Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“Simple. Judaism had its day, and if the Jews had been smart, when Christianity came along they’d have joined up. Christianity has had its day, and if you were intelligent you’d both join the newest religion. Islam!” He bowed low and said, “Soon all Africa will be Islamic. And all Black America. I see India giving up Hinduism while Burma and Thailand surrender Buddhism, Gentlemen, I represent the religion of the future. I offer you salvation.”

The easy nonsense of his statement pleased the men and they began to laugh, while from the other tent the photographer called, “Coffee,” and a day began, little different from the fifteen million days which had dawned over Makor since the first organized community had been established in its cave.

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In the early years of the 1500s Safed was an undistinguished village of one thousand people who lived in a collection of mud-walled houses perched along narrow alleys that climbed up and down the southwestern flank of a hill in the Galilee. At the crest of this hill, wasting in sunlight and inhabited only by eagles and crawling things, stood the gaunt remains of a Crusader fort, its once-soaring turrets fallen and its walls collapsed.

Winds from the north had deposited upon the humbled fortress a freight of blowing silt in which trees had taken root, so that the once-proud castle was now merely a mound of earth with only here and there a rock projecting, sometimes with a bit of carving, to indicate how majestic that hilltop had once been. Of the thousand residents some two hundred were Jews, a few were Christians and the rest were Muslim, with only one or two men who remembered hearing from their grandfathers that their hill had once been a bastion of the Crusaders.

The town, which nestled on the hillside well below the ruins, contained two mosques, a synagogue, a small church, some dark covered souks and a nest of small Jewish shops. The Turkish governor, ruling on edict from Constantinople, maintained peace among the various communities and allowed qadis to judge the Muslims, rabbis to rule the Jews and priests to govern the Christians. Once each year a small caravan straggled in from Damascus, bringing a few bales of shoddy goods in sad memory of the silks and spices of former times, and Turkey collected few taxes, for there was no substantial trade. In fact, if one had looked dispassionately at Safed in those early years he would surely have predicted, “This little village will continue sleeping forever. The only good thing here is the mountain air.”

Then in 1525 several events, apparently unrelated, conspired to change the history of Safed, transforming it for some ninety years into one of the most significant communities in the world: a manufacturing city of sixty thousand, a trading center known through Europe and the spiritual capital of the Jewish people. The drowsy little town was about to enter an age of gold so luminous that its memory would be cherished by nations then not even in existence. The revolution was achieved by three unlikely conspirators: the camel, the spinning wheel and the book.

The miracle of Safed began with the camel. As the wealth and power of the Turkish empire grew, with Constantinople replacing Genoa and Venice in control of merchandise passing from Asia to Europe, the new prosperity affected centers like the manufacturing city of Damascus and the ruined port of Akka. Since the highway between these two communities had always passed through Safed, the latter town became a post from which to protect caravans and a stopping point for merchants. Each body of travelers left behind in Safed some of its wealth and occasionally a few of its personnel, for the enchanting location of the town, perpetually cool with snow in winter, appealed to men tired of the desert. Most who reached Safed by this means were Arabs, and they occupied the southern and eastern sections of town, building new mosques and additional lines of covered souks.

But without the spinning wheel the camels could have accomplished little, and it reached Safed in an ironic way. When Jews were expelled from Spain and later from Portugal, many of the best and most courageous were drawn not to new refuges like Amsterdam but back to Eretz Israel, the land of their longing. Disembarking at Akka they were told by sailors in the one inn still existing along the waterfront, “Jerusalem is a hovel and Tubariyeh is no more. The real Holy Land exists only in Safed.” By foot and by donkey these strong-minded Jews made the overland trip to Safed, where they began to swell the western quarter of the town, building small stone houses on the beautiful slopes which overlooked both a wadi and a mountain. Seldom have the victims of a religious persecution found a refuge so gentle as did those Jews of Avaro and other Spanish cities who escaped to Safed.

They brought with them the spinning wheel, which they had used in Spain to spin merino wool, and with it they initiated in their new home what was to become the foremost weaving center in Asia. Huge caravans began to assemble in the ruins of Akka, waiting for ships bringing the raw wool of Spain and France, and in Safed the Jews produced from this wool an excellent cloth, dyeing it by ancient processes and shipping it back through Akka to the markets of Europe. Unexpectedly the income of Safed rose from ten thousand florins a year to two hundred thousand and then to six hundred thousand, and its Jewish population from two hundred Jews to well over twenty thousand. It had become what the sailors of Akka had said, “The leading town in Palestine.”

But caravans of camels have come to many towns, and riches have multiplied for a while, leaving no world-memories. And the same would have happened in Safed had not the Jews who carried the spinning wheel also brought a book, one of the most extraordinary in history, and it was the impact of this book that spread the name of Safed to the remotest Jewish community in the world, luring to the hillside center scholars from a dozen nations as different as Egypt and Poland, England and Persia.

But again, many towns have received books and done little with them. It was the glory of Safed that it received in addition to its book three rabbis prepared to give that book significance: Rabbi Zaki from Italy, Rabbi Eliezer of Germany, and the charismatic Rabbi Abulafia from Spain.

The first of the three rabbis to reach Safed was Zaki the Shoemaker, who, after seven years of painful struggle through Africa and the shores of Greece, landed with his wife and three daughters at the ruined, rock-strewn port of Akka. A caravan set forth intended for Damascus, and camped the first night at the uninhabited mound of Makor, from which the ancestors of Zaki had fled more than a thousand years before; but the houses his people had lived in lay beneath a Crusader fort, and it lay beneath a heap of sand and flowers.

On the next day, at about four in the afternoon, the caravan reached the pass separating the plains from the hills of Safed, and for the first time Zaki and his family saw the lovely town that was to be their home. On the summit a few great blocks of stone from the Crusaders’ fort reflected back the bright sunlight, while below them, spreading out across steep slopes, flowed a collection of little houses, like petals falling from a flower.

Zaki, his heart bursting with the wonder of what he saw, uttered those singing words which God had used in urging Lot forward: “‘Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.’” He had been in the plains and now the mountain beckoned.

“It looks as if it would be cold,” Rachel warned.

“In Salonica they assured us,” he reminded her. “Life is good here.”

“It looks as if the people would fall out of their houses and roll down the mountainside,” she complained.