The Jewish Religion

by Michael Friedländer

Two days before we left Chigakhor fierce heat set in, with a blue heat haze. Since then the mercury has reached 98° in the shade. The call to "Boot and Saddle" is at 3.45. Black flies, sand-flies, mosquitos, scorpions, and venomous spiders abound. There is no hope of change or clouds or showers until the autumn. Greenery is fast scorching up. "The heaven above is as brass, and the earth beneath is as iron." The sky is a merciless steely blue. The earth radiates heat far on into the night. "Man goeth forth to his work," not "till the evening," but in the evening. The Ilyats, with their great brown flocks, march all night. The pools are dry, and the lesser streams have disappeared. The wheat on the rain-lands is scorched before the ears are full, and when the stalks are only six inches long. This is a normal Persian summer in Lat. 32° N. The only way of fighting this heat is never to yield to it, to plod on persistently, and never have an idle moment, but I do often long for an Edinburgh east wind, for drifting clouds and rain, and even for a chilly London fog! This same country is said to be buried under seven or eight feet of snow in winter.

Genres: Travel, Middle East, History

494 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2006

About the author

Michael Friedländer was an Orientalist and principal of Jews' College, London. He is best known for his English translation of Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, which was the most popular such translation until the more recent work of Shlomo Pines, and still remains in print.

Reviews

[CarolBeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

WHEW! I have just finished the 399 small-print dense pages of “Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (Travels on Horseback in 1890) Volume Two” by Isabella Bird. Last year I read Volume One, and was DETERMINED to finish Volume Two as well. As it turns out, it took great determination.

I dearly love the writings of Isabella Bird. She was a British Lady who was told she needed to travel for her health, and travel she did! She was the first woman inducted into the Royal Geographic Society. Her travels on horse, camel, water buffalo, elephant, mule and so on are always full of adventure. She has a generous view of the societies in which she travels. That being said, in this book she was profoundly negative.

The people of Persia and Kurdistan during this time are living in a fairly fertile land, but are desperately poverty-stricken. Above them are tyrants that pile level upon level of taxes. These taxes are not spent on armies, infrastructure, or anything benefiting the populace, but only on keeping the rulers happy. If you can’t pay your taxes, you are severely beaten, at the very least. All around them are marauding thieves. They wait until the crops are harvested, the sheep are raised, the horses are trained, then attack, stealing everything, not leaving enough to (sigh) pay the taxes. Travelers are beset, with everything stolen except one shirt to wear. The people live in baked mud hovels, many of them just holes in the ground (ant hills, she calls them) with their animals living right with them. But the thieves will dig through the mud walls, and steal everything anyway.

She was shot at, had her items stolen, was surrounded many days morning to night by people wanting her to heal them as she was a sort of medicine woman. NONE of the people have any sense of honor or truth; lying, killing, and thieving are expected. She suffered extreme heat and cold. In one location, it was 124 ̊ inside her tent, but she couldn’t open it for air as it was covered by black flies (biting!) that covered the tent so it could not be seen. At the other end of the spectrum, after having much of her clothing stolen, she was riding in temperatures of ten degrees below zero.

The passage that made me laugh right out loud was this: “The altitude of Sujbulāk is 4770 feet. Here I have come upon the track of Ida Pfeiffer, who travelled in the Urmi region more than forty years ago, when travelling in Persia was full of risks, and much more difficult in all respects than it is now.” Oh really? HOW much more difficult can you get?

It is imperative that you read these books with an historical perspective. The 1890s and their mores are different from those of today. This book was quite scholarly and, at times, pedantic. We have learned about the crops, the social practices, the religious rites, the clothing, the role of women (abject slaves, basically) and so on. It did give some interesting perspective on the troubles in that region today. This, along with Volume One of the set, was my least favorite read from Isabella Bird. If you’re interested, try reading her “A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains” in which she travels through the United States Rocky Mountain ranges during winter. I’m giving it three stars on the basis of it being ISABELLA BIRD, but a difficult read.

[Stella · Rating 4 out of 5]

My husband read this to me. Quite long, seriously dangerous (I don’t remember the author having to shoot her gun in the air to ward off robbers before!), with exasperatingly bad escorts, dishonest servants, and general villains in the path of her travels. A lovably misbehaved horse named Boy. A disturbing and very sad insight into the “Armenian Question” I knew close to nothing about has made me re-evaluate what I recently dismissed too quickly in another book about the Armenian genocide by the Turks. What an unfortunate world we live in!