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I
am a Jew.
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew
hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections,
passions ? . . .
If
you prick us, do we not bleed,
If you tickle us, do we not laugh?
Shakespeare, (Shylock),
Merchant of Venice
Yes, I am a Jew;
and when the ancestors of the right
honourable member
were brutal savages on an unknown
island, -
mine were priests in the temple of
Solomon.
Benjamin
Disraeli,
(replying to MP Daniel O’Connell
in the House of Commons, 1835)
My knowledge of Israel
came largely from Biblical history, and was short on modern events. When
the geography and history of a land is learned only in church and Sunday
school, it does tend to have an air of unreality about it. I believe for
most of us, it takes a personal visit to the region to make the facts
alive and relevant. Along with many distant observers, however, I did
think the creation of a Jewish state was an amazing thing. How a people
could retain their faith, language, customs and ethnicity during nineteen
centuries of dispersal in other lands, is a historical wonder. But I do
not interpret their current possession of the land as signifying that they
have a divine right to treat the Palestine people in an unjust way. None
of my Israeli friends think that either. Israel has a right to exist and
to defend itself, but the Arab residents of Palestine also have a right to
a home, to a future, to security and to peace. That truth should not be
obscured by the terrorist murders by suicide bombers, or the shelling of
Palestine homes and villages by the Israeli army. Arabs and Israelis are
brothers, and ultimately there has to be reconciliation.
Jerusalem
Arab town west of
Jerusalem. Known as Bethany in New Testament times, the Arabs call it El-Lazarai,
the town of Lazarus. There are many Arabs in Israel, both Moslem and
Christian.
The portrayal of Jewish
people in English literature has been mixed, yet nearly all the books with
characters of that race, reflect the way they have been vilified and
persecuted, and been subject to injustice. Shakespeare’s Shylock evokes
both sympathy and dislike, yet students of the works of the bard of Avon
usually identify him as the real hero of The Merchant of Venice.
Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe portrays the beautiful but tragic
Jessica, suffering in consequence of her race and her religion. She has
been described as the most noble character in that romantic tale. Charles
Dicken’s Fagin, in Oliver Twist, is a despicable figure for the
most part, though a pathetic creature at the end. Some have argued that
he is balanced by the brutal Englishman Bill Sykes. But then, Sykes is
one of many English characters, while Fagin is the only Jewish person in
the book. I read each of those works while at school, but remained
largely unaware of the anti-semitic undertones they reflected. I could
never understand the anti-semitism of Christian persons since in my albeit
simple understanding of theology, all of mankind were guilty of the
betrayal and death of Christ, and, after all, Jesus was a Jew in every
sense of the word.
Nazi treatment of Jews in
the late 1930’s
I think I must have been
about ten years old when I first came across the horrors of the Holocaust
perpetrated on the Jewish people by Hitler and his Nazis. My parents had
gone off for a whole day, which was unusual for them, and my grandmother
was looking after us and preparing the tea. The weather being cold and
wet, I sought relief from boredom in the books in the ‘front room’
bookcase. One volume I found, Lest We Forget,
(by Lord Russell of Liverpool),
was a large
pictorial record of the concentration camps with photographs of the
surviving inmates and the heaps of dead bodies as discovered by the allied
troops on their arrival in 1945 at Auschwitz, Belsen, Buchenwald,
Dachau and other dreadful extermination camps.. The images have
haunted me ever since. I gazed at every picture and became physically
sick, but said nothing to other family members. My grandmother could not
understand why that evening I declined a meal that I would normally have
enjoyed.
Auschwitz concentration
camp
Grave of Belsen inmates
Buchenwald
I recall another early
awakening to the realities of the Middle East when seeking some relief
from our navigation studies, Skipper Willie Cowie of the Strathpeffer,
and I, went to a local cinema one evening in Aberdeen, to see Otto
Preminger’s film Exodus, based on the book by Leon Uris. The film,
made in 1960, relates some of the events leading up to the declaration of
the State of Israel in 1947. It portrayed the fears, goals, and
vulnerability of the fledgling state with graphic representations of
terrorist activities and the fighting that occurred in the lead-up to the
birth of the new state, and in its aftermath.
I was later to meet with
Israelis who took part in these events. The first was Raphael Ruppin, a
member of an illustrious family whose father was Chairman of the Jewish
Agency and as such enabled group of pioneers to establish the first
kibbutz (D’gania Alef) by providing them with land allocation and some
budget. He was later a Minister of Education. His brother-in-law was
Yigael Yadin Professor of Archeology at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem,
who had commanded the Israeli army during the war of independence, and who
was later Deputy Premier to Menachem Begin. Yadin is best known for his
marvelous books on archeological discoveries.
I was to spend some hours
with Yigael Yadin, and given that opportunity, quizzed him at length about
ancient Hebrew history, and his excavations at Masada and Hazor. Masada
we all know was the last fortress of first century Jews who held out
against the might of the Roman empire. The defenders eventually committed
suicide rather than surrender. The history has been well recorded by
Josephus and others, and has recently been presented in a film for the
benefit of cinema goers. Hazor was the chief northern city state in the
time of Joshua. It was conquered by the invading Hebrews, and was one of
the few cities that Joshua ordered to be burned according to the eleventh
chapter of the book of his name. During the Hazor excavations, Yadin’s
workers actually came across the 13th century BC level of ashes
that marked the city’s destruction by Joshua’s forces.
I met Ruppin when we were
both participating in the FAO / USSR seminar and study tour on fisheries
training and education. At that time he ran a fishery school located in
Michmoret on the Mediterranean coast. I was to visit him there several
times, and had the memorable experience of joining the family at a Seder
feast (Passover meal) that was led by Yadin himself. Raphael’s aged
mother was still around then. She had emigrated to Palestine after the
first world war, to meet her husband-to-be, and she had a wealth of tales
about the land and the people in those days. Raphael (at 80 years of age)
recently wrote an acclaimed novel on the Josephus period that has
remarkable relevance to the modern situation.
The other
character was even more interesting. Menachem Ben Yami was brought up in
Poland where he found himself in the Warsaw ghetto at the start of the
second world war. He escaped from the ghetto at the age of 16 and joined
a group of Jewish partisans survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and
within the framework of The Polish Communist resistance fought with them
and Soviet POW escapees against the Nazi forces for a year and a half. He
then joined the Red Army, and fought with them on the Eastern front for
another year. He was made a scout-sapper, with the duties of finding and
clearing mines ahead of his regimental scouting squad. After recovering
from a shrapnel wound in Soviet hospitals in Moscow, Menachem went back to
Poland to join the Polish army from which he was demobilized after a
couple of month as being too young!
Jewish immigration ship,
SS Kedmah
He then made his way to
Germany from where he helped to bring Jewish survivors from the East to
the UNRRA refugee camps in the American occupation zone. Later he was
sent by the Haganah underground to Marseilles where at a maritime school
he was trained to be a marine wireless operator. As such he boarded one of
the illegal emigrant ships and made it to Israel. Swimming ashore one
night he was arrested by British soldiers and put into an internment
camp. He escaped from the internment camp and joined a kibbutz where he
worked until the declaration of Israel’s statehood after which he fought
in the war of independence in the fledgling Israeli Navy.
Entering Jerusalem during
the 67 war.
Once all that was over,
Menachem returned to his kibbutz near Haifa and started to fish in the
Mediterranean. This was on a Scottish MFV that had been based in
Alexandria during the WW2 to serve as a firefighting vessel. Ben Yami
operated it for ten years, before moving for 3 years to the South Red Sea
port of Massawa, thus starting his international career. He married a
lovely young Jewish girl, Hannah, who had survived the Teresianstadt
concentration camp, but had lost her parents and sister in Nazi death
camps. Her two brothers survived by escaping from Germany during the war.
Kibbutz of Ein Gedi. The
kibbutzim are collective farms which practice communal ownership and
management. Many of them today have turned from agriculture to
manufacturing and are quite prosperous.
Although largely
self-taught, Ben Yami could speak four languages, - Polish, Hebrew,
Russian and English. (He later acquired some Italian and French).
Studying fishery literature in the 1950’s he obtained copies of Soviet
fishery texts. This was at the time when Russia was building fleets of
factory trawlers, and sending them all over the world to fish (and
possibly do other things as well). Menachem translated several of the
Russian fishery books into English, and that was how I first came across
his name, when I read these translations in the library of the Fishery
College in Canada, in 1965. The following year I was invited by Hilmar
Kristjonsson, FAO’s chief fishery technologist, to undertake some work in
his office in Rome, Italy. One evening there I was taken to a reception
in the office of Roy Jackson, then Director of Fisheries FAO. There was a
very pleasant Israeli man there, on his way to a brief study period in the
USA. I can still recall his boyish look and eager personality. That was
my first meeting with Menachem Ben Yami.
He was to become a
prolific fishery author, even producing computer programmes of data and
formulas of use to fisheries technologist. It was a pleasure for me to
work with him and even co-author some fishery papers with him. Menachem
had the most creative and agile mind I ever came across. Each problem or
issue was tackled with great enthusiasm. Lateral thinking was a
speciality.
He never tired of finding new ways to approach the challenges of fishery
management, or of adapting technology to address new needs. At over 70
years of age, he is still in demand all over the world as a speaker and
writer.
Now, some might think that
my Jewish friends might be hard-line anti-Arab Israelis, but nothing could
be further from the truth. They are both on the “peace wing” of Israeli
politics. Both are in favour of a Palestine state, and of the return of
the west bank to the Arab people. Both despaired of the aggressive
military actions of Ariel Sharon, although they approved of his plan to
withdraw from Gaza. [Of
Sharon, who was struck down by illness in 2006, Menachem says that
following his political U-turn, and his subsequent struggle against his
own party’s and other extremists, the whole “peace wing” became his
supporters. Therefore, as long as he sincerely pursued his Gaza evacuation
project he could count on the ever-wary support of the left and the center-left
parties. History teaches that there are strong rightist leaders who at a
certain stage “see the light” and resolve conflicts, which leftist leaders
are unable to resolve because of strong opposition from the right. It was
President Richard Nixon, the communist hater who established USA relations
with China. It was the rightist Begin, who made peace with Egypt by
withdrawing from the whole of Sinai. Golda Meir said at that time: “Such
peace I could have made before, but just imagine what he (Begin) would
have done to me…”. De Gaulle pulled France out of Algeria, and Churchill
started the dismantling of the British empire.]
Raphael Ruppin used to tell me of a close Arab friend of his who died some
years ago. They grew up together and became lifelong friends. “When
we discuss the Arab-Israeli problems”, said Raphael,
“we have differences, yes, - but if it was left to the two of us, we could
resolve all of the issues and make arrangements for long-term peace and
security, in a couple of days”.
An Arab home demolished by
the Israeli military
Refugee camp outside of
Jericho
The situation in Israel
today is bad, mainly for social reasons and the growing gap between haves
and have-nots. Some might say it could scarcely be worse, short of full
scale war breaking out again. However, it is somewhat improved on the
prevailing conditions at the turn of the century. But it all needs to be
seen in context, and the fledgling state of barely 60 years has had to
face a constant threat against its very existence. Few countries have to
live in a constant state of near war as Israel must.
But it is still surprising
to visit Israel and find Jews and Arabs working, studying, serving, side
by side, all over the small country. I have often taken Arab taxis when
driving around, and have enjoyed listening to the drivers’ point of view
which they will readily share. One has to remember that there are Arab
Jews, that is Jews who immigrated to Israel from Arab countries. Then
there are some Arabs who converted to Judaism (usually following military
service), but this makes them full-scale Jews in the eyes of the State.
There are also Christian Arabs, Arab-speaking Druses with their special
religion and culture, and Moslem Cherkes (Cercesians) who are not Arabs,
but descendants of Caucasians. There is also a large community, - almost
a tribe, of ‘Black Hebrews’ who live in a quasi-collective. Although
practicing a form of Judaism, they are not recognized as true Jews by the
orthodox rabbis. Many of them came to Israel from the USA. Recently the
Israeli army accepted into its ranks, its very first Israel-born Black
Hebrew. Thus there is a large and varied population of non-Jews and
quasi-Jews living in the state of Israel.
Bedouin Arabs, nomadic
tribesmen of Israel and Palestine
My wife’s family has interesting Jewish connections. A German-Jewish
family, the Schlomka’s, came to Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1948 when there
was much unrest in Israel. Fritz Ernst Constantin had been in a
concentration camp for a period in Germany and had gone from there to
Palestine in 1934, where he met and married Hannah Rachel Haber who had
been born in Jaffa in 1918. From then he used an Anglicised first name
of Michael. They had three young children, Conny, Helen and Freddy.
They set up a small second-hand bookshop business in the city, and
started to build a life for themselves. However, Mr Schlomka died
suddenly, and his wife who suffered throughout her life from bouts of
nervous illness, had to be hospitalized. My wife’s parents knew the
family and took an interest in the children, acting as foster parents to
them over a period of years. The older boy Conny died in tragic
circumstances, but Helen and Freddy survived, and were like a brother
and sister to my wife. Helen married a young local businessman, and
Freddy, after a few escapades, went to the USA, and from there he later
moved to Israel.
Today, Helen has a lovely grown-up family. She has researched her
family history with great diligence, and contacted relatives in Germany,
Israel, and the USA. She is a great supporter of the State of Israel,
and follows the events there with much concern. Freddy has taken a
different route. He married a world-class harpist, and on moving to
Israel, took a deep interest in the plight of the Palestine people. For
a period he operated a charity, ICAHD, the Israeli Committee against
House Demolitions, which rebuilds Arab houses that have been damaged or
destroyed by the Israeli army. (I doubt if any Jew could have been more
pro-Palestine people than that !) Freddy now promotes the development
of small mixed communities to demonstrate how Arabs and Israelis can
live together in harmony.
My visits to Israel took
place between 1975 and 1988, and were both official and personal in
nature. I was able to see the land from Tel Aviv to Jericho, and from
Galilee to Elat on the gulf of Aqaba. It is a fascinating place,
especially for anyone with a background in Biblical events. Almost every
corner of the country has links with the distant past. At Beth Shean,
near to mount Gilboa where King Saul and Jonathan were killed, a first
century Roman-era town that was destroyed in an earthquake, is being
painstakingly pieced together, stone by stone, like a huge
three-dimensional jigsaw for which there is no guiding picture ! I was
struck by the number of Bible places that are now Arab towns, including
Nazareth, Bethlehem and Bethany. Bethany was the home of Mary and Martha,
and where according to John’s Gospel, their brother was raised from the
dead. The present Arab residents of that little town, preserve a memory
of the Gospel account in their name for the village – El Lazarai –
the town of Lazarus. Old Jerusalem is like something out of a fairy tale
book. Viewing it from the Mount of Olives, one is transported back, not
just centuries, but millenniums.
View of Elat over the Gulf
of Aqaba
Nazareth, - now an Arab
city
the Sea of Galilee
Desert hill believed to be
the Mount of Temptation
The coastal towns of Joppa
(Jaffa) and Caesarea, are also full of remnants of their former
importance. The Sea of Galilee is still a magical lake in many ways, and
its fishing villages still function though catering more for tourists than
locals. Masada towers over the Dead Sea, in its austere fortress height,
where the messianic Jews held out to the last against the Roman army.
Elat is located strategically at the southern point of the Negev desert,
with the mountains of Moab on one side and the Sinai desert on the other.
One can still imagine the flotilla arriving there 3,000 years ago, that
brought the Queen of Sheba and her retinue on their state visit to the
Kingdom of Solomon.
My favourite site in all
Israel is the “garden tomb”. There are two locations in Jerusalem that
are regarded as the sites of the crucifixion and the tomb where Jesus’
body was interred. One is inside the ’church of the holy sepulchre’, and
with all due respects to devout pilgrims who venerate it, - the place does
not ring true to me. It is inside the old city, and the gospel records
clearly indicate that both were outside. Also, the places claimed for the
cross and the grave are just altogether too close together. And there is
absolutely no indication of the Golgotha skull-shaped rock, or the garden
where, John’s Gospel tells us, the tomb had been constructed.
the Skull Rock, Jerusalem
Garden Tomb, near to Skull
Rock
the Mount of Olives
Far more convincing is
“Gordon’s Calvary” identified just outside the old city wall by the
renowned general. The huge skull-shaped rock looks just as Golgotha is
described to us by three of the Gospel writers. Nearby a large garden has
been uncovered, with several rock-hewn tombs. One of these is preserved
as an example of what the original tomb would have looked like. It is
located by the Damascus gate, and close to a present day public bus
station. It has been believed since the time of King David that the
promontory is the Mount Moriah where Abraham was tested to offer his son
as a sacrifice, which is why the Moslem Dome of the Rock and the earlier
Temple of Solomon were constructed nearby.
It is truly amazing that
the world’s three monotheistic faiths converge on this one location where
four millenniums ago, a lonely Semitic patriarch performed a strange act
of faith that was to have profound and mysterious significance for all
humanity. “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for
righteousness”. And so he became the father of the faithful. Abraham
lived at the very dawn of civilization. He was centuries earlier than the
great Pharaoh Akhenaten, a predecessor of Tutankhamen. Akhenaten was
referred to as the heretic Pharaoh as he tried to change Egyptian religion
to the worship of the one god Aten. He was portrayed differently from the
stylised forms of the time and has been called the “first individual in
history”. But the individual Abraham lived long before him. He is
believed to have been buried in Hebron, now an Arab town near to Gaza.
There are no archeological
evidences of Abraham’s existence, though there are plenty attesting to
events in his lifetime like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; but
there are some artifacts dating from that period, that seem to refer to
the Mount Moriah event. “now I know that you fear God, since you have
not withheld your son, your only from me. Then Abraham lifted his eyes
and looked and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his
horns. He took the ram and sacrificed it instead of his son”. A
number of valuable artifacts, made of gold, silver or precious metal,
have been found in the region, that appear to represent a ram with its
horns wrapped in the branches of a thorn bush. Archeologists are unsure
what these items are, except to suggest that they had religious
significance, and may have been representations of Abraham’s Mount Moriah
experience.
Gold ram statuette from Ur
of the Chaldees, dating back to the time of Abraham.
Both Jewish and Moslem
tradition link the site of Abaraham’s experience with the ‘Bethel’ where
fugitive Jacob had a dream of a stairway from earth to heaven. (Even the
Scots got a claim on that event, their original ‘Stone of Destiny’ being
reputed to be the one that Jacob slept on). Both sites are where old
Jerusalem now stands. King David’s citadel, Akra, and Mount Zion, are
also part of the physical landscape, with the Mount of Olives lying to the
east. It was to that location that King David brought the most revered
item in the Jewish religion, - the Ark of the Covenant, - after it was
recovered from the Philistines, and from the house of Obed-Edom where it
had remained for a period.
The Ark itself was the
most sacred piece of furniture in the tabernacle or worship tent used
during the Israelites desert wanderings. Moses gave its specifications
and the instructions for its care and transport, in the Book of Exodus.
The sacred chest, was constructed of hard desert wood, overlaid with gold.
According to the New Testament writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
inside were the two stone tablets inscribed with the ten commandments, a
golden pot containing manna, and a budding almond rod that belonged to
Moses brother, the first High Priest, Aaron. The most striking thing to
an observer would have been the two angels or cherubim [Ancient
representations of ‘cherubim’, both Jewish and Sumarian, are
totally unlike the cherub pictures of children’s books. They were
understood to be among the fiercest and holiest of angelic beings.]
of beaten gold, at each end of the ark, their wings stretching forward and
touching each other, while their faces gazed into the ark, or onto the lid
or ‘mercy seat’ of pure gold, that was sprinkled with sacrificial blood.
While King David made all
the preparations for the construction of a Temple to house the Ark, he was
disqualified from building it as his hands were stained with blood from
his many battles and war experiences. It was left to his son Solomon,
whose name meant ‘peace’, to build the temple that he came to be
associated with. Solomon’s temple, on a mound called Ophel, stood for
over 4 centuries, till it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar who took the
Jewish people into captivity in Babylon. Rebuilding work started during
the reign of the Persian King Cyrus, led by Zerubbabel and other Jewish
leaders of the exile period, like Ezra and Nehemiah. The work was
finished in the time of Herod the Great (the first Herod we read of in the
New Testament), and that is why the second temple sometimes bears his
name. It was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. But from the time of the
destruction of Solomon’s temple, there is no mention of the location of
the Ark of the Covenant. This has led to much speculation, some of it
quite fanciful and bizarre.
Model of the Ark of the
Covenant
Following the destruction
of the second temple, the site in old Jerusalem was eventually built over
during the first millenium AD. The Romans had a fortress there, - Fort
Antonio, and later the followers of the Prophet Mohammed were to construct
the Dome of the Rock, and the Al Aqsa mosque which remain there to this
day. The western wall, or the ’wailing wall’ where devout Jews pray, is
believed to be all that remains of the second temple. Jesus was often in
that temple, where he taught and challenged, and drove out the money
changers. Nearby were the Roman and Jewish scenes of his trial, and the
place of his crucifiction, and burial. Few locations on the face of the
earth, have such historical and religious significance, or such potential
to stir powerful feelings of faith or nationality.
So, what became of the Ark
of the Covenant? As suggested in the Indiana Jones film, some believe it
was taken down through Egypt to Ethiopia, by devout Jews pledged to
protect it from Nebuchadnezzar. The basis of that idea is the belief that
the kings of Ethiopia were descended from Menelek, the child it is thought
that the Queen of Sheba bore to Solomon. Whether that tradition has
factual basis, we do not know, but certainly since Solomon’s time there
have been strong links with Ethiopia, and the existence of the tribe of
‘black Jews’, the Falasha. Christian era tradition also plays a part.
There has been a Christian church in Ethiopia since New Testament times
when the Ethiopian Minister of Finance visited Jerusalem and met with the
evangelist Philip. And strangely, many of the Ethiopian churches contain
old relics or replicas of the Ark.
However, mainstream
thought in Israel is that if the Ark is still around, it is buried under
the temple site, possibly near to the tunnels and caverns related to the
water system, that date back to the time of King Hezekiah. So we do not
know. But for those with an interest in Jerusalem’s history, or a
fascination with the historical origins of their faith, whether Christian,
Jewish or Moslem, the subject never fails to excite the imagination.
Arab and Jew together in
peace and friendship, - when might it become a reality? |
