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To: Fred Nerks

The Palistinians claim that the Jews have no history in the Holy Land, but one of the strangest things I’ve ever read is a secttion of Mark Twain’s book Innocents Abroad, written in 1869, where he remarks that the whole country is almost without any population of either religion.


20 posted on 07/01/2009 8:28:37 PM PDT by wildbill ( The reason you're so jealous is that the voices talk only to me.)
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To: wildbill
INNOCENTS ABROAD. LINK

for example:

"...We got away from Bethlehem and its troops of beggars and relic-peddlers in the afternoon, and after spending some little time at Rachel's tomb, hurried to Jerusalem as fast as possible. I never was so glad to get home again before. I never have enjoyed rest as I have enjoyed it during these last few hours. The journey to the Dead Sea, the Jordan and Bethlehem was short, but it was an exhausting one. Such roasting heat, such oppressive solitude, and such dismal desolation can not surely exist elsewhere on earth. And such fatigue!

The commonest sagacity warns me that I ought to tell the customary pleasant lie, and say I tore myself reluctantly away from every noted place in Palestine. Every body tells that, but with as little ostentation as I may, I doubt the word of every he who tells it. I could take a dreadful oath that I have never heard any one of our forty pilgrims say any thing of the sort, and they are as worthy and as sincerely devout as any that come here. They will say it when they get home, fast enough, but why should they not? They do not wish to array themselves against all the Lamartines and Grimeses in the world. It does not stand to reason that men are reluctant to leave places where the very life is almost badgered out of them by importunate swarms of beggars and peddlers who hang in strings to one's sleeves and coat-tails and shriek and shout in his ears and horrify his vision with the ghastly sores and malformations they exhibit. One is glad to get away...

Lepers sitting together on a roadside by the Valley of Gihon, Jerusalem, possibly begging money or food from passers by.

PHOTO GALLERY LINK

22 posted on 07/01/2009 9:09:36 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (FAIR DINKUM!)
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