The Source

by James A. Michener

  But the most remarkable characteristic which set Rebbe Itzik and his little group apart from the other Jews of Safad was their determination never to use Hebrew except as a holy language. From the Torah and Talmud they had derived the conviction that Hebrew would be used for common speech only after the arrival of the Messiah and that until such time it was reserved for religious purposes; and in furtherance of this belief Rebbe Itzik pointed out: “Observe that in the Talmud itself, only the Mishna, the law of God, is written in Hebrew. The Gemara, the explanation of ordinary rabbis, is inscribed in Aramaic. What the Talmud refused to do, we also shall refuse to do.”

  Therefore, outside the synagogue, the Vodzher Jews spoke only Yiddish and they held it to be offensive when others spoke to them in Hebrew. Occasionally Rebbe Itzik had scolded people who addressed him in that language, and he went so far as to refuse his followers permission to ride on any train run by the English government, since the tickets were printed in Hebrew as well as in Arabic and English.

  As long as Palestine remained in British hands the peculiarities of Rebbe Itzik’s group occasioned no difficulty. In Jerusalem, Jews of similar persuasion in obedience to the Talmud sometimes stoned ambulances that tried to move on Shabbat, but in the Vodzher part of Safad the streets were so narrow that no car could enter, and even that cause of irritation was avoided. But in 1948, with the likelihood of an eventual Jewish state, problems developed.

  Rebbe Itzik viewed with apprehension the idea of such a state in Palestine, and to imagine one bearing the name of “Israel” was repugnant. He told his associates, “The idea’s an outrage. It must not be permitted.” He became so violent in his rejection of statehood for the Jews that he threatened to become a nuisance, and when some young men of his congregation actually ran off to Kibbutz Makor to fight with the Palmach he deplored them as if they had converted to another religion. “There must be no Israel!” he protested.

  To support these curious reactions Rebbe Itzik found authority in the Torah. Repeatedly God had condemned the children of Israel to exile among other nations: “And I will scatter you among the heathen … and your land shall be desolate, and your cities waste.” Jerusalem was to be occupied, which meant that the Arabs, in holding the Holy Land, were acting as God’s agents, and to oppose them was sacrilegious. Furthermore, the Holy Land would revert to the Jews only when the Messiah appeared; then Hebrew could be spoken generally, and for ordinary human beings like the Palmach to try to force the coming of the Messiah was presumptuous. There must be no state of Israel, no Hebrew, no resistance to the Arabs. There must be submission, prayer and resignation; and if Arabs chose to massacre, that also was God’s will.

  Fortunately for MemMem Bar-El and his Palmach, only a handful of Vodzher Jews held these extreme views, for even among the little rebbe’s immediate followers about half listened when other leaders like Rav Loewe and Rabbi Goldberg advised: “The Palmach serves as an instrument of God’s will. Co-operate in every way, for this time we shall fight the Arabs.” When Rebbe Itzik was advised of what the other rabbis had said he folded his hands and looked at the ground. “They do not understand God’s will,” he whispered sorrowfully.

  The argument started toward noon on Thursday, April 15, when Ilana Hacohen, refreshed from hours of victorious love-making with her husband, came into the narrow street that ran past Rebbe Itzik’s home. As she left her new quarters, a rifle slung across her shoulder, she brushed back her bobbed hair, straightened her very short skirt, and happened to see the mezuzah nailed to the doorpost in conformance with the law of the Torah. Sensing the days of trial that lay ahead she reached up and touched it. As she did so, she happened to see in the street the tense little figure of Rebbe Itzik.

  “For good luck!” she said in Hebrew. “We’re going to need it.”

  To the little rebbe, everything this brazen girl had done was an outrage. She appeared like a wanton. She carried a rifle. Obviously she was fighting for a state of Israel. She had touched the mezuzah as if it had been an ordinary Christian idol. She had referred to it as a mere good-luck omen. And she had addressed him in Hebrew. With contempt he turned his back on her and walked away.

  Ilana Hacohen, reared on the fighting principles of her grandfather and her anti-rabbinical father, reacted on impulse. To the astonishment of the benevolent dictator, she grabbed him by the shoulder and wheeled him around so abruptly that his hat fell off. “Don’t you rebuke me,” she warned.

  Rebbe Itzik was not accustomed to opposition, and the unprecedented action of the sabra stunned him. He stooped, tried to recover his hat but awkwardly kicked it farther from him. As he rose he found his eyes opposite the brazen bare knees, then staring up at the girl’s tanned, insolent face. Irrelevantly he cried, in Yiddish, “You’re not even married to that man in there, are you?”

  “If you speak to me,” Ilana snapped, “use the language of the land.”

  The infuriated rebbe started to reprimand her and she started to answer back. Her defiance attracted a group of the rebbe’s congregation, and an old man cried, “Whore! Don’t dare to address our rebbe.”

  Ilana swung to face her accuser, and as she did so the butt of her rifle whipped close to the rebbe’s cheek, and he drew back. The newcomer thought his rebbe had been struck and he started to reach for Ilana. Deftly she grabbed her rifle with two hands and parried the clumsy effort.

  The noise drew Gottesmann to the narrow street, and he quickly deduced what was happening. He knew Ilana’s feeling toward the ultra-orthodox, whom her grandfather and father had derided, and he could guess the rebbe’s reaction to her, a soldier of the emerging state. He caught his wife and pulled her back into the house. Then he took her place in the street and tried to mollify the outraged Jews.

  Speaking Yiddish, which quietened things somewhat, he told the patriarch, “Rebbe, we’ve come to save your town—if we can.”

  “Only God will determine whether Safad stands or falls,” the rebbe replied.

  “That’s true,” Gottesmann agreed.

  “But we’ll help Him along,” a young passing Palmach fighter cried in Hebrew.

  Gottesmann, seeking to ease this new blow, assured the rebbe in Yiddish, “The important thing is, we must work together.”

  The insulted rebbe retreated to the shoemaker’s house, where his loyal supporters consoled him. At the same time Gottesmann retired to the house next door, where he told Ilana, “We’re here for one job, Lan. Don’t be sidetracked.”

  “We’re here for two jobs,” she corrected. “To win a nation and to see that it gets started right. You let that old fool …”

  “That’s not the word,” her husband protested. “Just stay away from him.”

  “I will, if he stays away from me.”

  But on the next day fresh trouble broke out. It was April 16, 1948, and the English were evacuating Safad. The captain in charge of trucks, a fed-up veteran from one of the mill towns in England who understood neither Arab nor Jew, marched wearily into the heart of the Jewish section, attended by four tough Tommies with submachine guns. He summoned Rebbe Itzik and some of the other elders, while MemMem Bar-El remained hidden behind a wall as Gottesmann translated the English for him.

  The British officer shouted, “Jews of Safad, in one hour we’re leaving. Your situation is hopeless. You’re a thousand. The Arabs waiting over there are fourteen thousand. Fresh troops moved down last night from Syria. If you stay, dreadful things are going to happen. We offer you—all of you—safe-conduct to Acre.” He waited.

  Rebbe Itzik moved forward. “We’ve held a meeting,” he said, indicating the ten Jews of his congregation. “And we have decided that the Vodzher Jews will stay here.” The British officer groaned and wiped his forehead. Then Itzik added, “But the people of Rabbi Goldberg and Rav Loewe are free to leave with you.”

  The Englishman turned to these two rabbis and said, “You’ve made the right choice.” He started shouting orders under which all the Jews could ride his trucks into
Acre, and after his instructions had been repeated in both Hebrew and Yiddish a few old men and some mothers with babies began preparing themselves to move through the Arab lines to the trucks.

  “All of you!” the officer bellowed. “Get going!” He started pushing the people toward the protected exit route but he was peremptorily halted by MemMem Bar-El, who appeared dramatically with a rifle, backed up by ten Palmach men.

  “No Jew will leave Safad,” he announced quietly in Hebrew. There was consternation. When the British officer heard Gottesmann’s translation he showed his incredulity. As for the would-be refugees, they took the command as a death sentence, while Rebbe Itzik held it to be insulting for a man with no authority—a stranger in Safad—to contradict the decision of the rabbis that the old and young could leave.

  “No Jew leaves Safad,” Bar-El repeated.

  “This is highly irregular,” the Briton fumed. “Who are you?”

  “MemMem Bar-El,” Gottesmann interrupted. “Palmach.”

  “How’d you get in?” the Englishman asked.

  “Right through your lines,” Gottesmann laughed.

  “But, man! You’re overwhelmed.” The tired Englishman indicated the four compass points. “Surrounded. Outnumbered. Starving.”

  “That’s right,” Gottesmann said. “All the Arabs have to do is come in a few steps and capture us.”

  The officer shrugged his shoulders and pleaded, “At least let us take out the children.”

  “You heard him,” Gottesmann said, indicating Bar-El.

  The Englishman ignored the MemMem and asked Gottesmann, “You educated in England?”

  “Norwich.”

  This seemed to make a difference to the Englishman, and he pleaded, “You know they intend to kill you all? They’ve told us so.”

  “We’re not evacuating.”

  “Let us take the cripples and sick.”

  MemMem Bar-El understood the plea and snapped, “We stay together. As we did at Massada … at Warsaw.”

  The Englishman licked his dry lips and said, “I’ve been trying to prevent a massacre. Now it’s on your head.”

  “It’s on all our heads,” Bar-El replied simply. “Your mother’s and my uncle’s. You English have done everything possible to destroy Palestine. When you leave … in a few minutes … you’ll turn all the installations over to the Arabs, won’t you? Arms, food, everything.”

  “I’ve been ordered,” the Englishmen explained apologetically. “It’s been agreed that the Arabs should have this town.”

  “And you worry about a massacre.” Bar-El spat contemptuously.

  “In these matters we have to be impartial.”

  “Goddamn your impartial soul,” Bar-El said hoarsely. Gottesmann refused to interpret this, but one Englishman who understood Hebrew started forward. A Palmach girl stopped him.

  Gottesmann said, “You’re so dreadfully wrong about Safad. It will not fall.”

  Bitterly the MemMem added, “Turn the keys over to the Arabs and when you’re back home remember the name. Safad. Safad. Safad.” He spat on the ground and led his men away.

  Gottesmann walked with the Englishman to the edge of the Jewish quarter. “I meant what I said,” he repeated. “We’re going to take this town.”

  “May God bless you,” the Englishman replied. He could say no more, for now he must turn all fortified positions, the food supplies, the field glasses and the extra armament over to the Arabs. Nearly two thousand additional troops had moved down from Lebanon and Syria to be in on the kill. Six thousand well-armed Arabs were determined that not one Jew should escape.

  Immediately after the parting two things happened. The tired Englishman said to one of his assistants, “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Jews ready to fight back. They’ll last three days. Pray for the poor bastards.” And an Arab sniper, seeing Gottesmann neatly framed in an alley, fired at him, but the bullet missed and the final battle for Safad was engaged.

  • • • THE TELL

  In the dining hall one clear October morning Cullinane asked, “What did a Jew who had served with the English think of their behavior in 1948?”

  It was an ugly question which most people avoided, for if the British had succeeded in their plan for turning Palestine over to the Arabs, Jews would have hated them forever; usually the topic was side-stepped. But Eliav had often considered it and had developed certain generalizations which he was willing to discuss.

  “Normally,” he began, puffing at his after-breakfast pipe, “I don’t mention the matter, so I’m not sure my thoughts are consistent, but the English did represent a goodly portion of my life and I’d be stupid not to have acquired some ideas. Briefly, when the English picked me up I was a rough, uneducated tyke and they made a man of me. During their war against the Germans they treated me with dignity, and I grew almost to love them. During our war against them they behaved with notable crassness, and I had to fight them. Looking back on everything, I’m perplexed.”

  “Let’s take your ideas one by one,” Tabari suggested. “First, they gave you manhood.”

  Eliav nodded. “You could make it stronger. They gave me life. They rescued me from Europe. Educated me, gave me this Oxford accent which helps me so much in impressing American archaeologists. Imagine what you could do with it in Chicago, John!”

  “I do very well with a fake Irish brogue, thank you,” Cullinane observed. “Remember, Chicago is an Irish Catholic city, not an English one. But tell me this, did the English ever admit you to full partnership?”

  “I’ve thought about that. You know, some Jews have risen to positions of great power in England. Disraeli reached the top. Sir Herbert Samuel did pretty well. Leslie Hore-Belisha. It’s remarkable, really.”

  “But did they accept you?” Tabari asked bluntly.

  “For a few moments during the war, I thought so. But I was fooling myself.”

  “Rather curious,” Tabari reflected, “because we Arabs who went to Oxford always considered ourselves full-fledged English gentlemen. Still do.”

  “You didn’t fight them later,” Eliav said.

  “Correct. We fought on their side, so our feeling was strengthened. There was another curious factor …” He was about to offer an obiter dictum but apparently thought better of it and pointed to Eliav. “Your second point. That during the war they treated you well.”

  “They did,” the Israeli said. “They taught me how to fight a guerilla war, how to organize a military unit … everything. In the War of Liberation I had to do some fairly ugly things against the English, but I always said, ‘Tommy, old boy, you taught me how to do this.’ And I found that they had taught me right.”

  “You’ve no bitterness?” Cullinane asked.

  “None,” Eliav said. Then, after drawing on his pipe, he added, “And I suspect I speak for most Israelis.”

  “Wait a minute!” Cullinane protested. “I’ve been reading some Israeli books and their scorn for the English pro-Arab policy … Why do you suppose a bunch of Jews blew up that lorry full of English soldiers at Tiberias?”

  Eliav took a deep breath, studied his pipe which now rested between his palms, and said, “Let’s talk about that lorry. It was blown up, as you may recall, in retaliation for English blundering at Akko. I don’t believe you should leap to the conclusion that the lorry could have been destroyed only by Jews who hated Englishmen. The men who did the job may have respected England very much.”

  There was a clatter of dishes as the kibbutzniks cleared away the tables, then Tabari resumed: “You said that during World War II you grew almost to love them. That’s a funny statement for a Jew.”

  “I meant that after my escape from Germany … When I appreciated what horrible things were happening …” Eliav paused, then added matter-of-factly, “We were a large family. Few survived.”

  Cullinane gripped his chair and thought: Sooner or later it smacks you in the face. I’ve known Eliav for all these months and now he tells me that he lost most o
f his family. In a restaurant you start to give a crude waitress hell. Then you see tattooed on her arm a Bergen-Belsen number. He bit his lip and said nothing.

  Tabari, possibly because he had been educated in England, was not affected by Eliav’s last statement. “So everyone has a sorrowful story. What’s it got to do with the discussion?”

  Eliav, like most Israelis, appreciated this impersonal reaction and said, “This. In the worst days of the war, when I was serving here in Palestine …”

  Tabari interrupted. “You’re one of the few Jews I know who calls it ‘Palestine.’ I thought that was frowned upon.”

  Eliav smiled. “When I’m speaking as a member of the British army I use their name. As an Israeli I’ll take it most unkindly if you call my homeland ‘Palestine.’ Well, anyway, when I served here and watched Rommel’s Afrika Corps coming at us through Egypt, and other Germans trying to reach us through Syria …” He stopped, puffed his pipe and said with great reserve, “If the British had not held desperately—you might also say heroically—six hundred thousand Jews would have been gassed to death in Palestine.” He relaxed and added lightly, “I rarely pray, and when I do I usually leave God and Moses out of it. But I have frequently asked blessings for Field Marshal Montgomery. I’m sure neither of you can imagine how I feel about him.” He tapped his pipe and said, looking at the floor, “It was a very near thing, gentlemen.”

  Cullinane asked, “Then you’re able to differentiate between Englishmen who fought with you and Englishmen who fought against you?”

  “Of course. Because I must differentiate between my two selves. The Jew who learned all he knows from the English and the Jew who later fought them with all his dedication.”