Nebraskans Visit Old Palestine

Special Correspondence, Cairo, Egypt, Dec. 21

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A warning about this one

A 1911 travel letter that characterizes the people it meets as a dishonest class, sells dirty food and works in a primitive manner. Transcribed as a record of how an American newspaper presented Palestinians to its readers, not because the archive endorses any of it.

Transcribed from the clipping

“We were annoyed by a guide or dragoman, as they class themselves, who insisted we should engage him for our tour in Palestine, and we later found out he was very dishonest, as is often the case with this class of people. The venders in the bazaars offer choice sugar candies for sale, but so mixed with dirt that they are uninviting to the stranger.

Fresh dates are plump and have an excellent red color, but are hard and astringent. We saw our first herd of camels here, which reminded us of the circus menagerie, but on noticing them heavily laden with huge stones we found that they were being used as beasts of burden. Everything is done in the most primitive manner, as the sawing of timber.

The log is placed on high horses, one man standing on top of it and the other below on the ground, pulling the saw…”

How this transcription was made

The headline, the photograph caption and the passage above have been read back against the scan. The rest of the letter runs to several agate columns and has not been transcribed.

Context added by this archive

Nebraskans on a tour, writing home, and the people of the country appear three times in a paragraph: as a guide who is very dishonest, as is often the case with this class of people, as venders whose candy is mixed with dirt, and as two men sawing a log.

They have no names, no numbers and no country of their own here — the country is Old Palestine, and the photographs are of a caravan, a dome, a gate and a well. The same page carries a department-store advertisement for dollar hats.

A correction

The presentation captions this scan as the Lincoln Journal Star. The masthead reads SUNDAY STATE JOURNAL, the Sunday edition of the Nebraska State Journal, which the Journal Star descends from. Filed under the established name so it does not become a second paper.

Cite this clipping

"Nebraskans Visit Old Palestine," Lincoln Journal Star, 22 January 1911. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1911-003. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1911-003