Fourth and Long: Presenting (and Resenting) the Sabbath
Rent from DeepDyveI
In 1836 John Lloyd Stephens, who was later to achieve fame primarily for his pioneering exploration of Mayan ruins in Central America, found himself in Jerusalem for the Jewish Sabbath, where he prayed among the "feeble remnant of a mighty people" in a synagogue near Mount Zion. Since having left Europe several months earlier, the New Jersey native, who was then just over thirty, had not been anywhere "where the women sat with their faces uncovered," and so during the inscrutable Saturday morning sermon "it was not altogether unnatural" (as he later wrote in his highly popular Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia, Petraea and the Holy Land) to turn his gaze "from the rough-bearded sons of Abraham to the smooth faces of their wives and daughters." In the women's section of the synagogue, Stephens spied "many a dark-eyed Jewess who appeared well worthy" of his gaze, and he boastfully reported that "many a Hebrew maiden turned her black orbs" upon him as well. Although he had already enjoyed the hospitality of the Jews of Hebron, with whom he talked "of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as of old [End Page 438] and mutual friends," this was apparently the young Columbia graduate's first taste of the Jewish Sabbath.
Stephens was invited for lunch to the home of a native of Gibraltar who had two wives and who described himself as the wealthiest Jew in Jerusalem. Noticing that the observance of the Sabbath in his host's home was so strict that "it was not allowable to extinguish a lamp which had been lighted the night before and was now burning in broad daylight over our table" Stephens began to experience "some uneasiness" about what to expect for dinner. He was pleased to learn, however, of "the admirable contrivance" his host had (allegedly) invented "for reconciling appetite and duty—an oven, heated the night before to such a degree that the process of cooking was continued during the night and the dishes were ready when wanted the next day."1 Stephens' host's claim to being the wealthiest Jew in Jerusalem may indeed have been accurate, but the Gibraltar native was certainly not the first to invent a "contrivance" that allowed the process of cooking to continue from Friday afternoon until Saturday afternoon – after all, the third chapter of the talmudic tractate Shabbat takes its name (Kirah) from such a contrivance.
At around the same time that Stephens was in Jerusalem, his countryman and contemporary William McClure Thomson, who had been sent to the Middle East by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, spent a Sabbath on the outskirts of Safed, to which he came from Beirut and whose Jews—"a strange assemblage from most of the nations of Europe," as he noted in The Land and the Book (first published in 1858)—constituted more than half of the town's population. Thomson, who had been born in Ohio in 1806 and had earned his B.A. at Miami University before studying at Princeton's (Presbyterian) Theological Seminary, referred in his learned yet enormously popular book to the "absurd superstitions" of the Safed Jews, as well as their "intense fanaticism . . . Pharisaic self-righteousness and Sadducean licentiousness." As a prime "specimen of the puerilities enjoined and enforced by their learned rabbis," Thomson pointed to the "subterfuge," as Alan Dundes would [End Page...
