Page:Folk-lore of the Holy Land.djvu/20

xviii Another company of old time immigrants, whose descendants have preserved individuality, were the Mughâribeh (sing. Mughrabi) or Moorish Jews. Pure Orientals in dress, speech and character, they have earned a bad name in the land as charlatans, many of them being professed wizards and conjurers. But a vast majority of the large and growing Jewish population are immigrants of the last fifty years, borne to Palestine on the waves of the Zionist movement, and looking about them surlily, with foreign eyes. Coming from the towns of East and Central Europe, the agricultural life expected of them is as strange as the country, and at first hostile. The Jew is now a foreigner in the Holy Land; and the standpoint and posture of his ancestors of the time of Christ to-day is found with the Moslem, who also claims descent from Abraham.

About one-third of the matter here presented has been published in America in another version, and the chapters on Animal and Plant-lore were originally contributed to the Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement, from which they are reprinted by permission of the committee. Stories spread fast and far in the East, and are soon localised (I have found a considerable number of these current among the people of Lower Egypt), and it may well