Herman Melville in Jerusalem
Herman Melville traveled a land later called the nation Israel in 1856. What did he see and think about?
It can be found in Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876).
Herman Melville, the Jew and Judaism
LOUISE ABBIE MAY0
Nineteenth-century American literature, derivative from British conventions to a great extent, tended to present Jewish characters in the molds of accepted stereotypes. The Jew was Shylock, the usurious old villain; Rebecca, the beautiful Jewess; or Sheva, the benevolent Jew and institutionalized countermyth to Shylock. Herman Melville is the only major American writer in the nineteenth century to include a seriouus consideration of Jews and Judaism in one of his works-Clarel.
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In his journal he comments, "In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem, the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull." He dismisses dreams of setting up a nation of Jewish farmers in Palestine. "In the first place, Judea is a desert. . . . In the second . . . . the Jews hate farming . . . Besides the numbers of Jews in Palestine is comparatively small. And how are the hosts of them scattered in other lands to be brought here? Only by a miracle."17 Clarel, however, cannot help but respond to the sight of pilgrims by the Wailing Wall, shut out from the gate by the Turks.
With sighs and groans, they cry, "To be restored! We wait, long wait." They live in Palestine in dismal poverty. Groups hang out in the streets with nothing to do at home. How can they live and get enough bread to survive? In surprisingly modern solutions: "In almost every country known, rich Israelites these kinsmen own: the hat goes round the world."'
In many ways Clarel is remarkable for a time when Jewish characters were presented as pleasant or unpleasant stereotypes and when Judaism was viewed as an exotic Oriental faith. Here, Judaism, Jewish customs and characters are intertwined with Clarel's search for faith, although they are not central to the book.
http://americanjewisharchives.org/publications/journal/PDF/1976_28_02_00_mayo.pdf
The tragedy of European Judaists during WWII had changed the landscape literally in terms of the fate of Judaists and Palestine. Hitler and Nazis came out of a corner of the world that had nothing to do with Melville's world. Nonetheless, Melville must have sensed something prophetic in Jerusalem.
The Turk permits the tribes to creephttp://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Clarel/Part_1/Canto_16
Abject in rear of those dumb stones,
To lean or kneel, lament and weep;
Sad mendicants shut out from gate
Inexorable. Sighs and groans:
To be restored! we wait, long wait!
Returning to Palestine and Jerusalem doesn't seem to promise glory to Judaists even when the great and unique author visited Jerusalem in 1856.
Rather, Judaists must have changed their minds to listen to a new instruction from YHWH. And it must be "Move to America!" It is so, since the US seems to have been the only nation that had authors who loved the Old Testament like Herman Melville even in the late 19th century.
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Mat 9:17 Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.