Section Two
Emperor and philosopher Julian overturned Christianity, restored paganism and gave the Temple Mount back to the Jews, before he was killed fighting the Persians. (illustration credit ill.22)
Top right The Byzantine emperor Justinian I and his wife Theodora (right), once a promiscuous showgirl, promoted themselves as universal Christian monarchs and built the colossal Nea Church in Jerusalem. (illustration credit ill.23)
The Madaba Map shows the magnificence of Byzantine Jerusalem and ignores the Temple Mount, which was kept as the symbolic rubbish-heap of Judaism. (illustration credit ill.24)
After the East fell to the Persians, Emperor Heraclius entered the city in 630 through the Golden Gate, which Jews, Muslims and Christians believe to be the setting for the Apocalypse. (illustration credit ill.25)
Arab conquest: This illustration from Nizami’s poem “Khamza” shows Muhammad’s Night Journey (Isra) to Jerusalem, riding Buraq, his steed with a human face, followed by his Ascension (Miraj) to converse with Jesus, Moses and Abraham. (illustration credit ill.26)
Caliph Abd al-Malik (seen here in one of the last Islamic coins to show human features) was the real formulator of Islam and a visionary statesman—yet it was said that his breath was so vile it could kill flies. In 691 he built the first surviving Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, inscribed with the earliest quotations from the Koran. (illustration credit ill.27)
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Abd al-Malik’s Dome (above) affirmed the supremacy of Islam and his Umayyad empire, challenged Christianity, outshone the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and emphasized the Muslims as successors to the Jews by building on the Rock, the foundation stone of the Jewish Temple (below).
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In 1099, after four hundred years of Islamic rule, the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem with an orgy of killing. The city still stank of putrescent flesh six months later. (illustration credit ill.30)
King of Jerusalem Baldwin I was a tireless warrior and worldly politician, but also a bigamist who was accused of indulging his fleshly appetites. (illustration credit ill.31)
For the Christians of the Crusader era, Jerusalem was the centre of the world—as shown in many twelfth-century maps, such as this one from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle of the Crusades. (illustration credit ill.32)
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Crusader splendour: the city reached its apogee under Queen Melisende, here seen marrying Fulk of Anjou. He accused her of an affair with Hugh of Jaffa. This exquisite Psalter (below) may have been his marital peace offering.
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The curse of Jerusalem: the boy Bald-win IV shows his tutor William of Tyre how he feels no pain during games played with friends, the first sign of leprosy. The leper-king symbolized the decline of the kingdom. (illustration credit ill.35)
Merciless when he needed to be, patient and tolerant when he could afford to be, Saladin created an empire embracing Syria and Egypt, annihilated the army of Jerusalem and then took the city. (illustration credit ill.36)
Emperor Frederick II, known as Stupor Mund—the Wonder of the World to some, the Anti-Christ to others—is seen here entering the Holy City. He negotiated a peace deal that divided Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims. (illustration credit ill.37)
Above left Saladin and his family re-Islamized Jerusalem, often using Crusader spolia. Muslims regard the Dome of the Ascension, built in 1200 on the Temple Mount, as the site of Muhammad’s Miraj, yet it started life as the Crusader Templar baptistery. But it was the Mamluks who really created today’s Muslim Quarter. Sultan Nasir Muhammad built the Cotton-Sellers Market in the distinctive Mamluk style (above centre); Sultan Qaitbay commissioned this fountain on the Temple Mount (above right). (illustration credit ill.38)
Suleiman the Magnificent: a Sultan to the Arabs, a Caesar to the Christians. He never visited Jerusalem but, regarding himself as the second Solomon, he rebuilt most of the walls and gates that we see today. (illustration credit ill.39)
Suleiman used a Crusader sarcophagus and decoration to build the fountain of the Gate of the Chain and asserted Ottoman splendour and legitimacy by adding mosaics to the Dome of the Rock. (illustration credit ill.40)
Charismatic, schizophrenic, Sabbatai Zevi was rejected in Jerusalem but the self-declared Jewish Messiah excited Jewish hopes—until the Ottoman Sultan forced his conversion to Islam. (illustration credit ill.41)
Section Three
The red-bearded Albanian generalissimo Ibrahim Pasha conquered Syria in 1831 and almost took Istanbul on behalf of his father, Mehmet Ali. He brutally crushed rebellious Jerusalem and opened up the city to Europeans. (illustration credit ill.42)
Mehmet Ali received the Scottish painter David Roberts on his way to Jerusalem: his paintings of Oriental scenes, such as this interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, influenced the European view of Palestine. (illustration credit ill.43)
The plutocrat and Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore (left) visited Jerusalem seven times and was one of the first to build outside the Old City. In 1860, he started his windmill and cottages (right). He was what Victorians thought a “noble Hebrew” should be like, but he had his secret scandals too: he fathered a child with his teenaged maid in his eighties. (illustration credit ill.44)
Much of the Old City was surprisingly empty in this period. This photograph taken in 1861 by the pioneering photographer Yessayi, the Armenian Patriarch, shows the deserted landscape behind the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. (illustration credit ill.45)
From the 1830s, the Sephardic Arab-speaking Jews of Jerusalem were joined by Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian empire and more Sephardis from the Arab world. European visitors were appalled and fascinated by the squalor and exoticism of Yemenite (left) and Ashkenazi (right) Jews. (illustration credit ill.46)
Jerusalem was also dominated by Russian Orthodox peasants (left, outside the Church at Easter), who prayed and caroused with equal fervour, while Jaffa Gate and King David Street (right) became the hub of European Jerusalem. (illustration credit ill.47)
Theodor Herzl (left, with family), assimilated Viennese journalist and brilliant publicist, was the organizer of political Zionism. In 1898, he approached Kaiser Wilhelm II (right, centre) who ordered Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem. Regarding himself as a German Crusader, the Kaiser wore a specially designed white uniform with a full-length veil attached to his pickelhauber. (illustration credit ill.48)
The Kaiser visits the Tomb of Kings. In the archaeological race between the Great Powers, the Frenchman Félicien de Saulcy had claimed this was King David’s tomb. It is actually the tomb of the first-century Queen of Adiabene. (illustration credit ill.49)
The American Colonists arrived as a millenarian Christian sect but they soon became beloved philanthropists: here, Bertha Spafford (sitting in the middle), a daughter of the founders, poses with Bedouin friends. (illustration credit ill.50)
Jerusalem’s mayor Selim al-Husseini: the very model of an aristocratic Jerusalemite. (illustration credit ill.51)
Ne’er-do-well aristocratic rogue and huckster Montagu Parker, later Earl of Morley, whose three-year project to uncover the Ark of the Covenant ended in the sole riot in Jerusalem’s history to unite Jews and Muslims. He only just escaped with his life. (illustration credit ill.52)
For almost half a century the fixer, aesthete, socialite and oud-player Wasif Jawhariyyeh knew everyone, saw everything, and recorded it all in his peerlessly vivid diary. (illustration credit ill.53)
Jemal Pasha (left), the dictator of Jerusalem during the First World War, was a Turkish nationalist with a taste for cigars, champagne, beautiful Jewish courtesans and brutal executions (right). (illustration credit ill.54)
Born in a Russian shtetl, Chaim Weizmann (left) was at home with kings and lords. His passionate charm helped convert Britain’s imperial panjandrums, Lloyd George (centre left), Churchill (centre right) and Balf
our, to Zionism, while Lawrence of Arabia (right) promoted the Arab cause. (illustration credit ill.55)
Surrender, 1917: Hussein al-Husseini, mayor of Jerusalem (centre, with walking stick), tried six times to surrender to the British with a sheet tied to a broom. (illustration credit ill.56)
Mandate: conqueror of Jerusalem, General Sir Edmund “the Bull” Allenby (right), and military governor Ronald Storrs celebrate the Fourth of July with Anna Spafford (left) at the American Colony in 1918. (illustration credit ill.57)
Lawrence of Arabia and Amir Abdullah follow Winston Churchill through the gardens of Augusta Victoria in 1921: the British Colonial Secretary created the new realm of Transjordan for the Hashemite Abdullah. (illustration credit ill.58)
The glories of Imperial Jerusalem: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, son of Queen Victoria, hands out awards in Barracks Square, though he grumbled when some recipients wore Ottoman and German medals. (illustration credit ill.59)
High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel (seated, centre) and Jerusalem governor Storrs (standing, fourth from the right) host the religious hierarchs of the city after a service to celebrate British liberation in 1924. (illustration credit ill.60)
Section Four
Sherif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Hussein (right) meets the early Palestinian nationalist leader Musa Kazem al-Husseini (left) in Jerusalem. (illustration credit ill.61)
The sherif never forgave his ambitious sons, Faisal (left), king first of Syria then Iraq, and Abdullah (right), later king of Jordan (seen here in Jerusalem in 1931), for seizing kingdoms of their own. (illustration credit ill.62)
David Ben-Gurion, working on new Jewish housing in 1924 (left), emerged as the tough Zionist leader just as Mufti Amin al-Husseini (right) emerged as Arab nationalist leader: here he leads the annual Nabi Musa, Jerusalem’s main Islamic festival, on horseback in 1937. (illustration credit ill.63)
The annual Easter ritual of the Holy Fire (seen from the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) was crowded, passionate and often fatal. (illustration credit ill.64)
The prayers at the Western Wall in 1944 to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust show the tiny, constrained area permitted for Jewish worship. (illustration credit ill.65)
Asmahan: Arabic singer, Druze princess, Egyptian film star, spy and temptress of the wartime King David Hotel. Was she murdered? She was the Marilyn Monroe of the Arab world. (illustration credit ill.66)
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Above left The Mufti Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler, who admired his fair hair and blue eyes. His cousin, Abd al-Kadir Husseini (above right), was an aristocratic warrior and Arab hero of 1947–48, whose death was a blow to Palestinian hopes. His funeral on the Temple Mount (below) was a chaotic, tense occasion: some mourners were killed by guns fired in the air.
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1946–48: As Arabs and Jews massacred each other’s civilians, Menachem Begin’s Irgun bombed British headquarters in the King David Hotel. British General Evelyn “Bubbles” Barker (left, bottom right on newspaper) already loathed the Jews, encouraged by his charming, exuberant mistress, the leading Palestinian hostess Katy Antonius (right). (illustration credit ill.69)
The battle of Jerusalem in 1948. (illustration credit ill.69a)
Arab soldiers escorting a Jewish prisoner during the fight for the Jewish Quarter (left); a Jewish girl fleeing from the fighting (right). (illustration credit ill.70)
Arab Legionaries behind sandbag barricades. (illustration credit ill.71)
The Arab victor of 1948 King Abdullah of Jordan waves to crowds in Jerusalem, but he paid with his life. (illustration credit ill.72a)
His assassin lies dead in al-Aqsa Mosque. (illustration credit ill.72b)
Abdullah’s grandson King Hussein of Jordan prepares for war in 1967: he reluctantly and disastrously placed his forces under Egyptian command. (illustration credit ill.72c)
Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated. (illustration credit ill.73a)
Israeli paratroopers and tanks advance towards Lions’ Gate. (illustration credit ill.73b)
Clockwise from top right: Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps cross the Haram and arrive in front of the Dome before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem. (illustration credit ill.74)
Family Trees
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Maps
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Acknowledgements
I have been helped in this huge project by a wide cast of scholars outstanding in their fields. I am deeply grateful to them for their help, advice and, where stated, reading and correcting of my text.
In the archaeological–biblical period, thank you, above all, to the following for reading and correcting this section: Professor Ronny Reich; Professor Dan Bahat, formerly the Chief Archaeologist of Jerusalem, who also gave me detailed tours of the city; Dr. Raphael Greenberg, who likewise treated me to site visits; and Rosemary Eshel. Thanks for help and advice to Irving Finkel, Assistant Keeper of Ancient Iraq and magical-medical texts at the British Museum; and to Dr. Eleanor Robson, Reader in Ancient Middle Eastern Science, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, for her correction of the sections on Assyria–Babylon–Persia, and Dr. Nicola Schreiber for her advice on the pottery implications for the dating of the gateways of Megiddo; to Dr. Gideon Avni, Director of Excavations and Surveys Department, IAA; Dr. Eli Shukron, for his regular tours of the dig in the City of David; Dr. Shimon Gibson; Dr. Renee Sivan of the Citadel. And special thanks to Dr. Yusuf al-Natsheh, Director of the Department of Islamic Archaeology of the Haram al-Sharif, for his help throughout the project and for arranging access to closed sites on the Haram and tours with Khader al-Shihabi. On the Herodian–Roman–Byzantine period, I am immensely grateful to Professor Martin Goodman of Oxford University and to Dr. Adrian Goldsworthy for the reading and correction of my text.
On the early Islamic period, Arabs, Turks and Mamluks, I owe huge thanks for his advice, guidance and detailed correction of my text to Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and also to Dr. Nazmi al-Jubeh, Dr. Yusuf al-Natsheh and Khader al-Shihabi. On the Mamilla Cemetery, I thank Taufik De’adel.
On the Crusades: thanks to Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Cambridge University, and to Professor David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History, Cambridge University, for reading and correcting the text.
On Jewish history from the Fatimids to the Ottomans: thanks to Professor Abulafia who gave me access to manuscript sections of his Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, to Professor Minna Rozen, Haifa University, and to Sir Martin Gilbert, who let me read the manuscript of In Ishmael’s House.
On the Ottoman period and the Palestinian Jerusalem Families: thanks to Professor Adel Manna, who rea
d and corrected the text of the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sections.
On the nineteenth-century–imperialist–early-Zionist periods: thanks to Yehoshoa Ben-Arieh; Sir Martin Gilbert; Professor Tudor Parfitt; Caroline Finkel; Dr. Abigail Green, who let me read her manuscript Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero; and Bashir Barakat, for his private research on the Jerusalem Families. Kirsten Ellis generously gave me access to unpublished chapters of Star of the Morning. Dr. Clare Mouradian gave me much advice and material. Professor Minna Rozen shared her research on Disraeli and other papers. On the Russian connection, thanks to Professor Simon Dixon, and to Galina Babkova in Moscow; and on the Armenians to George Hintlian and Dr. Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev.