On the Shores of the Mediterranean (33 page)

For our Kings who have despised Him:

To each of which separate lament the response was:

We sit in solitude and mourn
.

This was followed by another litany:

We pray Thee, have mercy on Zion:

to which the response was:

Gather the Children of Jerusalem
.

Haste, haste, Redeemer of Zion!

to which the response was:

Speak to the Heart of Jerusalem
.

May Beauty and Majesty surround Zion!

to which the response was:

Ah, turn Thyself mercifully to Jerusalem
.

May the Kingdom soon return to Zion!

to which the response was:

Comfort those who mourn over Jerusalem
.

May Peace and Joy abide with Zion!

to which the response was:

And the Branch of Jesse spring up at Jerusalem
.

What used to be a narrow alley in which the Jews prayed in front of the Wall was now a large open space, what was left of the dwellings of the Maghrebim, fanatical Muslims from north-west Africa, who used to make the visitor’s life a misery, having been bulldozed to form an open space that could accommodate tens of thousands instead of a few hundred persons. Now the whole of the Jewish Quarter, which had been destroyed during the street fighting of 1948 when the Jews had held it against the Arab Legion for six months before being forced to surrender, was being reconstructed and the great open space in front of the Wall, with its infinite variety of Jews from all quarters of the earth, on this Sabbath evening, was a memorable spectacle.

Of all the Jews at the Wall the most fascinating to a gentile were the Ashkenazim, the ultra-orthodox central and eastern European Jews who originally came to Jerusalem at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the intention of ‘Enticing the Divine Presence to Return’. There, nearly a century later, they were joined by those who had fled the pre-1914 pogroms, then by those who fled the Eastern
shtetlach
, the ghettoes, between the two world wars, and finally by survivors of the Holocaust.

The men wore the
shetraimel
, a big, now very expensive, circular black felt hat, trimmed with beaver, or else a similar hat, untrimmed but bigger still; long, dark overcoats with huge, square shoulders, made of silk or velvet or gabardine, and beneath them long black trousers which were slightly short, black shoes and socks, or else black knickerbockers and long black stockings. They were all extremely pale and most of them had full beards – red ones, which suggested that they might be of Tartar origin, brown, blond or black. Younger, beardless men and boys were distinguished by the
peyot
, side locks of hair worn forward of the ears. The younger boys wore black knickerbockers or long black shorts reaching below the knee and long black or white stockings so that no flesh was visible. Ashkenazim boys, their parents usually being poor, often wear their elder brother’s long trousers cut down to make these long shorts. Their women, in the matter of clothes, were unremarkable when they appeared in public, as were their daughters, wearing ordinary frumpy clothes and thick lisle stockings.

The effect of seeing, especially from the back, a number of these tall, black clad, solemn men with their enormous square shoulders and stilt-like legs standing immobile in the open space before the Wall in the gloaming, together with their pale, delicately featured, black clad, equally solemn male children, was most extraordinary. It was like looking at a flock of giant black-feathered birds of prey and their young which, at any moment, might take off and fly away with long, slow wing beats across the Holy City to their nests. And when this flock, as if by some secret agreement, suddenly began to break up, by which time the sun had disappeared behind the buildings in the Jewish Quarter to the west and the whole Wall was in shadow, we followed three of them as they set off homewards along the Tariq el-Wad. Tariq el-Wad is the long street, part of it forming a section of the Via Dolorosa, which runs through the Old City to the Damascus Gate, and following
them along it was exactly like pursuing three birds which are about to take off but never quite do so, as they scurried along its length, past the Moslem Orphanage, the Fourth Station of the Cross where Jesus met his mother, the House of the Rich Man, Dives, the House of the Poor Man, Lazarus, the Third Station of the Cross where he sank under the weight of it, the Armenian Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Spasm, which is on the site of a Turkish bath on the site of a Crusader church, on the site of a Byzantine basilica, past the Red Mosque and the Greek Praetorium to the Damascus Gate with us literally cantering after them. Then, with the end almost in sight, up Hanevi’im Street through what used to be open country, leaving to starboard the Terra Sancta Tourist Co. Ltd, on Nablus Road, the Franciscan Sisters’ Convent, taking a right fork by the Italian Hospital on to Me’a She’arim Street, leaving the Rumanian Patriarchate and various Jewish institutions, such as the Toldot Aharon Yeshiva,
³
the Batei Hungarim, the Shomrei Hachomot and the Beth Abraham Yeshiva to port and starboard, the Ashkenazim coming up with a very strong finish now as the sun began to set and the Jewish
Shabbat
was about to begin, before suddenly disappearing under an archway into the fastnesses of their dwelling place, Me’a She’arim, having covered something over a mile in just over fifteen minutes, leaving us on our knees.

Me’a She’arim means ‘hundredfold’ in Hebrew and the name is derived from the text in Genesis which was read in the synagogue when the final decision to found the community was arrived at in 1875: ‘Then Isaac sowed in that land and received in the same year a hundredfold and the Lord blessed him.’

This enclave was founded by Shelomo Zalman Beharan, and one long house on the south side of it covers an entire block of a street named after him. Me’a She’arim itself is in the form of a rectangle surrounded by parallel rows of one- and two-storey tenement buildings that face inwards into courtyards rather than outwards, the outer walls of the buildings which form the perimeter presenting a largely windowless front to the outside world, the only way into it being through one of six narrow gateways which can be swiftly barred, as they often needed to be when it was built in what was then the wilderness beyond the city walls. Deep wells, now no longer in use, provided water and could do so again in time of need. The place is a fortress, but one with a market place, some minute shops selling everyday necessities and ritual objects, and with its own free food kitchen for the poor and its own resident letter-writer for those who cannot write.

These long low buildings, which bear a remarkable resemblance to the married quarters in a Victorian barracks, are what are known as Warsaw or Hungarian Houses, and they are of the same kind in which the ancestors of the present occupants used to live in in the
shtetlach
of eastern Europe. They were built with the help of donations from Jews in many distant countries and the individuals within it, who inhabit different parts of it according to where they came from originally, Russia, Rumania, Poland or wherever else, and who embrace various sects, more or less extremely orthodox, are still supported, as they always have been, by donations from
Halukah
, fellow Jews abroad. The most extreme of these groups is Neturai Kartah, an ultra-right-wing, anti-Zionist group whose members believe that only the Messiah can establish a State of Israel and that everything that stems from the present administration of the State is therefore invalid and illegal. Its members are forbidden to vote in elections, to do military service or any other kind of work that benefits the State, and their children
are forbidden to attend state schools, or make use of swimming pools in which mixed bathing takes place. Post-mortem examinations of the dead are also forbidden and the corpses of members of Neturai Kartah are often literally stolen from mortuaries in order to prevent them taking place.

Everywhere in Me’a She’arim there are admonitory graffiti on the walls inveighing against Zion, and everywhere there are placards, such as the one prominently displayed near the Torah ve’irah, the synagogue of the most orthodox, which reads:

‘Jewish Daughter, the Torah obligates you to dress with Modesty. We do not tolerate people passing through our streets immodestly dressed.’

All of this is a source of acute displeasure to modern, freethinking Israelis, fighting for survival in a modern world, who consider the Ashkenazim who live in Me’a She’arim and other similar enclaves in Israel as idle layabouts and anachronistic impediments to political and material progress, if not as an actual menace to the State.

In fact, if study can be regarded as a form of activity, the Ashkenazim work as hard as anyone. Male children begin at an early age to study Hebrew and the Bible in what is called the
cheder
, literally ‘a room’, exactly as they did in Europe before the Holocaust. As grown men most of them spend their entire lives studying and expounding the Torah, which is the whole body of the Jewish sacred writings and tradition, including oral expositions of the Law.

The lingua franca is Yiddish, the vernacular language of European Jewry and of emigrants; a dialect of high German with admixtures of words of Hebrew, Romance and Slavonic origin that developed in central and eastern Europe during the Middle Ages, Hebrew being regarded as too sacred for secular use, although it is now the official language of the State of Israel.

By now, although the sky overhead was still bright after the sunset, here in Me’a She’arim it was quite dark. We were standing in a triangular courtyard in the heart of it, surrounded by various communal buildings devoted to religious use, the Yeshivaman, the principal place of assembly and study, behind which was the building where chickens were killed in strict accordance with the requirements of
kashrut
, the Jewish dietary laws, various
chedarim
and the synagogues, now all illuminated within, from which came the sounds of the scriptures being read in unison by the worshippers as they rocked rhythmically backwards and forwards on their heels, worshippers whose entire world revolved about their faith, the limits of which had been fixed immovably by the laws of the Talmud, and who regulated every moment of their lives by the minutely detailed laws of the medieval codex known as the
Shulchan Aruch
, otherwise ‘The Table Prepared’, which was based upon and elaborated from the decisions of the Talmud. They were men whose minds, in spite of having lived for centuries in eastern Europe, were closer in spirit to those of their predecessors who had gone into captivity after the destruction of the Temple 2500 years ago, men whose constant prayers were for the coming of the Messiah and the rebuilding of Zion.

It was also very quiet in Me’a She’arim. This was because the streets that pass near and through it, Shelomo Zalman Beharan Street and Rabbi Abraham Mislonim Street, had, when the sun went down, been closed to traffic. Anyone who now attempted to drive through it until the Sabbath ended on Saturday evening would find himself and his vehicle being pelted with rotten fruit and stones by Ashkenazim boys, who are much tougher than their fragile appearance might lead one to think, all shouting accusingly,
‘Shabbat! Shabbat!’

Meanwhile, inside the houses the women and girls and small children waited for their men to return from the synagogue. Ever
since the morning of the previous day, Thursday, until now, at the setting of the sun on Friday, the housewife would have been cleaning the house inside and out and cooking the food in readiness for the Sabbath, during which no work of any kind could be done, taking the twisted loaves sprinkled with poppy-seed in memory of the manna from heaven and making the most important dish of all, the
shalet
, known as
cholent
in Russia, and
chulet
in Bohemia, meat stewed with potatoes and fat, or else with peas, beans and barley, which she would place in the oven or on the top of the stove on Friday afternoon. It would then be hot enough to eat at midday on the Sabbath after the protracted service in the synagogue.

By now she would long since have covered the dining table with a white linen cloth, placed at the head of it the two twisted loaves, symbolic of the double quantity of manna gathered in the Wilderness of Sinai on another far-off Sabbath eve, covering them with a dark velvet cloth with a Hebrew benediction embroidered on it in yellow. Near it she would have put the ritual bottle of raisin wine and at the other end of the table the candles in their candlesticks, after which she would light them before covering her eyes with the palms of her hands and offering up the Hebrew prayer, ‘Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to kindle the Sabbath Light.’

She performed all these actions just as her ancestors had done in Jewish towns in Russia and Lithuania within the Russian Pale of Settlement, which no Jew might ever leave, and to which if he did he could never return, a form of imprisonment which began in 1769 in the reign of Catherine II and which endured until the First World War. Her forebears had done exactly the same in such Jewish towns as Mohilev on the bank of the Dniester in White Russia, the sort of town that had an unpaved main street, ankle
deep in mud or dust according to the season, with crumbling houses on either side of it in which they lived and ran their businesses. Just as they had done in the Warsaw ghetto, which between the two wars had a population of 300,000 souls, in the cities of Lemberg, Vilna, Kovno, Cracow and Bialystok where, in the 1920s, out of a total population of 90,000 people, more than 50,000 were Jews, a world from which some had escaped to see the lights of Broadway and worked for a living on the Lower East Side, or in Berlin or Vienna, or in the sweat shops in Whitechapel, or down the Mile End Road, or else had escaped to Palestine, or had stayed on in the ghettoes and been taken to the gas chambers. A world that is no more.