Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/19

Rh making some such Noah’s Ark as this seem necessary, if aught is to survive the banal deluge.

The region from which Mr Hanauer has drawn these stories is the hill-country between Bethel on the north and Hebron in the south. It is holy land for the Mohammedan and the Jew hardly less than for the Christian, and its population comprises all three branches of that monotheistic faith, whose root is in the God of Abraham. The Moslems, who are the dominant class, are the offspring of the Arab conquerors and of such of the conquered as espoused El Islâm; the Christians, the descendants of those old inhabitants of Syria, subjects of the Byzantine Empire, who at the conquest preferred their religion to worldly advancement. Their stories against one another, though abounding in sly hits, breathe as a rule the utmost good nature. Only in the Jewish legends one detects a bitterness which, in view of the history of their race, is pardonable. In the Middle Ages there existed in Jerusalem and Hebron, as in the cities of Europe, small despised communities of Jews, strictly confined to one quarter, the gates of which were locked at night. To these were added some three hundred years ago a company of Spanish Jews (Sephardim), fleeing hither from the Inquisition with their wives and families; who still at this day form a separate group and use among themselves an antiquated kind of Spanish which they pronounce oddly.