Читать книгу In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 - Nitza Rosovsky - Страница 17

“Paradise” is not a word found in other travelers’ descriptions. By mid-century, when the Grand Tour became fashionable, a growing number of “pilgrims and sinners”—to borrow a phrase from Mark Twain—arrived in the Holy Land, both the pious and the curious: missionaries and clergymen, writers and scientific investigators, painters and photographers, famous personalities as well as ordinary sightseers.

Twain, who descended upon Tiberias in 1867, recorded his scathing observations in The Innocents Abroad, published two years after his visit. There he described “the stupid village of Tiberias slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms,” its people “vermin-tortured vagabonds,” who were best examined at a distance: “They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and Negroes. Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias.” Upon leaving he wrote in his notebook: “I have only one pleasant reminiscence of this Palestine excursion—time I had the cholera in Damascus.” It turns out that Twain, under contract to a newspaper in California that had financed his trip, discovered on his way back home that several letters he had mailed to the paper from Italy were lost. To fulfill his word quota, he inflated his Holy Land notes by plagiarizing a little, and exaggerating his unfavorable impressions. As he makes clear in The Innocents Abroad, the land was so different from what he learned in Sunday school.

Many travelers—tormented by flies, mosquitoes, and bed bugs—quoted the tenth-century Arab geographer al-Muqadasi: “The King of the Fleas holds his court in Tiberias,” where the citizens “danced in their beds” which they shared with legions of bugs. Some lucky visitors stayed at Dr. Haim Weissmann’s small hotel that was clean, if simply furnished, where they consumed chicken, eggplant, tasty fish from the Sea of Galilee, and wine from Safed. The antiquarian Félicien de Saulcy slept at that hotel in 1850 and was bitten by fleas. The photographer Maxime Du Camp and his travel companion Gustave Flaubert stayed there as well.

Travelers noted the widespread poverty, mentioned the damage caused by the 1837 earthquake, and applauded the hot springs—famous since Roman times—with their elegant bathhouse, rebuilt by Ibrahim Pasha. Christian pilgrims praised the natural beauty of the lake and the mountains, scenery they assumed had changed little since the time of Jesus. The missionary William Thomson, author of The Land and the Book, described the Sea of Galilee and its environs: “To me, Gennesaret and its surroundings are ever fair” because there “our blessed Lord dwelt with men and taught the way of life.” One midnight, when the thermometer stood at 100° Fahrenheit, Thomson wondered why so many people lived in Tiberias, then reflected: “They are chiefly Jews, attracted hither either to cleanse their leprous bodies in her baths, or to purify their unclean spirits by contact with her traditionary and ceremonial holiness.”¹¹

Some travelers commented on the strange dress of Ashkenazi men: either long black coats, striped silk ones, or Indian cotton coats tied with a sash, and hats, either wide-brimmed or trimmed with fur. (I read somewhere that the fur hats were called gatos muertos by the Sephardim—that is “dead cats”—for the way they looked and, perhaps, smelled in the hot summers.) Travelers observed that some Jews were fair-skinned, but many visitors preferred the darker ones—the Sephardim—who had better manners than the Ashkenazim. Most women wore long-sleeved dresses, with bright flowers on a white background, and shawls over their shoulders, though some wore European clothes. A few travelers found the women charming.

Jews revered Tiberias both for its spiritual role after the fall of Jerusalem and for the sages and martyrs who were buried there, and they came on pilgrimage to pray at the numerous tombs. One famous sage said to be buried in Tiberias is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai who had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem in a coffin during the Roman siege, foreseeing the destruction of the Temple and fearing the disappearance of Judaism. He soon founded academies where his people were taught how to practice their religion without the central authority of Jerusalem and the Temple. One tradition, questioned by some, has it that the body of Maimonides—the famous philosopher and codifier of Jewish law who was a physician in Saladin’s court in Egypt and died there in 1204—was brought to Tiberias and re-interred there.