Palestine]
tion-, whose physical development is almost atrophied and whose intellectual development is abnormally strained. They are intensely bigoted, and are ruled by the rabbis. Nevertheless, these students represent an idea which must not be allowed to die; they have kept alive some aspects of Judaism for the Jewish people. The Hebrew university would go a long way to inspire the Halukah with the idea that they did not exist merely for themselves. It is important that the Halukah should be guided in such a way as would assure the flame of Jewish learning being kept alive in
Jerusalem under more tolerable conditions. There are in addition other communities, attracted to Jerusalem as the Holy City from all parts of the world, who, while they do not carry matters to such extremes as those described above, live a life of comparative seclusion from the ordinary affairs of the world and as more or less self-contained colonies. The most interesting of these is the Bokhara-Samarkand colony from Trans-Caspia. This colony, which is situated some two miles outside the Holy City, speaks either Hebrew or Persian Yiddish; most of the people write in Persian character. They are well-to-do, somewhat attractive in mien, and, if their statements regarding their origin are true, they are the descendants of people who have lived in Bokhara and Samarkand since the time of Tamerlane the Great, and before his time in Persia, and before that in Babylon. Another element that deserves mention is the Yemenites, who have been coming back to Palestine in fair numbers during the last twelve or fifteen years under the influence of the Zionist movement. These Yemenite Jews, who speak a pure Hebrew and very pure Arabic, have been cut off from the rest of the world since the rise of Islam in the seventh century of our era. They are the remnant of those large Jewish communities, many autonomous, which existed in all the cities of Arabia in the time of Mohammed. They have maintained themselves absolutely distinct and orthodox in religion for many
