Monday, March 16, 2015
Elder of ZiyonI cannot leave this place, however, without a word or two more. I had spent a long evening with my Jewish friends. The old rabbi talked to me of their prospects and condition, and told me how he had left his country in Europe many years before, and come with his wife and children to lay their bones in the Holy Land. He was now eighty years old; and for thirty years, he said, he had lived with the sword suspended over his head; had been reviled, buffeted, and spit upon; and, though sometimes enjoying a respite from persecution, he never knew at what moment the bloodhounds might not be let loose upon him ; that, since the country had been wrested from the sultan by the Pacha of Egypt, they had been comparatively safe and tranquil; though some idea may be formed of this comparative security from the fact that, during the revolution two years before, when Ibrahim Pacha, after having been pent up several months in Jerusalem, burst out like a roaring lion, the first place upon which his wrath descended was the unhappy Hebron ; and while their guilty brethren were sometimes spared, the unhappy Jews, never offending but always suffering, received the full weight of Arab vengeance. Their houses were ransacked and plundered; their gold and silver, and all things valuable, carried away; and their wives and daughters violated before their eyes by a brutal soldiery.This is the Hebron massacre of 1834. Unlike 1929, it was not the Jews' neighbors in Hebron who preformed the massacre this time but the Egyptians - even though the Jews had not done anything against them. Some say that the Jews were assured of their safety, which is why they didn't flee the oncoming soldiers as their Muslim neighbors did.
7 Jewish men were murdered and 5 Jewish girls raped before being killed.
The narrative shows that the Jews felt themselves to be on the lowest rung of the social ladder, always in danger from whatever event happens.
