However, my job demanded that I live in Jerusalem, and thus to suffer those periodic bouts of depression to which its citizens seemed to be prone - I called it the Jerusalem Sadness:

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Jerusalem Sadness is a local disease, like Baghdad Boils, due to the combined effect of the tragic beauty and inhuman atmosphere of the city. It is the haughty, desolate beauty of a walled-in mountain fortress in the desert. The angry face of Yahveh is brooding over the hot rocks, which have seen more holy murder, rape and plunder than any other place on this earth. Its inhabitants are poisoned by holiness. Josephus Flavius, who was a priest in the city and suffered from Jerusalem Sadness, has this strange phrase: “The union of what is divine and what is mortal is disagreeable.” The population of the city is a mosaic; but every portion of it is disagreeable. Perhaps the most disagreeable are the clergy, Muslim, Christian and Jewish alike. The Muslim clergy in my time used to call on the average twice a year for a holy blood bath. A peaceful Arab landlord would joke with the family of his Jewish tenants some Friday morning during the Ramadan, go to the Mosque, listen to the Imam, run home and slaughter tenant, wife and children with a kitchen knife. The Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian and other Christian clergy would come to blows over such questions as to “whether the Greeks had a right to place a ladder on the floor of the Armenian chapel for the purpose of cleaning the upper part of the chapel above the cornice in the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem”; and “whether the Greeks must attach their curtain tight or in natural folds to the lower Nail No.2 at the foot of the pillar which lies south-east of the left-hand set of steps leading to the manger” (both examples are authentic, and I may add to them the regulation “that the Latins should have their curtain fall naturally down the same pillar, leaving a space of sixteen centimetres between it and that of the Greek Orthodox”).
The Jewish clergy was engaged in feuds with the Muslims about rights of way to the Wailing Wall, and among themselves about the correct method of ritual slaughter; they also encouraged their orthodox disciples to protect the sanctity of the Sabbath by beating up the godless who smoked cigarettes in the streets and by throwing bricks at passing motor cars.
The political atmosphere was just as poisoned. The Husseini clan murdered members of the Nashashibi clan; during the riot season they both murdered Jews; the Jewish Parties hated each other, the British, and the Arabs, in that order; the British sahibs, here called hawadjas, behaved as British sahibs used to do. There were no cafes or night clubs, no cocktail parties, and no night-life of any kind in Jerusalem. People kept to themselves, their church, clan or party. It was an austere, pharisaic town, full of hatred, distrust and phoney relics. I lived at No. 29, Street of the Prophets, at five minutes distance from the Via Dolorosa, another five from the Mosque of Omar where for a shilling you are shown the Archangel Gabriel’s footprints on the rock. I have never lived at such close quarters with divinity, and never farther removed from it. The whole unholy history of the city, from David to Herod, from Pilate to the Crusaders, from Titus to Glubb, is an illustration of the destructive power of faith, and the resulting unpleasantness of the union of the mortal and the divine. It is this awareness of defeat, driven home by the haughty silence of the desert, of dry watercourse and arid rock, which causes the Jerusalem Sadness.
Sadness apart, I grew increasingly tired of Palestine. Zionism in 1929 had come to a standstill. Immigration had been reduced to a mere trickle. Nazism, which was to turn it into a flood, was still a monster being hatched in the womb of the future.
I had gone to Palestine as a young enthusiast, driven by a romantic impulse. Instead of Utopia, I had found an extremely complex reality which both attracted and repelled me, but where the repellent effect, for a simple reason, gradually gained the upper hand. The reason was the Hebrew language. It was a petrified language which had been abandoned by the Jews long before the Christian era-in the days of Christ, they spoke Aramaic - and had now been revived by a tour de force. By making Hebrew its official language, the small Jewish community of Palestine seemed to have turned its back on Western civilisation.
I felt that to undergo the same process would be spiritual suicide. I was a romantic fool, in love with unreason; but I knew that in a Hebrew-language environment I would always remain a stranger; and at the same time gradually lose touch with European culture. I had left Europe at the age of twenty. Now I was twentythree and had had my fill of both Arab romantics and Jewish mystique. I was longing for Europe, thirsting for Europe, pining for Europe.
*Arrow in the Blue, ch. xxii.
I asked the Ullsteins for a transfer, and had the good luck to be assigned to Paris. In subsequent years my interest in Zionism faded; it was reawakened, with a vengeance, thirteen years later, when the gas chambers went into action.\' A.Koestler \'Bricks to Babel\'.

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I will not cease from Mental Flight,

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Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

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Till we have built Jerusalem,

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In England’s green & pleasant Land.

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