Jerusalem: The Biography

  On 3 May, the Albanian presided over Orthodox Easter: 17,000 Christian pilgrims filled a seething city on the verge of outright revolt. On Good Friday night, the crowds packed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ready for the Holy Fire, watched by Robert Curzon, an English traveller who left a vivid memoir of what happened next. ‘The behaviour of the pilgrims was riotous in the extreme. At one point, they made a racecourse around the Sepulchre and some, almost in a state of nudity, danced about with frantic gestures, yelling and screaming as if possessed.’

  Next morning, Ibrahim entered the Church to witness the Holy Fire but the crowd was so dense that the guards cleared the way ‘with the butt-ends of their muskets and whips’ while three monks played ‘crazy fiddles’ and women started to ululate ‘with a very peculiar shrill cry’.

  IBRAHIM: HOLY FIRE, HOLY DEATh

  Ibrahim was seated. Darkness fell. The Greek patriarch, in ‘magnificent procession’, entered the aedicule. The crowd awaited the divine spark. Curzon saw the flicker then the flame of the Miracle which was passed to the pilgrim ‘who had paid the highest sum for this honour’, but ‘a furious battle’ broke out for the Fire; pilgrims fell to the floor in ecstatic faints; blinding smoke filled the Church; three pilgrims fell to their deaths from the higher galleries; an old Armenian lady died in her seat. Ibrahim tried to leave the Church but could not move. His guards, attempting to beat a way through the crowd, started a stampede. By the time Curzon ‘got as far as the place where the Virgin stood during the Crucifixion’, the stones felt soft under his feet.

  There was actually a great heap of bodies on which I trod. All dead. Many of them quite black with suffocation and others all bloody and covered with brains and entrails, trodden to pieces by the crowd. Soldiers with their bayonets killed a number of fainting wretches, the walls splattered with the blood and brains of men who had been felled like oxen.

  The frenzied stampede became a ‘desperate and savage’ fight for survival – Curzon saw people dying all around him. Ibrahim only just escaped with his own life, fainting several times until his guards drew their swords and sliced a path through human flesh.

  Bodies were ‘lying in heaps even upon the Stone of Unction’. Ibrahim stood in the courtyard ‘giving orders for the removal of the corpses and making his men drag out the bodies of those who appeared to be alive’. Four hundred pilgrims perished. When Curzon escaped, many of the bodies were actually ‘standing upright quite dead’.

  IBRAHIM: THE PEASANTS REVOLT

  As news of this disaster spread throughout a shocked Christendom, the Families of Jerusalem, Nablus and Hebron raised the rebellion. On 8 May, 10,000 armed fellahin attacked Jerusalem, but were repulsed by Ibrahim’s troops. On 19 May, in a scene that recalled King David’s taking of Jerusalem, the villagers of Silwan, below the City of David, showed the rebels a secret tunnel through which they crawled into the city and opened the Dung Gate set in the southern wall. The peasants pillaged the bazaars, the troops attacked them, only to join in the plundering. The Bimbashi – garrison commander – arrested the leaders of the Jerusalemite Families, the Husseinis and Khalidis. But 20,000 peasants were now rampaging through the streets and besieging the Tower. Two young American missionaries, William Thomson and his pregnant wife Eliza, cowered in their digs: he left her to seek help in Jaffa while she locked herself in their room, amid ‘the roar of cannon, falling walls, shrieks of the neighbours, terror of the servants and the expectation of massacre’. She gave birth to a boy, but by the time her husband made it back to Jerusalem she was dying. He soon left ‘this wreck of a country’.*

  Ibrahim, who had retreated to Jaffa, now fought his way across the hills, losing 500 men. On 27 May, encamped on Mount Zion, he attacked, killing 300 rebels. But he was ambushed near the Pools of Solomon, and besieged in David’s Tomb. The rebellion flared again led by the Husseinis and the Abu Ghosh. Ibrahim called his father for help.

  Mehmet Ali himself and 15,000 reinforcements sailed into Jaffa: ‘a fine looking old man’, bowing regally on a ‘splendid horse, natural, dignified and in perfect keeping with the character of a great man’. The Albanians crushed the rebels and retook Jerusalem; the Husseinis of Jerusalem were exiled to Egypt. The rebels rose again, but Ibrahim the Red slaughtered them outside Nablus, sacked Hebron, despoiled the countryside, beheaded his captives – and launched a reign of terror in Jerusalem. Returning to the city, he appointed the chieftain Jaber Abu Ghosh as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper governor, and beheaded anyone found with a weapon. The walls were bedecked with severed heads; prisoners rotted in the new Kishleh jail near the Jaffa Gate, since used by the Ottomans, British and Israelis.

  The Albanians were enthusiastic modernizers who needed European backing if they were to conquer the Ottoman empire. Ibrahim allowed the minorities to repair their smashed buildings: the Franciscans restored St Saviour’s; the Sephardic Jews started to rebuild the ben Zakkai Synagogue, one of the four synagogues of the Jewish Quarter; the Ashkenazis returned to the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720. Although the Jewish Quarter was now poverty-stricken, a few Russian Jews, persecuted at home, started to settle there.

  In 1839, Ibrahim made his bid for Istanbul, smashing the Ottoman armies. King Louis Philippe’s France backed the Albanians, but Britain feared French and Russian influence if the Ottomans fell. The sultan and his enemy Ibrahim both bid for Western support. The teenaged Sultan Abdulmecid issued a Noble Rescript promising equality for minorities, while Ibrahim invited the Europeans to establish consulates in Jerusalem – and, for the first time since the Crusades, permitted the ringing of church bells.

  In 1839, the first British vice-consul, William Turner Young, arrived in Jerusalem not only to represent London’s new power but to convert the Jews and accelerate the Second Coming.

  37

  THE EVANGELISTS

  1840–1855

  PALMERSTON AND SHAFTESBURY: THE IMPERIALIST AND THE EVANGELIST

  The diplomatic policy relating to Jerusalem was the work of Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, but the Godly mission was the achievement of his evangelical stepson-in-law, the Earl of Shaftesbury.* Palmerston, aged fifty-five, was not a Victorian prig or evangelical but an unrepentant Regency buck known as Lord Cupid for his sexual escapades (which he jovially recorded in his diary), as Lord Pam for his jaunty vigour, and as Lord Pumicestone for his gunboat diplomacy. Indeed Shaftesbury joked that Palmerston ‘didn’t know Moses from Sir Sidney Smith’. His interest in the Jews was pragmatic: the French advanced their power by protecting the Catholics, the Russians by protecting the Orthodox, but there were few Protestants in Jerusalem. Palmerston wanted to diminish French and Russian influence, and saw that British power could be advanced by protecting the Jews. The other mission – the conversion of the Jews – was the result of his son-in-law’s evangelical ardour.

  Shaftesbury, thirty-nine years old, curly haired and bewhiskered, personified the new Victorian Britain. A pure-hearted aristocrat dedicated to improving the lives of workers, children and lunatics, he was also a fundamentalist who believed that the Bible ‘is God’s word written from the very first syllable down to the very last’. He was sure that dynamic Christianity would promote a global moral renaissance and an improvement of humanity itself. In Britain, Puritan millenarianism had long since been overwhelmed by the rationalism of the Enlightenment but it had survived among the Nonconformists. Now it returned to the mainstream: the French Revolution with its guillotine, and the Industrial Revolution with its mobs of workers, had shaped a new British middle class that welcomed the certainties of piety, respectability and the Bible, the antidote to the raging materialism of Victorian prosperity.

  The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews, known as the Jews Society, founded in 1808, now flourished, thanks in part to Shaftesbury. ‘All the young people are growing mad about religion,’ grumbled another elderly Regency roué, Lord Melbourne, prime minister at Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837. Convinced that eternal salvation was at
tainable through the personal experience of Jesus and his good news (evangelion in Greek), these evangelicals expected the Second Coming. Shaftesbury believed, like the Puritans two centuries before, that the return and conversion of the Jews would create an Anglican Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Heaven. He prepared a memorandum for Palmerston: ‘There’s a country without a nation and God in his wisdom and mercy directs us to a nation without a country.’*

  ‘It will be part of your duty’, Palmerston instructed Jerusalem vice-consul Young, ‘to afford protection to the Jews generally.’ At the same time he told his ambassador to the Sublime Porte that he should ‘strongly recommend [the sultan] to hold out every just encouragement to the Jews of Europe to return to Palestine’. In September 1839, Young founded the Jerusalem branch of the London Jews Society. Shaftesbury was exultant, noting in his diary, ‘The ancient city of the people of God is about to resume a place among the nations. I shall always remember that God put it into my head to conceive the plan for His honour, gave me the influence to prevail with Palmerston, and provided a man for the situation, who can remake Jerusalem in her glory.’ Shaftesbury’s signet ring was inscribed ‘Pray for Jerusalem’, while (as we have seen) another zealous Victorian fixated with Jerusalem – Sir Moses Montefiore – added Jerusalem to his new coat of arms and inscribed it like a talisman on his carriage, his signet ring and even his bed. Now, in June 1839, Montefiore and his wife Judith returned to Jerusalem, armed with pistols to protect the cash they had raised in London.

  Jerusalem was ravaged by the plague, so Montefiore camped outside on the Mount of Olives where he held court, receiving over 300 visitors. When the plague was ebbing, Montefiore entered the city on a white horse, lent him by the governor, and proceeded to hear petitions and distribute alms to the poverty-stricken Jews. He and his wife were welcomed by all three religions in Jerusalem, but while they were visiting the Sanctuary in Hebron to the south, a Muslim mob attacked them. They only escaped with their lives thanks to the intervention of Ottoman troops. Montefiore was not discouraged. As he left, this reborn Jew and dedicated imperialist celebrated a similar though of course different messianic fervour as Shaftesbury: ‘O Jerusalem,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘may the city soon be rebuilt in our days. Amen.’

  Shaftesbury and Montefiore both believed in the divine providence of the British empire and the Jewish return to Zion. The righteousness of evangelical zeal and the reborn passion of Jewish dreams of Jerusalem dovetailed neatly to become one of the Victorian obsessions, and it happened that the painter David Roberts returned from Palestine in 1840 just in time to show the public his hugely popular romantic images of a flamboyantly Oriental Jerusalem ripe for British civilization and Jewish restoration. The Jews were in urgent need of British protection because the competing promises of tolerance issued by the sultan and the Albanians provoked a deadly backlash.

  JAMES FINN: THE EVANGELICAL CONSUL

  In March 1840, seven Jews in Damascus were accused of killing a Christian monk and his Muslim servant to use their blood for a human sacrifice at Passover. This imaginary scenario was the notorious ‘blood libel’ that had first appeared in Oxford at the time of the Second Crusade in the twelfth century. Sixty-three Jewish children were arrested and tortured to force their mothers to reveal the ‘hiding place of the blood’.

  Even though he had only just returned to London, Sir Moses Montefiore, backed by the Rothschilds, led the campaign to rescue the Damascene Jews from this medieval persecution. Joining forces with the French lawyer Adolphe Cremieux, Montefiore dashed to Alexandria where he canvassed Mehmet Ali to free the prisoners. But only weeks later, there was another case of the ‘blood libel’ in Rhodes. Montefiore sailed from Alexandria to Istanbul where he was received by the sultan whom he persuaded to issue a decree that categorically denied the truth of the ‘blood libel.’ It was Montefiore’s finest hour – but his success was due as much to his nationality as to his often ponderous diplomacy. It was a fine time to be an Englishman in the Middle East.

  Both the sultan and the Albanians were frantically bidding for British favour as the very existence of the Ottoman empire hung in the balance. Jerusalem remained under Ibrahim the Red who ruled much of the Middle East. While France backed the Albanians, Britain tried to satisfy their appetite while preserving the Ottomans. They offered Palestine as well as Egypt if Ibrahim would withdraw from Syria. It was a good offer but Mehmet Ali and Ibrahim could not resist the supreme prize: Istanbul. Ibrahim defied Britain so Palmerston put together an Anglo-Austrian-Ottoman coalition and despatched his gunboats, under Commodore Charles Napier, cannons blazing. Ibrahim crumbled before British might.

  Ibrahim the Red had opened up Jerusalem to the Europeans and changed her for ever but now, in return for hereditary rule in Egypt, he abandoned Syria and the Holy City.* The French, humiliated by Palmerston’s triumph, considered a ‘Christian Free City at Jerusalem’, the first proposal for an internationalized Zion, but on 20 October, 1840, the sultan’s troops marched back into Jerusalem. Within the walls, a third of the city was wasteland, covered in thickets of prickly-pear cacti, and there were only 13,000 inhabitants, but 5,000 of them were now Jews, their numbers boosted by Russian immigrants and refugees from an earthquake that had struck Safed in Galilee.9

  Even when Palmerston lost the Foreign Office to Lord Aberdeen, who ordered the vice-consul to desist from evangelical Jewish schemes, Young continued regardless. When Palmerston returned to power he ordered the Jerusalem consul to ‘receive under British Protection all Russian Jews who apply to you’.

  Meanwhile Shaftesbury had persuaded the new prime minister, Robert Peel, to back the creation of the first ever Anglican bishopric and church in Jerusalem. In 1841, Prussia (whose king had proposed a Christian international Jerusalem) and Britain jointly appointed the first Protestant bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, a Jewish convert. British missionaries became increasingly aggressive in their Jewish mission. In 1841, at the opening of the very English Christ Church near the Jaffa Gate, three Jews were baptized in the presence of Consul Young. The Jewish plight in Jerusalem was pitiful: the Jews lived ‘like flies who have taken up their abode in a skull’, wrote the American novelist Herman Melville. The swelling Jewish community lived in almost theatrical poverty without any medical care, but they did have access to the free doctors provided by the London Jews Society. This tempted a few converts.

  ‘I can rejoice in Zion for a capital,’ mused Shaftesbury, ‘in Jerusale for a church and in Hebrew for a King!’ Jerusalem went overnight from a benighted ruin ruled by a shabby pasha in a tawdry seraglio to a city with a surfeit of gold-braided and bejewelled dignitaries. There had not been a Latin patriarch since the thirteenth century and the Orthodox patriarch had long resided in Istanbul, but now the French and the Russians sponsored their return to Jerusalem. However, it was the seven European consuls, puffed-up minor officials representing imperial ambitions, who could scarcely contain their high-handed grandiosity. Escorted by towering bodyguards, the kavasses, wearing bright scarlet uniforms, wielding sabres and heavy gold wands that they banged on the cobbles to clear the streets, the consuls paraded solemnly through the city, craving any pretext to impose their will on the beleaguered Ottoman governors. Ottoman soldiers even had to stand in the presence of the consul’s children. The pretensions of the Austrian and Sardinian consuls were all the haughtier because their monarchs claimed to be kings of Jerusalem. But none were more arrogant or petty than the British and the French.

  In 1845, Young was replaced by James Finn, who for twenty years was almost as powerful as the Ottoman governors, yet this sanctimonious meddler offended everyone from English lords and Ottoman pashas to every other foreign diplomat. Regardless of orders from London, he offered British protection to the Russian Jews but never ceased his mission to convert them. When the Ottomans allowed foreign purchase of land, Finn bought and developed his farm at Talbieh and then another at Abraham’s Vineyard, funded by a Miss Cook of Cheltenham, and aided by a tea
m of dedicated English evangelical ladies, as a means to proselytize more Jews by teaching them the joys of honest work.

  Finn regarded himself as a cross between imperial proconsul, saintly missionary and property magnate, unscrupulously buying lands and houses with suspiciously large amounts of money. He and his wife, another fanatical evangelical, learned fluent Hebrew and the widely spoken Ladino. On one hand, they aggressively protected the Jews, who were brutally oppressed in Jerusalem. Yet at the same time his pushy mission provoked violent Jewish resistance. When he converted a boy called Mendel Digness, he caused mayhem as ‘the Jews climbed over the terraces and made great disturbances’. Finn called the rabbis ‘fanatics’, but back in Britain, the powerful Montefiore, hearing that the Jews were being harassed, sent a Jewish doctor and pharmacy to Jerusalem to foil the Jews Society, which in turn founded a hospital on the edge of the Jewish Quarter.

  In 1847, a Christian Arab boy attacked a Jewish youth who threw back a pebble which grazed the Arab boy’s foot. The Greek Orthodox traditionally the most anti-Semitic community, quickly backed by the Muslim mufti and qadi, accused the Jews of procuring Christian blood to bake the Passover biscuits: the blood libel had come to Jerusalem, but the sultan’s ban, granted to Montefiore after the Damascus affair, proved decisive.10