Throughout their history, Americans have always maintained an interest in the “Holy Land,” whether from a religious and biblical perspective or merely as a cultural touchstone and a fusion of geography, histories, and cultures transmitted from one generation to the next. In this regard, geographer John Kirtland Wright coined the term “geopiety” to describe the unique relationship between Americans and a foreign land that they had never seen, an unusual mixture of place, past, and faith.
However, beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks being in control of Eretz Yisrael opened the holy places to the West, many Americans began to consider actual visits to the Land of the Bible. Even for those who could not afford such a trip or arrange passage for whatever reason, there were suddenly hundreds of popular books, pamphlets, and articles about the Holy Land which renewed public interest in the Promised Land.
Based upon what they read and the preaching of their church leaders, Americans traveling to the Middle East overwhelmingly thought of Eretz Yisrael through the lens of their sacred texts, cultural myths, and national narratives and, as a result, they brought with them preconceptions based more upon fantasy than reality. Many pilgrims were disappointed by the reality of what they found; recall that Jerusalem and Eretz Yisrael were then part of a declining Ottoman Empire with extreme poverty, hunger, little infrastructure, appalling corruption, and a general absence of social amenities. At least two presidents during this period planned pilgrimages to Eretz Yisrael, including Ulysses Grant, who became the first president to visit Jerusalem in February 1878, and Abraham Lincoln, who was planning his trip there on the very day he was assassinated (Theodore Roosevelt had visited in 1873 as a teenager). Among the leading figures to visit Eretz Yisrael, which included Mark Twain, was Herman Melville.
Melville (1819-1891) was an American Renaissance novelist and poet best known for, among other works, Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; its sequel, Omoo (1847); and Billy Budd, a novella found in his desk after he died and published posthumously. However, mention the name “Herman Melville” and virtually everybody will respond “the author of Moby Dick” – the famous story of the sailor Ismael’s narrative of the maniacal quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for vengeance against Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that had bitten off his leg on the ship’s previous voyage.
Moby Dick is universally placed near the top of the list of America’s greatest novels but, it was a monumental literary flop during Melville’s lifetime, selling only 3,100 copies. As such, Melville is high on the list of revered writers and artists, including Van Gogh and Bizet, who were essentially ignored during their lifetimes and did not gain recognition and admiration until after their deaths.
Melville never recovered from the failure of Moby Dick. Moreover, at the same time, he suffered from headaches and sciatica; his farm was failing, as was his marriage; and he faced financial ruin. Even his subsequent efforts – including Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), Benito Cereno (1855), Israel Potter (1857), and several stories published in various magazines – were not well received. Suffering from crushed hopes and burnout, the severely depressed author feared that his writing career had ended and his friends grew increasingly concerned, with some even fearing that he was suicidal.
At his wife’s suggestion, and with the sponsorship of his father-in-law (the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court), Melville traveled to Europe and the Middle East in 1857 hoping to elevate his depressive mood and longing to find new inspiration for his work, and it was during this trip that he visited Jerusalem. His journal, which documents his travels, thoughts, and experience traveling through Eretz Yisrael, reflects both his deep spiritual yearning for the Holy Land and his disappointment in what he found there.
On Oct. 11, 1856, Melville boarded the Glasgow, a steamer bound for England and continued his travels through Constantinople, Alexandria, Cairo, and Rome. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem, he did not find, as he expected, a holy and spiritual city but, rather, a city comprised of little more than arid rocks, dust, and flies:
How it affects one to be cheated in Jerusalem… [is] the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favorites of heaven… The color of the whole city is grey & looks at you like a cold grey eye in a cold old man.
Stones of Judea. We read a good deal about stones in Scriptures. Monuments & stumps of the memorials are set up of stones; men are stoned to death; the figurative seed falls in stony places; and no wonder that stones should so largely figure in the Bible. Judea is one accumulation of stones – stony mountains & stony plains; stony torrents & stony roads; stony walls & stony fields, stony houses & stony tombs; stony eyes & stony hearts. Before you and behind you are stones. Stones to the right & stones to the left… In many places laborious attempt has been made, to clear surface of these stones. You see heaps of stones here & there; and stone walls of immense thickness are thrown together, less for boundaries than to get them out of the way. But in vain; the removal of one stone only serves to reveal there stones still larger, below it. It is like mending an old barn; the more you uncover, the more it grows – the toes of every one’s shoes are all stubbed to pieces with the stones…
Disappointed in many of the Christian shrines he visited, he characterized them as “pious frauds” including, for example, the Holy Sepulcher, of which he said “all is glitter and nothing is gold” and which he called “a sickening cheat.” He wrote of the Via Dolorosa, where women “pant under burdens” and men walk “with melancholy faces.” Jerusalem is a city “besieged by army of the dead – cemeteries all around… Weeds grow upon Mount Zion” where “inside the walls are many vacant spaces, overgrown with the horrible cactus.” The walls of the Holy City “obstruct ventilation, postpone the morning & hasten the unwholesome twilight” and he describes “wandering among the tombs – till I began to think myself one of the possessed with devils.” The Tomb of Lazarus is “a mere cave or cell” and the Plain of Jericho “looks like the Gate of Hell.” In Jehosophat, “Jew grave-stones lie as if indiscriminately flung abroad by a blast in a quarry. So thick, a warren of the dead – so old, the Hebrew inscriptions can hardly be distinguished from the wrinkles formed by Time… “
The Dead Sea was “foam on beach & pebbles like slaver of mad dog – smarting bitter of the water – carried the bitter in my mouth all day – bitterness of life – thought of all bitter things – Bitter is it to be poor & bitter, to be reviled, & Oh bitter are these waters of Death, thought I… ”
He described the bleak Judean wilderness as
barren… Whitish mildew pervading whole tracts of landscape – bleached – leprosy – encrustation of curse – bones of rocks – crunched, knawed (sic) & mumbled – mere refuse & rubbish of creation… no moss as in other ruins – no grace of decay – no ivy – the unleavened nakedness of desolation…
During his nineteen days in Eretz Yisrael, Melville visited Mount Hope, a Christian-owned agricultural settlement outside of Jaffa, whose mission was to teach farming to Jews to help accelerate the “Second Coming.” He also writes of meeting Mr. Saunders – “a broken-down machinist & returned Californian out at elbows” – in Jaffa who, along with his wife, were sent out to found an Agricultural School for Jews, which “miserably failed.” A skeptical Melville wrote:
The idea of making farmers of the Jews is in vain. In the first place Judea is a desert with few exceptions. In the second place, the Jews hate farming. All who cultivate the soil in Palestine are Arabs. The Jews dare not live outside walled towns of villages for fear of the malicious persecution of Arabs and Turks. Besides, the number 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.
Melville’s journal portrays a seemingly random assortment of odd characters who run about the streets, including pilgrims wearing “serious expressions,” old Arab men plowing in their shirttails, and Christian missionaries from the United States and England proselytizing in the streets, whom he describes as “strange,” “sad,” and “half melancholy, half farcical.” He meets three types of Americans: American tourists, newly-drawn to visit the Holy Land, as discussed above; American Jews who have made aliyah out of religious devotion to the holiness of Jerusalem and/or deep faith in living in the Jewish homeland; and Christian missionaries, who prepare for the Second Coming of their Savior and dutifully “prepar[e] the soil literally and figuratively” for the ultimate Jewish restoration to the Holy Land. As such, Melville, a deeply troubled visitor, was not a typical pilgrim in the traditional sense.
Melville’s descriptions of a Jerusalem as a soulless backwater pile of rocks full of dusty religious types were not exaggerated. However, his descriptions were undoubtedly skewed by his personal, financial, and artistic problems; even in his journal, he confessed to being “afflicted with skepticism.” In addition, as the son of a bankrupt Christian father who died when Herman was thirteen, and a devout Calvinist mother, and who was himself neither observant nor traditionally religious – one analyst cogently characterized him as a “devout agnostic” – his work generally exhibits great interest in the foundational issue of humanity’s capacity for good and evil and, in particular, his complex theology undoubtedly colored his view of Eretz Yisrael in the same way that theological issues dominated much of his work.
Melville’s complicated philosophical theology, positioned somewhere on the spectrum between atheism and religious devotion, even baffled Melville scholars, as evidenced by the fact that some claim him as the most scripturally-minded of all American writers while others identify him as the most agnostic. His close friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne, reflected Melville’s essential duality when he wrote: “Melville can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other.”
Having traveled to Jerusalem with the hope of lifting his spirits, Melville’s mood turned even bleaker when he was confronted by the reality of the desolate Holy City. As he wrote in his journal:
No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectation than Palestine – particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening… In the emptiness of the lifeless antiquity of Jerusalem, the emigrant Jews are like flies that have taken up their abode in a skull.
Although Melville spent only nineteen days in Eretz Yisrael, he spent nineteen years writing about it. Though he never again returned to Jerusalem, the sad status of the Holy City remained as an internal metaphor for his distressed soul and, even two decades later, Jerusalem had never left his consciousness. Much as Mark Twain’s travels to Eretz Yisrael famously resulted in Innocents Abroad, Melville used his journals and notes from his trip to write Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876), which is divided into four books: Jerusalem, The Wilderness, Mar Saba, and Bethlehem.
In this epic poem – at almost 18,000 lines, it is even longer than Paradise Lost and by far the longest published American poem of all time – he tells the story of Clarel, a spiritually anxious theology student who arrives in Eretz Yisrael hoping to connect to the divine, but instead finds a Jerusalem full of strange pilgrims and thieves and a land that only exacerbates his philosophical bewilderment and deepens his religious uncertainty as the pilgrimages goes on. Melville uses this narrative as a means to explore his own spiritual dilemma and his inability to either accept or reject Christian doctrine.
Clarel, the publication of which was financed by his uncle, was Melville’s final work but, like Moby Dick, it proved to be another grand failure panned by the critics and ignored by the public to the point that publishers were forced to burn 220 copies out of the first printing of 350. His wife wrote that “If ever this dreadful incubus of a book (I call it so because it has undermined all our happiness) gets off Herman’s shoulders, I do hope he may be in better mental health – but at present I have reason to feel the gravest concern & anxiety about it – to put it in mild phrase” and, years later, a gloomy Melville would admit that Clarel was “eminently adapted for unpopularity.”
However, although Clarel’s rhymed iambic tetrameter verse is written in an uncommon poetic style and employs a sometimes tortured syntax, the poem is a largely forgotten masterwork by one of America’s greatest authors and should be of great interest to Jewish readers.
As many scholars have noted, the range of Jewish life in Eretz Yisrael that Melville presents in Clarel conspicuously rejects the ingrained hierarchies and unquestioned absolutes of his time and resisted the almost universal 19th century characterization of the Jews there as strange devotees of an ancient faith. Rather, Melville’s Eretz Yisrael, as seen through Clarel’s eyes, is the land of all kinds of Jews with different origins, practices, and politics, and he seems to experience particular delight in repudiating the romantic orientalism of Eretz Yisrael. Moreover, whether or not intentionally, he lends support to early Zionist doctrine by dispelling the myth of Eretz Yisrael as a land generally uninhabited by Jews.
The first of “Clarel’s Jews” who he meets during his travels is Abdon, the “Black Jewish” proprietor of the boarding house where he is a guest who came to Eretz Yisrael from Cochin, India, where his family remained unwavering followers of Jewish law. From the pious Abdon, he learns about various Jewish practices, including mezuzah, tallit, and a Torah scroll, which he calls “Indian Pentateuch.”
During a visit to the Western Wall, Clarel meets Nathan, a man “scarcely Hebrew in his dress” but “rural, and hard cheek’s swarthiness/With nothing of an Eastern air.” Nathan is descended from Puritan settlers in rural Illinois. As a young man, he experiences a crisis of faith, converts to Judaism, and marries Agar, an American Jewess. After some time continuing his search for deeper meaning, he becomes a proto-Zionist and aspires to join “some zealous Jews on alien soil” who “maintain the dream” of the prayer at the end of the Passover seder, “Next year in Jerusalem.” Nathan, Agar, and his children initially settle in the plains of Sharon but, after being subjected to unremitting attacks from Arab plunderers, he moves his family to Jerusalem.
Clarel becomes infatuated with Nathan’s daughter, Ruth, whom Melville presents as saintly and pure but, because of Nathan’s adherence to Judaism, including its strict prohibition against intermarriage, he endeavors to keep the couple apart. However, soon after the commencement of their courtship, Nathan is murdered by Arab raiders. Forbidden as a Christian from sitting shiva with the family – a ban which, rather than constituting a strictly halachic proscription, may constitute a mere literary fiction to advance the plot – Clarel journeys to Bethlehem and Mar Saba, where he meets Margoth, a Jewish geologist and blaspheming apostate who derives great pleasure from contemptuously ridiculing observant Jews.
In a fascinating debate observed by Clarel in which they cite a variety of sources – such as Hillel, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Acosta – Derwent, a priest and biblical literalist, and Rolfe, a religious skeptic who questions the Bible’s basis as factual history, discuss Judaism and whether Margoth is a fair representative of the “Chosen People,” who have largely abandoned their faith, or an outlier from a still godlike people.
The last Jew whom Clarel meets – although the young man refuses to affirm whether he is Jewish – is an unnamed young hedonist from Lyon who disparages Jewish women as little more than prostitutes yet seems preoccupied by them. A Russian traveler later advises Clarel that the young man refrained from identifying himself as Jewish because “society is not quite catholic, you know, retains some prejudices yet” and that a Jew must either “melt or be separate.” This is a remarkable insight by Melville for his time and an astute and pithy statement of the ages-long Jewish Diasporan challenge to either assimilate into the prevailing public culture or retain their public Jewish identities (although one could argue that Hitler and the Holocaust proved once and for all that assimilation does not work).
Upon his return to Jerusalem after the shiva period, Clarel learns that both Ruth and Agar have died of grief over Nathan’s loss. The trauma over being denied access to Ruth during the shiva leads Clarel to renounce Judaism, and when his heartfelt prayers during Holy Week fail to yield Ruth’s miraculous return from the dead, he renounces his Christian faith as well. We last see him vanishing gloomily into the crowded streets of Jerusalem with his theological and philosophical questions unresolved.
Most critics agree that Clarel is fundamentally autobiographical, so that when, for example, Clarel swats at flies while trying to feel G-d’s grace, or when he is irritated by the tourist traps that line the road to every holy site in the city, or repulsed by a never-ending steam of ragged beggars and vendors plying their wares, Melville is recounting his own actual experiences. Melville and Clarel both travel to Eretz Yisrael for spiritual enlightenment and both arrive and leave besieged by doubt.
Some critics maintain that the poem was actually a prophetic pre-history of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, as Melville brilliantly considers the friction between science and issues of faith and doubt and the interplay between Jewish life and practices in the biblical past and presents contemporary Jewish life in the Ottoman empire in late-nineteenth century Eretz Yisrael. Ahead of his time in so many ways, he manifested a deep empathy and understanding for Jews unusual for that time in American history, and he treated his fictional Jews with humanity and sympathy at a time when few, if any, Christian writers did so. Many Melville historians persuasively argue that his Jewish sympathies were a direct result of his own life’s travails; on the edge of poverty and underappreciated during his life, he found common cause with a people whose entire existence had been marked by suffering and rejection, even in their own homeland.
