Instead of the usual devout Russians, a new breed of often sceptical Western visitors – 10,000 a year, by 1856 – poured into the city to see the Holy Places that had sparked a European war. Yet a visit to Jerusalem was still an adventure. There were no carriages, just covered litters. She possessed virtually no hotels or banks: visitors stayed in the monasteries, the most comfortable being the Armenian with its elegant, airy courtyards. However in 1843, a Russian Jew named Menachem Mendel founded the first hotel, the Kaminitz, which was soon followed by the English Hotel; and in 1848 a Sephardic family, the Valeros, opened the first European bank in a room up some stairs off David Street. This was a still a provincial Ottoman town, usually governed by a scruffy pasha who resided in a ramshackle seraglio – residence, harem and prison – just north of the Temple Mount.* Westerners were ‘astonished at the beggarly meanness of that mansion,’ wrote Finn, and repulsed by the mangy concubines and ‘ragamuffin officials’. As visitors sipped coffee with the pasha, they could hear the clank of prisoners’ chains and groans of the tortured from the dungeons below. During the war, the pasha tried to ensure tranquillity in Jerusalem – but the Greek Orthodox monks attacked the newly appointed Catholic patriarch and herded camels into his residence, all to the delight of the great writers who came to see those very shrines for which so many soldiers were dying in the grinding battles and putrid hospitals of the Crimea. They were not impressed.
THE WRITERS: MELVILLE, FLAUBERT AND THACKERAY
Herman Melville, then aged thirty-seven, had made his name with three novels based on his own breathtaking whaling adventures in the Pacific but Moby Dick, published in 1851, had sold just 3,000 copies. Melancholic and tormented, not unlike Gogol, he arrived in Jerusalem in 1856 to restore his health – and to investigate the nature of God. ‘My object – saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself as a passive subject to its weird impressions’ – and he was stimulated by the ‘wreck’ that was Jerusalem, beguiled by the ‘unleavened nakedness of desolation’. As we saw earlier, he was fascinated by the ‘fanatical energy and spirit’ and ‘Jewmania’ of the many ‘crazy’ Americans. They inspired his epic Clarel – at 18,000 lines, the longest American poem, which he wrote when he got home as he toiled in the US Customs Office.
Melville was not the only novelist looking for restoration and consolation for literary disappointment in the Orient: Gustave Flaubert, accompanied by his wealthy friend Maxime du Camp, and funded by the French government to report on trade and agriculture, was on a cultural and sexual tour to recover from the reception of his first novel. He saw Jerusalem as a ‘charnelhouse surrounded by walls, the old religions rotting in the sun’. As for the Church, ‘a dog would have been more moved than me. The Armenians curse the Greeks who detest the Latins who execrate the Copts.’ Melville agreed that the Church was a ‘half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death’ but recognized that wars were started in what he called the ‘thronged news-room and theology exchange of Jerusalem’.*
The coenobite fighting was only one aspect of the violent theatre of Jerusalem. The tensions between the new visitors – Anglo-American evangelicals and Russian Jews and Orthodox peasants on one hand, and the older world of the Ottomans, Arab Families, Sephardic Jews and Bedouin and fellahin on the other – led to a series of murders. One of James Finn’s evangelical ladies, Mathilda Creasy, was found with her head smashed in; and a Jew was found stabbed down a well. The poisoning of a richrabbi, David Herschell, led to a sensational court case but the suspects, who were his own grandsons, were acquitted for lack of evidence. The British consul James Finn was the most powerful official in Jerusalem at a time when the Ottomans were so indebted to Britain, hence he took it upon himself to intervene wherever he saw fit. Considering himself to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Holy City, he set about investigating each of these crimes, but despite his powers of detection (and the aid of six African necromancers), no killers were ever found.
Finn was the courageous champion and proselytizing irritant for the Jews who still needed his protection. Their plight was, if anything, getting worse. Most of the Jews lived in the ‘stinking ruins of the Jewish Quarter, venerable in filth’, wrote Thackeray, and their ‘wailings and lamentations of the lost glory of their city’ haunted Jerusalem on Friday nights. ‘None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem,’ Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in April 1854, ‘inhabiting the most filthy quarter, constant object of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins.’ A Jew who walked past the gate leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was, as Finn reported, ‘beaten by a mob of pilgrims’ because it was still illegal for a Jew to pass it. Another was stabbed by an Ottoman soldier. A Jewish funeral was attacked by Arabs. In each case, Finn swooped on the Ottoman governor and forced him to intervene and see British justice done.
The pasha himself was more interested in controlling the Palestinian Arabs whose rebellions and clan wars, partly a response to the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman empire, were often fought out with the gallop of camels, the swish of spears and the whistle of bullets around the walls of Jerusalem. These thrilling scenes played into the European view of Palestine as a biblical theatre crossed with a Wild West stage set, and they gathered on the walls to spectate the skirmishes which to them must have resembled surreal sporting events – with the added spice of the occasional fatality.
THE WRITERS: DAVID DORR, AN AMERICAN SLAVE ON TOUR
At their Talbieh evangelical farm for converting Jews, the Finns frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire. As bullets flew, Mrs Finn was often amazed to identify women amongst the warriors. She did her best to negotiate peace between the sheikhs. But the Bedouin were only part of the problem: the sheikhs of Hebron and Abu Ghosh fielded private armies of 500 warriors and fought full-scale wars against the Ottomans. When one of these sheikhs was captured and brought to Jerusalem in chains, the dashing warrior managed to escape and gallop away to fight again, like an Arab Robin Hood. Finally Hafiz Pasha, the aged governor of Jerusalem, had to lead an expedition with 550 troops and two brass field-guns to suppress the warlord of Hebron.
Yet despite such melodrama, on summer evenings, Jerusalemites of all creeds – Muslim and Christian Arabs along with the Sephardic Jews – picnicked on the Damascus road. The American explorer, Lieutenant William Lynch, observed a ‘picturesque scene – hundreds of Jews enjoying the fresh air, seated outside the walls under enormous olive trees, the woman all in white shrouds, the men in broad-brimmed black hats’. James Finn and the other consuls, preceded by Ottoman soldiers and kavasses with silver-mounted batons, promenaded with their wives. ‘As the sun set, everyone hurried inside the walls that were still locked every night.’
‘Ah the sadness of Jerusalem,’ sighed Finn who had to admit that the city seemed ‘monastically dull to a person imbued with the gay habits of other places. French visitors have been known to utter the ejaculation which ever accompanies the shrug of the shoulders at the contrast between Jerusalem and Paris.’ This was certainly not the sort of ejaculation which the priapic Flaubert expected and he expressed his frustration at the Jaffa Gate, ‘I let a fart escape as I crossed the threshold,’ even if ‘I was annoyed by the Voltaireanism of my anus.’ That sexual gourmand Flaubert celebrated escape from Jerusalem with a five-girl orgy in Beirut: ‘I screwed three women and came four times – three times before lunch and once after dessert. Young Du Campcame only once, his member still sore with the remnant of a chancre given him by a Wallachian whore.’
One unique American visitor, David Dorr, a young black slave from Louisiana who called himself a ‘quadroon’, agreed with Flaubert: on tour with his master, he arrived ‘with submissive heart’ filled with awe for Jerusalem but soon changed his mind: ‘When I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots than pay homage. After seventeen days in Jerusa
lem, I leave never wishing to return again.’*
Yet for all their irreverence, the writers could not help but be awed by Jerusalem. Flaubert considered her ‘diabolically grand’. Thackeray sensed ‘there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.’ Melville almost admired the ‘plague-stricken splendour’ of the place. Standing at the Golden Gate, gazing out at Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, Melville saw a ‘city besieged by armies of the dead’ and asked himself: ‘is the desolation the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?’13
As Russian forces were repeatedly defeated in the Crimea, Nicholas fell ill under the strain and died on 18 February 1855. In September, the Russian naval base at Sebastopol fell to the British and French. Russia had been thoroughly humiliated. After staggering military incompetence on all sides in a campaign that cost 750,000 lives, the new Russian emperor, Alexander II, sued for peace, surrendering his imperial ambitions for Jerusalem, but winning at least a restoration of the dominant Orthodox rights in the Sepulchre, the status quo that still remains in force today.
On 14 April 1856, the cannons of the Citadel saluted the signing of peace. But twelve days later, James Finn, attending the Holy Fire, watched ‘Greek pilgrims, provided with sticks, stones and cudgels, concealed beforehand behind the columns and dropped from the gallery,’ attack the Armenians. ‘Dreadful conflict ensued,’ he observed, ‘missiles were flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps, glass and oil pouring down upon heads.’ When the pasha rushed down from his throne in the gallery, he ‘received blows to the head’ and had to be carried out before his soldiers charged in with fixed bayonets. Minutes later, the Orthodox patriarch appeared with the Holy Fire to screams of exultation, the beating of chests, and flickering of flames.
The garrison celebrated the sultan’s victory with a parade on the Maidan which was ironic because soon afterwards, Alexander II bought this parade ground, once the site of Assyrian and Roman camps, to build a Russian Compound. Henceforth Russia would pursue cultural dominance in Jerusalem.
The victory was bitter sweet for the Ottomans, their weak Islamic realm saved by Christian soldiers. To show his gratitude and keep the West at bay, Sultan Abdulmecid was forced, in measures known as Tanzimat – reform – to centralize his administration, decree absolute equality for all minorities regardless of religion, and allow the Europeans all manner of once-inconceivable liberties. He presented St Anne’s, the Crusader church that had become Saladin’s madrassa, to Napoleon III. In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, exploiter of the Congo, was the first European allowed to visit the Temple Mount: its guards – club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur – had to be locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg empire – and ill-fated future Emperor of Mexico – arrived with the officers of his flagship. The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom. Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone.
In the last months of the Crimean War, Sir Moses Montefiore had bought the trains and rails of the Balaclava Railway, built specially for British troops in the Crimea, to create a line between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Now, endowed with all the prestige and power of a British plutocrat after the Crimean victory, he returned to the city, the harbinger of her future.14
38
THE NEW CITY
1855–60
MOSES MONTEFIORE: ‘THIS CROESUS’
On 18 July 1855, Montefiore ritually ripped his clothes when he saw the lost Temple and then set up his camp outside the Jaffa Gate where he was mobbed by thousands of Jerusalemites firing off guns in the air and cheering. James Finn, whose schemes to convert Jews he had repeatedly foiled, tried to undermine his reception but the liberal-minded governor, Kiamil Pasha, sent an honour guard to present arms. When Montefiore became the first Jew to visit the Temple Mount, the pasha had him escorted by a hundred soldiers – and he was borne in a sedan-chair so he would not break the law that banned Jews from the holy mountain lest they stood on the Holy of Holies. His life’s mission of helping Jerusalem’s Jews was never easy: many of them lived on charity and were so infuriated when Montefiore tried to wean them off his handouts that they rioted in his camp. ‘Really,’ wrote his niece Jemima Sebag, who was in his entourage, ‘If this continues, we’ll scarcely be safe in our tents!’ Not all his schemes worked either: he never managed to build his Crimean railway from Jaffa, but it was this trip that changed the destiny of Jerusalem. On his way, he had persuaded the sultan to let him rebuild the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720, and even more important, to buy land in Jerusalem to settle Jews. He paid for the restoration of the Hurva and started to look for a place to buy.
Melville described Sir Moses Montefiore as ‘this Croesus – a huge man of 75 carried from Joppa on a litter borne by mules’. He was 6 foot 3 and not quite seventy-five, but he was old to make such a trip. He had already risked his life on three visits to Jerusalem and his doctors had advised him not to go again – ‘his heart was feeble and there was poison in his blood’ – but he and Judith came anyway, accompanied by an entourage of retainers, servants and even his own kosher butcher.
To the Jews of Jerusalem and across the Diaspora, Montefiore was already a legend who combined the proconsular prestige of a rich Victorian baronet at the height of the British empire with the dignity of a Jew who always rushed to the aid of his brethren and had never compromised his Judaism. It was his unique position in Britain that gave him his power: he straddled the old and new societies, as much at home with royal dukes, prime ministers and bishops as he was with rabbis and financiers. In a London dominated by staid morality and evangelical Hebraism, Montefiore was the ideal of what Victorians thought a Jew should be: ‘That grand old Hebrew’, wrote Lord Shaftesbury, ‘is better than many Christians.’
He had been born in Livorno, Italy but he made his fortune as one of the ‘Jew brokers’ on the London Stock Exchange, an ascent helped by his happy marriage to Judith Cohen, sister-in-law of the banker Nathaniel Rothschild. His social rise and wealth were only a means to help others. When he received a knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1837, she described him in her diary as ‘a Jew, an excellent man’ while in his journal, he prayed that the honour ‘may prove the harbinger of future good to the Jews generally. I had besides the pleasure of my banner with “Jerusalem” floating proudly in the hall.’ Once he was rich, he scaled down his business and, often campaigning with his brother-in-law or his nephew Lionel de Rothschild, he devoted himself to winning political rights for British Jews.* But he was most needed abroad, where he was received like a British ambassador by emperors and sultans, displaying tireless courage and ingenuity while often in personal danger. As we have seen, it was his Damascus mission to Muhammad Ali and the sultan that made him famous.
Montefiore found himself admired even by the most eminent anti-Semites: when Nicholas I, in his crusade for Orthodoxy and Autocracy, was starting to repress the millions of Russian Jews, Montefiore travelled to St Petersburg to insist that Russian Jews were loyal, brave and honourable. ‘If they resembled you,’ replied Nicholas with ominous courtesy.† However he was more than capable of holding his own with anyone: when he rushed to Rome to intervene in an anti-Semitic intrigue, a cardinal asked him how much of Rothschild’s gold had paid for the sultan’s ban on the ‘blood libel.’ ‘Not as much as I gave your lackey for hanging up my coat in your hall,’ Montefiore replied.
His partner in all his enterprises was the vivacious, curly-haired Judith who always called him ‘Monty’, but they were not destined to found a dynasty: despite their prayers at Rachel’s Tomb, they never had children. Yet apart from his Jewishness and the Hebrew letters of Jerusalem on his coat of arms, Montefiore had the virtues and fa
ults of a typical Victorian grandee. He lived in splendour in a Park Lane mansion and a crenellated Gothic Revival villa in Ramsgate where he built his own synagogue and a unique if grandiose mausoleum based exactly on Rachel’s Tomb. His tone was ponderously orotund, his righteousness was scarcely leavened with humour, there was a certain vanity in his autocratic style, and behind the façade, there were mistresses and illegitimate children. Indeed his modern biographer reveals that while in his eighties, he fathered a child with a teenage maid, yet another sign of his astonishing energy.
Now his search for a place to buy in Jerusalem was helped by the Jerusalem Families whom he had always befriended: even the qadi called him ‘the pride of the people of Moses’. Ahmed Duzhdar Aga, whom he had known for twenty years, sold him a plot outside the walls between the Zion and Jaffa gates for 1,000 gold English sovereigns. Montefiore immediately moved his tents to his new land where he planned a hospital and a Kentish windmill so that Jews could make their own bread. Before he left he asked the pasha for a special favour: the stench of the Jewish Quarter, cited in every Western travelogue, was caused by a Muslim abattoir, its very presence a sign of the inferior status of the Jews. Montefiore asked for it to be moved and the pasha agreed.
In June 1857, Montefiore returned for the fifth time with the materials for his windmill and in 1859, construction started. Instead of a hospital, he built the almshouses for poor Jewish families that became known as the Montefiore Cottages, unmistakably Victorian like a red-brick, crenellated, mock-medieval clubhouse in English suburbia. In Hebrew they were called Mishkenot Shaanim – the Dwellings of Delight – but initially they were preyed on by bandits and their inhabitants were so undelighted they used to creepback into the city to sleep. The windmill did at first produce cheap bread but it soon broke down due to the lack of Judaean wind and Kentish maintenance.