ne who could not understand a word that was said.
Feeling had already gone as far as knocking Jews' hats off and other
popular sports, but not as yet on any universal and systematic scale;
I saw a few of the antiquated Jews with wrinkles and ringlets,
peering about here and there; some said as spies or representatives
of the Zionists, to take away the Anti-Semitic colour from the meeting.
But I think this unlikely; especially as it would have been pretty hard
to take it away. It is more likely, I think, that the archaic Jews
were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators;
for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel
in the Ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do not
welcome the new nationalist Jews; it would sometimes be hardly
an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without
the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion.
Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the
instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice;
so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate
the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought.
Only I fear that when the storm breaks, such distinctions
are swept away.

The storm was certainly rising. Outside the Jaffa Gate the road
runs up steeply and is split in two by the wedge of a high building,
looking as narrow as a tower and projecting like the prow of a ship.
There is something almost theatrical about its position and stage
properties, its one high-curtained window and balcony, with a sort
of pole or flag-staff; for the place is official or rather municipal.
Round it swelled the crowd, with its songs and poems and
passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly
the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theatre,
and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure
of the Mahometan Mayor of Jerusalem.

I did not understand his Arabic observations; but I know
when a man is calming a mob, and the mob did become calmer.
It was as if a storm swelled in the night and gradually died away
in a grey morning; but there are perpetual mutterings of that storm.
My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from
the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism;
and certainly not primarily from those poor Eastern Christians
of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun.
From time to time the