The Source

by James A. Michener

  “Jews won’t discuss it with you,” Tabari warned as he drove Cullinane to Akko for the purpose of picking up supplies. “They hope it’s a problem that will go away if nobody ventilates it too much.”

  “Why do you say problem?” Cullinane asked, as the beautiful spires of Akko rose from the sea.

  “Well, as an Arab I’m naturally closer to the Sephardim and perhaps I see things from their point of view. But I don’t believe I’m being prejudiced when I say that the Sephardim constitute more than half the population of Israel but hold less than five per cent of the good jobs.”

  “Education?” Cullinane asked.

  “And their easy way of life.” The Arab reflected, then said, “Let’s put it this way. If I were going on a camping trip with a bunch of Jews I’d want them to be Sephardim. Because then I’d be assured of a rollicking time. But if I had a factory where profits were obligatory, I’d insist upon hiring an Ashkenazi manager and as few Sephardi workmen as possible.”

  This seemed an improbable situation to exist in Israel, a nation called into being as an answer to discrimination, but Cullinane said nothing. Later he asked, “Do we hire any Sephardim at the dig?”

  “Not on the staff, of course. They don’t have the education. And there are none in the kibbutz gang, because they avoid kibbutz life. Among our volunteer students, two of the best. And naturally our Moroccans are all Sephardi.” He drove for a few minutes, then added, “Good Ashkenazim like Vered and Eliav are worried lest continued immigration change Israel into a Sephardi state.” Cullinane asked if that would be bad, but Tabari countered, “Look, old man, it’s not proper for me as an Arab to be discussing a purely Jewish problem. Ask Eliav. Or Vered.”

  “I did. And they said, ‘It’s of no consequence.’ ”

  “Being Ashkenazi, they would.” He stated this with no rancor but with a finality that announced, “I’ve no more to say.” But before he had driven another hundred yards he added, “The best clue is this. A heart specialist from America examined one thousand Jews in Israel. Of the Ashkenazim, sixty-four per cent showed signs of potential heart trouble. Of the Sephardim, less than two per cent.”

  In Akko, Cullinane was impressed anew at the easy manner in which Tabari moved from one small shop to another, joking with everyone and picking up minor items needed at camp, but after a while Cullinane wandered off on his own to investigate a small mud-walled house from which loud noise was issuing. From the street he listened for a while to singing and shouting, then started to drift on, but he was hailed by a stout woman who cried from the door in Spanish, “Come on in, American.” He did not speak the language well, but at the dig in Arizona he had picked up a few colloquialisms.

  “¿Que vaya?” he asked.

  “Elijah’s celebration,” she said, offering him a bottle of beer. Jabbing her elbows back and forth she bulldozed a passageway through the crowd and led him into a small synagogue, about the size of a hotel bedroom and jammed with perhaps half a hundred oriental Jews, bearded, happy, shouting. The hallway was overflowing with women and children, babies and barking dogs. Services had not yet started and there was a wild passing back and forth of beer bottles, Israeli sandwiches in which layers of goodies were crammed into a pocket of flat bread, a hideous orange soda pop and plates of paste made from ground chickpeas. The conviviality was extraordinary and the noise increased when a fat beadle started bellowing, “You!” When people began poking Cullinane in the ribs he realized that the beadle was shouting at him.

  “Put your hat on in the beth knesset!” the fat man yelled.

  Cullinane had no hat, but the large woman found him a yarmulke and popped it on the back of his head. “Now you’re as good a Jew as we are,” she said in good English.

  “What’s this about Elijah?” he asked.

  “We’re marching to his cave,” she explained.

  “Where’s that?”

  “In Haifa.”

  “Marching? In this heat?” It must have been more than fifteen miles from Akko to Haifa.

  “We march twenty feet,” she laughed. “Rest of the way by bus.” She told him to join the men in the synagogue proper and he said he doubted if any more could squeeze in, but she rejoined, “You’ve got muscles,” and she gave him a stout shove in the middle of his back.

  There was one thing in the synagogue he would never forget. By the door of the crowded room sat an idiot, a marvelous, gentle-faced young man of perhaps twenty-four, with the fat and happy cheeks of one who has surrendered all responsibility. His face radiated holiness, and those who entered the room bowed down to kiss him on the forehead, and he looked back at them with the compassionate eyes of YHWH. It was a terrifying experience—this group of old, bearded Jews bowing down to kiss God’s vicar—and Cullinane thought: At last I know one difference between the Sephardi and the Ashkenazi. No German Jew would humble himself to do that.

  The singing was delightful, an echo from the Old Testament when the Hebrews had lived in tents along the edges of the desert. It was oriental, a long-drawn wailing with kinds of sequences that Cullinane had not heard before, passionate music sung with passion. There was, so far as he could detect, no Jewishness about it but only the timeless wailing of the desert. Suddenly his ears were shattered by a different sound coming from the hallway jammed with women. It was a war cry—he could call it nothing less—in which several women uttered shrieks while vibrating their tongues rapidly against the roofs of their mouths. The effect was shattering, and he left the synagogue proper to ask the large woman what the new shouting was about, only to find that she was leading the noisemakers.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She stopped the war cry and laughed. “Call me Shulamit,” she said. “It’s the cry Arab women use when they want to inspire their men at a battle or a massacre.” She put her head back and uttered a piercing rendition, which was joined by other women. Shoving a plateful of the food into his hands, Shulamit said, “This is a day of joy. Eat!” And as he did so she returned to her war cries.

  “If you want to pray,” the beadle shouted in Spanish, “get inside. You kids!” he added in Hebrew. “Stop that! Let’s have some quiet here.” Six men began roaring for silence and one took to cuffing the older boys on the head, while these in turn abused the younger, who picked on the girls.

  “Silence!” the beadle bellowed, wiping his steaming face. Again his call was echoed by his six helpers.

  The noise increased. The singing continued and the women punctuated the bedlam with their war cries, trilling their tongues with fascinating speed. The idiot spilled a bottle of orange pop down his front, but a very old man in a long white beard cleaned the young man’s clothes with the cuff of his coat. There was more shouting for silence, and a boy struck a girl so hard that she began to cry, whereupon the two mothers involved beat their offspring heartily, after which there was muffled sobbing. An old rabbi started a speech to which no one in the hallway listened, and few in the synagogue.

  “Silence!” roared the beadle, but one of the women had appeared with a large tray of cold beer and a bottle of arrack, which passed from mouth to mouth as the rabbi droned on. It seemed to Cullinane that every second sentence contained the word Sephardim, which the old man pronounced Sfaradeem, and Cullinane, picking out what Hebrew he could understand, said to himself: Eliav and Vered can say that the Sephardim have no real grievance, but they should listen to what this one is saying. It was a lament such as a rabbi might have uttered a thousand years ago, except that then the word Sephardim had scarcely been invented. “Where are our leaders?” the old man wailed. “Why do we let them abuse us as they do?” If it had not been for the gulping of beer, the shouting of children, the choking taste of the raw arrack, the cries of the women and continued bellowing of the beadle, the address would have had a kind of pathos. In its present setting it was merely a formula: “What has happened to our beloved Sfaradeem?” What, indeed.

  At the end of the old man’s harangue the beadle and his helpe
rs took from the holy place four scrolls of the Torah, encased in handsome wooden boxes ornamented with silver horns, and the procession to Elijah’s Cave formed up, with women crying, men shouting, the idiot dancing and the old men in beards walking solemnly through the classic streets of Akko, leading a chant which in time became hypnotic. “Who are the people who serve God?” a man cried. “Israel!” shouted the crowd. “Israel, Israel, Israel!” came the cry, a hundred times, a thousand.

  The procession went only a few blocks to where some buses waited, whose loading was such a study in frenzy that Cullinane watched with a kind of horrified fascination. “Come along!” Shulamit cried, dragging the Irishman after her.

  “I can’t leave my friend,” Cullinane protested.

  “Who is he?” the big woman shouted.

  “Jemail Tabari.”

  “Everybody knows Jemail. You!” she shouted to a little boy. “Tell Jemail the American’s gone to Elijah’s Cave.” She threw the child a coin and Cullinane said that he would repay her. She turned around and looked at him. “Are you crazy?” she asked, grabbing a fresh bottle of beer.

  It was a trip that Cullinane would often recall, a voyage to the heart of Israel. Like most Americans visiting the country he had met principally the well-bred, the sophisticated Jews of the political elite. Vered Bar-El and Eliav were typical, but more important was this powerful sub-strata, this lusty, arrack-guzzling mob, so joyous and vital. The round-faced idiot looked back through the bus and clapped his hands clumsily, whereupon a woman again started the Arab war cry and the noise began that would not cease that day. It was a trip not to Elijah’s Cave but to some point far back in history, perhaps to the time of Elijah himself, and if Cullinane had not been fortunate enough to make it he would have failed to appreciate a major aspect of Judaism.

  “I cannot understand what happened to us,” Shulamit said in Spanish as she munched a huge sandwich while forcing food upon Cullinane.

  “You mean the Jews?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “The Sephardim. Since 1500 we’ve been the principal Jews in Israel. At Zefat, Tiberias, Jerusalem, we were the ones who counted. When the state started, in 1948, we were the numerous ones, but our leaders had always lacked force and by 1949 all the responsible jobs were held by Ashkenazim. Since then it gets worse, year by year.”

  “Is there conscious discrimination?”

  Shulamit considered this for some time, turned aside to join in a series of war cries which threatened Cullinane’s right eardrum, then said in English, “I would like to think not. But I’m worried about the future of this country.”

  “You feel yourself being excluded? You Sephardim generally?”

  Shulamit gave a wild cry, then asked abruptly, “You’re not a newspaperman, are you?”

  “Archaeologist,” Cullinane assured her.

  “Because this is an Israeli problem,” Shulamit insisted. “We don’t need advice from outside.”

  “I’m giving none,” Cullinane promised, and she continued to speak of the fact that between Ashkenazi and Sephardi there was little social contact and few marriages, that good places in the medical school went always to the Ashkenazi, that business, law, newspapering, cabinet positions … all were reserved for the other group.

  “I doubt it’s as bad as you say,” Cullinane argued, “but let’s suppose that it’s half true. Who’s at fault?”

  “We’re not talking about fault, we’re talking about fact. And if it continues, this country is in trouble.”

  “How’d you get into a mess like this?”

  “Don’t blame the Sephardim!” she protested.

  “I’m not blaming anybody.”

  “Because in America, where I used to work, the Ashkenazi have their own problems. A German Jew would not allow his daughter to marry a Galicianer.”

  “Who are they?”

  “From Poland. The worst part.” And Cullinane got the impression that Shulamit would never marry a Galicianer, either.

  The scene at Elijah’s Cave, high on a hill overlooking the Bay of Haifa, was a fitting climax to the synagogue and the bus ride. Thousands of people, mostly Sephardim, toiled up a very steep hill to a series of buildings which could accommodate perhaps two hundred. One teetering affair bore the notice:

  This Building Condemned as Unsafe Stay Away

  On its roof some three hundred children gathered. But the striking part of the crowd was the old men and women, come to the cave for mystic reasons, shouting and praying in the steaming sunlight. Some were camped on the ground and had been there for two days. Some sheltered themselves under eaves of the condemned building, while thousands of others milled back and forth, listening to anguished speeches in which old men reviewed the life of Elijah and the low state into which Sephardi Jews had fallen. It was a wild, mournful, gay, beer-drinking mob, but its inner significance could be appreciated only when Shulamit led Cullinane into the cave itself, a deep, plastered cavern that looked more like a subterranean room than a cave. It was jammed with the maximum number of people—perhaps five hundred—perspiring hideously in the dank air, lighting thousands of candles in the prophet’s hiding place, and bowing their heads for blessings from the various rabbis and holy men who clustered inside, breathing not air but some strange mixture of ozone, piety and religious frenzy. Cullinane had always thought that only Catholics indulged in priestly blessings, but now Shulamit knelt before one of the purple-clothed rabbis and kissed his hand, which he then placed on her head, giving her Elijah’s blessing, while in another corner a group of ten men formed themselves into a congregation, listening to an eleventh who conducted formal prayer services, perspiring, jostling, drowned out by the haunting war cries of some women at the entrance.

  “What has happened to our beloved Sephardim?” a man in still another corner shouted, while in the center a group of women from Morocco sang and beat on drums precisely like the ones which had been used at Makor four thousand years before. The music was wild and imperative and four little girls danced beautifully, throwing their arms in the air and captivating the men, including Cullinane, as Jewish girls had done for generations out of mind.

  “Where are the great Sephardim?” the man in the corner lamented, and the women at the entrance repeated their mournful cries as pilgrims lighted their candles in the murky cave.

  At dinner that night a much-sobered Cullinane sat silent. Tabari explained, “He got caught up in the celebration at Elijah’s Cave.”

  “How’d he do that?” Eliav asked, as if the Irishman were not present.

  “He wandered into the Sephardi synagogue at Akko,” the Arab laughed.

  “Pretty soon we’ll halt this wretched business of Ashkenazi and Sephardi,” Eliav said stubbornly. “It started only because the Jews were driven out of their homeland by Vespasian and forced into separate groups. Now that we’re reunited we’ll soon be one again.” And Cullinane, looking up, saw to his surprise that the tall Ashkenazi was speaking seriously and believed what he said.

  • • •

  In the spring of 67 C.E., when Vespasian, Titus and Trajan were bearing down upon Makor, the olive worker Yigal was fifty-three years old, still employed at the olive press and still a man of little significance in the community. His three sons were married and his principal joy was in playing with his eleven grandchildren, sitting on the steps of the Venus temple as they ran back and forth across the forum.

  In Makor, Yigal’s earlier success in protecting Judaea from the statues of Caligula had won him no lasting honor and he was considered by his neighbors to be an honest, simple-minded man skilled neither in business nor in government. He was a respected member of the synagogue, prayed regularly and sought no distinctions in the religious hierarchy of the Jews. In his older years he had become slightly stooped and his frail frame now seemed gaunt where before it had been spare. His hair was thin and gray and his shaven cheeks were hollow. His gray-green eyes often contained the hint of a smile, and he lived happily with his wife B
eruriah, showing no envy for the more successful members of his community who were always going off to important meetings in Jerusalem or Caesarea.

  By a curious chance it was his companion Naaman, the farmer, who had succeeded Simeon as head of the community, and if one had asked a dozen citizens of Makor who had been the hero of the resistance against the Romans a quarter of a century before, all would have replied, “Rab Naaman. He marched to Ptolemais and warned General Petronius not to bring graven images into Judaea.” It was understandable that Naaman should be so remembered, for when Yigal returned from that penetrating experience he was able to forget it and to resume his life as an olive worker; Naaman on the other hand had come home transformed by the miracle he had seen God perform. Without hesitating, and without seeking counsel even from his wife, he had abandoned at the age of thirty-eight the life of a farmer and had surrendered himself into the hands of cautious old Simeon, saying to that learned man, “Make me a scholar, that I may understand the ways of God.” For many years this uneducated farmer had memorized the holy books, had argued their precepts and had transformed himself into a learned sage with a real vocation for religious leadership. He was now, at the age of sixty-five, a venerable old man with a white beard, a muffled voice and clear blue eyes. Throughout the Galilee his wisdom was respected and many from distant villages sought his solutions to the problems that confronted them. He was a learned man and the Jews called him “Rab.”

  He had retained a sort of friendship with Yigal, whom he recognized as one of the stable Jews in Makor, but it would never have occurred even to him to put Yigal into any position of eminence, for whereas Naaman had grown into a new man with new responsibilities, Yigal had remained what he would always be: an honest workman who interfered with no one. In fact, had one been seeking the typical Jew of the Galilee he might have selected Yigal: devout, quiet, dedicated to his family and secure in his relationship to God.