Following in Mark Twain's Footsteps

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, I began reading Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad when I came to Israel in January. The book is essentially a travelogue of a five-month “pleasure excursion” that Twain took to Europe and Palestine in 1867; he wrote it for a San Francisco newspaper, which in return paid for his fare on the steamship Quaker City. I am now nearly finished with the book -- it has taken me roughly as long to read it as Twain took to travel through Europe and Palestine, so I almost feel as though I have been reading his travel reports in “real time.” I highly recommend it; it’s interesting and very funny, so much so that it sometimes made me laugh out loud.

Now that A. and I are planning some “pleasure excursions” of our own in modern-day Israel, I had the bright idea of revisiting some of the places that Twain describes and comparing notes with him here, in my own on-line travelogue. I thought of it as a kind of “virtual dialogue.” Since The Innocents Abroad was an inspiration for this blog, it seemed only fitting to follow in his footsteps. And by now, after reading some 430 pages of Twain’s travel reports, I feel like I’ve been one of his traveling companions and have gotten to know him over the past five months. Reading a new chapter feels a little like receiving a letter from a friend.

Once I began to think through this idea, however, it dawned on me that it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. For one thing, some of the places that Twain visited simply don’t exist anymore. For instance, in chapter 46 he describes Lake Hule, the Biblical “Waters of Merom.” However, Israel drained Lake Hule and its surrounding swamps in the 1950s for agricultural purposes. A small portion of the lake and swamp region was re-flooded as part of a restoration project in the 1990s, creating present-day Lake Agmon, but it is much smaller and shallower than the original lake.

Another problem is that many of the sites Twain visited are located in the West Bank. He “stopped to lunch” at Shechem, the site of Joseph’s Tomb and Jacob’s Well, which is now the Palestinian city of Nablus. (Israelis are currently not allowed to visit Joseph’s Tomb, which Palestinians vandalized and demolished in 2000. [For two updates on Joseph's Tomb since this post was originally published, see here and here. -W.Y., June 13.] Incidentally, Nablus is also the home of the Samaritans, whom Twain describes and who still live there.) Twain “passed Shiloh, where the Ark of the Covenant rested three hundred years,” and which is now the site of an Israeli settlement and the Palestinian town Turmus Ayya, 28 miles north of Jerusalem on Route 60. Twain visited the “shapeless mass of ruins” at Bethel (“it was here that Jacob lay down and had that superb vision of angels”), about 10 miles north of Jerusalem, which is now the site of the Palestinian village of Beitin and an adjacent Israeli settlement. Twain even camped at Jenin, which achieved notoriety during the second intifada as a major source of suicide bombers, provoking an Israeli military incursion in 2002. I’m not too keen on traveling to any of those places in light of the latest travel warning from the U.S. State Department: “The security environment in the West Bank remains volatile. Violent demonstrations, kidnappings, and shootings are unpredictable and can occur without warning. The Department of State urges Americans to defer travel to the West Bank at this time.” Mark Twain had much less to worry about; he feared the “quixotic heroism” of his traveling companions more than the “fierce Bedouins” that supposedly lay in wait for them: “They have their hands on their pistols all the time, and every now and then, when you least expect it, they snatch them out and take aim at Bedouins who are not visible, and draw their knives and make savage passes at other Bedouins who do not exist. I am in deadly peril always, for these spasms are sudden and irregular, and of course I cannot tell when to be getting out of the way.” I only wish the terrorists of today were as imaginary as Twain's Bedouins.

Even if A. and I can’t revisit all the places that Mark Twain describes, we can at least go to some of them: Banyas, Capernaum, Tiberias and the nearby “ancient warm baths” (now part of the Hamat Gader Park), the “Plain of Esdraelon” (the Jezreel Valley), Nazareth, and of course Jerusalem. We start with Jerusalem next week!