Джеймс Миченер - The Source

“To be used as you suggested,” the mufti growled. “For Akka.”

“Of course,” Governor Tabari cried pleasantly, and by great good fortune something inspired him to go to the two men and throw his arms about them, as if they were his friends, because at that moment an Egyptian servant appeared at the door behind them carrying a dispatch case; but because the governor gripped the two men tightly in an embrace, they could not turn to see the servant, and when they were able to do so he had disappeared on a signal from Tabari, taking whatever messages he had with him.

When the embrace ended Kaimakam Tabari cried to the servant, “Hassan, accompany the mufti to his home. He has a package for me.”

The Egyptian, his hands now empty, returned casually to the room. The mufti looked at him suspiciously and suggested, “I’ll bring the money over tomorrow.”

This called for Tabari to apply the second rule of Turkish administration: When a man agrees to a bribe don’t let him out of your sight till he delivers. He may reconsider. “You forget,” Tabari reminded the mufti, “I leave for Akka in the morning, and to be effective, your money should reach the mutasarrif promptly.”

The mufti bowed, extended his hand in friendship, then led the qadi from the room. As soon as they had parted from the governor the angry mufti drew the judge aside, so that the servant could not hear, and whispered, “Did you have the feeling that someone entered the room while the old bastard was embracing us?”

“I didn’t notice anything,” the bewildered qadi replied.

Suddenly the powerful mufti whipped about, caught the servant by the arm and demanded, “You just brought the kaimakam a dispatch from Akka, didn’t you?”

“No!” the startled Egyptian replied. In silence he accompanied the mufti to the latter’s home, where he checked and rechecked the thirty English pounds which the religious leader handed him.

At that moment Kaimakam Tabari was opening the dispatch case which the servant had been about to hand him a few minutes before. The routine papers Tabari laid aside, shuffling through the others until he found what he had suspected would be in the pouch. Hastily he took out the precious firman, inscribed in gold and sealed with red silk, and read:The petition of the Jew Shmuel Hacohen of Tubariyeh to purchase land at the foot of Bahr Tubariyeh, said land now in possession of Emir Tewfik ibn Alafa, native of Damascus, is hereby granted. The further petition of Hacohen to purchase additional land giving direct access to the Bahr Tubariyeh and the River Jordan is hereby denied. Under no circumstances shall Jews be allowed to acquire land with water frontage.

As Kaimakam Tabari finished reading the firman he smiled, for it meant that the mufti’s bribe had been ineffectual even at the moment of being paid, and as an official of the Turkish empire he relished such sardonic contradictions. But now his servant entered with the thirty pounds and news that was less pleasing: outside in the waiting room stood the Jew, Shmuel Hacohen, eager to discuss with the kaimakam the land which he had for the past four years been trying vainly to purchase.

… THE TELL

It was singular, John Cullinane thought, that twice in modern history the Jews had been saved by the Turks. It had happened in the sixteenth century when Turkey had offered the outcasts such refuges as Salonica, Constantinople and Safed; and it had been repeated in the nineteenth century when pogroms ravaged Poland and Russia. Why had it been the Muslim Turks who had salvaged the Jews when Christian nations tried to exterminate the religion from which they themselves had sprung? One might reason that Islam had been tolerant because it valued Old Testament traditions more highly than Christians did, for Muhammad had specifically directed tolerance toward Jews, while Christianity never did; but this was specious reasoning, and Cullinane dismissed it.

And why was it only the Jew whom the Turk tolerated? During the periods when the Turk was showing his greatest consideration to the Jew, he was at the same time persecuting the Druse and the Armenian, the Bulgarian and the Greek. The same kaimakam who on Monday aided the Jew, on Tuesday hung the Armenian, and on Wednesday shot the Greek.

It was necessary, Cullinane thought, to look outside the field of religion for an explanation, and when he did he found certain ideas which made sense. 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. This was not so with the Christians or the Arabs. With the former there was the constant threat that they might summon to the Holy Land nations like France, England or Russia to protect them; while with the Arabs there was the insidious possibility that they would somehow unite to throw off Turkish rule. Consequently, neither Christians nor Arabs were allowed freedom to expand.

At first glance, Cullinane thought, the situation seemed contradictory. One would normally argue that since the Jew was friendless he could be persecuted with impunity, whereas the Christian, surrounded by friends, had better not be touched. The Turks had reasoned otherwise: they did not wish to persecute anyone for his religious beliefs, but they did want to hold their shaky empire together and would tolerate no one who might in the future pose a threat to its continuance. Thus in Tubariyeh there was no possibility that the sickly ghetto students of the Talmud might one day coalesce into rebellion against the empire, whereas there was always the danger that the Arabs might do just that, so it was not illogical for a devout Muslim kaimakam to render decisions unfavorable to his mufti.

On the other hand, Cullinane learned that he must not interpret Muslim indifference to the Jews as constituting approval. The tragedy that was allowed to overtake Safad in 1834 was a classic example of Muslim administration, although in this instance it had been the invading Egyptians and not the Turks who were involved. On May 31, 1834, a sizable earthquake struck Safad, accompanied by much loss of property, and some weeks later word reached town that the Egyptian army was going to conscript Arab men. Superstitious Arabs concluded that some malign influence was working against them, and the Jews were blamed. The logical solution was to massacre them, which the Arabs started to do. For thirty-three unhampered days the Muslims were allowed to riot, destroying synagogues, killing rabbis and defacing over two hundred scrolls of the Torah, each worth more than a man’s home. The remnants of the great Jewish settlement were driven into the countryside, where for more than a month they lived on grass and slaughtered sheep, after which the government came back, caught the Arab ringleaders and hanged thirteen of them.

This was the way the Turks ruled: Start no pogroms yourself, but if the Arabs went to massacre the Jews, let them; then sweep in and execute the Arabs. Thus each community lost its leaders and relative quiet was maintained. But certainly in this cynical system the Turk treated the Jew no worse than he did the Muslim.

To Cullinane this impartiality was not surprising. He had found that most people, in their study of history, evaluated religion as a rather more important political force than it was. In the abstract one might expect Catholic France and Catholic Spain to recognize common interests, but they rarely did. Once when Cullinane was inspecting a dig in Persia he developed the attractive idea that the Muslim religion would some day unify western Asia, but before he had time to perfect his theory he found that Muslim Afghanistan was an ally of Hindu India, but wanted to go to war with Muslim Pakistan, which was an ally of Buddhist China. A little later Muslim Egypt tried to destroy Muslim Arabia. Even more spectacular to anyone digging in Israel was the example of the Crusaders, who set forth as a Christian army but who found their first enemies in Catholic Hungary, in Orthodox Constantinople and among the Christian communities of Asia Minor.