Leon Uris (37 page)

“I don’t know what to believe any more,” Yakov whispered. “All through those winters as we walked through the mountains blue with cold ... all through those blistering summers.”

Jossi said, “Now cheer up. Tomorrow we begin our journey to Jerusalem.”

Jerusalem! The magic word caused Yakov’s flagging spirits to soar.

The next morning they came down from Mount Canaan and moved south along the Sea of Galilee into the Genossar Valley, past Arbel and the Horns of Hattin on the plains where Saladin the Kurd had once crushed the Crusaders in mortal combat.

But as they trudged on, even Jossi became dismayed. Their Promised Land was not a land flowing with milk and honey but a land of festering stagnated swamps and eroded hills and rock-filled fields and unfertile earth caused by a thousand years of Arab and Turkish neglect. It was a land denuded of its richness. It was a land that lay bleeding and fallow.

After a while they came to Mount Tabor in the center of the Galilee, and climbed up this hill which had played such a great part in the history of their people. It was here that the Jewish Joan of Arc, Deborah, and her General Barak hid with their armies and swooped down to crush the invading host. Atop Tabor they could see for miles in every direction. Around them stood Crusader ruins and a tiny monastery; it was here that Jesus was transfigured and held communion with Moses and Elijah.

From Tabor they could see the entire sorrowful picture. A fruitless, listless, dying land.

... 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 spirit. Jossi reckoned that more Jews had to come to Palestine sooner or later, for there were bound to be more and worse pogroms in Russia and the entire Pale was stirring. Everyone recognized that something was missing that was not in the Talmud or the Torah or the Midrash or the Mishna. Most of the boys, like Yakov and Jossi, had escaped from Russian military service or had fled out of misery or poverty or some idealistic hopes. The Jews already in Palestine treated them as “outsiders.” Further—they were stateless wanderers.

It took a year for an answer to come back from Rabbi Lipzin. They learned that their mother had died of incurable and bottomless grief.

For the next four or five years Yakov and Jossi grew to manhood. They worked around the docks in Jaffa and in the fields of the Jewish settlements either as laborers or overseers. When the Jews began moving out of the old walled city in Jerusalem with the aid of the British Jewish philanthropist, Moses Montefiore, they worked as stonemasons. Everything in Jerusalem was being built of that hauntingly beautiful limestone quarried from the hills of Judea.

They lived from job to job. Little by little they lost contact with their deep religious training which had been the dominating force of ghetto life. Only on the high holy days did they travel to Jerusalem. Only on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, did they search their souls and their lives—and, too, on the Day of Judgment, Rosh Hashana—the new year. Yakov and Jossi Rabinsky became typical of a new type of Jew. They were young and strong and they were free men tasting of a freedom they had never known in the Pale. Yet they longed for a purpose and they longed for contact with the Jews of Europe.

The years 1891, 1892, and 1893 came and went. A few more settlers straggled in to burden the pocketbooks of the philanthropists.

But as Yakov and Jossi lived in apparent aimlessness in Palestine, dramatic events were taking place in another part of the world which were to shape their destiny and the destiny of every Jew for all time.

FRANCE 1894–97

The Jews of France and of most of western Europe were better off than the Jews of eastern Europe. After the massacres and expulsions of the Middle Ages, the vicious side of Jew-hating abated in both France and England.

A great day came for the Jews with the French Revolution. After fifteen hundred years there was at last a country in Europe which accepted them as equal human beings. France was the first country in Europe to grant Jews the full rights of citizenship without qualification. Their position was further enhanced by Napoleon, according to whom Judaism was a religion, not a nationality. So long as French Jews regarded it only as a religion and gave their loyalty to France, they ought to be granted full and equal status.

The early 1800s were the beginning of a golden era for the Jews of France. The Jewish community produced a host of brilliant doctors, lawyers, scientists, poets, writers, musicians, and statesmen who seemed to justify the Napoleonic concept of assimilation.

There were discreet forms of anti-Semitism in France, of course. But the unpleasantnesses associated with being Jewish were at a minimum there. Never before had Jews in Europe known such freedom or held such a position in society. By the middle of the 1800s they were well integrated into all walks of French life and had formed the powerful Universal Alliance as their voice and philanthropic arm.

Jew hating is an incurable disease. Under certain democratic conditions it may not flourish well. Under other conditions the germ may even appear to die, but it never does die even in most ideal climate.

In France there lived a young career army captain. He came from a well-to-do family. In the year 1893 he was hauled into a military court on trumped-up charges of selling secrets to the Germans. The trial of this man shook the world, and became an irremediable blotch on the cause of French justice. The man was found guilty of treason and sentenced to life on Devil’s Island.

His name was Alfred Dreyfus.

In the bitter winter of 1894 Alfred Dreyfus stood in disgrace in a courtyard. In a ceremony of public ostracism the epaulets were cut from his shoulders, his cheeks were slapped, his sword broken, and the buttons pulled from his cloak. He was denounced above an ominous drum roll as a traitor to France. As he was taken off to begin life in a penal hell he cried, “I am innocent! Long live France!”

Alfred Dreyfus was a Jew.

The dormant disease of anti-Semitism erupted in France. Goaded on by Edouard Drumont, the arch Jew hater, mobs of Frenchmen ran through the streets of Paris screaming the age-old cry—“Death to the Jews!”

In later years the great novelist Emile Zola took up the case of Dreyfus. In an open letter to the President of France he branded the horrible miscarriage of justice in immortal prose.

A certain man witnessed Dreyfus’ hour of disgrace in the Paris courtyard. Although Dreyfus was freed, this man could not forget the cry, “I am innocent!” Moreover he could not forget the Parisian mobs screaming, “Death to the Jews!” It haunted him day and night.

The man who could not forget was Theodor Herzl.

Theodor Herzl was also a Jew. He was born in Hungary, but his well-to-do family moved to Austria and he grew up in Vienna. His training in formal Judaism was superficial. He and his family firmly believed in the prevalent theories of assimilation.

Herzl was a brilliant essayist, playwright, journalist. Like so many creative men of his school he was hounded by an incessant restlessness. He was married to a good woman but one completely incapable of giving him the compassion and understanding he needed. Fortunately for Herzl his restless ventures were well financed by a generous family allowance.

Herzl drifted to Paris and eventually became Paris correspondent for the powerful Viennese
New Free Press
. He was relatively happy. Paris was a carefree city and his job was good and there was always that wonderful intellectual exchange.

What had brought him to Paris, really? What unseen hand guided him into that courtyard on that winter’s day? Why Herzl? He did not live or think as a devout Jew, yet when he heard the mobs beyond the wall shout, “Death to the Jews!” his life and the life of every Jew was changed forever.

Theodor Herzl pondered and thought, and he decided that the curse of anti-Semitism could never be eradicated. So long as one Jew lived—there would be someone to hate him. From the depths of his troubled mind Herzl wondered what the solution could be, and he came to a conclusion—the same conclusion that a million Jews in a hundred lands had come to before him—the same conclusion that Pinsker had written about in his pamphlet about auto-emancipation. Herzl reasoned that only if the Jews established themselves again as a nation would all Jews of all lands finally exist as free men. They had to have a universal spokesman—they had to command respect and dignity as equals through a recognized government.

The paper in which he set down these ideas was called “The Jewish State.”

Galvanized into action by this sudden calling, Herzl drove himself unmercifully to gather support for his ideas. He went to those enormously wealthy philanthropists who were supporting the colonies of Jews in Palestine. They ridiculed the Jewish state idea as nonsense. Charity was one thing—as Jews they gave to less fortunate Jews—but talk of rebuilding a nation was madness.

But the Jewish state idea caught on and spread through a hundred lands. Herzl’s idea was neither novel nor unique, but his dynamic drive would not let it die.

Important support began to gather around him. Max Nordau, a transplanted Hungarian in Paris with an international reputation as a writer, rallied to his support, as did Wolfsohn in Germany and De Haas in England. Many Christians in high places also expressed their approval of the idea.

In the year 1897 a convention of leading Jews throughout the world was called in the town of Basle, Switzerland. It was, indeed, a parliament of world Jewry. Nothing like it had happened since the second Temple had been destroyed. Assimilationists were there and Lovers of Zion were there. Orthodox Jews were there and Socialists were there. No matter what their leanings, they all had a common bond, and to a man they were prepared to stage a rebellion against two thousand years of unspeakable persecution. The Basle convention called for a return of Jews to their ancient historic homeland, for only through the establishment of a Jewish state could all Jews of all lands achieve freedom.

They called the movement Zionism.

As blood riots against the Jews were increasing in Russia, Poland, Rumania, Austria, and Germany and as Jew baiting was reborn in France, the Basle convention made its historic proclamation: