Chapter 5
Each colony is now governed by an elective council of inhabitants, with committees for education, police, and the arbitration of disputes, and they have organised co-operative unions which make them independent of middlemen in the disposal of their produce. Their production has rapidly risen in quantity and value, through the industry and intelligence of the average Jewish settler, assisted latterly by an Agricultural Experiment Station at Atlit, near Haifa, which improves the varieties of indigenous crops and acclimatises others[44]. There is a "Palestine Land Development Company" which buys land in big estates and resells it in small lots to individual settlers, and an "Anglo-Palestine Bank" which makes advances to the new settlers when they take up their holdings. As a result of this enlightened policy the number of colonies has risen to about forty, with 15,000 inhabitants in all and 110,000 acres of land, and these figures do not do full justice to the importance of the colonising movement. The 15,000 Jewish agriculturists are only 12-1/2 per cent. of the Jewish population in Palestine, and 2 per cent., of the total population of the country; but they are the most active, intelligent element, and the only element which is rapidly increasing. Again, the land they own is only 2 per cent. of the total area of Palestine; but it is between 8 and 14 per cent. of the area under cultivation, and there are vast uncultivated tracts which the Jews can and will reclaim, as their numbers grow--both by further colonisation and by natural increase, for the first generation of colonists have already proved their ability to multiply in the Promised Land. Under this new Jewish husbandry Palestine has begun to recover its ancient prosperity. The Jews have sunk artesian wells, built dams for water storage, fought down malaria by drainage and eucalyptus planting, and laid out many miles of roads. In 1890 an acre of irrigable land at Petach-Tikweh, the earliest colony, was worth £3 12s., in 1914, £36, and the annual trade of Jaffa rose from £760,000 to £2,080,000 between 1904 and 1912. "The impetus to agriculture is benefiting the whole economic life of the country," wrote the German Vice-Counsul at Jaffa in his report for 1912, and there is no fear that, as immigration increases, the Arab element will be crowded to the wall. There are still only two Jewish colonies beyond Jordan, where the Hauran--under the Roman Empire a corn-land with a dozen cities--has been opened up by the railway and is waiting again for the plough.
But will immigration continue now that the Jew of the Pale has been turned at a stroke into the free citizen of a democratic country? Probably it will actually increase, for the Pale has been ravaged as well as liberated during the war, and the Jews of Germany have based an ingenious policy on this prospect, which is expounded thus by Dr. Davis-Trietsch of Berlin[45]:
"According to the most recent statistics about 12,900,000 out of the 14,300,000 Jews in the world speak German or Yiddish (_jüdisch-deutsch_) as their mother-tongue.... But its language, cultural orientation, and business relations the Jewish element from Eastern Europe" (the Pale) "is an asset to German influence.... In a certain sense the Jews are a Near Eastern element in Germany and a German element in Turkey."
Germany may not relish her kinship with these lost Teutonic tribes, but Dr. Davis-Trietsch makes a satirical exposure of such scruples:
"It used to be a stock argument against the Jews that 'all nations' regarded them with equal hostility, but the War has brought upon the Germans such a superabundance of almost universal execration that the question which is the most despised of all nations--if one goes, not by justice and equity, but by the violence and extensiveness of the prejudice--might well now be altered to the Germans' disadvantage.
"In this unenviable competition for the prize of hate, Turkey, too, has a word to say, for the unspeakable Turk' is a rhetorical commonplace of English politics."
Having thus isolated the Jews from humanity and pilloried them with the German and the Turk, the writer expounds their function in the Turco-German system:
"Hitherto Germany has bothered herself very little about the Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe. People in Germany hardly realised that, through the annual exodus of about 100,000 German-speaking Jews to the United States and England, the empire of the English language and the economic system that goes with it is being enlarged, while a German asset is being proportionately depreciated....
"The War found the Jewry of Eastern Europe in process of being uprooted, and has enormously accelerated the catastrophe. Galicia and the western provinces of Russia, which between them contain many more than half the Jews in the world, have suffered more from the War than any other region. Jewish homes have been broken up by hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt whatever that, as a result of the War, there will be an emigration of East European Jews on an unprecedented scale....
"The disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany.... It will no longer do simply to close the German frontiers to them, and in view of the difficulties which would result from a wholesale migration of Eastern Jews into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad to find a way out in the emigration of these Jews to Turkey--a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three parties concerned...."
And from this he passes to a wider vision:
"The German-speaking Jews abroad are a kind of German-speaking province which is well worth cultivation. Nine-tenths of the Jewish world speak German, and a good part of the remainder live in the Islamic world, which is Germany's friend, so that there are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry."
By this exploitation of aversions, Dr. Trietsch expects to deposit the Jews of the Pale over Western Asia as "culture-manure" for a German harvest; and if the Jewish migration to Palestine had remained nothing more than a stream of refugees, he might possibly have succeeded in his purpose. But in the last twenty years this Jewish movement has become a positive thing--no longer a flight from the Pale but a remembrance of Zion--and Zionism has already challenged and defeated the policy which Dr. Trietsch represents. "The object of Zionism," it was announced in the _Basle Programme_, drawn up by the first Zionist Congress in 1897, "is to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine." For the Zionists Jewry is a nation, and to become like other nations it needs its Motherland. In the Jewish colonies in Palestine they see not merely a successful social enterprise but the visible symbol of a body politic. The foundation of a national university in Jerusalem is as ultimate a goal for them as the economic development of the land, and their greatest achievement has been the revival of Hebrew as the living language of the Palestinian Jews. It was this that brought them into conflict with the Germanising tendency. In 1907 a secondary school was successfully started at Jaffa, by the initiative of Jewish teachers in Palestine, with Hebrew as the language of instruction; but in 1914, when a Jewish Polytechnic was founded at Haifa, the German-Jewish _Hilfsverein_, which had taken a leading part, refused to follow this precedent, and insisted on certain subjects being taught in German, not only in the Polytechnic, but in the _Hilfsverein's_ other schools. The result was a secession of pupils and teachers. Purely Hebrew schools were opened; the Zionist organisation gave official support; and the Germanising party was compelled to accept a compromise which was in effect a victory for the Hebrew language.
Dr. Trietsch himself accepts this settlement, but does not abandon his idea:
"It was certainly impossible to expect the Spanish and Arabic-speaking Jews[46] to submit in their own Jewish country to the hegemony of the German language.... Only Hebrew could become the common vernacular language of the scattered fragments of Jewry drifting back to Palestine from all the countries of the world. But ... in addition to Hebrew, to which they are more and more inclined, the Jews must have a world-language _(Weltsprache),_ and this can only be German."
Anyone acquainted with the language-ordinances of Central Europe will feel that this suggestion veils a threat. What has been happening in Palestine during the War? Dr. Trietsch informs us that the Ottoman Government has been proceeding with the "naturalisation" of the Palestinian Jews, and that the "local execution of this measure has not been effected without disturbances which are beyond the province of this pamphlet." One significant consequence was the appearance in Egypt of Palestinian refugees, who raised a Zion mule corps there and fought through the Gallipoli campaign. What is the outlook for Palestine after the War? If the Ottoman pretension survives, the menace from Turkish Nationalism[47] and German resentment[48] is grave. But if Turk and German go, there are Zionists who would like to see Palestine a British Protectorate, with the prospect of growing into a British Dominion. Certainly, if the Jewish colonies are to make progress, they must be relieved of keeping their own police, building their own roads, and the other burdens that fall on them under Ottoman government, and this can only be secured by a better public administration. As for the British side of the question, we may consult Dr. Trietsch.
"There are possibilities," he urges, "in a German protectorate over the Jews as well as over Islam. Smaller national units than the 14 1-3 million Jews have been able to do Germany vital injury or service, and, while the Jews have no national state, their dispersion over the whole world, their high standard of culture, and their peculiar abilities lend them a weight that is worth more in the balance than many larger national masses which occupy a compact area of their own."
Other Powers than Germany may take these possibilities to heart.
Here, then, are peoples risen from the past to do what the Turks cannot and the Germans will not in Western Asia. There is much to be done--reform of justice, to obtain legal release from the Capitulations; reform in the assessment and collection of the agricultural tithes, which have been denounced for a century by every student of Ottoman administration; agrarian reform, to save peasant proprietorship, which in Syria, at any rate, is seriously in danger; genuine development of economic resources; unsectarian and non-nationalistic advancement of education. But the Jews, Syrians, and Armenians are equal to their task, and, with the aid of the foreign nations on whom they can count, they will certainly accomplish it. The future of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia is thus assured; but there are other countries--once as fertile, prosperous, and populous as they--which have lost not only their wealth but their inhabitants under the Ottoman domination. These countries have not the life left in them to reclaim themselves, and must look abroad for reconstruction.
If you cross the Euphrates by the bridge that carries the Bagdad Railway, you enter a vast landscape of steppes as virgin to the eye as any prairie across the Mississippi. Only the _tells_ (mounds) with which it is studded witness to the density of its ancient population--for Northern Mesopotamia was once so populous and full of riches that Rome and the rulers of Iran fought seven centuries for its possession, till the Arabs conquered it from both.
The railway has now reached Nisibin, the Roman frontier fortress heroically defended and ceded in bitterness of heart, and runs past Dara, which the Persians never took. Westward lies Urfa--named Edessa by Alexander's men after their Macedonian city of running waters[49]; later the seat of a Christian Syriac culture whose missionaries were heard in China and Travancore; still famous, under Arab dominion, for its Veronica and 300 churches; and restored for a moment to Christendom as the capital of a Crusader principality, till the Mongols trampled it into oblivion and the Osmanlis made it a name for butchery.
From Urfa to Nisibin there can be fields again. The climate has not changed, and wherever the Bedawi pitches his tents and scratches the ground there is proof of the old fertility. Only anarchy has banished cultivation; for, since the Ottoman pretension was established over the land, it has been the battleground of brigand tribes--Kurds from the hills and Arabs from the desert, skirmishing or herding their flocks, making or breaking alliance, but always robbing any tiller of the land of the fruits of his labour.
"If once," Dr. Rohrbach prophesies, "the peasant population were sure of its life and property, it would joyfully expand, push out into the desert, and bring new land under the plough; in a few years the villages would spring up, not by dozens, but by hundreds."
At present cultivation is confined to the Armenian foot-hills--an uncertain arc of green from Aleppo to Mosul. But the railway strikes boldly into the deserted middle of the land, giving the arc a chord, and when Turco-German strategic interests no longer debar it from being linked up, through Aleppo, with a Syrian port, it will be the really valuable section of the Bagdad system. The railway is the only capital enterprise that Northern Mesopotamia requires, for there is rain sufficient for the crops without artificial irrigation. Reservoirs of population are the need. The Kurds who come for winter pasture may be induced to stay--already they have been settling down in the western districts, and have gained a reputation for industry; the Bedawin, more fickle husbandmen, may settle southward along the Euphrates, and in time there will be a surplus of peasantry from Armenia and Syria. These will add field to field, but unless some stronger stream of immigration is led into the land, it will take many generations to recover its ancient prosperity; for in the ninth century A.D. Northern Mesopotamia paid Harun-al-Rashid as great a revenue as Egypt, and its cotton commanded the market of the world[50].
Southern Mesopotamia--the Irak of the Arabs and Babylonia of the Greeks--lies desolate like the North, but is a contrast to it in every other respect. Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach grudgingly admits[51] that down the Tigris to Basra, and not upstream to Alexandretta, is the natural channel for its trade. It gets nothing from the Mediterranean, neither trade nor rain, and every drop of water for cultivation must be led out of the rivers; but the rivers in their natural state are worse than the drought. Their discharge is extremely variable--about eight times as great in April as in October; they are always silting up their beds and scooping out others; and when there are no men to interfere they leave half the country a desert and make the other half a swamp. Yet the soil, when justly watered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Euphrates have deposited in what was originally the head of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it the _Sawâd_ or Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces--at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with the _Sawâd_ in fertility, but the _Sawâd_ does not so readily yield up its wealth. To become something better than a wilderness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the grand scale and a mighty population--immense forces working for immense returns. In a strangely different environment it anticipated our modern rhythm of life by four thousand years, and then went back to desolation five centuries before Industrialism (which may repeople it) began.
The _Sawâd_ was first reclaimed by men who had already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and a mature religion--less civilised men would never have attempted the task. These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on _tells_ heaped up above flood-level, each _tell_ a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the Arabian plateau. Sargon of Akkad and Naram Sin ruled the whole _Sawâd_ as early as 2500 B.C.; Hammurabi, in 1900, already ruled it from Babylon; and the capital has never shifted more than sixty miles since then. Babylon on the Euphrates and Bagdad on the Tigris are the alternative points from which the _Sawâd_ can be controlled. Just above them the first irrigation canals branch off from the rivers, and between them the rivers approach within thirty-five miles of each other. It is the point of vantage for government and engineering.
Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and the _Sawâd_ became a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power--Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs--and breathing out the works of man--grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion.
"The land," writes Herodotus[52], who saw it in its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and brought to harvest by water from the river--not, as in Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, but by human labour and _shadufs_[53] For Babylonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the largest of which is navigable. It is far the best corn-land of all the countries I know. There is no attempt at arboriculture--figs or vines or olives--but it is such superb corn-land that the average yield is two-hundredfold, and three-hundredfold in the best years. The wheat and barley there are a good four inches broad in the blade, and millet and sesame grow as big as trees--but I will not state the dimensions I have ascertained, because I know that, for anyone who has not visited Babylonia and witnessed these facts about the crops for himself, they would be altogether beyond belief."
Harnessed in the irrigation channels, the Tigris and Euphrates had become as mighty forces of production as the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtse and the Hoang-Ho.
"This," Herodotus adds[54], "is the best demonstration I can give of the wealth of the Babylonians: All the lands ruled by the King of Persia are assessed, in addition to their taxes in money, for the maintenance of the King's household and army in kind. Under this assessment the King is maintained for four months out of the twelve by Babylonia, and for the remaining eight by the rest of Asia together, so that in wealth the Assyrian province is equivalent to a third of all Asia."
The "Asia" over which the Achaemenids ruled included Russian Central Asia and Egypt as well as modern Turkey and Persia, and Egypt, under the same assessment, merely maintained the local Persian garrison[55]. Its money contribution was inferior too--700 talents as compared with Assyria's 1,000; and though these figures may not be conclusive, because the Persian "province of Assyria" probably extended over the northern steppes as well as the _Sawâd_, it is certain that under the Arab Caliphate, when Irak and Egypt were provinces of one empire for the second time in history, Irak by itself paid 135 million _dirhems_ (francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and Egypt no more than 65 million, so that a thousand years ago the productiveness of the _Sawâd_ was more than double that of the Nile.
Another measure of the land's capacity is the greatness of its cities. Herodotus gives statistics[56] of Babylon in the fifth century B.C.--walls 300 feet high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three- and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad straight streets intersecting one another at regular intervals, at right angles or parallel to the Euphrates. Any one who reads Herodotus' description of Babylon or Ibn Serapion's of Bagdad, and considers that these vast urban masses were merely centres of collection and distribution for the open country, can infer the density of population and intensity of cultivation over the face of the _Sawâd_. When the Caliph Omar conquered Irak from the Persians in the middle of the seventh century A.D., and took an inventory of what he had acquired, he found that there were 5,000,000 hectares[57] of land under cultivation, and that the poll-tax was paid by 550,000 householders, which implies a total population, in town and country, of more than 5,000,000 souls, where a bare million and a half maintains itself to-day in city alleys and nomads' tents.
And in Omar's time the _Sawâd_ was no longer at its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former (and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the Amara district a desert. The Persian Government, locked in a suicidal struggle with Rome, was powerless to make good the damage, and the shock of the Arab invasion made it irreparable[58]. Under the Abbasid Caliphs of Bagdad the rest of the country preserved its prosperity, but in the thirteenth century Hulaku the Mongol finished the work of the floods, and under Ottoman dominion the _Sawâd_ has not recovered.
Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir William Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his final conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at Bagdad in 1911[59].
"The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hectares.... All this land is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. The presence of 15 per cent. lime in the soil renders reclamation very easy compared with similar work in the dense clays of Egypt. One is never far away from the giant banks of old canals and the ruins of ancient towns."