Amzi

“ I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.' Think of this help, Amzi, in every struggle: in the struggle, worse than any time of battle, with one's own sinful heart. And there is not one of God's children but has realized the blessedness of following the commands of Jesus, 'Have faith in God. Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.' Amzi, you who love gentleness and peace, truth and humility, cannot you find in Christ and his loving precepts all you would ask? ”

“ Amzi sighed. "Yusuf," he said, "it appears all dark, impenetrable, to me. A wall of adamant seems to stand between me and God. Pray for me, friend. In this matter I fear I am heartless."
In spite of this assertion, there was genuine concern in the tone, and the priest's face flushed in the glad light of hope.
"Amzi," he exclaimed, "my hope for you increases. Even now, you begin to realize your own self: it remains for you to realize God's self. Know God—would I could burn that upon your heart! All else would be made plain." ”

“ Amzi to join the half-naked pilgrims, who had not yet donned their traveling-robes, Yusuf to lift his heart to Heaven, as he now did in every circumstance. In this silent talk to God he received comfort, and his heart was filled with hope for Amzi.
Even this journey, which seemed so inauspicious, might, he thought, be but the beginning of a happy end. He had learned that there are no trifles in life; that no event is so insignificant that God may not make use of it. He felt that Amzi was not utterly indifferent to the influence of divine power, so he waited in patience. ”

“ He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.' Amzi, whether in life or in death, it shall be as he wills."
Amzi looked at him curiously. "Yusuf," he said, "is there no extremity of your life in which your religion fails to give you comfort? It seems to furnish you with words befitting every occasion."
"Comfort in every hour of need," returned Yusuf, "deliverance in every hour of temptation, is our God able to bestow if we seek him in spirit and in truth. ”

“ No one can be neutral. Acts often speak in thunder-tones, when mere words are heard but in whispers."
"I fear me, Yusuf," said the Meccan, with a half-smile, "that Amzi has neither thundered in action, nor even whispered in words. So little good has he done, that he almost hates to think of your great influence theory." ”

“ Not a Moslem in Mecca who does not know the figure of Yusuf the Christian. Nay, Yusuf, your friend Amzi can effect a disguise much more easily. Here,"—running his fingers through his gray beard,—"a few grains of black dye can soon transform this; some stain will change the Meccan's ruddy cheeks into the brown of a desert Arab. The thing is easy."
"As you will, then," said the priest; and the two were soon busy at work at the transforming process.
With the garb of a Moslem soldier, Amzi was soon, to all appearance, a passable Mussulman, with divided beard, and chocolate-brown skin. ”

“ Amzi has, in his descent to old age, developed a wonderful activity of mind and body. He has become one of the most influential members of the little town in which he has taken up his abode. Realizing as never before the duty which man owes to man, and fully awakened at last to the fact that our talents are given us to be exercised fully, he no longer dreams away time in the Arab Kaif ”

“ In all the records of history there is nothing more wonderful than the marvelous success which attended Mohammed at Medina. Staid and sober merchantmen, men with gray heads, fiery youths, proselytes from the tribes of the desert, even women, flocked to him every day; and he soon realized that he had a vast army of converts ready to live or die for him, ready to fight for him until the last.
Amzi, alone, of all his followers, seemed to stand aloof, half-believing, yet unwilling to proclaim his belief openly ”

“ There seemed little hope for Dumah. The small Jewish band then in Medina could not dare to cope with the overwhelming numbers of Moslems that swarmed in the streets. If Dumah were delivered it must be by stratagem; and yet what stratagem could be employed?
Early in the evening Amzi and the priest withdrew to the roof for consultation.
"You believe that your God is all-powerful—why do you not beseech him for our poor lad's safety?" cried Amzi passionately.
"I have not ceased to do so since his capture," returned Yusuf. "But it must be as the Lord willeth. He sees what is best. ”

“ Amzi shook his head quickly in denial. "Mohammed is one of the most upright of men, one of the last to seek personal favor or distinction by dishonest means, one of the last to be a maker of lies. Verily, Yusuf, I know not what to think of his revelations. If he does not in truth see these visions, he at least imagines he does. ”

“ Waterman.
"Upstairs? Thunder! A woman!"
Whereupon Amzi, having handed round the eggnog, stood sipping a glass contentedly in his favorite post by the hearth.
"A woman upstairs!"
"Yep. She's a woman."
"Amzi!"
Their backs grew rigid. They had never believed their brother capable of such a thing. They exchanged glances that telegraphed the horror of this depravity. If it had been any one else on earth! And the brazenness of it! Hastings and Fosdick grinned at each other, as much as to say that after all you never can tell. It was a pleasant discovery that their brother-in-law was only human. ”

“ When the advance to Bedr was ordered, I was one under authority, and had no choice but to submit, though I had little enough love for the stench of blood."
"Yet," returned Amzi, "Yusuf's life is too precious to be risked in such madness. It is not necessary for him to court death; for the time may soon come when he shall be forced to fight in self-defence. Till then, let foolish youths dash to the lance's point if they will." ”

“ The three men had discreetly betaken themselves across the hall and the children of Amzi II were alone.
"You forget, Lois, that there are other persons besides [Pg 236] ourselves to consider. If it were just Amzi and us—" persisted Mrs. Waterman, shifting her ground before this shameless confession.
"There's the whole world, when you come to that," said Lois. "What's in your mind, Jo,—Tom and Phil? Well, there's nothing novel in that; I thought about them a good deal before I came back. You may scratch Tom off the list; he's clear out of it. ”

“ In Mauri- tania it was applied by the Mussulman invaders to all the non-Arab peoples driven by them from the plains to the uplands. It thus gradually acquired a degrading sense, and the Algerian Arabs now more usually designate their own tribes by the equivalent word ar-sh. On the other hand, the Berber Kabyles of the Jurjura highlands, descendants of the ancient Sanheja confederation, call themselves Imazighen, or Amzigh, that is, " Freemen," a word identical with the Maxyes of Herodotus. ”

“ The campaign, begun with occasional pamphlets, followed the development of German anti-Semitism. In Austria, as in Germany, Liberalism had been undermined by that worst form of racial intolerance known as Christian Socialism, which was and is nothing but the old spirit of clerical reaction masquerading in the guise of anti-Semitic prejudice and pseudo-democratic demagogy.238 In Austria, as in Germany, the operations were conducted by two bodies of men—the racial and the religious enemies of the Jew. The two bodies met on the common ground of objection to the Jews’ acquiring land. ”

“ A Jew might be treated as respectfully as a foreign ambassador, but a foreign ambassador is a foreigner. Finally, I would give the same privileged position to all Jews everywhere, as an alternative policy to Zionism, if Zionism failed by the test I have named; the only true and the only tolerable test; if the Jews had not so much failed as peasants as succeeded as capitalists. ”

“ The Amazai country is divided into two by a northern spur from the Mahaban Mountain; the villages lying to the east of this spur, and between it and the Indus, belong to the Saiyid Khel, and those to the west to both sub-divisions. The country is narrow, rough, well watered and wooded. The strength of the trans-frontier Amazais in fighting men is about 1500, and they have a high reputation for courage, but while a number of the cis-frontier men are enlisted, few come in for service from across the border. ”

“ Of course, Uganda is in Africa, and Africa is not Zion and never will be Zion, to quote Herzl’s own words. But Herzl knows full well that nothing is so valuable to the cause of Zionism as amicable political relations with such a power as England is, and so much more valuable as England’s main interest is concentrated in the Orient. Nowhere else is precedent as powerful as in England, and so it is most important to accept a colony out of the hands of England and create thus a precedent in our favor. ”

“ Let us no longer speak of Jews of Alsace, of Portugal, or of Germany! Though scattered over the face of the earth, we are still one people, worshipping the same God, and as our law commands, we are to obey the laws of the country in which we live.”1 This is not the language of men who aim at assimilation and the disintegration of their nationality. The ideas of these men are not to be confused with what modern Jewish assimilation preaches. Modern Jewish assimilation denies and rejects all Jewish “separatism” except on the religious side. ”

“ The British Government proclaimed its policy of Zionism because it believed that Zionism was identified with the policy and aims for which good men and women are struggling everywhere. That policy is the policy of the Allies in this war. It is the policy to which we are pledged; it is the policy which we believe accords with the wishes of vast numbers of the Jewish people, many of whom have cast wistful eyes to Palestine as again destined to be their national home. ”

“ Herzl intended to use the influence of the Germans to [43] affect the Sultan and make him more sympathetic to Zionist proposals. Herzl told the Grand Duke that he would like to have Zionism included within the cultural sphere of German interests. The Grand Duke said that the Kaiser seemed inclined to take Jewish migration under German protection. The great powers were interested in maintaining certain extra territorial rights within the Turkish Empire. If they had nationals in any part of the Empire, they claimed the right to protect them over and above Turkish law. ”

“ In utter abhorrence of the country and its inhabitants, the Moslem servants who accompanied the Embassy from India all took their departure, willing rather to brave the dangers and difficulties of a long journey through the inhospitable deserts of the Adaïel, than to prolong a hateful sojourn in Abyssinia. One half of the number were murdered on the way down, and the places of all long remained empty. In any part of the world it would be difficult to find domestics inferior to their Christian successors. ”

“ In short, as one writer of the time pithily expresses it, ‘all the contractors are Jews and all the Jews are contractors.’ “Austria does not differ in this respect from Germany, France and England. The wealthy Jews, who in the reign of the Emperor Leopold received permission to resettle in Vienna (1670) —the Oppenheimers, Wertheimers, Mayer Herschel and the rest—were all army-contractors. And we find the same thing in all the countries under the Austrian Crown. “Lastly, we must mention the Jewish army-contractors who provisioned the American troops in the Revolutionary and Civil wars.” ”

“ Its target has never been the Jew, as a person, but racist zionism and undisguised aggression. In this sense, ours is also a revolution for the Jew, as a human being, as well. We are struggling so that Jews, Christians and Muslims may live in equality, enjoying the same rights and assuming the same duties, free from racial or religious discrimination.
44. We do distinguish between Judaism and zionism. While we maintain our opposition to the colonialist Zionist movement, we respect the Jewish faith. ”

“ We tell the Jew, “We let our own unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as its logic.
The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks, and Italians. ”

“ The Arabs fear exactly the three things which he says they need. Only the Arabs would call it a knowledge of financial trickery and an experience of political intrigue, and the power given by hoards of money not only of their own but of other peoples. About Dr. Weizmann and the true Zionists this is self-evidently unjust; but about Jewish influence of the more visible and vulgar kind it has to be proved to be unjust. Feeling as I do the force of the real case for Zionism, I venture most earnestly to implore the Jews to disprove it, and not to dismiss it. ”

“ But the Jew who has not like the Occidental received the Pandora's gift of political organization, and stands substantially in a relation of indifference to the state; who moreover is as reluctant to give up the essence of his national idiosyncrasy, as he is ready to clothe it with any nationality at pleasure and to adapt himself up to a certain degree to foreign habits—the Jew was for this very reason as it were made for a state, which was to be built on the ruins of a hundred living polities and to be endowed with a somewhat abstract and, from the outset, toned-down nationality. ”