Page:Troja by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/61

they work much better than the Asiatic Greeks, are more honest, and I had in them the great advantage that they worked on Sundays and on the numerous saints' days, when no Greek would have worked at any price. Besides, as I could always be sure that they would work on with unremitting zeal, and never need to be urged, I could let them sink all the shafts and assign to them other work, in which no superintendence on my part was possible. For all these reasons I always allotted to the Turkish workmen proportionally higher wages than to the Greeks. I had also now and then some Jewish labourers, who likewise worked much better than the Greeks.

I may take this occasion to mention that all the Jews of the Levant are descendants of the Spanish Jews who, to the ruin of Spain, were expelled from that country in March, 1492, under Ferdinand and Isabella. Strange to say, in spite of their long wanderings and the vicissitudes of their fortunes, they have not forgotten the Spanish language, in which they still converse among themselves, and which even the Jewish labourer speaks more fluently than Turkish. If one of these Jews now returned to Spain, his vocabulary would of course excite much amusement, for it abounds with antiquated Spanish words, such as we find in Don Quixote, and it also contains many Turkish words. But still it is a wonder that the Spanish language could have been so well preserved here in the East for four centuries, in the mouths of a people who do not write it with Latin, but solely with Hebrew characters, whenever they have to correspond among themselves. Thus, to all the Spanish letters I addressed to the Jew S. B. Gormezano at the Dardanelles, who happened to be for a time my agent, I got the answers always in Italian, and was assured that the writer did not know how to write Spanish with Latin characters, as from his childhood he had been accustomed to use the Hebrew alphabet in writing Spanish.

I had two Turkish delegates, one of whom, called Mo-