiced by the “ancients,” he calculated that an acre of good ground will easily feed four men for a year, allowing each two pounds, six ounces of bread a day, “but since our
Israelites were great eaters let us allow them double the nourishment, that is to say four pounds, twelve ounces a day,” or two men to an acre. The area of the ancient kingdom of Judea he estimates at 3,365,000 acres, and, deducting half of this as noncultivable, he concludes that it could still support the equivalent of one man to an acre for the whole. Curiously enough, this figure of three and a half million is not far from that which the present government of Israel is aiming at, though ridiculed as fantastic and impossible by all the White Paper experts.

The general impression of Palestine as barren, Burton went on, was due to the fact that travelers usually saw only the country between Jaffa and Jerusalem, which was never famous for fertility; and “for want of culture and tillage among the barbarous Infidels … who by their continuous wars and ravages have made it almost desolate and like a desert” it has become “like a place forsaken by God.” Yet in Bible times it flowed with milk and honey, thanks to the husbandry of the Israelites, who terraced and fertilized it and wasted none of it in “parks for hunting, nor Avenues, nor Bowling greens, nor grass-plats.”

The general decay under Islam was noticed, too, by the group of fourteen Englishmen, members of the Levant Company’s factory at Aleppo, whose tour is reported in the book. Passing through Caesarea and the country north of Jaffa, they found it “now ruinate and inhabited by a company of savage Arabs.” Jaffa, for which Richard fought so valiantly, where Venetian galleys once massed in the bay to disembark their pilgrim crowds, was, these merchants thought, a poor second-class harbor. Its chief trade was in potash for soap and in cotton and cotton yarn. Far from falling on their knees or thinking solemn thoughts, these travelers of three hundred years ago behaved exactly like the guided bus tourists of today. At Jerusalem they crowded around the visitors’ book to look for familiar names and counted a hundred and fifty-eight English visitors since the year 1601. At the site of the Garden of Eden “we spent
some time in cutting sticks and setting our names on the great trees.” On the Bethlehem road they fell in with some local Christians “whose art is to make the figure of our Saviour’s sepulchre or what Holy story you please upon your Arm; they make it of a blew color and it is done by the continual pricking of your Arm with two needles.” Everyone in the group selected a pattern from prints shown and was accordingly tattooed.

In 1776, over a hundred years later, another party from the Aleppo factory came through, and their account, by one Richard Tyron, is still as matter-of-fact in tone as if they had been visiting London from the provinces. They are not bothered by questions of ancient prophecy or future fulfillment. Tyron, remarking on the general rack and ruin, notes briefly that the land “is now under a curse” and leaves it to that. Between these two visits a century apart few Englishmen were coming out to Palestine; the fashionable tour was rather to Greece and Rome, the lands of classical antiquity. Only factors or chaplains of the Levant Company already resident in the East occasionally wandered through Palestine, looking less for religious experience than for knowledge and information about the country.

Thomas Shaw, for example, a chaplain from Algiers, who published his tour of the Holy Land in 1738, was chiefly concerned in sketching botanical species, which adorned his book in splendid copperplate illustrations. Likewise Henry Maundrell, chaplain at Aleppo, indulges in no religious raptures, but is more interested in copying ancient inscriptions, examining ruins, and uncovering traces of old cisterns and aqueducts. His
Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem
, first published in 1697, went into three editions and was reprinted in many travel collections during the next century. Although Palestine is now, he reports, “a most miserable, dry, barren place,” yet it is “obvious for anyone to observe that these rocks and hills must have been anciently covered with earth and cultivated.”
He gives an admirable little lecture on soil erosion, showing how the ancients, “for the husbandry of these mountains,” built walls to form “many beds of excellent soil rising gradually one above another from the bottom to the top of the mountains.” At the Dead Sea Maundrell confutes old legends by making his own observations. Birds fly over the sea and do
not
fall dead into its waters, he reports, and he finds oyster shells and other signs of marine life on its shores. He takes practical note, too, of the Turks’ method of governing subject peoples by sowing division among them (a method not unfamiliar in the later British Empire), “by which art they create contrary interests and parties amongst the inhabitants, preventing them from ever uniting under one prince, which, if they should have the sense to do (being so numerous and almost the sole inhabitants thereabouts) they might shake off the Turkish yoke and make themselves supreme lords of the country.”

By far the most learned work of the eighteenth century dealing with Palestine was written by Richard Pococke, son of the great Hebrew and Arabic scholar. His
Description of the East
appeared in 1743–45 in three magnificent folio volumes, of which the second dealt with Syria and Palestine.

Nothing could be more typical of the eighteenth-century attitude toward Palestine than that Pococke, who was to become a bishop, chose to dedicate his volume on the Holy Land to that prototype of the material virtues, the Earl of Chesterfield. The Holy Land is, after all, he says by way of preface, “a very interesting subject,” with many places “of which we hear mention every day and generally take pleasure in acquiring the least knowledge in relation to them.” In this spirit he sets out from Egypt to cross the wilderness in the footsteps of the Exodus, determined to give an accurate eyewitness picture of that famous route. He notices every landmark, describes the vegetation in detail, and sketches innumerable plans and maps from every
elevation, showing every tree and rock. He copies rock inscriptions and tries to identify each stopping place and the site of each incident of Moses’ forty-year march. Avoiding the Bedouins as “a very bad people,” he finds hospitality with a tribe of “Seleminites” who seem to adhere to the Jewish religion and who, he surmises, might be descended from Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law.

Once arrived in Jerusalem, he examines each local tradition to see if it conforms with known facts, history, and probability, accepting nothing on faith. His masterly attack on the supposed pillar of Absalom, a popular tourist attraction, is like Sherlock Holmes’s elucidation of a muddy footprint; “Josephus calls it a marble pillar; but as he says it was two furlongs from Jerusalem, though this vale, in which Kedron runs, might be the King’s dale; yet as the distance does not agree, it may be doubted whether this was really the monument; and it seems more probable that it was farther to the south-west, beyond the vale of Gehinnon. But if this was the King’s dale in which Melchisedeck, King of Salem, came to meet Abraham, it would be a circumstance to prove that Jerusalem was the ancient Salem.” And in conclusion he notes that the pillar’s Ionic style indicates an origin considerably later than the time of Absalom.

Pococke traversed the whole country from the Dead Sea to Galilee, missing nothing, studying everything for what it could reveal of the famous past. Cisterns, pools, and wells that he found in the Plain of Esdraelon showed him how the land was once irrigated. Struck by the beauty of a field of tulips in bloom near Ramleh, he was led to surmise that these must have been the “lilies of the field” that outshone Solomon in all his glory. This was breathing life into the pages of the Bible. More than all his elaborate engravings of mosques and sepulchers (which later archaeologists have proved largely incorrect) Pococke’s tulips began the process of unwrapping Palestine from the cerements of the past.

In the closing year of the eighteenth century Englishmen were once again fighting on the beach before Acre, five hundred years to the decade since the Crusaders had lost Acre for the last time. The famous fortress dominating the seaward approach to Palestine and the military highway along the coast had been a prize of arms uncounted times during its embattled career of some thirty centuries. In 1291, the last Europeans were expelled by the Turks, and the key to Palestine, and with it all the Holy Land, were finally enveloped in the Turkish empire.

Now, suddenly, after five centuries of Islamic sleep, British gunboats boomed in the harbor and fierce Mamelukes desperately defended the walls while a European army laid siege by land. This time, oddly enough, the British were defending the fort, not attacking it. They were fighting on the side of the Turks against a European foe, and their guns were aimed not at the walls of Acre, but at the army of Napoleon beneath them.

Palestine’s geography had returned to plague it. It lay across the road to India, where Napoleon was determined to plant his foot, cut off his arch-enemy, Britain, from the wealth and commerce of the East, and rule unchallenged over a second Alexandrian empire. Egypt and Syria were essential to his plan, and to the same degree it was essential
to Britain to keep them out of his clutches. The very army Napoleon took on his expedition to Egypt was the army that he had assembled for the invasion of England. At the last minute that fatal hesitancy to dare the Channel dash that overcame Hitler, too, at the water’s edge in 1940, turned Napoleon eastward in the hope of stabbing Britain from behind, exactly as Hitler was to turn to North Africa in pursuance of the same vain strategy.

In fact, the parallels fall so thick and fast between the Napoleonic and the Hitlerian campaigns that one is often under the impression of seeing double. In both epochs the strategy that swirled around Palestine was the same—and still is. Reduced to the simplest terms, it amounts to this: Whatever swelling despot—non-British, of course—threatens to gain the mastery of Europe must be kept at all costs from likewise controlling the Middle East. This was as true in Napoleon’s time as in the Kaiser’s, as in Hitler’s, and as today in Russia’s. The area from Cairo to Constantinople, inclusive, must be kept out of the hands of any would-be world ruler who could convert the Mediterranean into a private lake and close the approaches to the Far East. From the strategic point of view little Palestine must fit into the larger pattern for the Middle East, regardless of who holds the country. Once it was the Turks, then the British, now Israel. It does not matter which—as far as power politics are concerned—so long as it is not the power dominating Europe.

Oversimplified perhaps, this in essence is the problem known to nineteenth-century diplomacy as the Eastern Question. The name has an old-fashioned flavor; it almost seems to wear Victorian sideburns. One thinks of Castle-reaghs and Cannings, Talleyrands and Metternichs, of “incidents” and secret treaties, of czars, pashas, and beys, of the Crimea, of Disraeli and the Suez Canal. Sometime during World War I the name fell into disuse along with all the rest of the star-and-garter glitter of nineteenth-century diplomacy. Today there are new actors on the
stage—oil and Arabs, Israel and the United States—but the plot is basically still the same as when England, toward the end of the eighteenth century, first planted her “Keep Out!” signs along the frontiers of the Middle East. In those days and for more than a century thereafter the policy took the form of keeping the already ailing Turkish empire intact against all comers. After the final collapse of the empire in 1918 England simply determined to substitute herself for the Turk and hold the area either directly or through Arab puppets, a method that worked well enough until World War II, after which nothing worked in the old way any more. We are now too close to events to see clearly who or what is the coming power in the Middle East; it may be Arab nationalism, or Russia, or, if you are an Arab, the lurking figure of “World Zionism.” The proper business of the historian, however, is the past, not the future.

The first antagonist to force England to take a position on the Middle East was not Napoleon, but Russia. In fact, if one is looking for parallels, one can turn the pages of history at any point since about 1780 and never fail to find Russia inching down toward an egress on the Bosporus. Not that Russia had any pretensions to Palestine as such, but Palestine’s fate was bound up with that of the Turkish empire, of which it was a part. Whenever the lengthening shadow of the Kremlin edged over Turkish frontiers, at once a furious activity would ensue in the chanceries of Europe, as if they had suddenly sensed a chill and a darkness away in the East. Attachés scurried between embassies, dispatches crisscrossed between capitals like files of ants. A count of all the incidents, ultimatums, wars, congresses, treaties, and settlements concerned with one or another aspect of the Powers’ relations with the Turkish Empire during the nineteenth century would show that the Eastern Question absorbed more diplomatic maneuvering, intrigue, and energy than any other single issue of foreign policy. (The term “nineteenth century” is another verbal convenience of some elasticity. If you want it to
mean a century, you use it to cover the period 1815–1914. The quarter-century from Bastille to Waterloo, 1789–1815, is then fitted in as a sort of entr’acte between eighteenth and the nineteenth, featuring a special performance by the French Revolution and Napoleon.)