The Source

by James A. Michener

  “Oh, I agree with you thoroughly,” Tabari cried enthusiastically. “That’s why I do hope you can find the money for Akka.”

  “Will the mutasarrif be qualified to make the decision?” the mufti asked, lured against his will into discussing the case on its merits.

  “Of course!” Tabari said in all seriousness, but even as he spoke he reflected: Two years ago the papers were started on their way from Tubariyeh to Akka to Beirut to Istanbul. The decision has surely been made by now, and somewhere along that chain a firman from the sultan is headed this way. Now the European governments have been insisting upon more liberal land laws throughout the empire, and if the sultan grants privileges to Russians and Englishmen, he must do the same for the Jews. So if I want to get my baksheesh from the qadi and the mufti I’d better get it now, before they learn that the sultan’s decision has gone against them.

  The mufti was speaking in a low growl: “Aren’t you afraid of having Jews buy land?”

  “I am indeed,” the kaimakam replied with honest passion. “It would change everything. Open the gates for …” He didn’t know for what, but he suspected that the easy old days of accommodation and the quiet passage of years would vanish. He felt an honest sorrow, which he quickly suppressed, for time was passing and the firman might arrive at any moment without his having got the money.

  “If we give you the thirty pounds?” the qadi asked plaintively.

  “I’d work diligently to keep the Jews off the land.”

  “And we could rely on this?” the qadi pleaded.

  “You have my word of honor!” the kaimakam expostulated. “In fact, I’m riding to Akka tomorrow. I’ll hand the mutasarrif your money myself, and there’ll be no Jews in Tubariyeh.” To himself he reasoned: If the sultan’s decision is otherwise, I’ll insist I did my best to halt it.

  This wily thought, as it came to him, must have betrayed its duplicity in some way, for the canny mufti, watching Tabari’s face, gasped to himself: That dirty swine! He already knows what the sultan decided and he’s trying to steal our money. Damn him! I’ll give him the money and strangle him with it. Tonight I’ll send a message to the mutasarrif telling him what’s happened. And before the week is passed, our friend Tabari will be in jail.

  But now something of the mufti’s trickery betrayed itself to Tabari, who was well schooled in the basic rule of Turkish administration: When you have forced a man to pay a bribe, study him carefully to see how he plans to take his revenge. It became clear to Tabari that if his mufti paid the bribe he would do so in hatred and only because he saw some way of hurting the kaimakam. What could the mufti do to endanger me? Tabari asked himself. Only one thing. Pay the money to me, inform the mutasarrif that he’s done so, and count on me to keep the money for myself. Smiling genially at the red-faced religious leader, Tabari thought: You illegitimate pig. I’ll take your money and I’ll give every piaster to the mutasarrif, then tell him what a swine you really are. In two weeks you’ll be in Yemen.

  Now the qadi and the mufti looked at each other in consultation, and the qadi delivered their decision: “We’ll give you the thirty pounds, Excellency.”

  “To be used as you suggested,” the mufti growled. “For Akka.”

  “Of course,” Governor Tabari cried pleasantly, and by great good fortune something inspired him to go to the two men and throw his arms about them, as if they were his friends, because at that moment an Egyptian servant appeared at the door behind them carrying a dispatch case; but because the governor gripped the two men tightly in an embrace, they could not turn to see the servant, and when they were able to do so he had disappeared on a signal from Tabari, taking whatever messages he had with him.

  When the embrace ended Kaimakam Tabari cried to the servant, “Hassan, accompany the mufti to his home. He has a package for me.”

  The Egyptian, his hands now empty, returned casually to the room. The mufti looked at him suspiciously and suggested, “I’ll bring the money over tomorrow.”

  This called for Tabari to apply the second rule of Turkish administration: When a man agrees to a bribe don’t let him out of your sight till he delivers. He may reconsider. “You forget,” Tabari reminded the mufti, “I leave for Akka in the morning, and to be effective, your money should reach the mutasarrif promptly.”

  The mufti bowed, extended his hand in friendship, then led the qadi from the room. As soon as they had parted from the governor the angry mufti drew the judge aside, so that the servant could not hear, and whispered, “Did you have the feeling that someone entered the room while the old bastard was embracing us?”

  “I didn’t notice anything,” the bewildered qadi replied.

  Suddenly the powerful mufti whipped about, caught the servant by the arm and demanded, “You just brought the kaimakam a dispatch from Akka, didn’t you?”

  “No!” the startled Egyptian replied. In silence he accompanied the mufti to the latter’s home, where he checked and rechecked the thirty English pounds which the religious leader handed him.

  At that moment Kaimakam Tabari was opening the dispatch case which the servant had been about to hand him a few minutes before. The routine papers Tabari laid aside, shuffling through the others until he found what he had suspected would be in the pouch. Hastily he took out the precious firman, inscribed in gold and sealed with red silk, and read:

  The petition of the Jew Shmuel Hacohen of Tubariyeh to purchase land at the foot of Bahr Tubariyeh, said land now in possession of Emir Tewflk ibn Alafa, native of Damascus, is hereby granted. The further petition of Hacohen to purchase additional land giving direct access to the Bahr Tubariyeh and the River Jordan is hereby denied. Under no circumstances shall Jews be allowed to acquire land with water frontage.

  As Kaimakam Tabari finished reading the firman he smiled, for it meant that the mufti’s bribe had been ineffectual even at the moment of being paid, and as an official of the Turkish empire he relished such sardonic contradictions. But now his servant entered with the thirty pounds and news that was less pleasing: outside in the waiting room stood the Jew, Shmuel Hacohen, eager to discuss with the kaimakam the land which he had for the past four years been trying vainly to purchase.

  • • • THE TELL

  It was singular, John Cullinane thought, that twice in modern history the Jews had been saved by the Turks. It had happened in the sixteenth century when Turkey had offered the outcasts such refuges as Salonica, Constantinople and Safed; and it had been repeated in the nineteenth century when pogroms ravaged Poland and Russia. Why had it been the Muslim Turks who had salvaged the Jews when Christian nations tried to exterminate the religion from which they themselves had sprung? One might reason that Islam had been tolerant because it valued Old Testament traditions more highly than Christians did, for Muhammad had specifically directed tolerance toward Jews, while Christianity never did; but this was specious reasoning, and Cullinane dismissed it.

  And why was it only the Jew whom the Turk tolerated? During the periods when the Turk was showing his greatest consideration to the Jew, he was at the same time persecuting the Druse and the Armenian, the Bulgarian and the Greek. The same kaimakam who on Monday aided the Jew, on Tuesday hung the Armenian, and on Wednesday shot the Greek.

  It was necessary, Cullinane thought, to look outside the field of religion for an explanation, and when he did he found certain ideas which made sense. The Turk did not favor the Jew because he preferred him to the Christian; on the contrary, the Turk, like God, found the Jews to be a stiff-necked people, most difficult to manage. But the Jew stood alone and could be treated alone. He had no outside nation pressing to intervene on his behalf, and so long as he behaved himself reasonably well he was welcomed in Turkey and treated generously. This was not so with the Christians or the Arabs. With the former there was the constant threat that they might summon to the Holy Land nations like France, England or Russia to protect them; while with the Arabs there was the insidious possibility that they would somehow unite to throw
off Turkish rule. Consequently, neither Christians nor Arabs were allowed freedom to expand.

  At first glance, Cullinane thought, the situation seemed contradictory. One would normally argue that since the Jew was friendless he could be persecuted with impunity, whereas the Christian, surrounded by friends, had better not be touched. The Turks had reasoned otherwise: they did not wish to persecute anyone for his religious beliefs, but they did want to hold their shaky empire together and would tolerate no one who might in the future pose a threat to its continuance. Thus in Tubariyeh there was no possibility that the sickly ghetto students of the Talmud might one day coalesce into rebellion against the empire, whereas there was always the danger that the Arabs might do just that, so it was not illogical for a devout Muslim kaimakam to render decisions unfavorable to his mufti.

  On the other hand, Cullinane learned that he must not interpret Muslim indifference to the Jews as constituting approval. The tragedy that was allowed to overtake Safad in 1834 was a classic example of Muslim administration, although in this instance it had been the invading Egyptians and not the Turks who were involved. On May 31, 1834, a sizable earthquake struck Safad, accompanied by much loss of property, and some weeks later word reached town that the Egyptian army was going to conscript Arab men. Superstitious Arabs concluded that some malign influence was working against them, and the Jews were blamed. The logical solution was to massacre them, which the Arabs started to do. For thirty-three unhampered days the Muslims were allowed to riot, destroying synagogues, killing rabbis and defacing over two hundred scrolls of the Torah, each worth more than a man’s home. The remnants of the great Jewish settlement were driven into the countryside, where for more than a month they lived on grass and slaughtered sheep, after which the government came back, caught the Arab ringleaders and hanged thirteen of them.

  This was the way the Turks ruled: Start no pogroms yourself, but if the Arabs went to massacre the Jews, let them; then sweep in and execute the Arabs. Thus each community lost its leaders and relative quiet was maintained. But certainly in this cynical system the Turk treated the Jew no worse than he did the Muslim.

  To Cullinane this impartiality was not surprising. He had found that most people, in their study of history, evaluated religion as a rather more important political force than it was. In the abstract one might expect Catholic France and Catholic Spain to recognize common interests, but they rarely did. Once when Cullinane was inspecting a dig in Persia he developed the attractive idea that the Muslim religion would some day unify western Asia, but before he had time to perfect his theory he found that Muslim Afghanistan was an ally of Hindu India, but wanted to go to war with Muslim Pakistan, which was an ally of Buddhist China. A little later Muslim Egypt tried to destroy Muslim Arabia. Even more spectacular to anyone digging in Israel was the example of the Crusaders, who set forth as a Christian army but who found their first enemies in Catholic Hungary, in Orthodox Constantinople and among the Christian communities of Asia Minor.

  Cullinane had learned not to expect Catholic Ireland and Catholic Spain to share common views, and he doubted that Muslim Turkey and Muslim Syria ever would, either. For religion was not a solid basis upon which to construct either a nation or a congeries of nations, and he could foresee the distant time when Pan-Arabism, not religion, would unite true Arab states like Syria, Iraq and Arabia, while surrounding non-Arabic states would go their historic ways: to the west Muslim Egypt would assume a position of leadership among the nations of Africa; to the east Muslim Iran would concentrate on Asia; while to the north Muslim Turkey would associate herself with the problems of Europe. Nationalism, not religion, would decide, and he often caught himself wondering whether the new state of Israel had been wise to commit herself so completely to one faith, no matter how ancient and deeply rooted in the local soil that faith might be. He was surprised at the power of religious parties in the government, at the religious emphasis in schools and at the fact that Israel, like Turkey of old, had handed civil problems like marriage and inheritance to religious courts composed of rabbis if one were Jewish, priests if one were Catholic, or ministers if one happened to be Protestant. As a good Christian he could not help concluding: This is where Byzantium was sixteen centuries ago. Why would a new nation of its own free will insist upon repeating such mistakes? He felt that one of these days he ought to ask Eliav about these matters, for apparently Jews felt that their religion contained special features which exempted it from errors which had overtaken other faiths.

  • • •

  Shmuel Hacohen wanted land. He had to have land. More than any other man in Palestine this sway-backed, hard-working Jew from Russia had to find land; and as twilight ended on this hot summer day he became desperate, for the same messenger who had brought the dispatches from Akka to Kaimakam Tabari had brought word to Hacohen that the first shipload of Jews from Europe had landed two days earlier at that port. Tomorrow they would begin marching to Tiberias, and unless there was land awaiting them Hacohen would face disaster.

  Four years ago, when he first came to Tiberias, he had thought that buying land for a Jewish settlement would be a simple task, but months and years had slipped by in tantalizing negotiation, in bribery and confusion, and Hacohen found himself in 1880 no nearer to having acquired his acres than he had been in 1876. For example, two full years had elapsed since his last petition had been forwarded to Istanbul. How could any government postpone making such a decision for two whole years?

  At six o’clock on this very hot day Shmuel sat in his miserable room, wondering what to do. He lived in a hut that marked the border between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi sections, and not even in the worst of Russia had he known such a room, for in Russia one had at least a floor and—if he tried hard enough—a freedom from bedbugs; but here in the hopeless filth of Tiberias there was nothing except old men studying the Talmud, women living their pointless lives like animals, and children growing each year in ignorance. It was a hideous perversion of the way a Jew ought to live in his homeland, and Shmuel Hacohen was morally outraged.

  He groaned in the heat. Obviously he must again implore the kaimakam to release the land needed by the incoming Jews, but as he visualized the kaimakam he shook his head: I can’t understand him at all. He recognized that Tabari was corrupt beyond any standard existing in Russia, and he knew that the kaimakam intended to squeeze out of the Jews every piaster possible. He was also aware that Tabari used the mutasarrif in Akka and the wali in Beirut as convenient excuses for extracting additional baksheesh, but what Hacohen could not understand was the man’s apparent lack of any moral base from which to operate.

  Shmuel was willing to concede that Kaimakam Tabari was at heart a good man; otherwise he could have played Jew against Arab, and Christian against both, generating rifts within the community as Russian governors did, but this Tabari refused to do. He handled each religious group in his community in the same corrupt manner, thus preserving a kind of happy-go-lucky peace, and after Hacohen’s experiences in Russia he knew how to appreciate such peace. In his homeland Hacohen had learned to work with men who were mostly good or mostly bad, and with such men he knew where he stood. But with Kaimakam Tabari the problem was more complex, for the man could never bring himself to announce forthrightly what was to be done. Even when Hacohen bought him off with many pounds, things could not be considered settled, for the next man who brought the kaimakam a few more pounds could buy him back the other way. Trying to purchase land through such a man was frustrating to the point of despair, and Shmuel Hacohen had reached that point.

  In his steaming, filthy room, not fit for sheep or goats, the wiry little Jew pulled on his western clothes, jammed his feet into hot leather shoes and prepared to wrestle yet again with the slippery, smiling kaimakam. But this day was going to be different. He was determined to get land. He would get the land he had paid for or …

  He did not finish the sentence, because even in his state of anxiety he knew that he had no weapon with which to th
reaten the amiable official. A Jew could not protest to Akka or go to Beirut. He must deal only with Kaimakam Tabari. Nor could a Jew, like a Frenchman, appeal to his ambassador for aid—because the Jew had no ambassador. All Shmuel Hacohen could do was to pay more baksheesh to Tabari, and then more, and then still more.

  Consequently, on this last desperate day Hacohen knelt in the dust at the head of his mattress and rummaged among some stones, from which he withdrew his final cache of funds. He had nearly a thousand English pounds, the last of his money from Russia, and this must close the deal. He brushed his trousers and started for the door, then stopped, considered for a long time, and returned reluctantly to the foot of his bed, where he dug into the earthen floor, coming up at last with a beautiful, shining gold coin. He studied it with love and regret, concluding that on this day of judgment even that coin was expendable.

  He had found the ancient piece on one of his first scouting trips along the southern end of Bahr Tubariyeh where he had stopped to kick at the soil to see if it was promising. When he uncovered a dark, rich earth, capable of yielding fine crops if properly farmed, he took a stick and continued digging as if the land were already his, and in so doing turned up this antique coin covered with Arabic writing. It was waiting for me, he told himself.

  It had been Shmuel’s intention to spend this lucky coin toward the purchase of his own home in the new settlement, and he had resisted all temptations to waste it otherwise, but now he was trapped. He must have land for his Jews, and if this gold coin could help him get it, the coin would have to be spent.

  Into his right pants pocket he put what little Turkish money he had left. Into his coat he put the roll of English bills. And into his left pants pocket, where he could feel its reassuring weight against his leg, he placed the gold coin. Putting on his Turkish fez he brushed his suit again and prayed, “God of Moses, lead me out of this wilderness.”