Perhaps, Rabbi Moshe asked Rabbi Shmuel Yosef, the son of Rabbi Shalom Mordekhai ha-Levi, you have heard why Rabbi Abraham the circumciser was never worthy to go up with us to the Land of Israel, seeing that he is a fit and proper man, God-fearing and greatly occupied with the fulfillments of the commandments and above all with the commandment of circumcision, in virtue of which we were given the Covenant of the Land?
Why, said Rabbi Shmuel Yosef, the son of Rabbi Shalom Mordekhai ha-Levi, the reason is that he put our Father Abraham to the trouble of leaving the Land of Israel and going forth outside the Land. For once there was a students’ riot in town and all Israel hid themselves in their houses. Now on that very day Rabbi Abraham went to circumcise a baby whose father had just been slain on that same evil occasion. When he came in, he found nobody there to hold the baby, not even a chair on which to sit.
Can I, said he, be both godfather and circumciser?
Well, he looked out of the window and saw an old man walking along the street with a little stool in his hand. Rabbi Abraham knocked on the window to attract the old man’s attention. In he came, sat down on the stool and took the baby on his knees. Then Rabbi Abraham circumcised the baby and said the blessing with the phrase, ‘Who has hallowed the friend from the belly.’ After Rabbi Abraham had completed the blessings, the unknown godfather vanished. Everyone thought that Elijah, the Angel of the Covenant, had been revealed to him, but in truth it was our Father Abraham who came to show his affection for his son on the day of his introduction into the covenant of Abraham.
All the countless heavens on high grew dark and the stars and moon were covered. The air was damp and had a salty tang. The whole world was still. Nothing was to be heard but the sound of the sea waves kissing. The company broke up and went to their sleeping places. The moon sank, the stars went in, and the planets went on their way.
The ship sailed on and on, while the Holy One, blessed be he, rolled the light away before the darkness and the darkness before the light, and sent a wind which moved the ship. Every day the sun grew stronger, so that no one could gaze at it, while at night each separate star gave as much light as the moon. And the sea waves swayed and moved and sparkled with light, and a kerchief floated upon the waves like a ship in the heart of the sea; and a man sat on the kerchief, his face turned to the east. Not a great wave of the sea rose to drown him, no sea beast approached to swallow him, but the seagulls soared and flew around him in the air. How long the comrades had been on board ship you can judge for yourselves; for before they went aboard they had shaved their heads, and now the head tefillin sank into the hair. Yet whenever they looked out to sea, facing them they could see the light sparkling on the waters, the kerchief floating like a ship in the heart of the sea, and a man sitting upon the kerchief with his face turned to the east.
Chapter ten. Stambul
In due course the ship reached Kushta the Great, which is Constantinople, which is Stambul. There the comrades took a small boat and entered the town to wait for the ship which is hired by the congregation of Stambul every year; for every God-fearing Sephardic Jew who has the means goes up to the Land of Israel to prostrate himself upon the graves of the Fathers or to settle there.
Now Stambul is a great city whose like is not to be found anywhere in all the world, having many quarters in which representatives of all the peoples dwell and the king of Ishmael, the Great Turk, rules over them. Himself he lies on a bed of ivory which lulls him to sleep. Sometimes he sleeps half a year and sometimes a whole year. There is a box full of snuff beside him, with a gold bird resting upon it. When the time comes for the king to awaken, the bird opens the box and goes to the king and places the snuff in his nostrils; then the king sneezes and the bird says, Your good health!
Thereupon all the princes and pashas come along with all the dukes and ask the king how he is. And he has three hundred and sixty-five princes, one for each day of the year; and as soon as each of the princes has done his day’s duty, the king gives him a golden thread, whereupon he knows that his time is come to depart from the world; he goes home and strangles himself, while the king, watching from his window, claps his hands and rejoices.
Then there is a clock in the king’s palace, made of human bones, and on the hour it can be heard tolling from one end of the city to the other. Even babes still in their mother’s wombs quiver at the sound. And the city has many gardens and orchards and bathhouses and places of amusement, each more beautiful than the next — beautiful within but filthy without. Numberless dogs roam the streets; nowhere in the entire world are there so many dogs as in Stambul. And unclean birds stroll about at their ease, gorging on the filth and the carrion. There are also rats as large as geese; and these dwell even in the mansions of the princes.
Furthermore, there are many fires in Stambul, and when a fire begins in one house, the licking flames consume all the houses in the whole street, since their houses are made of wood. Sometimes these fires burn three hundred or four hundred houses together, and sometimes even more. They take no steps to stop the fire; only, the watchmen of the city stand shouting, Allah is God and Mohammed is his Prophet.
The synagogues in Stambul are many, numbering a hundred and more, with rugs and carpets woven of gold and silver thread, on which great sages recline and teach the revealed and the secret Torah. They have many books in their possession and happy is the eye that has seen them all. Why, they even have that rare and precious volume, ‘Desire of the Days,’ which is a wonder, as the well-informed know. They exercise their authority by permission of the state and do not understand our own Yiddish tongue. So when anyone wishes to talk to them, he must speak in the Holy Tongue. They are clean in thought, and cleanly in dress, and pleasant in speech, and all their deeds are done gently, and their figures are princely.
Their customs differ from our own, and they put on their tefillin while seated, in accordance with the view of the sage Rabbi Joseph Karo. Some of them indeed put on two pairs of tefillin at the same time. They have no fondness for casuistry when they study the Talmud, their great strength being rather in erudition. But the love of the Land of Israel burns in their hearts, and when they go up to the Land of Israel they take with them the carpets on which they have studied Torah and burn them on the grave of Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai on the thirty-third day of the Counting of the Omer.
There are Karaites to be found in Stambul who do not believe in the words of our rabbis of blessed memory but they are versed in Scripture and are as familiar with the twenty-four books of the Bible as an ordinary Jew is with his prayers; and they have synagogues of their own. They do not wear fringes as our own Jews do, but hang them up in the synagogue and look upon them in order to fulfill the injunction, ‘that ye may look upon it’; and they do the same with the palm fronds at the Feast of Booths. They have sages of their own who produce fresh interpretations and commentaries on the Torah every day; but they have no quarrel with our own Jews, since they must have recourse to us. For inasmuch as they still observe all the biblical laws of ritual purity and impurity and do not defile themselves by attending to the dead when any of their own community dies, they must hire poor rabbinist Jews to perform the last offices of burial. In former times they used to sit in the dark on the Sabbath eve and kindled no light, until the light of our teachers was revealed to them. The Land of Israel is precious to them; they mourn over its destruction and donate vessels and money to their own House of Study in Jerusalem and find all kinds of excuses in order to go up and increase their number in the Holy City.