The Source
by James A. Michener
(Fawcett Crest, 1965)
He thought it strange that in the Holy Land a man should orient himself by facing away from Jerusalem.
Page 14.
“We cannot possibly uncover the entire tell. What we can uncover is a picture of what happened there, and it’s that we’re after.”
Page 17.
Cullinane wrote his date 1950 C.E., which had originally signified Christian Era, but which was now universally read as Common Era. Dates before Jesus were written B.C.E., Before the Common Era, and this satisfied everyone.
Page 19.
The tells of Israel were far too valuable to allow just anyone to come in with a team of amateurs to butcher them.
Page 20.
Many crimes against history had bee perpetrated in Israel by enthusiastic men with shovels who dug hasty trenches through improperly recorded levels.
Page 21.
“Warn your men not to dig up any facts that confuse the issue.”
Page 30.
This was a constant danger at an archaeological site: enth5rusiastsic workmen, seeking to gain bonuses and also to please the foreigners whom in general they liked, were accustomed to hide things in the soil and then to come upon them triumphantly with their hoes.
Page 31.
From thousands of miles away men had come to probe into the secrets of the tell and at this hour they had struck a significant thing. It was a magnificent moment.
Page 35.
It was essential to record where it had stood and how it had fitted into the wall.
Page 38.
In Israel the festive night of the week is Saturday.
Page 64.
Why not look at the young Jews at the kibbutz? They refuse to fool around with archaic forms, but they know the Bible better than any Catholic you’ve ever met. They study it not to find religious forms but to discover the organic bases of Judaism.
Page 69.
The tell contained seventy-one feet of accumulation laid down during eleven thousand years, and that meant less than eight inches added per century.
Page 73.
Laboratories determine the Carbon-14 content in a sample by counting the number of Carbon-14 disintegrations per minute per gram of ordinary carbon.
Page 75.
Israel was right; it was taking people - any people - as America had once done; so that in fifty years the bright new ideas of the world would come probably from Israel and no longer form a tired America.
Page 77.
Honey was the only sweet the cave men knew.
Page 90.
Every hundred years or so new experiences would accumulate, requiring the invention of new words; but this was a slow process, for Ur and his neighbours were extremely cautious and the utterance of a new word might upset the balance of nature and call into being strange forces that were better left at rest, so words tended to be restricted to the same sounds that time had made familiar.
Page 91.
The cave lent strength to those who lived within it and the preposterous idea of his wife and son, to build a separate house for one small family by the well, was instinctively repugnant to him. Men should live together smelling each other and brining honey home to all.
Page 95.
The greatest advantage came in an area which the old man could not have foreseen: In the cave of Ur’s ancestors had lived much like animals. They had been forced to live where the cave was and within the space it provided; they were its prisoners both in acting and thinking, and in their older years they were apt to be killed or starved to death because younger families required the cav. But with the building of the self-contained house Ur would become the master and the house would be his servant. He would be forced to engage in new ways of thinking, whether he wanted to or not.
Page 96.
Everything of importance in nature had a will of its own that operated either in favor of man or against him.
Page 98.
The closest approach, perhaps, to a ritualized behavior came at the moment of death, when it was acknowledged that the dead man would require some food and protection in the unknown days ahead. He was therefore buried in a specified position, his head on a pillow of rock, accompanied by a few pots of food, a spear and some ornament he had love.
Page 99.
The fear which the family was now discovering was of another kind: it sprang from the slow-maturing apprehension regarding the relationship of man to his world, the gnawing suspicion that perhaps things were not so simple s they seemed on this average autumn day when ripening grain hid in the stalks and a rumor of deer echoed in the forest.
Page 102.
It was a rule of life that the Family of Ur was discovering: the more committed a family becomes to a given project, the more vulnerable it also becomes. Having partially conquer nature, they were now a prey to it.
Page 103.
It was an epochal event, this utterance of the word him. For the first time a human being at the well of Makor had spoken of an immanent spirit as “he,” a personified being who could be approached directly on a woman-to-deity basis.
Page 104.
This was the first fumbling effort to evoke the I-You relationship - “I am begging You, my partner, for mercy” - under which society would henceforth live, until the multitude of gods would become more real than sentient human beings.
Page 104.
In his new apotheosis as owner Ur began to bring new fields into cultivation, but the word fields could be misleading. For Ur a field was an area no larger than a table, at its maximum as large as several tables placed together.
Page 105.
The identification of he, the unique human being, probably resulted from an expanding social order in which categories became more clearly defined. A man began to perform a certain job or to live in a specified portion of the communal cave. He thus existed in relationship to known verities and in time began to partake of recognizable characteristics, even to develop them in order to fulfill the requirements of a burgeoning social order. As a result, he developed a personal space that moved with him and was his, a function that was his, and a manner of behavior that distinguished him.
Page 110.
There was an additional implication in the word he: it signified that the bearer of the pronoun existed in some kind of relationship to the forces of nature that surrounded him; he knew his place as it were, and developed a strong sense of private property, and this discovery must have come very late indeed.
Page 110.
It was ins
tructive and accurate to imagine earliest man as living for most of his first two million years within an insulation of stupidity, not fully differentiating himself from the physical world, the spiritual world, or the world of the other sentient animals.
Page 111.
At what point did women discover that they were more functional as women if they wore some ornament to differentiate themselves from men?
Page 111.
Once a group of people had the intelligence to say, “Let’s sew our skins,” ways would surely be found to do the sewing.
Page 112.
Flint could be worked into axes, arrowheads, spears, needles, saws or almost any tool that man could envisage; of equal importance, two pieces of flint when struck together produced fire.
Page 115.
Primarily Makor was an agricultural center whose rich fields produced a surplus which could be traded for manufactured goods.
Page 125.
In an age of violent change, when the super-empires were trying to establish themselves, Makor was allowed to exist only because it was a minor settlement off to one side of the major thoroughfare connecting Egypt, which had long ago built its pyramids, to Mesopotamia, which had already built its ziggurats.
Page 126.
There was one special god whom all the citizens of Makor kept close to their hearts, and this as Astarte, the tempting, rich-breasted goddess of fertility. It was she who brought the grain to ripening and the cow to calving, the wife to the birthing stool and chickens to the nest. In an agricultural society, smiling little Astarte was the most immediately significant of all the gods, for without her nothing that concerned the cycle of life could come to pass.
Page 127.
The cult of human sacrifice was of itself not abominable, nor did it lead to the brutalization of society: lives were lost which could have been otherwise utilized, but the matter ended in death and excessive numbers were not killed, nor did the rites in which they died contaminate the ind.
Page 140.
When the first farmer planted wheat intentionally he bound himself like a slave to the concept of fertility.
Page 140.
In the world that Urbaal knew, he was surrounded by an infinity of gods.
Page 144.
His people worked harder than most, so their flocks prospered. His women spent long hours making cloth, so his men dressed better than other nomads. He taught diligence in all things and reverence, too, so the families about him multiplied. And since his people were content to live within the protection of El-Shaddai, they were happy and creative.
Page 177.
Nomads who lived at the mercy of the desert, who set forth on a journey from one water hold to the unseen next, taking with them as an act of faith all they owned and everyone they loved, trusting blindly that the path had been ordained for them and that after many days of near-death they would find the appointed well where it was supposed to be … such nomads had to trust a god who saw the entire desert and the hills beyond. Reliance upon El-Shaddai, the unseen, the unknown, was a religion requiring the most exquisite faith, for at no point in their lives could these lonely travelers be sure.
Page 178.
The Hebrews insisted upon the circumcision of their men for a logical reason: it not only formed a covenant between the man and El-Shaddai, an unbreakable allegiance whose mark remained forever, but it also had the practical value of indicating without question or quibble the fact that the man so marked was a Hebrew.
Page 183.
The circumcised man had better fight to the death because for him there was no masking his identity. The Hebrews were therefore strong warriors who sere sometimes defeated but rarely demoralized, and for much of this cohesive spirit the desert rite of circumcision was responsible.
Page 184.
He spent his days digging physically into the earth of Makor and his nights probing the spirit of the Judaism that had been responsible for building so much of the tell.
Page 193.
“Even when the King James Version was made, it was purposefully old-fashioned. Something beautiful and poetic. Today it’s positively archaic, and for young people to study their religion form it can only mean they’ll think of that religion as archaic aa- clothed in dust and not to be taken as contemporary.”
Page 195.
Deuteronomy was a living book and to the living Jew it had contemporary force.
Page 196.
In several sieges of Makor the enemy had triumphed by capturing the well outside the wall and mounting siege until the internal cisterns were empty. Then, face by thirst, the town had been forced to surrender.
Pages 201-202.
The problem of how Canaanite and Hebrew should share the same land but not the same religion would never be wholly settled.
Page 211.
To the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher thew theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend.
Page 212.
El-Shaddai will live forever because he is not a thing.
Page 216.
Canaanites and Hebrews had started their national histories sharing the same god, El, who represented an unseen power, but even int eh first moment of sharing they had treated El in contrasting ways, for the Canaanites had consistently diminished his universal qualities. Being townspeople, thy captured El and made him a prisoner inside their walls: they fragmented him into Baal and Astarte and a host of lesser gods. … The Hebrews on the other hand, beginning with the same god having the same attributes, had freed him of limiting characteristics, launching a process that would ultimately transform him into an infinite god if infinite power. Each modification the Hebrews introduced in the desert years intensified the abstract powers of El. They called him Elohim, all the gods; or Elyon, the most high; or El-Shaddai, the god almighty. And soon they would end by dropping the El altogether and calling him by no name at all, representing him only by the mysterious unpronounceable letters YHWH, whereupon his transformation would be complete. But later generations would back away from the austere Hebrew apotheosis and would once more give him a name: God.
Page 217.
The Canaanites were degrading the concept of god while the Hebrews were elevating it.
Page 217.
The history of this mound below us, Governor Uriel thought, is the history of men learning to live together in a town, faithful to the gods of town life, and that is the only history in the world that matters.
Page 218.
The town was filled with men who had never worked in open areas tending sheep and discovering for themselves the actuality of their god; these men sat cramped before a wheel making pottery. They wrote on clay which they did not dig and sold wine which they had not pressed. Their values were warped and their gods were of a trivial dimension.
Page 218.
Our god has always preferred honest people who live outdoors above crafty ones who live in towns.
Page 219.
El-Shaddai was in a position to carry it the executions himself but he always preferred to reason with his Hebrews.
Page 233.
The relationship between El-Shaddai and his Hebrews was not an absolute thing; not even a god could order Zadok to obey blindly a dictate that was wholly repugnant to him or one that contradicted his moral judgment.
Page 233.
The god of the Hebrews was not an indifferent deity who remained above the contest; hew sweated with his warriors, determined to bring them factory.
Page 235.
As the mound grew in height its crown of usable land contracted in size.
Page 247.
According to the ancient laws of the Hebrews the weak had rights, thew pauper had a claim upon the charity of his neighbors, taxes were allocated fairly and punishment could not be capricious.
Page 247.
Makor remained pretty much a Canaanite town. For example, it held to the ancient calendar of Canaan, which was divided int o two seasons, the hot and the cold.
Page 248.
The complaisant town of Makor with its amiable gods could never have produced Yahweh; that transformation required the captivity in Egypt, the conflict with the Pharaohs, the exodus, the years of hunger and thirst in the desert, the longing for a settled home and the spiritual yearning for a known god … these were the things required for the forging of Yahweh.
Page 260.
As Yahweh grew more powerful he also grew more remote, so that it was no longer possible to walk with him in the olive grove.
Page 260.
The remoteness of Yahweh, his stern invisibility, made it inevitable that many Hebrews would cling to lesser deities who provided them with the personal warmth that Yahweh no longer did.
Page 260.
Like many people faced with this ultimate decision of which god they will worship and in what way, they shied away from direct dialogue, hoping that time would solve the problem and make the decision for them.
Page 267.
“A man can see Jerusalem any time he wishes. It depends upon the kind of yoke he’s willing to accept.”
Page 294.
One does not embrace messengers; one listens to them.
Page 314.
It is impossible for any man to vacillate between two gods: if he tries, he is slowly eroded.
Page 329.
To Hebrews a man’s name carried a significance unknown in other nations.
Page 347.
Women under Judaism were treated no worse than Near Eastern women in general: deplored at birth, endured in adolescence, married off as soon as possible, discriminated against in law and subjected to misery if they became unwanted widows.
Page 351.
One of the reasons why Judaism had been so strong internally was its subtle relationship between the sexes, but he could not forget that Christianity overwhelmed Judaism partly because of its emotional appeal to women. Judaism was a religion for men, Cullinane said to himself. Christianity for women.
Page 353.
“Are Muslims circumcised?” Cullinane asked.
“Of course. Besides, we Arabs are semitic.”
Page 354.
When you accept my punishment you also accept my divine compassion.
Page 371.
You are a people commanded to remember.
Page 371.
Following their return form Babylon they had adopted the convention that the god who had saved them was so powerful that his name must never be pronounced, nor did they write it, nor refer to it in talk among themselves. Their god was known simply by the sacred tetragrammaton YHWH, unpronounceable and unknowable.
Page 380.
The gods were tall and white and naked, bespeaking the divinity that lay in any man who trained himself to physical perfection.
Page 387.
In all seasons of the year the Galilee is a masterpiece of nature, an area to make the heart glad that man is an animal who can love the earth as a deer loves the cool highlands or as the bee eater loves the fields over which he skims; but in autumn, when the seasons are a out to change, it as a special beauty, and if great thoughts have sometimes come from this small region it is partly because this magnificence of the land - the magnificence that lies in familiar things rather than in great waterfalls or towering mountains - has always impressed itself upon the people who lived in the area.
Pages 407-408.
The Greeks were a meticulous people to whom cleanliness and beauty were imperative.
Page 408.
“The Greeks and the English developed sports. The romans and the Americans degenerated them into spectacles. And the Arabs and Jews said to hell with the whole silly mess.”
Page 412.
There is no city in the empire, not even Rome itself, more enticing than Caesarea, that remarkable city which we have built of white marble ad the sweat of slaves.
Page 428.
Judea is far from Rome and of little consequence, really. Years ago with my help Herod charmed Caesar Augustus, and in the intervening decades the Roman emperor has been silting to support Herod as long as the later maintains discipline along the borders of the empire.
Page 441.
Today Sephardi meant loosely the oriental Jew as opposed to the European, the lumpen proletariat as contrasted to the sophisticated expert form Russia or Germany. The two groups differed in inconsequential ways: Ashkenazim spoke Yiddish based on German; many Sephardim used Ladino, a vulgar Spanish. They also pronounced Hebrew differently, the Sephardi usage representing the world standard; and they followed different synagogue rituals, where the Ashkenazi was often preferred.
Page 473.
With the extermination of 6,000,000 Ashkenazim in World War II and the bottling up of another 3,000,000 in Russia, the Sephardim became proportionately more important; and when the state of Israel was launched, its geographical position in Asia meant that it contained more Sephardi oriental Jews than Ashkenazi Europeans. Suddenly what had been a diminishing factor became one of central significance.
Page 473.
“God lives on a little farm,” Yigal said.
Page 484.
“No man can understand the kind of work God will allot him in this life, but whatever it is, he had better perform it faithfully.”
Page 501.
To an onlooker he would have been an amusing little man that bright morning, an ordinary Jew making believe he was a general, but he sustained his men as if he had been a Caesar fresh from triumphs along the Rhine.
Page 503.
Jesus Christ was born, so far as we know, in the summer of 6 B.C.E., that being sometime before the death of King Herod the Great.
Page 509.
The major contacts of a frontier town like Makor were never with Jerusalem or Nazareth, nor even with eh settlements along the Sea of Galilee; they had to be with Ptolemais, that alien port so near at hand yet almost always in the grip of strangers who followed exotic religions.
Pages 509-510.
Makor had to worry about Ptolemais, not Jerusalem.
Page 510.
Paul spoke with clarity, relying upon reason to persuade his listeners.
Page 510.
The synagogues of Galilee had usually been drab affairs in the Jewish tradition of a bleak exterior and a warm interior.
Page 521.
Just ass Queen Helena had gone through the Holy Lad arbitrarily deciding where the cherished relics of Christianity were, so devout Jews had established categorically where the saintly scenes of their religion had occurred.
Page 527.
No Jewish rabbi would ever accept discipline by a hierarchy of any kind: his contract was a personal one with the community that invited him to guide them.
Page 529.
It was his Talmud that provided the fence around the Torah, protecting God’s law form unintentional trespass; God had said merely, “Remember Shabbat,” but the rabbis had staked out their fence far from the actual Shabbat, defending the sacred day behind a multitude of laws. It was on this holy work of building the fence of the Talmud that Rabbi Asher would spend the rest of his life.
Page 533.
Jewish kitchens became a symbol of Gd’s covenant and to keep dishes separated was a trivial thing.
Page 536.
What the rabbis were doing, in part consciously and in part unconsciously, was to create a body of law that would bind the Jews together as they went into exile to the Diaspora.
Page 536.
Gentiles, observing their homelessness, would construct the myth of the Wandering Jew, but in reality this phrase was meaningless, for no matter where the Jew wandered, if he took with him the Talmud he was home.
Page 537.
After years of discussion it was determined that a man was any male child who had reached the age of thirteen; henceforth no public worship was possible without the presence of ten Jewish men above the age of twelve.
Page 538.
The Talmud was also a testimony to the joy of Jewish living. Its preaching on the law was hard and clear, but side by side it contained abundant passages which tempered that law to make the finished document a signing, laughing, hopeful summary.
Page 550.
Rabbi Asher had tried to live as if on the morrow he were dead.
Page 572.
John experienced what he had not known before: men who loved beauty as an enhancement of life.
Page 588.
Although the Christians presented a solid front against Jews and pagans, among themselves they were sorely divided, for they could not agree upon the nature of their religion.
Page 588.
He knew then that he would neve be free to leave Makor, since he was now as firmly bound to the basilica as he had been to the synagogue, for when a man builds a place of worship the walls himself inside.
Page 592.
Mark saw that the struggle to establish the essentials of faith for Christianity was going to prove as difficult as it had been for Judaism; but when the law was finally agreed upon, the church would possess a miracle of wisdom whose structure no one, certainly neither the Rabbi Jesus nor the Apostle Paul, could have foreseen.
Page 594.
The destruction could not be halted, for the hatred of the imperial troops was directed against abstract ideas: not Jews but the places where they worshiped, the homes where they lived.
Page 597.
‘Be merciful … if you can. Spare the aged, the women, the children … if you can. Give every man an honest chance to join you, and if he submits, accept him as he is. But even if the enemy resists, kill no sheep, no camel, no ox - unless you intend to eat it. And let no man harm a palm tree or an olive.’
Page 608.
The Jews had their Old Book delivered to them through Moses, while the Christians had their New called forth by Jesus Christ, but the Arabs had the Koran, and since the latter summarized the best of the preceding two, the former were no longer essential.
Page 611.
In those springtime years of Arabian faith, when leaders like Abd Umar had known Muhammad personally, Islam seemed a marvel of cohesion and order; when compared to the confusions that tormented the Christian church and the inadequacy that had overtaken the Jews.
Page 612.
The fall of Tiberias had ended the rich pilgrim traffic to Capernaum.
Page 613.
Of course, the basic argument - was Jesus man-and-God-at-the-same-time as Egyptians argued, or was He man-then-God as those of Constantinople believed? - had long been settled precisely as Father Eusebius had foreseen: each side was wrong and all good Christians now acknowledged that Christ owned two complete natures, one forever human, the other forever divine, though the Egyptians still refused to abandon their contention and on it had constructed a separatist church.
Page 613.
The problem which now tormented the church was this: Was the spiritual nature of Jesus human or divine?
Page 613.
If one considered Jesus to be all man, His divinity was rendered meaningless, while the miracle of Mary as the Mother of God vanished; on the other hand, if one argued that He was all God, the significance of human redemption was diminished and the crucifixion could be interpreted merely as a device adopted by God to prove a point: no human suffering or agony need be involved. However, if a concept of Jesus could be evolved whereby His substance, His nature and His will could all be accepted as both divine and human, then Christianity would have acquired a subtle unifying principle upon which enormous structures of faith and philosophies of life could be built.
Page 615.
Better than most Arabs, Abd Umar appreciated how much of the Koran had come to Muhmmad through the teachings of Jewish sages.
Page 617.
To any intelligent mind the religion of Muhammad must be the logical next step in the growth of Judaism, and the Prophet waited for the Jews to join him.
Page 617.
Constantinople had laid down the rule that no new Jewish buildings could be started nor improvements added to those already standing. Furthermore, even if a synagogue were in existence, it must not compete in either height or appointments with Christian churches in the same community, and since the Nestorian minority in Makor could afford little, the synagogue was truly a hovel.
Page 620.
The Jews were a living insult to the trend of history, and if one helped exterminate them, he must be doing God’s work.
Page 665.
“When you once describe a venture as a holy war you surrender all capacity to judge honest alternatives.”
Page 678.
“When men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness upon their people.”
Page 680.
Small-town memories are long.
Page 688.
The new Crusader walls, of course, had to stand well inside the lines followed by the earlier Canaanite and Jewish walls, for as the mount had risen in height its available building area was constantly constricted and was not much smaller than before, so that when the giant walls were completed a new pattern of life had to develop.
Page 695.
“The more we know about history, the better.”
Page 708.
Like many Arabs of his day he thought it strange that thew unlettered Crusaders took so little interest in learning.
Page 709.
We never became a sea power with ships of our own, for we depended upon the men of Venice and Genoa, who bled us white and betrayed us whenever it suited their interests. Nor did we achieve an alliance with the Arabs, binding their land to ours. So in the end Syria combined with Egypt and we were left an enclave on the edge of the sea.
Page 717.
To come to Tabarie in winter and take the baths, that was the best that Galilee offered.
Page 721.
As the Crusades ground to their mournful halt, Acre summarized the reasons why this movement was crumbling in disaster, for few cities in history had been so sorely divided as was Acre in 1290.
Page 733.
A basic weakness of the Crusades: differences in Europe determined behavior in the Holy Land.
Page 733.
“A Jew believes in God. That He is one alone, has no physical form, and is eternal. Only God may be worshiped, but the words of His prophets are to be obeyed. Of these prophets, Moses our Teacher was greatest, and the laws which came to him at Sinai came directly from God. The Jew obeys this law of Moses. He believes that God is all-knowing, all-powerful. He believes in reward and punishment, both in this world and hereafter. He believes that the Messiah will come and that then the dead shall rise.”
Pages 738-739.
“Why do we hate your Jews so deeply?”
The bearded one replied, “Because we bear testimony that God is one. We were placed among you by God to serve as that reminder.”
Page 739.
“God’s universe must be considered as one great whole composed of interrelated parts, and its majestic purpose is not the gratification of our puny selves.”
Page 741.
For a brief moment it was logical to believe that the known world might soon unite under the leadership of Rome. And then Martin Luther strode with rude and giant steps across the boundaries of Europe, awakening men like Calvin and Knox who would destroy old associations and establish new.
Page 764.
Why did not the Christians, since they held supreme power, simply annihilate the Jews once and for all? They were restrained because Christian theologians had deduced from passes in the New Testament the ambivalent theory that Jesus Christ would not return to earth bringing with Him the heavenly kingdom until all Jews were converted to Christianity, but at the same time 144,000 unconverted Jews were needed to be on hand to recognize Him and bear witness to His arrival.
Page 765.
“When will we learn, O Israel, that we serve the Lord not in buildings but in our hearts?”
Page 808.
This trio of books, Torah, Talmud, Zohar, had produced a unified religion with tremendous powers for survival; in fat, the religion seemed to have a built-in determination to survive, for throughout history, whenever its contemporary form had seemed doomed, some new primitive force had evolved which had given the religion another thrust forward.
Page 819.
“The Christian discovers the spirit of God, and the reality is so blinding that you go right out, build a cathedral and kill a million people. The Jew avoids this intimacy and lives year after year in his ghetto, in a grubby little synagogue, working out the principles whereby men can live together.”
Page 822.
From time to time someone ought to call the attention of the people to the everyday joys and triumphs of a decent life.
Page 832.
If the cords that bind you foul are untied you are free to find you own Torah.
Page 836.
I am a servant of the law as it develops in the lives of men.
Page 854.
“We Jews can be stupid people, Zaki. Only the law keeps us strong. We are a people of the Book and the day will come when only the Book will preserve us from ourselves.”
Page 856.
Safed was a town which enhanced the mystical interpretation of life.
Page 857.
“The mystic perceives with his heart what his mind knows to be true … but cannot prove.”
Page 861.
In those somnolent years the Turkish empire operated on the principle that each government employee ought to be able to put aside each year, in one manner or another, four times his official salary: one to pay baksheesh on the job he already held, one to pay for the job he wanted next, one to help his superior pay for his job, and one to hold back for emergencies. Any Turkish official who did not know how to extort, lie, squeeze, blackmail and defraud without creating scandal was obviously unqualified to help run the empire.
Page 876.
If along the lake there were no schools, if women of all creeds lived like animals, it was simply that n alternatives had been suggested.
Page 878.
The basic rule of Turkish administration: When you have forced a man to pay a bribe, study him carefully to see how he plans to take his revenge.
Page 884.
The second rule of Turkish administration: When a man agrees to a bribe don’t let him out of your sight till he delivers.
Page 885.
The Turk did not favor the Jew because he preferred him to the Christian; on the contrary, the Turk, like God, found the Jews to be a stiff-necked people, most difficult to manage. But the Jew stood alone and could be treated alone. He had no outside nation pressing to intervene on his behalf, and so long as he behaved himself reasonably well he was welcomed in Turkey and treated generously.
Page 886.
Most people, in their study of history, evaluated religion as either a rather more important political force than it was.
Page 888.
Religion was not a solid basis upon which to construct either a nation or a congeries of nations.
Page 888.
Apparently Jews felt that their religion contained special features which exempted it form errors which had overtaken other faiths.
Page 888.
If any people in the world had a right to mourn the loss of that sacred city to Islam it was the Jews, but its surrender was used as a reason for exterminating them.
Page 897.
The other custodians had allowed the once sweet land to deteriorate, the wells to fall in and the forests to vanish; the Jews had brought the land back to productivity.
Page 914.
Israelis, as Jews, had no ore claim to a free Israel than Quebec’s misguided Frenchmen had a right to a separatist state merely because they happened to be Catholics.
Page 914.
To establish a state wholly on religious foundations led to historical perplexities like Jinnah’s Pakistan or the problems involving northern Ireland.
Page 914.
History was neither logical nor moral, and whether one liked it or not the passage of years did establish a pragmatic sanction which only egomaniacs like Benito Mussolini or ghostly fools like the wandering dauphins of France tried to revoke.
Page 915.
“Throughout history this bridge-land of Israel has been able to exist as a viable nation only when it maintained sensible economic relations with neighboring lands like Syria and Lebanon or neighboring empires like Egypt and Mesopotamia.”
Page 915.
“Superior husbandry gave the Anglo-Saxons custodianship of America. Superior English governance gave England temporary title to Ireland.”
Page 916.
She was the tough, muscular girl of the impending state of Israel, a true sabra - “flower of the cactus,” as those born in Palestine were called.
Page 935.
English politicians could be excused if they believed that within two weeks after May 15, 1948, the last Jew in Palestine would be pushed into the sea; it would be therefore unwise to aid these misguided people in prolonging their suicide. Wherever possible, existing fortifications, equipment and physical advantages were being handed over to the Arabs. By mid-April, 1948, the outlines of the transition were clear. The British would go; the Arabs would come; the fleets of the world would stand by in the eastern Mediterranean t rescue whatever Jews escaped the final massacres.
Pages 937-938.
Safad commanded the hills, and just as it had been vital to the Crusaders in 1100 C.E. as a salient protecting Tiberias and the roads to Acre, and to the Mamelukes in 1291 C.E. as a point from which to control the rest of Galilee, so now in 1948 it was again a site overlooking the jugular vein of the area. Taking into consideration the overwhelming superiority of Arab numbers, the United Nations had logically awarded Safad to the forthcoming Arab state, but if it were allowed to remain in Arab hands the viability of any Jewish nation would vanish.
Pages 938-939.
Rarely a day passed in Ilana’s childhood when she did not hear some practical discussion of the Bible as the historical background of her people.
Page 944.
To the Jews of Kfar Kerem, Saul was a man of history, not a shadowy figure in a religious chronicle, and so with Gideon, David and Solomon.
Page 945.
The most remarkable characteristic which set Rebbe Itzik and his little group apart form the other Jews of Safad was their determination never to use Hebrew except as a holy language. From the Torah and Talmud they had derived the conviction that Hebrew would be used for common speech only after the arrival of the Messiah and that until such time it was reserved for religious purposes.
Page 965.
Outside the synagogue, the Vodzher Jews spoke only Yiddish and they held it to be offensive when others spoke to them in Hebrew.
Pages 965-966.
The Greeks and the Romans, knowing of the Jews’ refusal to move on Shabbat, had always tried to select that day for their major offensives and by this tactic had won easy victories until the rabbis of Akiba’s time had pronounced the principle that when a man or a nation were in peril of tis life any provision of the Torah might be put in abeyance, except those regarding murder, incest or apostacy.
Page 982.
Jews above all people exist on their inheritance.
Page 992.
“It is our task to illuminate the rest of the world by our allegiance to the one God.”
Page 992.
Outnumbering their enemy by more than forty to one, the Arab forces had constructed their own panic, and had then obeyed it.
Page 1011.
The arrival of Jesus Christ in the Galilee did not mysteriously signal the disappearance of competing religions; they survived with stubborn vigor, and if the testimony of the synagogues could be trusted, actually increased their power.
Page 1040.
“When you start digging into a human soul, or a tell, or a historical concept, you quickly find yourself at levels of rawness you did not anticipate. But they confront you and you follow them to their conclusions.”
Page 1041.
“If your faith is capable of encompassing Jesus it can certainly absorb historical contradictions.”
Page 1042.
‘If you shout for the next ten years, “I’m not a Jew,” it signifies nothing, for that’s a problem which your neighbor decides. Not you. No Jew can ever cease being a Jew.’
Page 1058.
He began to perspire as his body grew one with the ancient land.
Page 1062.
In Israel everyone was an archaeologist.
Page 1067.
Kibbutzniks in the fields, sensing that something important was about to happen at their tell, quit their work to become archaeologist.
Page 1068.
To call them men - those walking creatures that had killed the elephant - was in some ways repugnant, for they could neither far, nor fish, nor tend fruit trees, or tame a dog, nor build a house, nor make clothes, or even form words with their apelike lips; but neither could they be called animals, for there were these things which they could do: they could make a tool; they could grasp it in a hand; and by grunts and shoves they could organize a team and plan a system for killing a huge thing like an elephant … and for these reasons they were men.
Page 1070.
“In 1948, against every plea of the Jews, some six hundred thousand Arabs evacuated this country. They did so at thew urging of their political leaders. On the promise that within two weeks they would come back as victors, take over all Jewish property and do what they liked with Jewish women. Now it’s sixteen years later. They tell us the number of refugees has multiplied to a million. Arab governments have not allowed them to find new homes in Arab countries and the time has passed when they can recover their old homes here.”
Page 1078.
What a terrible burden a man must bear if he climbs the stairs of the years.
Page 1085.
God exercised His power through the law.
Page 1087.
It was no mean thing to be a Jew and the custodian of God’s law; for if His law was exacting it was also ennobling. It demanded respect if not blind obedience.
Page 1087.
Life isn’t meant to be easy, it’s meant to be life. And no religion defended so tenaciously the ordinary dignity of living. Judaism stressed neither an after-life, an after-punishment, or heaven; what was worthy and good was here, on this day, in Zefat. We seek God so earnestly, Eliav reflected, not to find Him but to discover ourselves.
Page 1087.