Spies in Palestine

by James Srodes

  Wallace had been a Civil War general and the governor of the New Mexico territory where he had set in motion events that led to the shooting of legendary killer William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. He also had been the author of the wildly popular novel about the heroic Jewish slave-charioteer, Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Arriving in Constantinople in 1881, Wallace quickly became one of the most trusted of the foreign advisers of Abdul Hamid II in his efforts to modernize his Empire.

  This time the Oliphant delegation, with Wallace’s support, quickly won the Sultan’s permission to buy land for Jewish settlement south of Haifa near the end of the Mount Carmel mountain range. Using the funds he had raised in London, Oliphant and his wife moved to Palestine with the settlers but divided their time between the European quarter of Haifa and a village of Druze in the shadow of the Mount itself. The First Aliyah—literally, “the Act of Returning”—back to the Biblical homeland of Eretz Israel of the Jews scattered centuries earlier by the Diaspora was now underway in earnest.

  The land for the sixty-five aliyot families was located ten miles farther along at the edge of the range, near the coastal road that linked Haifa with Hadera and Jerusalem farther south. It was a woebegone hamlet named Zamarin that could barely sustain a handful of Arab peasants. It was a dismal place, dominated on one side by the Carmel hills and on the seaward side by the tall ruins of a Crusaders’ castle.

  Disaster loomed from the start. Those settlers with actual farming experience had dealt with fertile land that had been cleared and prepared centuries before. The land the Ottomans had allocated was a near-barren mix of malarial swamp and arid hard-packed soil pocked with boulders. The task of draining the swamps and channeling the water onto the dry land was backbreaking work made all the harder as malaria decimated their ranks. By the end of the first year, nearly half the settlers had died or fled back to Europe, seeking sanctuary with relatives in the crowded Jewish ghettos of major cities.

  But Ephraim Aaronsohn was made of sterner stuff. Like a few others, he had come with financial resources that enabled him to endure the early years. The settlers who survived the first years also broke with two of the assumptions of the Aliyah movement’s early founders. While many of the projects and ventures they undertook were communal in structure—road-building, irrigation canals, and storage barns—nevertheless, each family plotted out their own land for their private profit. Secondly, the Aaronsohns ignored the notion that only the Jews themselves should work their land. They bypassed the de facto segregation that kept older settlements of Arab peasants, Yishuv Jews, and Palestinian Christians separate. Ephraim was an early employer of Arab workers, paying good wages and establishing respectful albeit cautious relations with the elders of the nearby villages.

  In this outreach to their Arab neighbors, Ephraim was echoing the dream of the theoretical founder of the Zionist movement, Theodore Hetzl, who argued for an Eretz Israel for Jews where religious practice would be a strictly personal matter. More, Herzl believed that Jews who migrated to Palestine would be welcomed by the Arab peasantry once they saw they would share in the benefits of the husbandry and new technologies that the European aliyots would bring with them.

  Life in the early years was not all drudgery for Malkah and Ephraim. Children, and lots of them, were crucial not only for assuring a family’s future, but also to preserve the fabric of the larger community. Ephraim and Malkah had arrived in Palestine with two young sons, Aaron, who was six, and Zvi, age four. After their arrival the couple’s first daughter was born, but soon died. In the next decade two more sons, Shmuel and Alexander, would be born, while two other daughters would die in infancy. In 1890, Sarah was born, followed two years later by the couple’s sixth child to survive, Rivka.

  By the time Sarah was born, the identity of the Aaronsohn family was firmly established as an amalgam of the personas of Ephraim and Malkah and the realities of their new home in Palestine. Like Ephraim and her brothers, Sarah was strong and energetic. From Malkah, Sarah and her brothers inherited a fierce dignity that stemmed from the mother’s heritage as the daughter of a distinguished rabbi back in Romania and her family’s claim to be directly descended from King David. The Aaronsohns had forceful direct personalities that could be abrasive.

  They were a self-contained society and stood out with the broader Jewish communal culture of their neighbors. That broader culture had been forged by many forces, the persecution of the people and governments in the lands where the Diaspora had taken them, the dependency of Jews on each other for survival, and, not least, the strict adherence to the rituals of their Biblical faith that sustained their souls. The Aaronsohns, while observant, were not religious, nor were they especially communal in their ties to their neighbors. They stood apart, and while the other pioneers at work in Zichron Ya’akov respected Ephraim and his sons for their diligence, there was an envious suspicion that the family thought themselves better than others. To an extent the envy was well founded.

  Much had changed in the eight years since the first aliyots had arrived in Palestine. The nameless communes of crude shelters had become a network of prosperous villages funded by a wealthy benefactor whose tightly managed funds transformed the farmers from survivalists into developers of a diverse mix of exportable foods and products. The village the Aaronsohns called home was one of the earliest of these new creations and it had a new name—Zichron Ya’akov—that honored the father of their new wealthy patron, French Baron Edmond de Rothschild.

  Faced with the prospect of famine and failure, the leaders of the aliyot pioneers had almost immediately begun to importune wealthy Jews in Europe to come to their aid. By the end of 1882 they had attracted the interest of Baron de Rothschild, who, while an heir to the wide banking network of his famous family, was not interested in (or perhaps not encouraged to participate in) its highly complex enterprises.

  For much of his life Baron Edmond had devoted his time to building up his soon-to-be-legendary wine chateaus, as well as amassing a huge collection of art and founding a number of scientific research institutes in France and elsewhere in Europe.

  As a sponsor of several French archaeological expeditions into Syria–Palestine, he became interested in the prospects of the region and so, when the aliyots approached him, he was primed to respond. He abandoned his art collecting and began assembling technical managers—most from vineyard plantations in French North African colonies—to oversee the building of modern housing, schools and roads, and the development of crops—grapes, dates, citrus, honey—that could be sold in the market at Haifa and profitably exported abroad.

  The baron had complex motivations. He had become a convinced Zionist. The project, if managed properly, would also prove his worth to his financier brothers and cousins. And then there was his wine. For twenty years France’s famed wineries had seen vineyards destroyed by a phylloxera aphid that attacked the roots of the vines. So new pest-free vineyards would be planted in Palestine, and the wine not dedicated for sacramental purposes would be barreled and exported to Europe’s thirsty markets. In addition to the vineyards, one of his first projects was to build two state-of-the-art wineries, the first at Zichron Ya’akov. Ephraim Aaronsohn became one of its director-managers.

  It takes an effort to imagine the transformation the early aliyots underwent in the first decade of their time in Palestine. Only a few years before they had escaped the state-sanctioned terrorism of the pogroms. The land they came to first appeared almost uninhabitable. They were viewed askance by the Yishuv communities and warily by their Arab neighbors. Disease and disenchantment decimated their ranks.

  And now, thanks to Baron Rothschild’s infusion of an estimated $50 million (in nineteenth-century dollars), modern villages with good schools, synagogues, roads, and solidly built stone houses were rising up around them. Now they could keep the observances of their faith without fear even as they built a future for their children. Now there was no ghetto to confine them and they knew the heady freedom of living in the
ir own land.

  It was in this new village of Zichron Ya’akov that Sarah came of age and blossomed. From childhood, she had early taken on the intense and outgoing personalities of two of her brothers, Aaron and Alexander. The two other brothers, Zvi and Shmuel, and the baby sister Rivka, born in 1892, tended to be more passive and content. But not Sarah. She was taller than most girls of the village and well aware of her robust, athletic figure. She had an easy laugh and loved to dance. But her eyes mirrored the intensity and impatience of Aaron and Alexander.

  In many respects, Sarah’s evolution from what she might have been had the family stayed in Romania to what she was becoming mirrored the development of Zichron Ya’akov. They both kept a firm footing in the traditions of Judaism and the family but both expanded and flowered as the land around them was tamed and restored to its Biblical paradise. Both were open, modern, and expansive.

  She remained a dutiful and affectionate daughter all her life even as she advanced into modern times. She became the best seamstress in the village and fashioned dresses for herself and others that were skillful copies of the fashions that appeared in the latest European magazines. But there was a wild curiosity that drove Sarah. At twelve she overcame her father’s first refusal for a horse of her own. Mounted on Tayar, she prowled the hills and caves in the Carmel range that was the boundary between the coastal villages and the stark Gaza desert beyond the hills. She became a skilled horsewoman and a crack pistol shot, and that reputation along with her remarkable fiery hair earned a wary respect among the more remote Arab villagers who might have interfered with her. She also showed an early talent for easily absorbing languages, at first the often confusing dialects of Arabic that marked the different sects of local Arabs and those of the Bedouin tribesmen who lurked on the Gaza desert wastes on the other side of the Carmel mountain range. It was a talent that she shared with her older brothers Aaron and Alexander.

  That same wanderlust drove Sarah to learn apace with her eldest brother Aaron’s rapidly expanding library, which emphasized his studies in geology and botany, but also included texts on philosophy and politics. Education of girls in the schools sponsored by Baron de Rothschild came to an end at age twelve and that was certainly enough for Rivka. But Sarah pushed on, becoming an avid reader of Aaron’s books in French and German, while becoming fluent in Hebrew and Turkish.

  By the time she was fifteen she had become Aaron’s secretary and surrogate representative in local farming matters when he was away from Zichron Ya’akov. Aaron was on the move by then and on the verge of becoming an international celebrity. Sarah too was poised for the first steps on the march in her dramatic transformation from what she was to what she has become today.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Friends in America

  1905–1910

  Aaron Aaronsohn (1876–1919)

  Sarah’s eldest brother, Aaron Aaronsohn, was a force of nature. Tall, broad-shouldered, and muscular, Aaron had taken his father’s entrepreneurial ambition and discipline to another level even as a boy. He had been six years old when the family moved to Palestine. Early on he had been forced into the backbreaking work of older men as they dug the unyielding soil of their new land in a battle simply to survive.

  But more than the imposing figure of a man that he became, many observers—including the teachers Baron de Rothschild hired for his village schools—were awed by the fierce intellectual curiosity that pushed Aaron to constantly search the land of Palestine and its flora for ways to improve it, to return it to the proverbial land of milk and honey that Hebrew texts had described. He could be peremptory and brusque with those who did not think as quickly as he, but even those he annoyed recognized his zeal.

  Aaron had achieved astonishing progress as a self-taught prodigy in botany, geology, and hydrology—as well as becoming a fluent writer in French and German. The baron concluded from school reports that the lad needed more advanced studies back in Europe, where studies of Middle Eastern agriculture were a hot topic of research at many important universities. So while he was barely in his twenties, Aaron was brought to France from Palestine and sponsored by the baron at a leading agricultural college in Grignon. There Aaron quickly perfected both his French and German pronunciations and began corresponding with crop scientists at the leading institutes in Germany. All these senior academics warmed to the young man’s intelligence and fervor and were free with their mentoring.

  One motive for such generosity was simple: a need for bread. Millions in Europe and the United States had abandoned farm life for big cities and industrial jobs that were scarcely less rigorous. But now someone must feed them, and the world’s wheat crops had hit a plateau of productivity. Traditional breadbasket lands were over-farmed and the varieties of wheat had atrophied somewhat. New techniques were needed and scientists began to study the “dry farming” traditions of Near Eastern crops where heat was intense and water scarce. The search also was on for a genetically untainted wheat—an “Ur-wheat”—that might revive the genetic productivity of crops.

  Aaron sent a steady stream of books and letters back to Zichron Ya’akov chronicling his progress and his realization that there could be just such a historic wheat in Palestine—and that he was the one who could find it. To do that, however, he first had to repay his sponsor by returning to Palestine as a kind of project manager as the baron’s network of model villages was spreading.

  For Sarah, Aaron, and the rest of the Aaronsohns this was a golden time. Of all the baron’s villages, Zichron Ya’akov was the most successful. While no one was rich, the remaining settlers were at last free of the fear of starvation, crops were abundant, and the village itself began to attract new arrivals. They had their own doctor living there, a two-story synagogue, and a new European-style hotel proved a popular stop for travelers on the coastal road. The Aaronsohns were prosperous enough to own their own carriage (and employ an Arab driver) for their frequent trips to Haifa twenty miles to the north for vineyard business or pleasure.

  When Aaron was home he and his friends would race their horses and meet up with young friends who competed with them in various contests, including excursions into the desert where they kept an eye on the Bedouin who prowled about for stray livestock to pilfer.

  Sarah too enjoyed the new freedom. At village dances her gay laughter and love of dancing drew attentive suitors from nearby villages as well as the boys she had grown up with in Zichron. She was popular with other girls as well, all the more so when she got one of the first sewing machines. Like all her friends, Sarah avidly read the popular magazines available from Europe. The new publishing technique of halftone photographs featured celebrities wearing the latest Paris fashions, and Sarah became adept at copying the latest trends in couture for herself and others.

  But while she was as adept at the innocent flirting as any young person, no one could penetrate that reserve that kept all Aaronsohns aloof from others. The Aaronsohns’ sense of separation would have troubling—if unintended—consequences. As a roving consultant throughout the region where Rothschild villages were being established, Aaron could not help but clash with the French technicians and managers who worked directly for the baron.

  For the French, who were used to having dictatorial powers during their colonial careers, this young upstart Jew became an annoyance and then a threat to their control over the development of the villages and their agriculture. Also, not a few of the managers were used to siphoning off funds through kickbacks from local suppliers. Perhaps just as important, Aaron never appreciated that the supervisors themselves were operating under micromanaged orders from the baron himself. Rothschild understandably reasoned that since it was his money, he should have final say.

  When Aaron failed to convince village overseers to do as he demanded, he angered them further by writing peremptory letters directly to Rothschild. When charges of incompetence failed to move the baron, Aaron alleged corruption and conflicts of interest. While there is evidence that some of his accusat
ions may have been well founded, the baron found Aaron’s tone insulting and, finally, after sending him a letter of rebuke for his insolence and ingratitude, Aaron resigned his post and returned to Zichron Ya’akov free to devote all his time to the search for the “mother of all wheat.”

  When he returned to Zichron Ya’akov in early 1905, Aaron immediately set out on his search. He prowled the hills and valleys in the Carmel range as far as the desert borders, examining cultivated fields and wild flora in canyon crevasses. At night he found shelter in the caves that had been refuges since Biblical times. Sarah, now fifteen and a skilled horsewoman, often followed him bringing water and supplies, tracking him and fending off threats from Arab youths and Bedouin livestock poachers.

  New York Times, October 26, 1906

  Then in the spring of 1906 he spotted in an orchard in the Galilee a single stalk of what he identified as genetically historic wild wheat. Spurred by that fragile discovery he pushed on to Mount Herman, where a survey of its western slope proved fruitless. As an afterthought, Aaron tried the eastern slope of the mountain and came upon an entire field of the wild wheat.

  Aaron’s reports and samples were quickly sent to his mentors in Berlin and caused a sensation. His discovery ignited both controversy and celebrity for a number of reasons. He had raised the prospect of genetically combining the hardier “Ur-wheat” (the press quickly dubbed it “the mother of all wheat”) with the more traditional species to create a new productive source of sustenance. At the same time, Aaron’s discovery had played into the heated argument among anthropologists about where the “cradle of civilization” had its origins.