The Maccabaean

IN the lesson from the Torah of Sabbath Nitzabim I read: “Its whole land is burnt into brimstone and salt; it is not sown, and groweth nothing, and no herb comes up therein, like the upturning of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboim, which the Lord overturned in His anger and in His fury.” A simple minded fellow, who little over a year ago went from Louisville (Ky.) to Jerusalem with his wife and child, and who has now come back with his little stock of savings gone, and without his wife and child, whom he had to leave behind for lack of money wherewithal to bring them home, has given me a living illustration of the text in Deuteronomy. “I thought,” he says, “I had some money, and I would earn a little; and that everything is cheap. But bread is dear, and we have to buy water, too; and the whole time I did not earn a cent. Even if I had been a shoemaker, what could I have earned? Most of the Fellaheen wear sandals, and one pair will do them for years. But how is it in the colonies? Not very good either. In Jerusalem,” he says, “there is nothing but praying and learning; no business. All very good as far as it goes ‘between man and God’ (ben adam lammakom), but not ‘between man and his neighbor.’ ”

What he says about the dearth of water in a city which had a good water supply nearly three thousand years ago, I see confirmed both by the Jewish and by the secular press.

What is the cause of all this? Our sins and the sins of our fathers are assigned by the text as the ultimate causes in the verses next following that above quoted. But what is the proximate cause? Not the soil or climate; for the rainfall has increased considerably; it has almost doubled in the last fifty years, and though much of the soil has been washed off by winter floods, leaving the bare rock on the surface, there are still wide tracts of wonderful fertility which bear vines and fig trees and palms and on which wheat and barley can be grown in profusion. This is especially so in old Samaria. The weakness and rapacity of the Turkish Government come in for much of the blame; but that Government is supreme at Damascus and Bagdad as well as at Jerusalem, and those cities, with the country surrounding them, are almost prosper-

.ous, at least they are free from the beggary and the dire want which make the Holy City so repulsive.

What then is the curse of Palestine? Simply this, that to the greater part of the Jews and of the Christians who live there, it is nothing but the Holy Land, the land of recollection and of prediction, of the past and of the future; not a home and workshop of the present day.

How can the land be redeemed?

Of Turks there are but few, hardly more than a few civil and military officers. Of Arabs, or rather of Musselmans speaking Arabic, there is a very poor, illiterate peasantry in the southwest, and a sparse population, not much better off than the Fellaheen of Judea, is found in Samaria and Galilee, while "East of Jordan" is the stamping ground of the wandering Bedouin; altogether not as many as 150,000.

The Christians are mainly monks and priests and missionaries, or men who make their living out of religion in various ways, such as the manufacture or sale of relics and of souvenirs. Only the Maronites of the Lebanon in the extreme north of Palestine are a hard-working and thrifty population.

With and by such elements neither a farming nor a manufacturing industry can be built up.

It is very probable that when the Zionists have laid up a goodly sum in the Colonial Bank, they can, by an arrangement with the Sultan, commute all the taxes upon the Jews of Palestine for a fixed tribute, and thus shield the wealth and industry of the land against the rapacity of the Pasha and of local office holders; but when they do this, only the smallest part of the problem is solved. If we wish to create and preserve wealth, there must not be order and security only, but above and before that there must be an industrious population. As there are hardly thirty thousand Christians in a country which at one time supported over two millions, we need not trouble ourselves much about them; the problem is to get the right kind of Jewish colonists. It is a difficult one; every true Zionist must boldly face it, and the leaders of the movement must grapple with it.