Haifa; or, Life in modern PalestineOliphant, Laurence
History
Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine
Oliphant, Laurence
Palestine -- Description and travel
Haifa, Nov. 25.—In one of the most remote and secluded valleys in the
mountains of northern Galilee lies a village, the small population of
which possesses an interest altogether unique. As I looked down upon it
from the precipitous and dangerous path by means of which I was skirting
the flank of the mountain, I thought I had rarely seen a spot of such
ideal beauty. It was an oasis, not actually in a desert—for the rocky
mountain ranges were covered with wild herbage—but in a savage
wilderness of desolation, in the midst of which the village nestled in a
forest of orange, almond, fig, and pomegranate trees, the tiny rills of
water by which they were irrigated glistening like silver threads in the
sunlight, and the yellow crops beyond contrasting with the dull green of
the hill verdure, long deprived of water, and the gray rocks which
reared their craggy pinnacles above it.
The name of this village was Bukeia. I had heard vaguely of the
existence of a spot in Galilee where a community of Jews lived who
claimed to be the descendants of families who had tilled the land in
this same locality prior to the destruction of Jerusalem and the
subsequent dispersion of the race; as it had never been suspected that
any remnant of the nation had clung to the soil of their fathers from
time immemorial, and as it is certain that this is the only remnant that
has, I took some trouble to ascertain the name of the village, and felt
that it was worth a pilgrimage to visit it. Although hitherto unknown to
Europeans and tourists, it has been for many years a spot much
frequented by the Jews of Safed and Tiberias, and this summer
especially, when the cholera panic prevailed in the country, there was a
perfect rush of the wealthier Jews and rabbis of those towns to its pure
air and bracing climate. In a small way it is a sort of Jewish
sanatorium.
But the village does not consist altogether of Jews. In fact, they form
the minority of the population, which is composed of eighty Druse, forty
Greek-Christian, and twenty Jewish families, the latter numbering about
one hundred and twenty souls in all. Refusing the invitation of the
Druse and Christian sheiks to accept their hospitality, I listened
rather to the solicitations of the elderly Hebrew who eagerly placed his
house at my disposal, and was the patriarch of his coreligionists, his
local title being, like those of the heads of the other communities,
that of sheik. His house was a stone erection with a court-yard, and
contained a single large room, which, as is common in Arab houses,
afforded eating and sleeping accommodation for the whole family. On this
occasion it soon became crowded to excess.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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