Haifa; or, Life in modern PalestineOliphant, Laurence
History
Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine
Oliphant, Laurence
Palestine -- Description and travel
The experiment of associating Jews and Moslem fellahin in field labor
will be an interesting one to watch, and the preliminary discussions on
the subject were more picturesque than satisfactory. The meeting took
place in the storehouse, where Jews and Arabs squatted promiscuously
amid the heaps of grain, and chaffered over the terms of their mutual
copartnership. It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly
incongruous than the spectacle thus presented—the stalwart fellahin,
with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols
projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs drawn
tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their
loose, flowing abbas, and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted,
effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as
oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their
countenances—the former inured to hard labor on the burning hillsides of
Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town,
unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their
wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture
than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered
to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the
first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with
these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter—a stout,
handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as
the fellahin themselves. My friend and myself, in the ordinary costume
of the British or American tourist, completed the party.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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