Part 7

"The War found the Jewry of Eastern Europe in process of being uprooted, and has enormously accelerated the catastrophe. Galicia and the western provinces of Russia, which between them contain many more than half the Jews in the world, have suffered more from the War than any other region. Jewish homes have been broken up by hundreds of thousands, and there is no doubt whatever that, as a result of the War, there will be an emigration of East European Jews on an unprecedented scale....

"The disposal of the East European Jews will be a problem for Germany.... It will no longer do simply to close the German frontiers to them, and in view of the difficulties which would result from a wholesale migration of Eastern Jews into Germany itself, Germans will only be too glad to find a way out in the emigration of these Jews to Turkey--a solution extraordinarily favourable to the interests of all three parties concerned...."

And from this he passes to a wider vision:

"The German-speaking Jews abroad are a kind of German-speaking province which is well worth cultivation. Nine-tenths of the Jewish world speak German, and a good part of the remainder live in the Islamic world, which is Germany's friend, so that there are grounds for talking of a German protectorate over the whole of Jewry."

By this exploitation of aversions, Dr. Trietsch expects to deposit the Jews of the Pale over Western Asia as "culture-manure" for a German harvest; and if the Jewish migration to Palestine had remained nothing more than a stream of refugees, he might possibly have succeeded in his purpose. But in the last twenty years this Jewish movement has become a positive thing--no longer a flight from the Pale but a remembrance of Zion--and Zionism has already challenged and defeated the policy which Dr. Trietsch represents. "The object of Zionism," it was announced in the Basle Programme, drawn up by the first Zionist Congress in 1897, "is to establish for the Jewish people a publicly and legally assured home in Palestine." For the Zionists Jewry is a nation, and to become like other nations it needs its Motherland. In the Jewish colonies in Palestine they see not merely a successful social enterprise but the visible symbol of a body politic. The foundation of a national university in Jerusalem is as ultimate a goal for them as the economic development of the land, and their greatest achievement has been the revival of Hebrew as the living language of the Palestinian Jews. It was this that brought them into conflict with the Germanising tendency. In 1907 a secondary school was successfully started at Jaffa, by the initiative of Jewish teachers in Palestine, with Hebrew as the language of instruction; but in 1914, when a Jewish Polytechnic was founded at Haifa, the German-Jewish Hilfsverein, which had taken a leading part, refused to follow this precedent, and insisted on certain subjects being taught in German, not only in the Polytechnic, but in the Hilfsverein's other schools. The result was a secession of pupils and teachers. Purely Hebrew schools were opened; the Zionist organisation gave official support; and the Germanising party was compelled to accept a compromise which was in effect a victory for the Hebrew language.

Dr. Trietsch himself accepts this settlement, but does not abandon his idea:

"It was certainly impossible to expect the Spanish and Arabic-speaking Jews to submit in their own Jewish country to the hegemony of the German language.... Only Hebrew could become the common vernacular language of the scattered fragments of Jewry drifting back to Palestine from all the countries of the world. But ... in addition to Hebrew, to which they are more and more inclined, the Jews must have a world-language (Weltsprache), and this can only be German."

Anyone acquainted with the language-ordinances of Central Europe will feel that this suggestion veils a threat. What has been happening in Palestine during the War? Dr. Trietsch informs us that the Ottoman Government has been proceeding with the "naturalisation" of the Palestinian Jews, and that the "local execution of this measure has not been effected without disturbances which are beyond the province of this pamphlet." One significant consequence was the appearance in Egypt of Palestinian refugees, who raised a Zion mule corps there and fought through the Gallipoli campaign. What is the outlook for Palestine after the War? If the Ottoman pretension survives, the menace from Turkish Nationalism and German resentment is grave. But if Turk and German go, there are Zionists who would like to see Palestine a British Protectorate, with the prospect of growing into a British Dominion. Certainly, if the Jewish colonies are to make progress, they must be relieved of keeping their own police, building their own roads, and the other burdens that fall on them under Ottoman government, and this can only be secured by a better public administration. As for the British side of the question, we may consult Dr. Trietsch.

"There are possibilities," he urges, "in a German protectorate over the Jews as well as over Islam. Smaller national units than the 14 1-3 million Jews have been able to do Germany vital injury or service, and, while the Jews have no national state, their dispersion over the whole world, their high standard of culture, and their peculiar abilities lend them a weight that is worth more in the balance than many larger national masses which occupy a compact area of their own."

Other Powers than Germany may take these possibilities to heart.

Here, then, are peoples risen from the past to do what the Turks cannot and the Germans will not in Western Asia. There is much to be done--reform of justice, to obtain legal release from the Capitulations; reform in the assessment and collection of the agricultural tithes, which have been denounced for a century by every student of Ottoman administration; agrarian reform, to save peasant proprietorship, which in Syria, at any rate, is seriously in danger; genuine development of economic resources; unsectarian and non-nationalistic advancement of education. But the Jews, Syrians, and Armenians are equal to their task, and, with the aid of the foreign nations on whom they can count, they will certainly accomplish it. The future of Palestine, Syria, and Armenia is thus assured; but there are other countries--once as fertile, prosperous, and populous as they--which have lost not only their wealth but their inhabitants under the Ottoman domination. These countries have not the life left in them to reclaim themselves, and must look abroad for reconstruction.

If you cross the Euphrates by the bridge that carries the Bagdad Railway, you enter a vast landscape of steppes as virgin to the eye as any prairie across the Mississippi. Only the tells (mounds) with which it is studded witness to the density of its ancient population--for Northern Mesopotamia was once so populous and full of riches that Rome and the rulers of Iran fought seven centuries for its possession, till the Arabs conquered it from both.

The railway has now reached Nisibin, the Roman frontier fortress heroically defended and ceded in bitterness of heart, and runs past Dara, which the Persians never took. Westward lies Urfa--named Edessa by Alexander's men after their Macedonian city of running waters; later the seat of a Christian Syriac culture whose missionaries were heard in China and Travancore; still famous, under Arab dominion, for its Veronica and 300 churches; and restored for a moment to Christendom as the capital of a Crusader principality, till the Mongols trampled it into oblivion and the Osmanlis made it a name for butchery.

From Urfa to Nisibin there can be fields again. The climate has not changed, and wherever the Bedawi pitches his tents and scratches the ground there is proof of the old fertility. Only anarchy has banished cultivation; for, since the Ottoman pretension was established over the land, it has been the battleground of brigand tribes--Kurds from the hills and Arabs from the desert, skirmishing or herding their flocks, making or breaking alliance, but always robbing any tiller of the land of the fruits of his labour.

"If once," Dr. Rohrbach prophesies, "the peasant population were sure of its life and property, it would joyfully expand, push out into the desert, and bring new land under the plough; in a few years the villages would spring up, not by dozens, but by hundreds."

At present cultivation is confined to the Armenian foot-hills--an uncertain arc of green from Aleppo to Mosul. But the railway strikes boldly into the deserted middle of the land, giving the arc a chord, and when Turco-German strategic interests no longer debar it from being linked up, through Aleppo, with a Syrian port, it will be the really valuable section of the Bagdad system. The railway is the only capital enterprise that Northern Mesopotamia requires, for there is rain sufficient for the crops without artificial irrigation. Reservoirs of population are the need. The Kurds who come for winter pasture may be induced to stay--already they have been settling down in the western districts, and have gained a reputation for industry; the Bedawin, more fickle husbandmen, may settle southward along the Euphrates, and in time there will be a surplus of peasantry from Armenia and Syria. These will add field to field, but unless some stronger stream of immigration is led into the land, it will take many generations to recover its ancient prosperity; for in the ninth century A.D. Northern Mesopotamia paid Harun-al-Rashid as great a revenue as Egypt, and its cotton commanded the market of the world.

Southern Mesopotamia--the Irak of the Arabs and Babylonia of the Greeks--lies desolate like the North, but is a contrast to it in every other respect. Its aspect is towards the Persian Gulf, and Rohrbach grudgingly admits that down the Tigris to Basra, and not upstream to Alexandretta, is the natural channel for its trade. It gets nothing from the Mediterranean, neither trade nor rain, and every drop of water for cultivation must be led out of the rivers; but the rivers in their natural state are worse than the drought. Their discharge is extremely variable--about eight times as great in April as in October; they are always silting up their beds and scooping out others; and when there are no men to interfere they leave half the country a desert and make the other half a swamp. Yet the soil, when justly watered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Euphrates have deposited in what was originally the head of the Persian Gulf. The Arabs call it the Sawâd or Black Land, and it is a striking change from the bare ledges of Arabia and Iran which enclose its flanks, and from the Northern steppe-land which it suddenly replaces--at Samarra, if you are descending the Tigris, and on the Euphrates at Hit. The steppe cannot compare with the Sawâd in fertility, but the Sawâd does not so readily yield up its wealth. To become something better than a wilderness of dust and slime it needs engineering on the grand scale and a mighty population--immense forces working for immense returns. In a strangely different environment it anticipated our modern rhythm of life by four thousand years, and then went back to desolation five centuries before Industrialism (which may repeople it) began.

The Sawâd was first reclaimed by men who had already a mastery of metals, a system of writing, and a mature religion--less civilised men would never have attempted the task. These Sumerians, in the fourth millennium B.C., lived on tells heaped up above flood-level, each tell a city-state with its separate government and gods, for centralisation was the one thing needful to the country which the Sumerians did not achieve. The centralisers were Semites from the Arabian plateau. Sargon of Akkad and Naram Sin ruled the whole Sawâd as early as 2500 B.C.; Hammurabi, in 1900, already ruled it from Babylon; and the capital has never shifted more than sixty miles since then. Babylon on the Euphrates and Bagdad on the Tigris are the alternative points from which the Sawâd can be controlled. Just above them the first irrigation canals branch off from the rivers, and between them the rivers approach within thirty-five miles of each other. It is the point of vantage for government and engineering.

Here far-sighted engineers and stronghanded rulers turned the waters of Babylon into waters of life, and the Sawâd became a great heart of civilisation, breathing in man-power--Sumerians and Amorites and Kassites and Aramaeans and Chaldeans and Persians and Greeks and Arabs--and breathing out the works of man--grain and wool and Babylonish garments, inventions still used in our machine-shops, and emotions still felt in our religion.

"The land," writes Herodotus, who saw it in its prime, "has a little rain, and this nourishes the corn at the root; but the crops are matured and brought to harvest by water from the river--not, as in Egypt, by the river flooding over the fields, but by human labour and shadufs For Babylonia, like Egypt, is one network of canals, the largest of which is navigable. It is far the best corn-land of all the countries I know. There is no attempt at arboriculture--figs or vines or olives--but it is such superb corn-land that the average yield is two-hundredfold, and three-hundredfold in the best years. The wheat and barley there are a good four inches broad in the blade, and millet and sesame grow as big as trees--but I will not state the dimensions I have ascertained, because I know that, for anyone who has not visited Babylonia and witnessed these facts about the crops for himself, they would be altogether beyond belief."

Harnessed in the irrigation channels, the Tigris and Euphrates had become as mighty forces of production as the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtse and the Hoang-Ho.

"This," Herodotus adds, "is the best demonstration I can give of the wealth of the Babylonians: All the lands ruled by the King of Persia are assessed, in addition to their taxes in money, for the maintenance of the King's household and army in kind. Under this assessment the King is maintained for four months out of the twelve by Babylonia, and for the remaining eight by the rest of Asia together, so that in wealth the Assyrian province is equivalent to a third of all Asia."

The "Asia" over which the Achaemenids ruled included Russian Central Asia and Egypt as well as modern Turkey and Persia, and Egypt, under the same assessment, merely maintained the local Persian garrison. Its money contribution was inferior too--700 talents as compared with Assyria's 1,000; and though these figures may not be conclusive, because the Persian "province of Assyria" probably extended over the northern steppes as well as the Sawâd, it is certain that under the Arab Caliphate, when Irak and Egypt were provinces of one empire for the second time in history, Irak by itself paid 135 million dirhems (francs) annually into Harun-al-Rashid's treasury and Egypt no more than 65 million, so that a thousand years ago the productiveness of the Sawâd was more than double that of the Nile.

Another measure of the land's capacity is the greatness of its cities. Herodotus gives statistics of Babylon in the fifth century B.C.--walls 300 feet high, 75 feet broad, and 58 miles in circuit; three- and four-storied houses laid out in blocks; broad straight streets intersecting one another at regular intervals, at right angles or parallel to the Euphrates. Any one who reads Herodotus' description of Babylon or Ibn Serapion's of Bagdad, and considers that these vast urban masses were merely centres of collection and distribution for the open country, can infer the density of population and intensity of cultivation over the face of the Sawâd. When the Caliph Omar conquered Irak from the Persians in the middle of the seventh century A.D., and took an inventory of what he had acquired, he found that there were 5,000,000 hectares of land under cultivation, and that the poll-tax was paid by 550,000 householders, which implies a total population, in town and country, of more than 5,000,000 souls, where a bare million and a half maintains itself to-day in city alleys and nomads' tents.

And in Omar's time the Sawâd was no longer at its best, for, a few years before the Arab conquest, abnormally high floods had burst the dykes; from below Hilla to above Basra the Euphrates broadened into a swamp, and the Tigris deserted its former (and present) bed for the Shatt-el-Hai, leaving the Amara district a desert. The Persian Government, locked in a suicidal struggle with Rome, was powerless to make good the damage, and the shock of the Arab invasion made it irreparable. Under the Abbasid Caliphs of Bagdad the rest of the country preserved its prosperity, but in the thirteenth century Hulaku the Mongol finished the work of the floods, and under Ottoman dominion the Sawâd has not recovered.

Can it still be reclaimed? Surveys have been taken by Sir William Willcocks, as Adviser to the Ottoman Ministry of Public Works, and his final conclusions and proposals are embodied in a report drawn up at Bagdad in 1911.

"The Tigris-Euphrates delta," he writes, "may be classed as an arid region of some 5,000,000 hectares.... All this land is capable of easy levelling and reclamation. The presence of 15 per cent. lime in the soil renders reclamation very easy compared with similar work in the dense clays of Egypt. One is never far away from the giant banks of old canals and the ruins of ancient towns."

But he does not expect to make all these 5,000,000 hectares productive simultaneously, as they are said to have been when Omar took his inventory. "It is water, not land, which measures production," and he reckons that the average combined discharge of the rivers would irrigate 3,000,000 hectares in winter, and in summer 400,000 of rice or 1,250,000 of other crops. This is the eventual maximum; for immediate reclamation he takes 1,410,000 hectares in hand. His project is practically to restore, with technical improvements, the ancient system of canals and drains, using the Euphrates water to irrigate everything west of the Tigris (down to Kut) and the Shatt-el-Hai, and the water of the Tigris and its tributaries for districts east of that line. Adding 33 per cent. for contingencies to his estimate for cost of materials and rates of labour, and doubling the total to cover interest on loans and subsequent development, he arrives at £29,105,020 (Turkish) as the cost, from first to last, of irrigation and agricultural works together; and he estimates that the 1,410,000 hectares reclaimed by this outlay will produce crops to the value of £9,070,000 (Turkish) a year. In other words, the annual return on the gross expenditure will be more than 31 per cent., and under the present tithe system £7,256,000 (Turkish) of this will remain with the owners of the soil, while £1,814,000 will pass to the Government. This will give the country itself a net return of 24.9 per cent. on the combined gross cost of irrigation and agricultural works, while the Government, after paying away £443,000 (Turkish) out of its tithes for maintenance charges, will still receive a clear 9 per cent. per annum on the gross cost of irrigation, to which its share in the outlay will be confined.