The Splendour of Israel
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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.
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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)