IN introducing to the general public a writer who has heretofore been known chiefly among the people of his own race, his publishers may perhaps be permitted to say a word. Rabbi Iliowizi is a Hebrew of pure lineage, the son of a zealous member of the Chassidim, a Kabbalistic sect numbering over half a million members in Russia, Roumania and Gallicia, but rarely met with in this country. He passed his infancy and boyhood in the Russian provinces of Minsk and Moghileff, and in Roumania, growing to manhood and receiving his education at Frankfort-on-the-Main, Berlin and Breslau, where he qualified himself for a theological career. After six years of study in Germany, he spent some four years more perfecting his training in modern languages and in Arabic and Hebrew in London and Paris, under the auspices of the Anglo-Jewish Association and the Alliance Israelite Universelle, as a preparation to take charge of one of the outlying mission stations maintained by these affiliated societies in the Orient, where they support some fifty schools for the benefit of their oppressed co-religionists. After a prolonged service in Morocco, engaged in the educational work of the two societies, Mr. Iliowizi lived for a year at Gibraltar, and then came to America to devote himself to the ministry of the Jewish Church, and is now the spiritual head of a large congregation of his own people.

Mr. Iliowizi has hitherto contributed principally to the literature of his race, being known among Jews by several works; most widely, perhaps, by a volume of stories of Russian life, under the title of “In the Pale,” recently published by the Jewish Publication Society of America for its subscribers. In the series of Eastern tales, comprising the present book, which appeals to a larger audience, he has the special advantage, not only of a lengthened residence among Eastern peoples, but that he is himself of an Oriental race, of a heredity highly tinctured by the tenets of one of its most mystical sects, and personally is of a strongly Semitic type of mind, tempered by the maturing of his powers in the clear atmosphere of the New World intellectual life. He has, therefore,—or ought to have,—exceptional facilities for interpreting to the West the mind and heart of the East.

Whoever has lived long in the Orient,—and Morocco is essentially Eastern in its atmosphere, even if geographically it might possibly be otherwise classed,—cannot but realize the subtle and inexpressible influence that so strongly pervades its life, and which, often as it has been spoken of, is so hard for the Occidental mind fully to understand or appreciate. It is the “call of the East,” as Mr. Kipling happily puts it, and of which his British soldier sings in such realistic fashion:

The mystery of the great desolate desert stretches, with their overpowering solemnity of deadly silence, has from time immemorial exercised a most powerful influence upon the imagination of those who frequent them; and their optical illusions are often so curious and so startling as to afford easy explanation of the legends of hidden and phantom cities, such as are told here and elsewhere, and indeed of much else beside. Stories similar to “Sheddad’s Palace of Irem,” and that of the vanishing city of the Peri in “The Croesus of Yemen,” are frequently met with.

The gloominess of the mountain regions, especially that of the Sinaitic Peninsula, has also had a profound influence in giving color to the legendary lore of the middle Orient; and this combination of desert and mountain influences perhaps largely accounts for what is distinctively peculiar in the mysticism of the East, and for much that will be found in this book.