The Human Touch

When the average Jew goes abroad to the colorful and the picturesque parts of the earth, he goes chiefly on the main-travelled tourists’ roads. He does not seek out synagogues and ghettos to recall him to the sources of his ancestry. This average Jew feels at ease when he learns there are no Jews about; no ghetto Jews and no ghetto. Perhaps to the Gentile tourist, synagogues and ghettos constitute part of the picturesqueness of the foreign scene, but to many of the tourist Jews such sights are reminders of the social blot on the escutcheon. There are assimilated Jews who are as eager to be reminded of their bearded, corkscrew-lock wearing rabbi ancestors as a Nazi official is eager to have it known that his grandmother was a Jewess. I recall what a sense of relief the Jews in a certain tourist group felt when, at Algiers, the guide informed them that the old ghetto had been wiped away and the Jews who had once resided there had been absorbed into the general French citizenry. Even if he was wrong he was comforting.

There is, however, another type of Jewish traveller who is always in quest of his youth, so to speak, or, rather, of the youth of his race. Wherever he goes he seeks Jews, and the more old-fashioned the better; and Jewish scenes, streets and synagogues and cemeteries. He may be a journalist, but, more often, he is the artist, seeking to record on paper the historic and the picturesque aspects of his far-flung people. Among these artists are Saul Raskin and Lionel Reiss, both of whom have recorded, in lithograph, etching, water color and oil, Jewish places and Jewish types, Palestine being their common terrain. Reiss has done many pictures of the Jew throughout Europe as well as in Palestine. I do not mean that these are the only Jewish artists who have sought to tell the story of dispersed Jewry in line and tone, but they are fairly typical.

AN UNUSUAL TOURIST

Ary Stillman is a contradiction to both these types. He is a tourist, albeit not in the conventional sense, who deliberately seeks out the Jewish places, the Jewish type, in remote parts of the world, and he is a painter who refrains from recording the Jewish sights and types seen. The Jewish aspects of the world are for his private delectation.

Two years ago, during a self-conducted tour, he visited the cities of Spain and Northern Africa in which Jews have left some token of their architecture and their faith. He visited the synagogues and the Talmud Torahs in every large town in those places, and he presents the conclusion that you can virtually guess the epoch in which each synagogue was built by the architectural impression it makes. Where the synagogue is large, spacious and elegant, the epoch in which it was built was one of freedom, if not mere toleration. In synagogues where the building material is poor and the quarters cramped, you are safe in concluding, according to Mr. Stillman, that the epoch, for Jews, was one of fear and uncertainly.

The Synagogue of Samuel Levi in Toledo is an example of the first, while the synagogue in the same city which became the Church of Santa Maria La Blanca may be taken as an example of architectural protective coloration being a synagogue which look more Moorish than Jewish. In the synagogues of Morocco, he tells me, the architecture testifies to the desire of the worshippers to find a place of escape, of shelter.

A PURE RACIAL TYPE

Throughout Northern Africa, but mainly in the cities of Spanish Morocco, the visitors will see the descendants of Jews who fled the Inquisition-men and women who show in their faces that they are even purer racially than the Jews of Palestine. Many of them speak Arabic, the Arabic of their ancestors. He found many of these Jews in the border town of Ouazan, which is strictly French territory but is too close to the border of Spanish Morocco not to show a trace of Iberian influence. Eleven kilometers from the city there is a Jewish cemetery, a very ancient one, wherein lies buried Reb Amram, a mystic saint of the Middle Ages.

Now every Lag B’omer, at Meron, near Safed, in Palestine, Jews gather together to rejoice in the blessed memory of Rabbi Simeon Ben Yohai. Now on that day there are gathered at the cemetery outside Ouazan hundreds of Jews from all over Northern Africa to do honor to the memory of their saint, but for Reb Amram the celebration continues for a week, which may not be orthodox.

The bonfire, which is started at the beginning of the festivities and is kept going for the whole week, is the center of the celebration. Around it gather the rich, who come to do the mitzvahs, and the poor, who come to receive them. The wealthy come with their servants, their tents and their flocks of sheep and, of course, with alms for the poor. The beggars and the crippled come with their crutches and with the hope that they will leave the cemetery cured, for Reb Amram’s burial place has the repute, in Northern Africa, of a Jewish Cathedral of Lourdes. Mr. Stillman was present at the ceremonies for three days; he was struck chiefly by the fact that these Jews looked more purely Jewish than any strain of Jews he had seen anywhere, Palestine not excepted.

SYNAGOGUE OF MAIMONIDES

Perhaps the experience that gave Mr. Stillman his most satisfying Jewish thrill was his visit in Cordoba, where he walked the streets that once had been the Jewish quarter and visited the synagogue where Maimonides had prayed. It is a small, intimate synagogue, hidden in a corner, as it were, and hidden so well, or considered of so little importance that it escaped desecration by the mob, or conversion into a church by the authorities who used to do such things so many years ago that the bones of saints are now buried in the crypts of what were once synagogues.

The Republican government of Spain has recently turned over the synagogue of Maimonides to the care of the Jews of Morocco as a museum of Jewish antiquities, and from a representative of the Alliance Israelite in Tetuan, Mr. Stillman learned that a great effort is being made to acquire books and manuscripts of the period not destroyed by the flames of the Inquisition.

In the Ghetto of Fez, Mr. Stillman was thrilled afresh, for in the very quarter in which it was written he read, albeit in French, the “Guide to the Perplexed” which Maimonides had written and on which rests the greater part of his claim to fame, not overlooking the Rambam’s Bible commentary. On the whole, Mr. Stillman found Fez not attractive, “Jewishly,” most of the synagogues in the Mellah, or ghetto, being hole-in-the-corner affairs. The young Jews of Fez are deeply devoted to France, speak French in preference to the Arabic of their elders and hope at some time to be able to make their homes in the “mother” land.

Mr. Stillman learned of a curious case of the dead governing the living. When the French took possession of what is now French Morocco and began rebuilding the towns, they selected as the site for the main square of Fez the Jewish cemetery. On that square an entrepreneur built a hotel and bath house, neither of which has ever been used by a single good Jew because there is a legend that both hotel and bath house are haunted by the spirits of the dead. And there is nothing the owner can do to dispel that legend.

Mr. Stillman’s ghetto and synagogue tour included the old Jewish quarter of Frankfort-au-Main where he spent four days of the Rosh-Hoshonah-Yom Kippur week of two years ago; the old synagogue at Prague, where the legend of the Golem originated and in which still broods the spirit of the Middle Ages; and the old quarter and synagogues of Amsterdam, where he almost had to pinch himself to realize that he was not living in the time of Spinoza and Rembrandt.