Джеймс Миченер - The Source

In the summer of 1878 the new kaimakam, Faraj Tabari, took office, and when Shmuel reported his predecessor’s trickery in taking baksheesh for services never performed, the official laughed disarmingly and promised, “With me you’ll get the land,” and with these honeyed words Tabari had launched an agonizing period in Hacohen’s life. Postponements, lies, chicanery, these were the rule in Tubariyeh now, while in Russia the Jews of Vodzh, having concluded that Kagan had absconded with their funds, were making plans to arrive en masse in Akka. In frustration Hacohen went to the kaimakam and asked, “When can I get the land?” But Tabari merely stroked his mustache and said, “Mmmmmmmmm, on a matter as grave as this I’d better consult the mutasarrif in Akka,” and Shmuel understood that this would require more money. To approach the wali in Beirut would cost much more, while a letter to the sultan in Istanbul was prohibitive.

At the end of 1879, improbable as it seemed, Hacohen, this inconspicuous Jew from Vodzh, had seven different officials of the Turkish empire in his employ, one way or another, but the land was not yet his. By applying constant pressure and bribes whose number he had lost count of, Shmuel had advanced his case to a point where Emir Tewfik in Damascus was willing to sell the useless acres for the not exorbitant sum of nine hundred and eighty English pounds, but the baksheesh required to reach this agreement already totaled more than seventeen hundred pounds. And still the Turkish government would announce no decision.

Yet Hacohen did not lose faith in Kaimakam Tabari, for in a curious manner the thieving Arab had demonstrated an unquestioned friendship for the Russian Jew. One night, as Shmuel sat in his filthy room wondering whether or not to abandon Tubariyeh, he heard muffled footsteps on the cobblestones and intuitively checked to see that the places where he had hidden his money were secure. He had barely done so when his door burst open and eight Jews in fur caps, side curls and long coats rushed at him, pinioned his arms and dragged him off to a rabbinical court convened in the Ashkenazi section of town.

It was a gloomy, portentous scene, with three rabbis waiting to judge the prisoner. In Yiddish the charges against Hacohen were read: “He is not a part of our community. He does not observe our laws strictly nor does he study at the synagogue. He has been heard speaking against Lipschitz, who knew him as a suspicious one in Vodzh, and he disturbs the district with his folly about land purchases and Jews working as farmers.” As the preposterous phrases rolled forth Shmuel thought: The real charge they don’t make. That I endanger their way of life.

Then came the sentence, incredible for the year 1880, but made possible by the Turkish custom of allowing each religious community to govern itself: “Shmuel Hacohen is to be fined to the amount of his possessions. He is to be stripped, stoned and banished from Tubariyeh, and may he leave Eretz Israel without further disturbing the ways of Judaism.” Before Shmuel could protest, the first provisions of the sentence were carried out.

Jewish men who had come to fear the little Russian who lived outside their narrow world laid hands on him and stripped away his clothing until he stood naked. Pockets in his torn garments were searched for money, which was handed to the court, after which he was hauled to a corner of the wall, where the general population began hurling rocks at him, not caring whether they blinded him or killed him, and he might have died except that one of the rabbinical judges interceded and the bleeding prisoner was dragged to the main gate of town and thrown outside the walls. The mob then proceeded to his hovel, where they started digging up the floor to find any gold he might have hidden.

It was at this point that Kaimakam Tabari interfered. His gendarmerie, hearing that a Jewish punishment was under way, had paid no attention, for this was a matter concerning one of the religious communities, and how they disciplined their people was not a governmental concern; but word of the unusually harsh sentence reached Tabari: “Did you say Hacohen? The Jew from Russia?” When he knew that it was the little land buyer who was being stoned he summoned his guard and went to the town gate, where torches showed the naked and bleeding Jew wandering vainly outside the walls.

“Take him home,” Tabari ordered. “You, you and you, give him your clothes.” When gendarmes reported that officers of the rabbinical court were wrecking Shmuel’s hut, Tabari hurried there and said to the mob, “Go home, all of you.”

As Shmuel regained his mournful room he saw with gratitude that the searchers had not reached the money intended for the purchase of his land. He fell on his mattress, too bewildered to cry. The sentence of the court had been so unexpected, the punishment so harsh, that he was content to have escaped with his life, and as for the kaimakam’s intervention, this Shmuel could not explain, but as he wiped his sores with a dirty cloth he asked himself: Did he keep me alive only so that he could rob me of what I have left? The thought was unworthy, for Shmuel could remember that as he had stood naked outside the walls the torches had shown him the kaimakam’s face, and it was that of a man who could not tolerate such punishments. If in the forthcoming months Tabari stole all of Hacohen’s savings, this would not alter the fact that tonight he had acted as one human being toward another. Why had he done so? Shmuel fell asleep before he found an answer, but Faraj Tabari, sitting alone in his room overlooking the mosque, asked himself the same question and replied: He was little and he had a swayed back, but he looked like my brother-in-law, so I had to save him. And for the first time the kaimakam expressed the hope that his brother-in-law might soon visit Tubariyeh to explain which of the new ideas could be put into practice here.

The next days Shmuel would not remember. In a daze of pain from the stoning by which Eretz Israel had rejected him, its mountains falling upon him in his nightmares, he lay upon his mattress while insects came to inspect his wounds. Each of the Jewish communities left him alone, the superstitious Sephardim viewing him as a curse and the vengeful Ashkenazim hoping that he would die. By tradition Arabs did not come into the quarter where he lay, so his fever and nightmare were allowed to run their course and for two days of delirium Shmuel imagined that he was back in Vodzh, through whose cool lanes he went seeking timber.

When he recovered, unaided by anyone, he went into the alley to buy food, but the stares he met from the Jews were so hateful that he retreated to his hovel more wounded than he had been by the rocks. Was he wrong? Was it impossible to bring European Jews to this district and with them to build a new way of life, independent of charity? Weak though he was, he said to himself: It can be done! And he went back into the streets of Tubariyeh determined to resist his tormentors, but when he saw the bearded faces staring at him, waiting till they could catch him away from the kaimakam’s protection, he returned to his hovel and whispered, “God of Moses, I can accomplish nothing in this evil town.” And he prepared to flee.

From the earthen floor he dug up his money, and in the ill-fitting clothes which the kaimakam had forced his tormentors to give him he slipped out of town. Children saw him going and ran to tell their fathers, who left their studies to taunt the fugitive as he headed toward the north. At Safad he found conditions even more repellent than in Tubariyeh: old, suspicious Jews huddled over their Talmuds while young men took to robbery; the spiritual glory of the hilltop town was not even remembered. He left it behind and climbed over the hills that lay to the west, and what he found there saved him for the work he was destined to accomplish, for one evening as he wandered across a barren hillock, where he knew that trees must once have flourished, he came upon a little settlement that changed his perspective on what Jews could do in Israel.