# The Splendour of Israel *Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.* --- > Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Robert Payne, The Splendour of Israel, bahai-library.com. > ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── > > ' I. i 7 > '' > ,/ '/o. "'= '- \ 635.3, c 95. 5 > BY THE SAME AUTHOR > THE SPLENDOUR OF > The Splendour of Greec~ > The Splendour of Franc~ > > The Gold of Troy > The Holy Fire > Fathers of the Western Church > ISRAEL > Chunking Diary > Schweitzer: Hero of Afric:a > Zero > The Terrorists by > Mao Tse-Tung ROBERT PAYNE > The White Rajahs of Sa1áawak > The Holy Sword > Gershwin > The Three Worlds of Bods Pasternak > > Illustrated and with maps > > LONDON > > ROBERT HALE LIMITED > @ Robert Payne 19?3. > First published in Great Britain 1963 > > Robert Hale Limited > 5 3 Old Brornpton Road > London S.W.7 > > CONTENTS > > Jerusalem l l > The Place of Splendour 25 > Mount Zion 38 > Tel Aviv > Caesarea > Haifa 67 > Lake Huleh > Razor 83 > Beth Shean go > Beth Shearim 103 > Nazareth 109 > Mount Tabor 120 > Tiberias 125 > The Sea of Galilee 138 > b4á 512/ Ashkelon 150 > Beersheba > Massada 162 > Ela th 172 > Jerusalem 177 > Index 187 > > PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN > BY EBENEZER BAYLIS AND SON LIMITED > THE TRINITY PRESS, WORCESTER, AND LONDON > 18 THE SPLENDOUR OF ISRAEL JERUSALEM 19 > careless of clothes and wear open-neck shirts and care little for The tomb stands on the summit of the hill, with Jerusalem in > appearances. The girls dress without extravagance. The mood is the distance dusky yellow and gold, very beautiful. There is an im- > calm, a little sombre, not given to ostentation, quietly self-assured. pression of height, of wind-swept spaces, of being between the > Wages are low. There are theatres and cinemas and art galleries, desert and the sown. The site has been chosen with exquisite care. > there is even a ferris wheel outlined with electric lights at the Today and for many years to come Herzl, who began life > bottom of the municipal gardens, but there is no feeling that as an obscure Hungarian playwright, will continue to haunt > people are desperately searching for entertainment. They are self- Jerusalem. His portrait-always the same portrait-hangs in all > contained, and a surprising number of them are young: the the public buildings. Yet this portrait is scarcely fair to him; he is > average age must be about thirty. In five minutes, in any of the shown in profile, frowning, heavily-bearded, lost in deep medita- > main streets, you will see Jews from Persia, India, Morocco, tion. It is the portrait of a faintly sinister prophet, dark and > Argentina, Yemen, Europe and America.Jerusalem is the melting saturnine. In fact, he was red-cheeked, with deep-set eyes which > pot. All colours, all races are represented, and all are Jews. often glowed with laughter, and in his elegance he resembled a > Jerusalem is a fortress. So it has been, and so it will always be. guardsman or a man about town rather than a prophet. He was > The forward defences are scattered among the hills, as they were vain of his good looks, and was perfectly aware of the power of his > in the time of King Jehoiakim, whose southern bastion has flashing eyes. > recently been discovered by archaeologists in nearby Ramat He was born with many gifts. He could have been a poet or a > Rahel, a hilltop with one of the world's most spectacular views. novelist or a journalist or a playwright with a European reputa- > From there you look out across a valley to Bethlehem and the tion, but he wrote his plays too easily and his one surviving novel > red-roofed Church of the Nativity, and not far away stands a white is not a novel at all; it is a visionary account, in minute detail, of a > and gleaming mountain shaped like an extinct volcano: Herod Jewish state in Palestine as it would appear about the year 1962. > made it into a fortress palace, and on the summit he was buried in Nor was there anything original in his book The Jewish State, > a gold coffin studded with jewels. The mountains of Moab lie far which he completed when he was thirty-six; others before him > to the east, the honey-coloured walls of Jerusalem rise to the had proclaimed that the Jewish state needed to be founded, pre- > north, and the modern city sweeps around to the west. From that ferably in Palestine. What was original in him was his vision of the > hilltop, near the ruins of a Judean fortress of the eighth century New Jerusalem, which he saw in such clear outline that he almost > B.c. and of a Byzantine church, all of Jerusalem and the land believed in its existence. His greatest gift was nothing less than > around it seem to lie at your feet. The frontier is only two hundred the gift of prophecy. > yards away. Once he had conceived of the idea of the New Jerusalem, he > painted it in such rich colours that it became credible even to > those who had no sympathy with it. For centuries the Jews had > AT HERZL'S TOMB > dreamed ofreturning to Jerusalem. "Next year inJ erusalem"was a > In the J udean hills, not far from] erusalem, and on the road to Ain common greeting, which had lost its meaning by repetition. Herzl > Karem, where John the Baptist was born, there stands the square proclaimed: "Jerusalem this year, now, this very moment." He > block of polished black marble which commemorates Theodor drew a picture of a modern Jerusalem lying outside the walls of > Herzl, the founder of Zionism, who in 1898 prophesied that the the sacred city. A modern gleaming metropolis with wide avenues, > state of Israel would come into existence in fifty years. He lies boulevards, parks, tree-shaded streets, recreation centres, electric > beneath that immense marble tomb. On one side, written in a street-cars. As for the old city, it would be conserved as a monu- > peculiarly vivid and powerful Hebrew script, there is his name. ment to the past with hospices for the pilgrims of all the denomina- > There is no date of death, no date of birth, nothing about him. tions which regarded Jerusalem as a holy city, but there would be > No text from the Old Testament decorates the tomb, as it no private dwellings. There would be hospitals and clinics and a > decorates so many of the memorials in Israel. No star or shield of great Peace Palace. Whenever a disaster occurred anywhere in > David, no Menorah, no Ark of the Covenant, is depicted on the the world, the Peace Palace would respond immediately with > tomb. There is only the immense black stone and the great name. help. The victims of floods, earthquakes, famine, drought and > So, in the Middle Ages, might men commemorate the death of a epidemics would have only to turn to the Peace Palace to know > great prince. that they were being cared for. It would be the United Nations, > 20 THE SPLENDOUR OF ISRAEL JERUSALEM 21 > > the World Health Organization, and UNESCO, the largest and and they must be kept together; this too has been done. He > most powerful centre of humanitarian activity on earth. wanted a public works system, and he insisted that the new state > So he dreamed, and though the Peace Palace was never erected should follow the middle road between capitalism and collec- > in Jerusalem, his vision of the new city outside the walls, rising on tivism. He wanted a limit set to the growth of the towns, and each > the encircling hills, came about very much as he predicted it. He town must live on the produce of the surrounding fields. He made > wrote his description of Jerusalem in 1898 when only about forty vast plans for irrigation, and wrote happily about the wealth that > thousand Jews were living there, many of them in squalor. would come from the potash of the Dead Sea. Sometimes he was > In those days, at the turn of the century, the Valley ofEsdraelon overwhelmed by the sheer ebullience of his imagination, as when > was little more than marshes and swampland. It was owned he dashed off in his diary: "The high priests will wear impressive > largely by absentee Turkish and Arab landlords, and seemed robes. The cuirassiers will wear yellow trousers and white tunics. > destined to become a kind of permanent graveyard. The scatter- The officers will have silver breastplates." But there are not many > ing of Arab peasants who lived there called it "the Gateway to statements like this. The diary is largely a sober examination of > Hell". Herzl, in one of the visionary passages of his novel Old-New his own triumphs and defeats, and a continuing exploration of the > Land, described it as a great flowering plain thickly sown with nature of the Jewish state. > wheat, oats, maize, hops and tobacco, with cows and sheep But when he was writing, the Jewish state belonged to the dis- > grazing in the meadows, and trim villages and homesteads dotted tant future. He was a statesman without a state, a prophet without > about the valley and crowding the hillsides. So it became, but no a country. He bearded the powerful Jewish multi-millionaires, > one except Herzl had ever guessed there would be this flowering. Baron Maurice de Hirsch and Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and > When Herzl published his novel in 1902, Haifa was little more made them listen to his plan for settling the Jews on the soil. He > than a village lying at the foot of Mount Carmel, with a popula- inaugurated a series of Zionist Conferences, and laid down a > tion of perhaps ten thousand people. He never visited the town, programme for establishing a home for the Jewish people which > though he caught a passing glance of it from the sea. In his would be secured by public law. He believed the home should be > imagination the village became a city towering up the entire in Palestine, then under the rule of the Sultan of Turkey, "the sick > length of Mount Carmel, and spreading all the way to Acre. man of Europe", who sometimes gave the impression that he > There was a superb port with great piers and jetties, and vessels of would cheerfully sacrifice Palestine in payment of an astronomical > all nations lay at anchor under the sheltering mountains. For purchase price. Many Jews preferred assimilation in their adopted > some reason he imagined this teeming city very silent, with almost countries to the adventure of setting up a Jewish state. Herzl > no noise in the streets. He wrote : thundered against them, accusing them of timidity and cowardice. á > At various times he thought he would be able to establish the > Brilliant Oriental robes mingled with the sober costumes of the Jewish state in the arid El Arish area of northern Sinai, in Mozam- > Occident, but the latter predominated. There were many Chinese, bique, Tripoli or the Congo, but all these ventures failed. The > Persians and Arabs, but the city itself seemed thoroughly European. prize was always Palestine. > One might easily imagine oneself in a large Italian port. The brilliant > With his commanding presence, his social graces, his missionary > blue of sky and sea were reminiscent of the Riviera, but the buildings > were much cleaner and more modem, and the streets less noisy. The > zeal, he was able to engage the interest of kings and princes and > quiet was due largely to the dignified behaviour of the many Orientals European statesmen. The German Emperor and the Sultan of > which precluded the raising of their voices, but also to the absence of Turkey listened to long speeches on the need for building a Jewish > any draught animals. There was no hoofbeat of horses, no crackling of state and its advantages to the rest of the world. His interviews > whips, no rumbling of wheels. The roads were as smooth as the side- with the Sultan were curiously disturbing, for Herzl had the > walks, and the automobiles drove past silently on rubber wheels. impression that he was talking to a marionette and it was beyond > his power to know who was pulling the strings. Sultan Abdul > Again and again in his diaries, where the best of his writing is Hamid II was a small, shabby man with long yellow teeth, the > preserved, he sketches out some detail of the Jewish state which hooked nose of a Punchinello, and ears that stuck out from the side > has proved to be amazingly accurate. He sketched out its con- of his head, thus protecting his fez from falling down and com- > stitution, labour laws, social welfare, education, town-planning. pletely covering his face. He listened politely to everything Herzl > He wanted entire communities transplanted in the Jewish state, said, made vast promises, and never kept them. It was the same > 66 THE SPLENDOUR OF ISRAEL > > it had a garrison of perhaps five hundred men who were perma- > nently resident. The Arabs destroyed Caesarea. Then for cen- > turies there were only a few fishermen's huts among the ruins. > Today you can still trace the long aqueduct which brought > sweet water to the wells of Caesarea, though most of it is covered > with sand. But close to the city the supporting arches of the > aqueduct can still be seen. In the twilight it looks like an immense > serpent sloughing off its interminable coils. Haifa > They were close enough now to make out the details. In the road- > stead between Acre and the foot of Mount Carmel huge liners rode at > anchor, and beyond the liners could be seen the charming contours of > the bay and the mountain. At the northern end there was Acre with > its harsh oriental beauty, with its grey castle walls and cupolas and > minarets spearing the morning sky, and from Acre to the top of the > mountain there were those thousands of white houses and the moun- > tain itself was capped with magnificent buildings. > > W > HEN Herzl wrote these words in 1902, there was > scarcely a single house on Mount Carmel and no > liners had ever put into the bay. But the memory of > Mount Carmel, seen only briefly from a ship's rail, haunted him > as no other landscape had ever haunted him. Of Jerusalem he > always spoke sombrely, as of a place so ancient that it should be > kept as a museum or under glass, and neither Paris nor Rome nor > any of the other cities he visited and discussed in his letters drew > from him the excitement he reserved for this small town which > sheltered at the foot of a green mountain. > In Herzl's day the harbour of Haifa had long since been silted > up with sand, and the streets, according to a contemporary > traveller, were "filthy and wretched beyond description". A > colony of German Templars had settled there in the sixties of the > last century, outnumbering the pitifully small group of Jewish > merchants and the Arabs who sometimes pastured their sheep and > goats on the slopes of the mountain. The Templars cultivated the > narrow plain near the seashore; there were olive fields, small > orchards and occasional palm trees, a few shops, a few lanes of > houses huddled together. Herzl saw the thickly wooded mountain > turning into a modern city gleaming in the sunset, all stone and > marble. He saw great avenues ringing the mountain, and vast > public squares "shaded by palms which served as lamp-posts at > night, with clusters of lamps hanging from them like glass fruit". > He believed Haifa would become a great metropolis "with the > safest and most convenient harbour in the Mediterranean". All > this he saw with his prophetic eyes, after seeing with his ordinary > 68 THE SPLENDOUR OF ISRAEL HAIFA 69 > eyes a dismal village on the sea-coast. It is always a mystery when powerful force whose fame reverberated across the Mediter- > prophecies are fulfilled. ranean. Vespasian sacrificed to the god when revolving in his > Today, when you arrive in Haifa and see that white mountain mind his secret hopes of empire. Tacitus tells the story of how > which only sixty years ago was the haunt of leopards and hyenas, Vespasian came to Carmel and heard what he wanted to hear: > you wonder whether such things are possible. Haifa has the look > of an old city. It is well anchored on its mountain, and does not Between Syria and Judea is Carmel-the name given to a mountain > have the bright, new, chromium-plated look of Tel Aviv. It has and to a god. Here there is no image of the god nor any temple : the > grown organically, spreading up the mountainside according to traditions of antiquity prescribe only the altar and its sacred associa- > the natural laws of growth. At first it grew very slowly, cautiously, tions. > throwing up small shoots along the lower ranges of the mountain. Vespasian came here to offer sacrifices and ponder his secret am- > The Jewish immigrants arriving from Germany in the I930S bitions. Basilides was the priest, and after repeatedly inspecting the > forced the pace a little, so that already by the time of World entrails he said: "Vespasian, whatever you desire, whether it is to build > a house or to enlarge your estates or to increase the number of your > War II most of the mountain was covered with houses. Now the > slaves, all these will be given to you. To you shall be given a vast > whole mountain has become a city, which is beginning to spread palace, boundless territories, multitudes of men." > over the neighbouring mountains. Whole new settlements have These obscure auguries were soon spread among the populace, and > been built on the top of Carmel, and there is no knowing when various attempts were made to interpret them. Indeed, little else was > the process will stop. spoken about by the common people; and in Vespasian's presence they > Haifa even today is still very largely a German-Jewish city. The discussed the auguries all the more freely because men have more to > people go about with the methodical, practical air of German say to men who desire great things. > Jews. There is no nonsense about them. In all other towns in > Israel life comes to a virtual stop on the Sabbath. In Haifa on the Tacitus is not always reliable when he speaks about theJews- > Sabbath the buses are kept running, ships enter the dock, the he had some theories about them which must be among the most > funicular railway still operates. It is the largest and best-equipped inaccurate ever recorded-but here he was speaking about > seaport in Israel, with the only deep-water harbour, and it is matters which he may easily have learned from members of > determined that nothing shall impede the flow of trade. Sig- Vespasian's entourage. The account rings true. Vespasian went > nificantly it has acquired a reputation for quiet, unobtrusive on to seize the empire and to become the scourge of the Jews. > scholarship, and has more bookshops per street than any other A few months later Jerusalem fell and Judea became a small > town in Israel. I found ten bookshops in three blocks on Herzl province under Roman rule. > Street, and this may well be the world's record. The pride of But it is not for such stories that we remember Carmel. We > Haifa is the technological institute known as the Technion, remember the mountain chiefly because with Hermon and Tabor > originally built in I9I2 on the slopes of the mountain, now in a it possesses a particular holiness and a particular beauty. "Thine > pine forest on top of the mountain, with a magnificent view of the head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thy head like > great bay and the houses clustered along the white slopes. purple," wrote the author of the Song efSongs. The prophet Isaiah > Where there are new hotels and gleaming white modern build- speaks of "the excellency of Carmel and Sharon, they shall see > ings there were once hermit caves and quiet sanctuaries in the the glory of the Lord". That the green forests on the mountain > woods. For centuries Carmel was sacred to Baal Hadad, the should wither, and its fruits perish, is his darkest image of desola- > ancient god of the Canaanites, who was Lord of the Heavens, tion. For the ancient Hebrews, Carmel is the emblem of the > Maker of Thunder and Rain, and of Fertility; and when the earth's ripeness and blessedness, for while the rest of the country > prophet Elijah called upon the priests of Baal to summon down changed to the yellow of death during the heat of summer, > fire upon the sacred bull, he was, in order to destroy them, Carmel, luxuriating in its heavy dews, remained unfailingly green. > deliberately taunting them with their own sacred symbols-the The green has nearly vanished and the forest has turned into > holy fire, the holy bull. Ifit had not been for Elijah, Baal Hadad stone, but somehow the city still suggests ripeness. > might have become the ruling god of the Near East. Jehovah Like the new city of Jerusalem, Haifa has all the advantages of > conquered, but Baal Hadad never entirely disappeared. He ancient traditions and up-to-the-minute modernity. Elijah and > haunted the topmost crags of the mountain, a mysterious and Elisha are almost physical presences ; there are still pilgrimages to > THE SPLENDOUR OF ISRAEL HAIFA > > Elijah's smoke-blackened cave. Yet sometimes the prophetical might be a very large and well-equipped government experi- > voices acquire ironical overtones. "Feed Thy people with Thy mental station until it occurred to me that no government would > rod, the flock of Thine inheritance, which dwell solitarily in the build in such a modern style, with such deliberate art in the > forest in the midst of Carmel," said the prophet Micah. But "the making of the building. In fact, the yellow building was a house > forest in the midst of Carmel" has vanished, and no one can dwell of horror. > solitarily on the mountain. The history of this house begins in I949 when a handful of > As though the possession of a holy mountain, a beautiful bay, a survivors from the ghettos of Poland and Lithuania settled here > rich harbour and a teeming modern city were not enough, Haifa on the Plain of Acre and founded a kibbuts which they called > also possesses Acre as a suburb. This is rather like having an Lahamei Hageta'_at, meaning "The Fighters of the Ghettos". They > enormous mansion with an exquisite Oriental summerhouse at had brought with them a few pathetic relics and souvenirs of the > the bottom of the garden. Acre is the ancient Ptolemai:s, once fighting ~nside the ghettos and the subsequent partisan campaigns. > endowed by the luxury-loving Emperor Ptolemy II Philadelphus At first it was to be a very small museum housed in one of the > with marble colonnades, libraries and gymnasiums. St. Paul buildings on the kibbuts, but gradually the concept widened to > landed there when he went up to Jerusalem for the last time, include relics, archives and photographs concerning the entire > saluting the brethren then staying in the town, and spending a history of the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis. It would be > day with them. Under the Crusaders it became St. Jean d'Acre, a memorial to the six million dead. It would say what had to be > and was held by them for I82 years except for a two-year period said, commemorate what had to be commemorated. It would be, > when it fell to Saladin. There, finally, in May, I29I, exactly a as well as human hands could make it, an eternal monument to a > hundred years after it had been wrested from Saladin by Richard senseless and intolerable crime. > the Lion-Heart, the Moslems took the walls by storm and in a In_side, the yellow building gives an impression of extraordinary > single day killed thirty thousand of the defenders. On that day spaciousness. The rooms are palatial, very high, very broad, with > ended the Latin Kingdom in the Holy Land. their dark polished floors and well-proportioned windows. One > Wandering through Acre today, you would hardly dream that ~arge room contains a scale model of a concentration camp with > it was ever a city of importance. The small grey donkeys wind its wretched huts and tall watchtowers; the model is half the size > through shadowy streets where the jutting eaves keep out the sun. of the roo~. There are blown-up photographs along the walls, > There are streets so dark you can barely see the faces of passers-by here and m all the other rooms. There are scraps of uniform, > at noon, and so narrow that even the donkeys must go in single slabs of the black bread fed to the prisoners, proclamations, > file. There is the smell of spices. You might be in some small orders. Mostly there are these blown-up and grainy photographs > town in Persia or Malaya, so pervasive is the atmosphere of the reproduced from books and newspapers. We see the Jews herded > Orient. Then suddenly, you find yourself looking down from into cattle trucks, or walking about the ghettos of Warsaw wear- > street level at a vast Crusader church sunk deep in the earth and ing the yellow badge of David, or assembling in the concentration > still being excavated, with huge columns like roots which have camps. It is a world of black and white, without depth, without > never seen the sun. At such moments, very briefly, you become dimension, soundless and strangely impersonal. They might be > aware of the power wielded by the Crusaders. stills from an old movie. It is only with a great effort that one can > bring oneself to feel that these photographs represent events that > actually happened, that this bath chamber or this smokestack > THE HousE OF HORROR formed part of a terrifying engine of destruction, and that these > Not far from Acre, along the coastal road, an enormous yellow people looking out calmly from the faded photographs are in > building faces the sea. Here the air is sweet, for there are orange agony. > groves all round, and the plains are well watered, very green even What was shocking was the sense of unreality, the appalling > at the height of summer. A long Turkish aqueduct, biscuit- ineffectiveness of these photographs hanging in these palatial > coloured, runs along the road, and through the arches you can rooms. The photographs lied : they left out everything of import- > see green fields, tall cypresses, red-roofed houses, silvery water ance. Just as it was impossible to suffer with these ghostly people > towers. The yellow building might be a school or a theatre, except in the photographs, so it was impossible to feel any emotion in > for the fact that there is no town or village nearby. I thought it front of the loaf of bread, resembling a black cinder, which stood > > — *The Splendour of Israel (Used by permission of the curator)*