The New JerusalemChesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Religion
The New Jerusalem
Chesterton, G. K. (Gilbert Keith)
Jerusalem; Jews -- Restoration; Palestine
coquettish compromise of the other Moslem women of Cairo.
It simply means that the Moslem religion is here more sincerely observed;
and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will
soon feel in Jerusalem, if he has come from these more commercial
cities of the East; a spiritual tone decidedly more delicate
and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city.
Whatever the human vices involved, it is not altogether for
nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions.
When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could
not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops
that could not be opened, within a stone's throw of the Sepulchre.
This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism
or formalism; but if these are vices they are not vulgarities.
There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem,
especially those from the ghettoes of eastern Europe.
They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn
on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers.
Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some rococo
burlesque of the ringlets of an Early Victorian woman.
Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil;
and one need not be an Anti-Semite to say that the face is often
made to match. But though they may be ugly, or even horrible,
they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton; they trail behind
them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties,
along with their grand though often greasy robes of bronze
or purple velvet. They often wear on their heads that odd
turban of fur worn by the Rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt.
And indeed that great name is not irrelevant; for the whole truth
at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture
of a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent.
For Rembrandt the Rabbi was, in a special and double sense,
a distinguished figure. He was something distinct from the world
of the artist, who drew a Rabbi as he would a Brahmin. But Sargent
had to treat his sitters as solid citizens of England or America;
and consequently his pictures are direct provocations to a pogrom.
But the light that Rembrandt loved falls not irreverently on
the strange hairy haloes that can still be seen on the shaven heads
of the Jews of Jerusalem. And I should be sorry for any pogrom
that brought down any of their grey wisps or whiskers in sorrow
to the grave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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