A Trip Abroad: An Account of a Journey to the Earthly Canaan and the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs; To Which Are Appended a Brief Consideration of the Geography and History of Palestine, and a Chapter on Churches of Christ in Great BritainJanes, Don Carlos
Religion
A Trip Abroad: An Account of a Journey to the Earthly Canaan and the Land of the Ancient Pharaohs; To Which Are Appended a Brief Consideration of the Geography and History of Palestine, and a Chapter on Churches of Christ in Great Britain
Janes, Don Carlos
Churches of Christ -- Great Britain; Palestine -- Description and travel; Voyages and travels
alien race and an alien creed." So far as I know, all writers give these
worshipers credit for being sincere, but on the two occasions when I
visited the place, I saw no such emotion as described in the foregoing
quotation. The following lines are often rehearsed, the leader reading
one at a time, after which the people respond with the words: "We sit in
solitude and mourn."
"For the place that lies desolate;
For the place that is destroyed;
For the walls that are overthrown;
For our majesty that is departed;
For our great men who lie dead;
For the precious stones that are buried;
For the priests who have stumbled;
For our kings who have despised Him."
This solemn practice has been observed for about twelve hundred years,
but the same place may not have been used all the time. "She is become a
widow, that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among
the provinces is become tributary! Jerusalem hath grievously sinned;
therefore she is become as an unclean thing" (Lam. 1: 1, 8).
On Friday evening we entered some of the many synagogues yet to be found
in Jerusalem and observed the worshipers. On Saturday we went to the
House of Industry of the English church, where boys are taught to work.
Olive wood products are made for the tourist trade. We passed a place
where some men were making a peculiar noise as they were pounding wheat
and singing at their work. This pounding was a part of the process of
making it ready for food. An old lady was standing in an open door
spinning yarn in a very simple manner. We watched her a few minutes, and
I wanted to buy the little arrangement with which she was spinning, but
she didn't care to part with it. She brought out another one, and let me
have it after spinning a few yards upon it. I gave her a Turkish coin
worth a few cents, for which she seemed very thankful, and said, as Mr.
Ahmed explained: "God bless you and give you long life. I am old, and
may die to-day." She told us that she came from Mosul, away beyond the
Syrian desert, to die in Jerusalem. We visited the synagogue of the
Caraite Jews, a small polygamous sect, numbering in this assembly
about thirty persons. They also differ from the majority of Hebrews in
rejecting the Talmud, but I believe they have a Talmud of their own.
Their place of worship is a small room almost under the ground, where we
were permitted to see a very fine old copy of the Hebrew Scriptures, our
Old Testament. The work was done by hand, and I was told the man who
did it was sixteen years of age when he began it, and was sixty when he
finished the work, and that the British Museum had offered five thousand
dollars for the book. Some of these people speak English, and we
conversed with one woman who was quite intelligent. They kindly
permitted us to go up and view the city from the housetop.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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