First Israelis
IT looks as if the legends concerning modern Israel are going to be as numerous as those about the Davidic Kingdom or as those that surround the Second Hebrew Commonwealth of the Mac- cabees. Together with that of Enso Sereni in this world war, that of Sarah Aaronsohn in the first is perhaps the most important. And in The Nili Spies Miss Engle has written not merely the bio- graphy of a person but the history of a family. Sarah Aaronsohn and her elder brother, Aaron, were born in Palestine in the Eighties and Nineties. Although their parents were Europeans, they and the few thousand Jewish pioneers in Palestine at that time were Turkish subjects. The most interest- ing, and indeed exciting, part of this book is not the exploits of a group of courageous and bril- liant soldiers of fortune on behalf of the British against the Ottoman Turks but Miss Engle's por- trait of the lives of the Aaronsohn children and their friends, who in growing to manhood and womanhood, learning to farm and to speak Hebrew at the same time, helped to lay the foundations of a modern liberal republic in the swamps of a neglected and desolate province of the Ottoman Empire. It reminds one constantly of Huckleberry Finn.
As seen in retrospect, the decision that Aaron Aaronsohn and Absalom Feinberg made in 1914, to side with the Allies against the Protecting Power against the wishes of the leaders of the small and scattered Jewish colonies in Palestine, seems a simple and wellnigh inevitable one. But this was in the days before the Balfour Declara- tion, the defeat of Turkey and large Jewish immigration into Palestine. At this date Ger- many contained the largest, the most settled and prosperous, and the most intelligent Jewry in the world, and Russia, an allied nation, was respon- sible for the worst pogroms in history. If their activities were discovered, if they got caught or if the Central Powers were not defeated, every- thing they and the other Hebrew pioneers had given their lives for would be destroyed. And at first the British were not at all helpful. Spies who worked for money were easy to understand. But these young people, subjects of an enemy power, who were risking their lives, not for England, but for a nation that existed only on the map of their own hearts, seemed not unnaturally suspicious to a committee of military bureaucrats.
When she was captured by the Turks, Sarah committed suicide rather than betray her comrades and British military secrets. T. E. Lawrence never denied the rumour that he was in love with her, although they never met. It is quite safe to place her, with Ruth, Rachel and the Mother of the Maccabees, amongst the great Jewish women of human history. Not bad for a girl who died before she was twenty-five.
PAUL, 'POITS
Previous page
