The Maccabaean

IN Damascus, I saw the moon rise. I stood upon a hill in the desert, where one of the many rivulets of the Barada joins the Satchijeh. Thousands of women veiled in black sat at the water's edge, cowering like an immense flock of raven. At the approach of males they covered their faces with their black shrouds. Night fell without any transitory stage of twilight. The moon rose over the city at my feet in a cold sky, blood-red and maddeningly beautiful. . . .

People arriving, Baedeker in hand and dragged about town by a cheating dragoman, never see the true face of Damascus. I never look into a Baedeker and my purse strings are hermetically closed against guides. For six days, almost uninterruptedly, I lived in the bazaar of Damascus. There one meets, in a single day, more Bedouins than in a month of desert-travel. There are crowds, there is life, tumult, shouting —the soul of the Near East centers here, the very market-cries of the bazaar-venders are lurid, extravagant, poetical. A saddle-colored oldster in a white turban praises his sweatmeats as “flowers of the Prophet, the nourishment of the just, the reflection of the Houris in Paradise.” A cook calls his salad of cucumbers and tomatoes “the refreshment of the Archangel Gabriel.” “Wet your throats, oh true believers!” shouts a lemonade-vender, incessantly clashing two metal-platters to bespeak attention. The entire bazaar resounds with strange noises —savage, strident, discordant like the shouts and groans of an emotional religious mass-rite. The air is pungent with odors—with the reek of beasts, the flavor of spices, the smells of cooking, of dust, of human perspiration. The camels of the desert stalking through the throng are serene, heedless, a little contemptuous, it seems to me, of the surrounding pell-mell—they have an air of British globe-trotters exhibiting signs of ennui. A group of Bedouins stand before an armorer shop, rifles slung across their shoulders, blades pressing against their thighs. As straight of carriage as the palm-trees of their own desert, with coal-black beards and glowing eyes, they are an arresting sight. In their ways, Bedouins are very human, Orientally human, and therefore misunderstood by European travelers of the Guide-and-Baedeker variety. Their young women are as gracile as antelopes, their beauty flashing through veils and shrouds and all manner of mystifying mummery.

One may live for days in the bazaar without a moment's boredom in the midst of this colorful, ingenuous and unabashed life which embraces the stranger with its native warmth if there be enough vitality within him to respond. At the Arab theatre, for instance, human beings play like human beings, not like actors; the audience warning the youthful lover, in excited shouts from the pit, against the villain's wiles. Shout with them, if you are in a boisterous humor —or go, in a quieter and more meditative mood, to the Dschami-el Kebir, in the trail of prayer-mumbling

devotees, through courtyards whose stillness renders audible from afar the splashing of their fountains—yards with fairy-like palm trees that awaken nursery-memories of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments springing into life as the chant from the minaret calls the true believers to prayer.

Not far from Sukel Hamidje lies the Jewish quarter. The houses look incredibly, ruinously old—as old as the immemorial antiquity of this city—which was old when Abraham was lying in his cradle. The houses of the Jewish quarter are full of fissures, poor in windows, hovel-like and of a yellowish, loamy color. The side-streets and alleys are full of heartrending destitution—the Oriental kind of destitution which has parted with its last shirt. A middle-class of highly skilled Jewish mechanics live here in comparative comfort. The well-to-do traders look like Arabs, affect French airs and live, for the most part, the stupidly dissolute lives of Levantines. On the streets of Jewish Damascus, on a Sabbath, I met Yellin, the greatest of all living Hebraists, an exile from Jerusalem and a director, at present, of the Arab National Library—a man whose beautiful mind is sheltered within the most beautiful head to be found in a land rich in fine types. His spoken Hebrew sounded like the music of the spheres.

There are, in this terrible and desolate Ghetto of Damascus, inconspicuous, wretched-looking house-fronts hiding the most wonderful interiors human eye ever beheld, with gorgeous arcades, inlaid floors, lofty. domelike roofs, priceless hangings, scented bowers covered with dark green l-aves—the houses of the rich hiding their splendid habitations behind dilapidated fronts. The hostesses of these houses are, as a rule, anything but attractive—their dresses — European and “extreme” in style—untidy. their bodies unwieldy with fat, and their souls suflering from the fatty degeneration of Levantinism. They are victims of French boarding-schools, domestic idleness, ignorance and gluttony —hybrids of two cultures, with the schools of the Alliance Israelite for an unsuccessful intermediary between them. In Palestine, this sort of culture is now generally known for what it is—and combated, not only by sensible Jews, but by the Arabs as well. Both Jews and Arabs of Damascus are disgusted with foreign schools.. The Arabs are eager now to learn Hebrew and the Jews to learn Arabic, and both are heartily sick of the sham-culture emanating from the Alliance and the mission-schools. There is a new ethnic self-consciousness in this protest-movement—a significant revolt against alien civilizations superimposed upon the two native Semitic races that bids well for an emancipated future. It puts me in mind of the Bedouin’s scorn for paper-money: when he comes to Damascus from the desert, he pays, and expects to be paid, in gold. May his liking for genuine values be of good omen for the future of both Semitic cultures!