d The sign outside Cook’s office read: “Thomas Cook and Son have the largest staff of dragomans and muleteers, the best landaus, carriages, camp, saddlery etc in Palestine!” The building of the Grand New Hotel revealed Roman remains: a part of the Second Wall, tiles inscribed with the Tenth Legion’s insignia and a column erected by a legate of Augustus, used for decades as the base of a streetlamp.
e The German architect and archaeologist Conrad Schick was the most prolific architect of his time, but his buildings defy any pigeon-holing—his home, Thabor House, and chapel contain vestiges of Germanic, Arab and Graeco-Roman styles.
f The Husseinis and the other Families such as the newer Nashashibis became much richer, embracing the commercial boom; one of the Husseinis provided the wooden sleepers for the new railway. In 1858, the Ottoman Land Law privatized many of the ancient waqfs, which suddenly made the Families into rich landowners and traders in grain. The losers were the Arab fellahin, the peasants, now at the mercy of feudal absentee landlords. Hence Rauf Pasha, the last Hamidian governor, called the Families “parasites.”
g His year in Jerusalem was cut short by the Mahdi’s rebellion in Sudan. Recalled to govern Sudan, Gordon was besieged and then killed in Khartoum, reputedly holding his Bible. The Garden Tomb was not the only archaeological achievement of the Colony: as we saw much earlier, it was Jacob Eliahu, the child of a Jew converted by the London Jews Society who defected to the Colony, who found the inscription left by the workers in the Siloam tunnel.
h In 1904, the founders’ daughter Bertha Spafford married a fellow colonist, Frederick Vester, and their heirs still own the hotel.
CHAPTER 41
Russians
1880–1898
GRAND DUKE SERGEI AND GRAND DUCHESS ELLA
Russian peasants, many of them women, often walked all the way from their villages southwards to Odessa for the voyage to Zion. They wore “deeply padded overcoats and furlined jackets with sheepskin caps,” the women adding “bundles of four or five petticoats and grey shawls over their heads.” They brought their death shrouds and felt, wrote Stephen Graham, an English journalist who travelled with them disguised by perfect Russian, shaggy beard and peasant smock, “that when they have been to Jerusalem, the serious occupations of their life are all ended. For the peasant goes to Jerusalem to die in a certain way in Russia—just as the whole concern of the Protestant centres round life.”
They sailed in the “dark and filthy holds” of subsidized ships: “In one storm, when the masts were broken, the hold where the peasants rolled over one another like corpses, or grasped at one another like madmen, was worse than any imagined pit, the stench worse than any fire!” In Jerusalem, they were welcomed “by a giant Montenegrin guide in the magnificent uniform of the Russian Palestine Society—scarlet and cream cloak and riding knickers—and conducted through the Jerusalem streets” crowded with “Arab beggars, almost naked and ugly beyond words, howling for coppers,” to the Russian Compound. There they lived in capacious, crowded dormitories for “threepence-a-day” and ate kasha, cabbage soup and mugs of kvass root-beer in the refectories. There were so many Russians that the “Arab boys ran alongside shouting in Russian ‘Muscovites are good!’ ”
Throughout the journey, rumours would spread: “There is a mysterious passenger on board.” When they arrived, crying “Glory be to Thee O God!,” they would say, “There’s a mysterious pilgrim in Jerusalem,” and claim to have seen Jesus at the Golden Gate or by Herod’s wall. “They spend a night in the Sepulchre of Christ,’ explained Graham, “and receiving the Holy Fire, extinguish it with their caps that they will wear in their coffins.” Yet they were increasingly shocked by “Jerusalem the earthly, a pleasure-ground for wealthy sightseers,” and particularly by “the vast strange ruined dirty verminous” Church, “the womb of death.” They would reassure themselves by reflecting, “We find Jesus really when we cease looking at Jerusalem and allow the Gospel to look into us.” Yet their Holy Russia itself was changing: Alexander II’s liberation of the serfs in 1861 unleashed expectations of reform that he could not satisfy: anarchist and socialist terrorists hunted him down in his own empire. During one attack, the emperor himself drew his pistol and fired at his would-be killers. But in 1881 he was finally assassinated in St. Petersburg, his legs blown off by bomb-throwing radicals.
Rumours quickly spread that Jews were implicated (there was a Jewish woman in the terrorists’ circle but none of the assassins was Jewish) and these unleashed bloody attacks against Jews across Russia, encouraged and sometimes organized by the state. These predations gave the West a new word: pogrom, from the Russian gromit—to destroy. The new emperor, Alexander III, a bearded giant with blinkered, conservative views, regarded the Jews as a “social cancer” and he blamed them for their own persecution by honest Orthodox Russians. His May Laws of 1882 effectively made anti-Semitisma a state policy, enforced by secret-police repression.
The emperor believed Holy Russia would be saved by autocracy and Orthodoxy encouraged by the cult of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He therefore appointed his brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich to the presidency of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society “to strengthen Orthodoxy in the Holy Land.”
On 28 September 1888, Sergei and his twenty-three-year-old wife, Elizabeth, nicknamed Ella, pretty granddaughter of Queen Victoria, consecrated their Church of Mary Magdalene, with white limestone and seven glistening gold onion-domes, on the Mount of Olives. Both were moved by Jerusalem. “You can’t imagine what a profound impression it makes,” Ella reported to Queen Victoria, “when entering the Holy Sepulchre. It’s such an intense joy being here and my thoughts constantly turn to you.” Ella, born a Protestant princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, had passionately embraced her conversion to Orthodoxy. “How happy” it made her to “see all these holy places one learns to love from tender infancy.” Sergei and the emperor had carefully overseen the design of the church, with Ella commissioning its paintings of Magdalene. “It’s like a dream to see all these places where our Lord suffered for us,” Ella told Victoria, “and such an intense comfort to pray here.” Ella needed comfort.
Sergei, thirty-one years old, was a military martinet and domestic tyrant haunted by rumours of a secret gay life that clashed with his severe belief in autocracy and Orthodoxy. “Without redeeming features, obstinate, arrogant and disagreeable, he flaunted his peculiarities,” claimed one of his cousins. His marriage to Ella placed him at the centre of European royalty: her sister Alexandra was about to marry the future tsar Nicholas II.
Before they left, Sergei’s interests—empire, God and archaeology—merged in his new church, the St. Alexander Nevsky, right next to the Church of the Sepulchre. When he bought this prime site, Sergei and his builders had uncovered walls dating from Hadrian’s Temple and Constantine’s Basilica, and when he built his church, he incorporated these archaeological finds into the building. In the Russian Compound, he commissioned Sergei’s House, a luxury hostel with turreted neo-Gothic towers for Russian aristocrats.b The lives of Sergei and Ella would be tragic; yet, apart from these buildings and the thousands of Russian pilgrims they attracted, his defining contribution was as one of the proponents of the official anti-Semitism that drove Russia’s Jews towards the sanctuary of Zion.
GRAND DUKE SERGEI: RUSSIAN JEWS AND THE POGROMS
In 1891, Alexander III appointed Sergei governor-general of Moscow. There, he immediately expelled 20,000 Jews from the city, surrounding their neighbourhood in the middle of the first night of Passover with Cossacks and police. “I can’t believe we won’t be judged for this in the future,” Ella wrote, but Sergei “believes this is for our security. I see nothing in it but shame.”c
The six million Russian Jews had always honoured Jerusalem, praying towards the eastern walls of their houses. But now the pogroms pushed them either towards revolution—many embraced socialism—or towards escape. Thus was triggered a vast exodus, the first Aliyah, a word that meant flight to a higher place, the H
oly Mountain of Jerusalem. Two million Jews left Russia between 1888 and 1914, but 85 percent of them headed not for the Promised Land but the Golden Land of America. Nonetheless thousands looked to Jerusalem. By 1890, Russian Jewish immigration was starting to change the city: there were now 25,000 Jews out of 40,000 Jerusalemites. In 1882 the sultan banned Jewish immigration and in 1889 decreed that Jews were not allowed to stay in Palestine more than three months, measures scarcely enforced. The Arab Families, led by Yusuf Khalidi, petitioned Istanbul against Jewish immigration, but the Jews kept coming.
Ever since the writers of the Bible created their narrative of Jerusalem, and ever since that biography of the city had become the universal story, her fate had been decided faraway—in Babylon, Susa, Rome, Mecca, Istanbul, London and St. Petersburg. In 1896, an Austrian journalist published the book that would define twentieth-century Jerusalem: The Jewish State.20
a This word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, in his book The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, in time to describe the new racial breed of hatred that was replacing the old religious version.
b Sergei’s House remained technically owned by the long-dead Sergei’s estate until President Putin admired it on his 2005 visit to Israel and was said to have been so moved that he wept. Israel returned the hostel to Russia in 2008.
c Alexander III died in 1894 and was succeeded by his inexperienced, inept and unlucky son Nicholas II, who shared his father’s rigid belief in autocracy. He liked and trusted “Uncle Sergei.” As governor-general, Sergei was responsible for the coronation festivities in Moscow during which thousands of celebrating peasants died in a stampede. Sergei advised his nephew to continue with the celebrations and evaded responsibility.
PART NINE
Zionism
O Jerusalem: the one man who has been present all this while, the lovable dreamer of Nazareth, has done nothing but increase the hate.
—THEODOR HERZL, Diary
The angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape, and plunder than any other place on this earth.
—ARTHUR KOESTLER
If a land can have a soul, Jerusalem is the soul of the land of Israel.
—DAVID BEN-GURION, press interview
No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy
It’s not easy to be a Jerusalemite. A thorny path runs alongside its joys. The great are small inside the Old City. Popes, patriarchs, kings all remove their crowns. It is the city of the King of Kings; and earthly kings and lords are not its masters. No human can ever possess Jerusalem.
—JOHN TLEEL, “I Am Jerusalem,” Jerusalem Quarterly
And burthened Gentiles
o’er the main
Must bear the weight
of Israel’s hate
Because he is not
brought again
In triumph to Jerusalem.
—RUDYARD KIPLING, “The Burden of Jerusalem”
CHAPTER 42
The Kaiser
1898–1905
HERZL
Theodor Herzl, a literary critic in Vienna, was said to be “extraordinarily handsome,” his eyes were “almond-shaped with heavy, black melancholy lashes,” his profile that of “an Assyrian Emperor.” An unhappily married father of three, he was a thoroughly assimilated Jew who wore winged collars and frock-coats; “he was not of the people,” and had little connection to the shabby, ringletted Jews of the shtetls. He was a lawyer by training, spoke no Hebrew or Yiddish, put up Christmas trees at home and did not bother to circumcise his son. But the Russian pogroms of 1881 fundamentally shocked him. When, in 1895, Vienna elected the anti-Semitic rabble-rouser Karl Lueger as mayor, Herzl wrote: “The mood among the Jews is one of despair.” That same year, he was in Paris covering the Dreyfus Affair, in which an innocent Jewish army officer was framed as a German spy, and he watched Parisian mobs shrieking “Mort aux Juifs” in the country that had emancipated Jews. This reinforced his conviction that assimilation had not only failed but was provoking more anti-Semitism. He even predicted that anti-Semitism would one day be legalized in Germany.
Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests “will wear impressive robes”; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem. The Rothschilds, initially sceptical of any Jewish state, rejected Herzl’s approaches, but these early notes soon matured into something more practical. “Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home,” he proclaimed in The Jewish State in February 1896. “The Maccabees will rise again. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes.”
There was nothing new about Zionism—even the word had already been coined in 1890—but Herzl gave political expression and organization to a very ancient sentiment. Jews had envisaged their very existence in terms of their relationship to Jerusalem since King David and particularly since the Babylonian Exile. Jews prayed towards Jerusalem, wished each other “Next Year in Jerusalem” each year at Passover, and commemorated the fallen Temple by smashing a glass at their weddings and keeping a corner of their houses undecorated. They went on pilgrimage there, wished to be buried there and prayed whenever possible around the Temple walls. Even when they were grievously persecuted, Jews continued to live in Jerusalem and were absent only when they were banned on pain of death.
The new European nationalism inevitably provoked racial hostility towards this supranational and cosmopolitan people—but simultaneously the same nationalism, along with the liberty won by the French Revolution, was bound to inspire the Jews too. Prince Potemkin, Emperor Napoleon and U.S. President John Adams all believed in the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as had Polish and Italian nationalists, and of course the Christian Zionists in America and Britain. Yet the Zionist pioneers were Orthodox rabbis who saw the Return in the light of messianic expectation. In 1836, an Ashkenazi rabbi in Prussia, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, approached the Rothschilds and Montefiores to fund a Jewish nation, and later wrote his book Seeking Zion. After the Damascus “blood-libel,” Rabbi Yehuda Hai Alchelai, a Sephardic rabbi in Sarajevo, suggested Jews in the Islamic world should elect leaders and buy land in Palestine. In 1862, Moses Hess, a comrade of Karl Marx, predicted that nationalism would lead to racial anti-Semitism, in Rome and Jerusalem: the Last National Question, which proposed a socialist Jewish society in Palestine. Yet it was the Russian pogroms that were decisive.
“We must re-establish ourselves as a living nation,” wrote Leo Pinsker, an Odessan physician, in his book, Auto-Emancipation, writing at the same time as Herzl. He inspired a new movement of Russian Jews, “The Lovers of Zion,” Hovevei Zion, to develop agricultural settlements in Palestine. Even though many of them were secular, “our Jewishness and our Zionism,” explained a young believer, Chaim Weizmann, “were interchangeable.” In 1878, Palestinian Jews had founded Petah Tikvah (Gateway of Hope) on the coast but now even the Rothschilds, in the person of the French Baron Edmond, started to fund agricultural villages such as Rishon-le-Zion (First in Zion) for Russian immigrants—altogether he would donate the princely sum of £6.6 million. Like Montefiore, he tried to buy the Wall in Jerusalem. In 1887, the mufti, Mustafa al-Husseini, agreed a deal but it fell through. When Rothschild tried again in 1897, the Husseini Sheikh al-Haram blocked it.
In 1883, long before Herzl’s book, 25,000 Jews started to arrive in Palestine in the first wave—Aliyah—of immigration. Most but not all were from Russia. But Jerusalem also attracted Persians in the 1870s, Yemenites in the 1880s. They tended to live together in their own communities: Jews from Bokhara, i
ncluding the Moussaieff family of jewellers who had cut diamonds for Genghis Khan, settled their own Bokharan Quarter that was carefully laid out in a grid, its grand often neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, sometimes Moorish mansions designed to resemble those of Central Asian cities.a
In August 1897, Herzl presided over the first Zionist Congress in Basle and afterwards he boasted to his diary: “L’état c’est moi. At Basle, I founded the Jewish state. If I said this out loud today, I would be greeted by universal laughter. Perhaps in five years and certainly in fifty, everyone will know it.” They did—and he was only five years out. Herzl became a new species of politician and publicist, riding the new railways of Europe to canvass kings, ministers and press barons. His relentless energy aggravated, and defied, a weak heart, liable to kill him at any moment.
Herzl believed in a Zionism, not built from the bottom by settlers, but granted by emperors and financed by plutocrats. The Rothschilds and Montefiores initially disdained Zionism but the earliest Zionist Congresses were ornamented by Sir Francis Montefiore, Moses’ nephew, “a rather footling English gentleman” who “wore white gloves in the heat of the Swiss summer because he had to shake so many hands.” However, Herzl needed a potentate to intervene with the sultan. He decided that his Jewish state should be German-speaking—and so he turned to the very model of a modern monarch, the German Kaiser.
Wilhelm II was planning an Oriental tour to meet the sultan and then proceed to Jerusalem for the dedication of a new church built close to the Sepulchre on the land granted to his father, Kaiser Frederick. But there was more to the Kaiser’s plan: he prided himself on his diplomacy with the sultan and saw himself as a Protestant pilgrim to the Holy Places. Above all he hoped to offer German protection to the Ottomans, promote his new Germany and counter British influence.