"Rather than interpreting The Innocents Abroad through the satirical exaggerated lens which Twain was known for, his account of the Holy Land is taken as an accurate representation of Palestine, one that has been excessively appropriated by the Zionist movement while at the same time rejected by Palestinians." (MarkTwainStudies.com)
It's standard in aliyah literature to print American author Mark Twain's depiction (Innocents Abroad) of a bleak Palestine during his visit here. See for example this manipulative summary at Zionist.org. "Twain’s descriptions directly contradict modern claims that pre-20th-century Palestine was a thriving Arab nation. Instead, he encountered a nearly abandoned landscape, with few inhabitants, little agriculture, and widespread neglect."
His account is so glorious to aliyaniks because it seems to fit in with the idea, that is pushed relentlessly, that geulah has come, and the land that was empty and desolate of everything is now booming. This guilts you into making aliyah which in the Modern Orthodox world is a greater deed than getting the 10 commandments from the Almighty on Har Sinai.
See this example from the JPost. The Post article even claims that Twain's fame as an author came about because of this article. Of course, everything is because of Israel: "At his peak, Mark Twain was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. What few realize is that it was an unlikely trip to the Holy Land that established his fame as an author."
Is that true? Actually "First Notable Work: Mark Twain gained initial recognition with the publication of 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' in 1865. This humorous short story was published in the New York Saturday Press and brought him national attention." (Wikipedia) "Innocents Abroad" only solidified his fame. So as usual, we are not getting the truth.
And what's the truth about Twain's account? The video posted here talks about it. It tells us that Twain talked sardonically and acerbically about many things and he exaggerated too. His articles were read by an American audience whose egos would be flattered by his disgust for everything that wasn't American. He also didn't completely blast the Holy Land and speak of it as empty of people in his two week visit.
Not that he issues complements to the Arabs he encountered. The culture clash with 19th century (Victorian) St. Louis and San Francisco is too vast for that. But he certainly doesn't talk of a "land with no people..."
For example, read his depiction of Magdala, a village 3 miles North of Tiberias:
"Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy--just the style of cities that have adorned the country since Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded. The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect."
"We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls of Tiberias. We went into the town before nightfall and looked at its people--we cared nothing about its houses. Its people are best examined at a distance. They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes. Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias. The young women wear their dower strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or inherited. Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by fortune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right--worth, well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars and a half. But such cases are rare. When you come across one of these, she naturally puts on airs. She will not ask for bucksheesh. She will not even permit of undue familiarity. She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all. Some people can not stand prosperity. They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty."
"As we trotted across the Plain of Jezreel, we met half a dozen Digger Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like a pack of hopeless lunatics."
"We climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria, where the woman may have hailed from who conversed with Christ at Jacob's Well, and from whence, no doubt, came also the celebrated Good Samaritan.... The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious, and stoned two parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago who brought about the difficulty by showing their revolvers when they did not intend to use them..."
"Shechem is distinguished as one of the residences of the patriarch Jacob, and as the seat of those tribes that cut themselves loose from their brethren of Israel and propagated doctrines not in conformity with those of the original Jewish creed. For thousands of years this clan have dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and having little commerce or fellowship with their fellow men of any religion or nationality. For generations they have not numbered more than one or two hundred, but they still adhere to their ancient faith and maintain their ancient rites and ceremonies."
"We left Jacob's Well and traveled till eight in the evening, but rather slowly, for we had been in the saddle nineteen hours, and the horses were cruelly tired. We got so far ahead of the tents that we had to camp in an Arab village, and sleep on the ground. We could have slept in the largest of the houses; but there were some little drawbacks: it was populous with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly, and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two donkeys in the parlor. Outside there were no inconveniences, except that the dusky, ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both sexes and all ages grouped themselves on their haunches all around us, and discussed us and criticised us with noisy tongues till midnight. We did not mind the noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost an impossible thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking at you. We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and started once more. Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, whose sole ambition in life is to get ahead of each other."
"The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention."
That's not 1867 Boston, but it's not a land devoid of people. Dare we call his account anti-Semitic? We shouldn't because Twain had generous words about Western European Jews as well as his Austrian Jewish son in law but today any hint any discomfort with anything any Jews do is viewed as anti-Semitic, particularly by aliyahniks who will still publish the parts of his essay that serve their purposes.
What else do they leave out? You won't find this depiction of a grove near Little Hermon in the aliyah literature:
"We found here a grove of lemon trees--cool, shady, hung with fruit. One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare, but to me this grove seemed very beautiful. It was beautiful. I do not overestimate it. I must always remember Shunem gratefully, as a place which gave to us this leafy shelter after our long, hot ride. We lunched, rested, chatted, smoked our pipes an hour, and then mounted and moved on."
How could that be if the state was not in existence?
What they also don't tell you is his bleak description even of the Kineret:
"The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe--[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.]--by a good deal--it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows. Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Genessaret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant."
You see the way he talks. He grumbles. It makes for entertainment. I bet those aliyah brochures never showed you those words about the Kinneret.
Those also didn't show you these, written by William C. Grimes, American politician and businessman (1857–1931), on his trip to the Holy Land. Twain quotes them in his essay:
"We had taken ship to go over to the other side. The sea was not more than six miles wide. Of the beauty of the scene, however, I can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or uninteresting. The first great characteristic of it is the deep basin in which it lies. This is from three to four hundred feet deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny valleys. Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient
sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water. They selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes of glorious beauty. On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the north-east shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more attention than would a forest. The whole appearance of the scene is precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm. The very mountains are calm.That speaks of a land of Israel that was just fine long before the arrival of the state."
"They tell us Twain describes a desolate land with few people. Such a statement, which of course has political significance, ignores that Twain came to the land in a period in which many of its residents were absent because of serious economic difficulties that forced them to live for a certain time in Egypt or other lands,” she says. “They suffered here from serious drought and plagues of locusts. The entire region also suffered economically because the Civil War in America ended and so the price of cotton in the region plummeted, a central crop in Egypt and [Palestine]. Twain did not see the context and used clichés such as the isolation and wildness of the population. This is far from a complete picture, and it is impossible to consider it documentary evidence."
It's standard in aliyah literature to print American author Mark Twain's depiction (Innocents Abroad) of a bleak Palestine during his visit here. See for example this manipulative summary at Zionist.org. "Twain’s descriptions directly contradict modern claims that pre-20th-century Palestine was a thriving Arab nation. Instead, he encountered a nearly abandoned landscape, with few inhabitants, little agriculture, and widespread neglect."
His account is so glorious to aliyaniks because it seems to fit in with the idea, that is pushed relentlessly, that geulah has come, and the land that was empty and desolate of everything is now booming. This guilts you into making aliyah which in the Modern Orthodox world is a greater deed than getting the 10 commandments from the Almighty on Har Sinai.
See this example from the JPost. The Post article even claims that Twain's fame as an author came about because of this article. Of course, everything is because of Israel: "At his peak, Mark Twain was probably the most popular American celebrity of his time. What few realize is that it was an unlikely trip to the Holy Land that established his fame as an author."
Is that true? Actually "First Notable Work: Mark Twain gained initial recognition with the publication of 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' in 1865. This humorous short story was published in the New York Saturday Press and brought him national attention." (Wikipedia) "Innocents Abroad" only solidified his fame. So as usual, we are not getting the truth.
And what's the truth about Twain's account? The video posted here talks about it. It tells us that Twain talked sardonically and acerbically about many things and he exaggerated too. His articles were read by an American audience whose egos would be flattered by his disgust for everything that wasn't American. He also didn't completely blast the Holy Land and speak of it as empty of people in his two week visit.
Not that he issues complements to the Arabs he encountered. The culture clash with 19th century (Victorian) St. Louis and San Francisco is too vast for that. But he certainly doesn't talk of a "land with no people..."
For example, read his depiction of Magdala, a village 3 miles North of Tiberias:
"Magdala is not a beautiful place. It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable, and filthy--just the style of cities that have adorned the country since Adam's time, as all writers have labored hard to prove, and have succeeded. The streets of Magdala are any where from three to six feet wide, and reeking with uncleanliness. The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The sides are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very warlike aspect."
"We are camped in this place, now, just within the city walls of Tiberias. We went into the town before nightfall and looked at its people--we cared nothing about its houses. Its people are best examined at a distance. They are particularly uncomely Jews, Arabs, and negroes. Squalor and poverty are the pride of Tiberias. The young women wear their dower strung upon a strong wire that curves downward from the top of the head to the jaw--Turkish silver coins which they have raked together or inherited. Most of these maidens were not wealthy, but some few had been very kindly dealt with by fortune. I saw heiresses there worth, in their own right--worth, well, I suppose I might venture to say, as much as nine dollars and a half. But such cases are rare. When you come across one of these, she naturally puts on airs. She will not ask for bucksheesh. She will not even permit of undue familiarity. She assumes a crushing dignity and goes on serenely practicing with her fine-tooth comb and quoting poetry just the same as if you were not present at all. Some people can not stand prosperity. They say that the long-nosed, lanky, dyspeptic-looking body-snatchers, with the indescribable hats on, and a long curl dangling down in front of each ear, are the old, familiar, self-righteous Pharisees we read of in the Scriptures. Verily, they look it. Judging merely by their general style, and without other evidence, one might easily suspect that self-righteousness was their specialty."
He talks of other encounters with people as he continues in his journey:
"As we trotted across the Plain of Jezreel, we met half a dozen Digger Indians (Bedouins) with very long spears in their hands, cavorting around on old crowbait horses, and spearing imaginary enemies; whooping, and fluttering their rags in the wind, and carrying on in every respect like a pack of hopeless lunatics."
"We climbed a high hill to visit the city of Samaria, where the woman may have hailed from who conversed with Christ at Jacob's Well, and from whence, no doubt, came also the celebrated Good Samaritan.... The inhabitants of this camp are particularly vicious, and stoned two parties of our pilgrims a day or two ago who brought about the difficulty by showing their revolvers when they did not intend to use them..."
"Shechem is distinguished as one of the residences of the patriarch Jacob, and as the seat of those tribes that cut themselves loose from their brethren of Israel and propagated doctrines not in conformity with those of the original Jewish creed. For thousands of years this clan have dwelt in Shechem under strict tabu, and having little commerce or fellowship with their fellow men of any religion or nationality. For generations they have not numbered more than one or two hundred, but they still adhere to their ancient faith and maintain their ancient rites and ceremonies."
"We left Jacob's Well and traveled till eight in the evening, but rather slowly, for we had been in the saddle nineteen hours, and the horses were cruelly tired. We got so far ahead of the tents that we had to camp in an Arab village, and sleep on the ground. We could have slept in the largest of the houses; but there were some little drawbacks: it was populous with vermin, it had a dirt floor, it was in no respect cleanly, and there was a family of goats in the only bedroom, and two donkeys in the parlor. Outside there were no inconveniences, except that the dusky, ragged, earnest-eyed villagers of both sexes and all ages grouped themselves on their haunches all around us, and discussed us and criticised us with noisy tongues till midnight. We did not mind the noise, being tired, but, doubtless, the reader is aware that it is almost an impossible thing to go to sleep when you know that people are looking at you. We went to bed at ten, and got up again at two and started once more. Thus are people persecuted by dragomen, whose sole ambition in life is to get ahead of each other."
"The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention."
That's not 1867 Boston, but it's not a land devoid of people. Dare we call his account anti-Semitic? We shouldn't because Twain had generous words about Western European Jews as well as his Austrian Jewish son in law but today any hint any discomfort with anything any Jews do is viewed as anti-Semitic, particularly by aliyahniks who will still publish the parts of his essay that serve their purposes.
What else do they leave out? You won't find this depiction of a grove near Little Hermon in the aliyah literature:
"We found here a grove of lemon trees--cool, shady, hung with fruit. One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare, but to me this grove seemed very beautiful. It was beautiful. I do not overestimate it. I must always remember Shunem gratefully, as a place which gave to us this leafy shelter after our long, hot ride. We lunched, rested, chatted, smoked our pipes an hour, and then mounted and moved on."
How could that be if the state was not in existence?
What they also don't tell you is his bleak description even of the Kineret:
"The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large a sea as Lake Tahoe--[I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because I am far more familiar with it than with any other, and partly because I have such a high admiration for it and such a world of pleasant recollections of it, that it is very nearly impossible for me to speak of lakes and not mention it.]--by a good deal--it is just about two-thirds as large. And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe; these low, shaven, yellow hillocks of rocks and sand, so devoid of perspective, can not suggest the grand peaks that compass Tahoe like a wall, and whose ribbed and chasmed fronts are clad with stately pines that seem to grow small and smaller as they climb, till one might fancy them reduced to weeds and shrubs far upward, where they join the everlasting snows. Silence and solitude brood over Tahoe; and silence and solitude brood also over this lake of Genessaret. But the solitude of the one is as cheerful and fascinating as the solitude of the other is dismal and repellant."
You see the way he talks. He grumbles. It makes for entertainment. I bet those aliyah brochures never showed you those words about the Kinneret.
Those also didn't show you these, written by William C. Grimes, American politician and businessman (1857–1931), on his trip to the Holy Land. Twain quotes them in his essay:
"We had taken ship to go over to the other side. The sea was not more than six miles wide. Of the beauty of the scene, however, I can not say enough, nor can I imagine where those travelers carried their eyes who have described the scenery of the lake as tame or uninteresting. The first great characteristic of it is the deep basin in which it lies. This is from three to four hundred feet deep on all sides except at the lower end, and the sharp slope of the banks, which are all of the richest green, is broken and diversified by the wadys and water-courses which work their way down through the sides of the basin, forming dark chasms or light sunny valleys. Near Tiberias these banks are rocky, and ancient
sepulchres open in them, with their doors toward the water. They selected grand spots, as did the Egyptians of old, for burial places, as if they designed that when the voice of God should reach the sleepers, they should walk forth and open their eyes on scenes of glorious beauty. On the east, the wild and desolate mountains contrast finely with the deep blue lake; and toward the north, sublime and majestic, Hermon looks down on the sea, lifting his white crown to heaven with the pride of a hill that has seen the departing footsteps of a hundred generations. On the north-east shore of the sea was a single tree, and this is the only tree of any size visible from the water of the lake, except a few lonely palms in the city of Tiberias, and by its solitary position attracts more attention than would a forest. The whole appearance of the scene is precisely what we would expect and desire the scenery of Genessaret to be, grand beauty, but quiet calm. The very mountains are calm.That speaks of a land of Israel that was just fine long before the arrival of the state."
Twain writes about Grimes' piece: "It is an ingeniously written description, and well calculated to deceive." The same we can say about selective quoting of Twain's essay.
I was talking today to a friend who argues that the most shameless promoters of aliyah are not secular Israelis who usually are shocked that you would ever leave America but Zionist religious Jews. And so Haaretz, the newspaper that Orthodox Jews love to hate, is more honest about Twain's account. Moshe Gilad writes in his article "Mark Twain's Book on the Holy Land Is Still Controversial - Some Would Say Trumpian" (March 16, 2017):
"The book was published in 1869 and is still quoted widely today in order to prove all sorts of claims. Many use it to prove the land was empty at the time and the Palestinian people is an invention. Others quote it to prove how much Zionism improved the situation, which was horrible and desperate until the Zionists arrived. Many tour guides love to quote Twain because he is funny and highlights the land in a critical and amusing way. Others (myself included) quote him in order to show that very little has changed here over the last 150 years."
Prof. Milette Shamir of the English and American studies department at Tel Aviv University also finds Twain's article to be misused in part because he came at a bad time:
I was talking today to a friend who argues that the most shameless promoters of aliyah are not secular Israelis who usually are shocked that you would ever leave America but Zionist religious Jews. And so Haaretz, the newspaper that Orthodox Jews love to hate, is more honest about Twain's account. Moshe Gilad writes in his article "Mark Twain's Book on the Holy Land Is Still Controversial - Some Would Say Trumpian" (March 16, 2017):
"The book was published in 1869 and is still quoted widely today in order to prove all sorts of claims. Many use it to prove the land was empty at the time and the Palestinian people is an invention. Others quote it to prove how much Zionism improved the situation, which was horrible and desperate until the Zionists arrived. Many tour guides love to quote Twain because he is funny and highlights the land in a critical and amusing way. Others (myself included) quote him in order to show that very little has changed here over the last 150 years."
Prof. Milette Shamir of the English and American studies department at Tel Aviv University also finds Twain's article to be misused in part because he came at a bad time:
"They tell us Twain describes a desolate land with few people. Such a statement, which of course has political significance, ignores that Twain came to the land in a period in which many of its residents were absent because of serious economic difficulties that forced them to live for a certain time in Egypt or other lands,” she says. “They suffered here from serious drought and plagues of locusts. The entire region also suffered economically because the Civil War in America ended and so the price of cotton in the region plummeted, a central crop in Egypt and [Palestine]. Twain did not see the context and used clichés such as the isolation and wildness of the population. This is far from a complete picture, and it is impossible to consider it documentary evidence."
So we see how propaganda works. You show them what you want to show them, as a particularly dishonest salesman once said to me. That's how aliyah propaganda works too. To hide the housing shortage you show a photo of a $2 million apartment in Jerusalem but don't mention the price. You show photos of soldiers standing arm in arm. You don't show the ones whose legs have been blown off. You show photos of religious students in the park. You don't show the schools because they are dumps. You also don't show the photos of all the off the derech kids wandering the streets with their phones on Shabbos.
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