My favourite cross-cultural date legend is much more recent. It's a spy story. The central character is Avshalom Feinberg, a Jew born in Ottoman Palestine who was secretly gathering information for the British during World War I when he

vanished.

It was 1917. The British Army was

advancing from Egypt against the Ottoman Turks in Palestine, and Feinberg had joined an espionage ring led by Aaron Aaronson, an agronomist famous for discovering the wild ancestor of domesticated wheat. On January 13, Feinberg and a companion set

off on camels, disguised as Bedouin,

heading south toward Sinai to link up with

British forces. But soon, lost in the desert

by el-Arish, they were spotted by Bedouin

gunmen accompanied by Turkish soldiers.

The Bedouin disguise didn't fool real

Bedouin. Feinberg's companion was shot

but managed to escape, though not for

long, and he was hanged by the Turks in

Damascus later that year. Feinberg

disappeared. "The desert swallowed

Avshalom's body," as one chronicler put it,

"and with it the secret of his death." Once

the British conquered Palestine, and

especially after the state of Israel was

founded in 1948, the spy became a Zionist

legend. But the site of his disappearance was across the Egyptian border, inaccessible to Israelis, and no body was found.

Nothing new emerged until 1966, when the

case drew the attention of an Israeli

investigator who specialized in locating

soldiers missing in action. Several sources

provided an intriguing detail, as the

investigator, Shlomo Ben Elkana, recounted

in a book about the affair: Out in the desert

was a lone date palm that some locals

called el-qabr el-yahudi, the "Jewish grave."

When the Sinai desert fell under Israeli

control the very next year, during the Six- Day War of 1967, the investigator travelled to the spot. Local Bedouin contacts led him to the lonely palm tree. He hired workers and started digging. First, they found

animal bones, then a button. Then a hand grenade. Then two human arm-bones and bits of a spine, parts of a skeleton that was tangled in the roots of the tree. A yard below the surface they found Feinberg's skull, pierced by a bullet hole. The palm had

grown

from a date he had in his pocket. But

the story didn't end there.

The investigator tracked down a Bedouin elder named al-Haj Muhammad Abu Safra, a devout Muslim who seemed to know a lot about the spy's death. In fact he'd been there, Abu Safra admitted, though he said it was a Turkish soldier, and not a Bedouin tribesman, who fired the fatal shot. He is

called Avshalom Feinberg by an Arabic

version of his first name, Abu Salim. Abu Safra said they buried the spy where he fell. A year later the palm sprouted. The old man explained that this proved something about the spy's character, echoing the same idea expressed in Psalms. "We

understood that this man had been just

and righteous," Abu Safra said. "Otherwise,

no date palm would ever have grown."



explain the complete meaning of this passage
The passage tells the story of Avshalom Feinberg, a Jewish spy who disappeared in the desert while trying to gather information for the British during World War I. His disappearance led to his becoming a legend among Zionists in Israel. In 1966, an Israeli investigator specializing in locating missing soldiers became interested in the case and, with the help of local Bedouin, located Feinberg's remains underneath a date palm tree in the Sinai desert. Though the exact circumstances of his death remain unclear, the fact that a date palm tree grew from a date in his pocket was seen as a sign of his character. The passage highlights the mysterious and adventurous nature of espionage, as well as the importance of legends and the significance of symbols.