The Portrait

by Geoffrey Clarfield (September 2013)

Historians of the region have pointed out that winter is a time of introspection and planning and oddly, a time of peace, for the storms that Poseidon sends from the Pillars of Hercules to the Cedars of Lebanon fall mainly between October and April and make military movement hard. Wise mariners have always done their best to spend these months drinking home made arak, or ouzo, amid the tobacco smoke of the taverna, telling tall tales and longing for spring.

When the first rain comes, it is as if a jealous God has chastised his followers and ordered them to repent for their licentious ways forcing them inwards, making them sit with kin and neighbors indoors, while the storm god pounds their roofs with water. They huddle around charcoal burning braziers, or the modern equivalent, that rekindle familial warmth and allow elders to argue over the true meaning of sacred texts.

The man in the portrait is not from the Mediterranean but he seems comfortable in its light and beside its walls, as if he has adopted the place as his home, and like many who take up residence in a foreign country, he stands there as if the archaeological debris of the centuries that surrounds him is so much part of daily life as to become unremarkable. Unlike a tourist he has no camera around his neck nor does he carry a bag.

Scholars of the Mediterranean point out that for centuries it has been a region that cannot feed itself. Thus, since the rise of the Spanish and Ottoman empires, its fluctuating agricultural output has always been supplemented with imports from as far away as the Slavic lands and as far north as the Baltic Sea. It has exported what it produces best, people-quick witted, tortured by a system of values that is based on honor and shame and which creates a curious, guarded but gregarious and inquisitive personality type that despite its talkativeness is loathe to give away important information. Just think of Columbus.

Let us suppose, for arguments sake, that the man in the portrait is one of those lovers of things Mediterranean, admittedly a man from a temperate climate, but who from a boyhood of Bible Stories and Homer vowed that he would spend some years of his life searching for the living remnants of this ancient part of the world.

Among the British such desire has produced Arabists, men like Doughty, Burton, Lawrence and Thesiger, all who combined their love of things Mediterranean with either a fear of, or distaste for women. No, the portrait does not reflect that tension and we can imagine him in a friendly chat with any member of the opposite sex.

He is not alone and there are many like him in the land. There is no name for them in Israel but they know each other when they meet. Driven on the one hand, by the cold reality of anti-Semitism and determined to oppose it with a vibrant and engaged adoption of Israeli identity and concerns, they at the same time maintain a fascination with the Eastern Mediterranean and its ancient habits and strive to become part of its life.

An old man who had been born in the land before WWI and who as young man had run away from home and had tended horses in the Hashemi royal stables of Amman, told him that the quiet that he had observed was based on shock. The Arabs of the West Bank had imagined that the Jews would do to them what they had planned to do if they had won the war. During that year he freely walked through the streets of East and West Jerusalem while in the Sinai the Egyptians were implementing their war of attrition.

On kibbutz he tasted something, which has long disappeared, a utopian society based on non-material values. He picked fruit, broke rocks and cleared fields and had his first experience of gaining prestige for acts that did not bring money. That world has now disappeared, for the Mediterranean cannot abide that kind of self-denial for more than a generation. It died out once the Romans no longer persecuted the ancient Christians and every time the Jews have gained an iota of material prosperity pleasure seeking has become the norm (as the endorsement of pleasure, in moderation, is one of the key differences between Catholic and Jewish theology).

Israel in 1971 was moving out of its Spartan phase and into a phase where the climate and the culture in which all Israelis now found themselves, was beginning to make itself felt.

Her father spoke Arabic better than he did Yiddish and quoted Arabic proverbs. His favorite food was olives and bread and his son in law bonded with him by watching the Egyptian films that the Israelis authorities played every Friday afternoon. By now Israel was a divided country in a different way, secular/religious, Sephardic/Ashkenazi, Jew and Arab, Palestinian nationalists and Israeli nationalists.

What he had seen as a visitor in 1971 was the dust settling after the storm and what he experienced in 1981 was the next storm. Fundamentalism was gaining hold of the Islamic world and the only hope on the horizon was the maintenance of the peace treaty with Egypt. Socialism was dying, everyone was buying cars, thousands of Israelis were studying abroad and the first signs of Americanization were in the air.

There are a small number of Israelis, travelers, archaeologists and ethnographers who after 1967 made the Sinai their home. Some of them spent most of their time wandering among and studying the ways of the Sinai Bedouin. When the Sinai was returned to Egypt each one of them dealt with the shock of their personal exodus in their own way.

The man in our portrait returned to graduate school and soon found himself living among the nomads of the Horn of Africa, camel herders who moved between Somalia and Ethiopia, the prehistoric, cultural ancestors of the Bedouin and Israelites. He had been expelled from his Mediterranean garden.

In the late nineties he found a different Israel than that which he had left. One part was religious, the other secular. One part was high tech and making American salaries while the other lived in subsidized poverty similar to Naples and southern Italy.

Israeli youth are now digesting India and bringing Jewish mysticism back with them from the temples and ashrams of the sub-continent. The Yoga of Ben Gurion has returned, but it now comes directly from the source. This reawakening of the east among young Israelis is weaning an entire generation away from Hebrew rock and roll and towards an exploration of their Mediterranean musical roots.

Israel is now medieval and modern, secular and religious, but above all, it has become a thoroughly Mediterranean state. Such is the portrait of the country that exists in the mind of the man in the picture, taken as it was on a sunny afternoon in the ancient city of Acco, some years ago. I am quite certain that I have discerned his thoughts correctly for it is my portrait, painted fifteen years ago. The man in the picture is somewhat different from the man I have become, but we are still strongly related.

 

Geoffrey Clarfield is an anthropologist at large.

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