That night Graham recorded how his companions – ‘excited, feverish, and fluttering like so many children’ – filled their bags with Jerusalem earth, Jordan water, palms, death shrouds, stereoscopes – ‘and we kissed each other all over again!’
What embracing and kissing there were this night; smacking of hearty lips and tangling of beards and whiskers. There commenced a day of uproarious festivity. The quantity of wine, cognac and arak [aniseed-flavoured liqueur] consumed would appal most English. And the drunken dancing would be rather foreign to Jesus!
That year, Easter coincided with Passover and Nabi Musa. While Rasputin policed the morals of the Orthodox sisterhood whom Wasif was busy debauching, an English aristocrat unleashed riots and made headlines across the world.5
THE HON. CAPTAIN MONTY PARKER
AND THE ARK OF THE COVENANT
Monty Parker, a twenty-nine-year-old nobleman with a plumage of luxuriant moustaches and pointed Edward VII beard, expensive tastes and minimal income, was an opportunistic but credulous rogue, always on the lookout for an easy way to make his fortune – or at least find someone else to pay for his luxuries. In 1908, this Old Etonian son of a Cabinet minister in Gladstone’s last government, younger brother of the Earl of Morley, ex-Grenadier Guards officer and veteran of the Boer War, encountered a Finnish hierophant who convinced him that together they could discover in Jerusalem the most valuable treasure of world history.
The Finn was Dr Valter Juvelius, a teacher, poet and spiritualist with a taste for dressing up in biblical robes and deciphering biblical codes. After working for years on the Book of Ezekiel, encouraged by séances with a Swedish psychic, Juvelius believed he had uncovered what he called ‘The Cipher of Ezekiel’. This revealed that in 586 bc, when Nebuchadnezzar was about to destroy Jerusalem, the Jews had hidden what he dubbed ‘the Temple Archive’ – the Ark of the Covenant – in a tunnel south of the Temple Mount. But he needed a man of action who could also help him raise the funds required to find the Ark. Who better than a dim but energetic English aristocrat with the best connections in Edwardian London?
Juvelius showed his secret prospectus to Parker, who excitedly read this revelation:
I now believe I have empirically proved the extremely ingenious deduction that the entrance to the Temple Archive is the Akeldama and that Temple Archive stands untouched in its hiding place. It ought to be a simple matter to produce the Archive of the Temple from its 2500 year old hiding-place. The existence of the Cipher proves the Temple Archive remains untouched.
Parker was convinced by this crank’s closely argued thesis – even if it was scarcely more rational than the plot of The Da Vinci Code. At a time when even the Kaiser was attending séances and when many believed in the Jewish conspiracy, Juvelius had no trouble finding converts. As one of his adepts wrote to him, ‘the Jews are a somewhat secretive race’ – so naturally they had hidden the Ark rather well.
Parker had Juvelius’ document translated from Finnish and bound in a glossy brochure. Then he told his pals, a disreputable crew of indebted aristocrats and military mountebanks,* about this astonishing opportunity to make a fortune: surely this cache would be worth $200 million? Parker was a glib salesman who soon attracted more investors than he could handle. British, Russian and Swedish aristocrats threw money at him, as did wealthy Americans such as Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough. Parker’s syndicate needed free access to the Temple Mount and the City of David, which he was convinced could be arranged ‘by dint of liberal baksheesh!’ In spring 1909, Parker, Juvelius and their Swedish bodyguard-cum-fixer Captain Hoffenstahl visited the sites in Jerusalem, then sailed for Istanbul where Monty, offering ministers 50 per cent of the treasure and cash up front, managed to corrupt much of the new Young Turk regime from the grand vizier down, signing a contract between Djavid Bey, the finance minister, and ‘Honourable M. Parker of the Turf Club, London’.
The Sublime Porte advised Parker to hire an Armenian called Mr Macasadar as his fixer and sent two commissioners to supervise the dig. In August 1909 Captain Hoffenstahl collected the ‘Cipher’ from Juvelius then headed to meet Parker and his friends in Jerusalem, where they made their headquarters in the Kaiser’s Augusta Victoria Fortress on the Mount of Olives and stayed at the Hotel Fast (the best in town). Monty and his friends behaved like a stag-party of hearty public-schoolboys, giving ‘gay dinners’and holding shooting competitions using oranges for target-practice. ‘One morning, we heard unusual noises,’ remembered Bertha Spafford, the American Colonist, ‘and saw the worthy archaeologists playing at being donkeyboys, running alongside the donkeys and imitating the yelling, usually made by Arab boys who were mounted in the Englishmen’s place.’ Parker’s gang bribed many of the potentates of Jerusalem, suborned the governor Azmey Pasha, hired a huge retinue of workers, guides, maids and bodyguards and started to excavate on the Ophel hill. This was and remains the archaeological fulcrum in the quest for ancient Jerusalem: here Charles Warren had dug in 1867. Later the American archaeologists Frederick Bliss and Archibald Dickie found more tunnels which together suggested that this was the site of King David’s Jerusalem. Parker was guided spiritually from afar by Juvelius, and by another member of the expedition, the Irish ‘thought-reader, Lee’. Even when he found nothing, Parker did not lose his faith in Juvelius.
Jerusalem’s Jews, backed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild (who was himself financing a dig for the Ark of the Covenant), claimed that Parker was abusing sacred Jewish ground. Muslims too were anxious, but the Ottomans kept them at arm’s length. To ease their suspicions, Parker hired the archaeological scholar Père Vincent of the Ecole Biblique to supervise his excavation – which did in fact find more evidence that this was the site of a very early settlement. Vincent was oblivious to the real purpose of the dig.
In late 1909, the rains halted Parker’s work, but in 1910 he sailed back into Jaffa on Clarence Wilson’s yacht, the Water Lily, and continued his excavations. The Arab workers went on strike several times. When the courts threatened to back the Arabs, Monty and his partners decided that only a dazzling display of British Trooping of the Colour pageantry would overawe the natives: they decided to confront the mayor (Wasif the oud-player’s patron) ‘in full uniform’. Captain Duff, wearing helmet, cuirass and the white gauntlets of the Life Guards, and Monty Parker in scarlet tunic and bearskin were, recalled Major Foley, ‘the star turns. We created a sensation!’
When the strikers were dismissed, this farcical parade headed triumphantly through the Old City, led, in Foley’s words, by ‘a troop of Turkish lancers, then the Mayor and Commandant, some holy men, then Duff, Parker, me, Wilson, Macasadar and Turkish gendarmes in the rear.’ Suddenly Duff’s mule bolted through the bazaars with the captain hanging on until he was thrown into a shop and buried in peanuts, much to the hilarity of his friends. ‘An old Jew’, said Foley, ‘thought it was the end of the world and started to wail in Yiddish.’
This display – or more likely ‘liberal baksheesh’ – worked for now. Parker meticulously sent secret reports to the syndicate, covertly named FJMPW after some of its members, and accounts for the bribes, which on his first visit cost £1,900. He spent £3,400 in the first year, and when he had to return in 1910 his accounts reveal ‘Payments to Jerusalem officials: £5,667’. The mayor, Hussein Husseini, received £100 a month. These lavish bribes must have been a blessing for the Jerusalem grandees, but Parker realized that the Young Turk government was in flux and that Jerusalem was a sensitive place: ‘The utmost caution must be used for the smallest mistake may involve serious difficulties!’ he reported. Yet even he did not really understand that he was playing on a volcano. When he resumed digging in the spring of 1911, Parker paid out even more but he was now desperate: he decided to dig on the Temple Mount, bribing Sheikh Khalil al-Ansari, hereditary Custodian of the Haram, and his brother.
Parker and his gang, disguised in pantomime Arab garb, crept on to the Temple Mount and, in the precinct of the Dome itself, they
broke open the pavement to dig into the secret tunnels beneath. However, on the night of 17 April, a Muslim nightwatchman, unable to sleep in his crowded home, decided to camp out on the Haram, where he surprised the English and ran into the streets, shouting that disguised Christians were digging up the Dome of the Rock.
The mufti turned back the entire Nabi Musa procession and denounced this wicked Ottoman and British conspiracy. A mob, reinforced by the pilgrims of Nabi Musa raced to defend the Noble Sanctuary. Captain Parker and his friends galloped for their lives to Jaffa. The crowd, which for the one and only time combined Muslims and Jews, both equally outraged, tried to lynch Sheikh Khalil and Macasadar whose lives were saved only when the Ottoman garrison intervened and arrested them. They and Parker’s police guards were all imprisoned in Beirut. In Jaffa, Monty Parker just made it on board the Water Lily. But the police there were alerted that he might have the Ark of the Covenant about his person. They searched him and his baggage, but found no Ark. Parker knew he had to escape – so, bamboozling the Ottoman gendarmes by playing the English gentleman, he illuminated the Water Lily and announced that he was going ‘to hold a reception on board for the Jaffa officials’. He then sailed away as they were about to board.
Back in Jerusalem, the crowds threatened to kill the governor and slaughter anyone British as rumours spread that Parker had stolen the Crown of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant and the Sword of Muhammad. The governor was in hiding for fear of his life. By the morning of 19 April, the London Times reported, ‘there was a tremendous row throughout the city. Shops closed, peasants bolting out of the place and rumours spreading’. The Christians were terrified that ‘Mahomedan pilgrims from Nabi Musa’ were coming ‘to assassinate all Christians’. Simultaneously the Muslims were petrified that ‘8,000 Russian pilgrims were armed to massacre the Mahomedans’. All sides believed that ‘the Solomonic regalia’ had been ‘transferred to Captain Parker’s yacht’.
Europeans stayed indoors and locked their gates. ‘The wrath of the people of Jerusalem was so great’, remembered Bertha Spafford, ‘that patrols were posted on every street.’ Then on the last day of the Nabi Musa, with 10,000 Jerusalemites on the Temple Mount, the mob ‘stampeded. A fearful panic ensued, peasant women and pilgrims pouring out of the walls and running toward the city gates crying “Massacre!” Every family armed itself and barricaded its home. The “Parker fiasco”,’ wrote Spafford, ‘came nearer to causing anti-Christian massacre than anything that happened during our long residence in Jerusalem.’ The New York Times informed the world: ‘Gone with Treasure that was Solomon’s. English Party Vanishes on Yacht After Digging under Mosque of Omar: SAID TO HAVE FOUND KING’S CROWN. Turkish Government Sends High Officials to Jerusalem to Investigate!’
Monty Parker, who never grasped the gravity of all this, sailed back to Jaffa that autumn but was advised not to land ‘or else there might be more trouble’. He told the syndicate that he would ‘proceed to Beirut’ to visit the prisoners. His plan was then to go on: ‘To Jerusalem to quiet the press and get hold of the Notables to see a little bit of reason. Once all is quiet, get the Governor to write to the Grand Vizier and say it’s safe for us to return!’ Jerusalem never did ‘see a little bit of reason’ but Parker kept trying until 1914.*
There were diplomatic complaints between London and Istanbul, Jerusalem’s governor was sacked, Parker’s accomplices were tried but acquitted (because nothing had been stolen), the money was gone, the treasure chimerical, and the ‘Parker fiasco’ brought down the curtain on fifty years of European archaeology and imperialism.6
44
WORLD WAR
1914–1916
JEMAL PASHA: THE TYRANT OF JERUSALEM
Parker’s adventure had exposed the realities of the Young Turks’ rule over Jerusalem: they were no less venal and inept than their predecessors, but they had raised Arab expectations of autonomy, if not more. A nationalist newspaper, Filastin, was founded in Jaffa to express this new consciousness. But soon it became clear that the Young Turks remained a ruthless and secretive organization with only a democratic façade. They were Turkish nationalists who were determined to suppress not just Arab hopes but even the teaching of Arabic. Arab nationalists started to found secret clubs to plot for independence and even the Husseinis and other scions joined them. Meanwhile the Zionist leaders encouraged their new immigrants to create ‘Jewish towns, particularly in Jerusalem, the head of the nation’, and they now bought the land for the future Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. This alarmed the Families – even though the Husseinis and other landowners such as the Sursocks of Lebanon were all quietly selling land to the Zionists.
Ruhi Khalidi, French-speaking intellectual and now deputy speaker of the Parliament in Istanbul, was an Ottoman liberal, not an Arab nationalist. But he carefully studied Zionism, even writing a book about it, and decided that it was a threat. In Parliament, he tried to ban any Jewish land purchases in Palestine. The richest scion of the Families, Ragheb al-Nashashibi, an elegant playboy, ran for Parliament too, promising, ‘I’ll dedicate all my energies to removing the danger awaiting us from Zionism.’ The editor of Filastin warned, ‘If this state of affairs continues, the Zionists will gain mastery over our country.’*
On 23 January 1913, a thirty-one-year-old Young Turk officer, Ismail Enver, a veteran of the 1908 Revolution who had made his name fighting the Italians in Libya, burst into the Sublime Porte, shot the war minister and seized power. He and two comrades, Mehmet Talaat and Ahmet Jemal, formed the triumvirate of the Three Pashas. Enver won a small victory in the Second Balkan War which convinced him he was the Turkish Napoleon, destined to restore the empire. In 1914, he emerged as Ottoman strongman and war minister – and even married the sultan’s niece. The Three Pashas believed that only the Turkization of the empire could stop the final rot. Their programme anticipated Fascism and the Holocaust in its barbarity, racism and warmongering.
On 28 June 1914, Serbian terrorists assassinated the Austrian heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Great Powers staggered then stampeded into the First World War. Enver Pasha was eager to fight, pushing for a German alliance to provide the necessary military and financial backing. Kaiser Wilhelm, remembering his trip to the East, backed the Ottoman alliance. Enver appointed himself vice-generalissimo under his puppet sultan and entered the war by bombarding Russian ports from his newly supplied German battleships.
On 11 November, Sultan Mehmet V Rashid declared war on Britain, France and Russia – and in Jerusalem jihad was proclaimed in al-Aqsa. At first there was some enthusiasm for war. When the commander of the Ottoman troops in Palestine, the Bavarian general Baron Friedrich Kress von Kressenstein, arrived, the Jews of Jerusalem welcomed his units with a triumphal arch. The Germans assumed protection of the Jews from the British. Meanwhile Jerusalem awaited the arrival of her new master.7
On 18 November Wasif Jawhariyyeh, the oud-player, still only seventeen years old, watched Ahmet Jemal, minister of the marine and one of the Three Pashas, drive into Jerusalem as effective dictator of Greater Syria and supreme commander of the Fourth Ottoman Army. Jemal set up his headquarters in the Augusta Victoria on the Mount of Olives. On 20 December, an elderly sheikh arrived at the Damascus Gate in a stately carriage bearing the Prophet’s green banner from Mecca. His entrance into the city caused ‘indescribable commotion’ as ‘an orderly and picturesque train of soldiers followed the flag through the Old City’ as they sprinkled rosewater. The whole population of Jerusalem followed in his wake ‘singing Allahu akhbar in the most beautiful parade I ever saw,’ wrote Wasif Jawhariyyeh. Outside the Dome, Jemal declared jihad. ‘Jubilation took possession,’ agreed Kress von Kressenstein, ‘of the entire population’ – until the ancient Meccan sheikh suddenly died just before Christmas, an embarrassing augur for the Ottoman jihad.
Jemal, forty-five years old, squat and bearded, always protected by a camel-mounted squadron of guards, combined brutish, paranoid cruelty with charm, intelligence and grotesque buffooner
y. A bon vivant with ‘a weakness for pomp and circumstance’, and for beautiful Jewesses, he had a sense both of his own greatness and of his own absurdity. While he terrorized Jerusalem, he liked to play poker, race horses through the Judaean hills, drink champagne and smoke cigars with his friend, Count Antonio de Ballobar, the Spanish consul. Ballobar, an elegant aristocrat in his late twenties, described the pasha as a ‘sale type’ but ‘bon garçon’ – a filthy type but a good boy. Bertha Spafford thought Jemal ‘a strange man and one to be feared’, but also ‘a man of dual personality’ capable of charm and kindness. Once, without anyone seeing, he gave a diamond-studded medal to a little girl whose parents found her with it when they returned home. One of his German officers, Franz von Papen, simply judged him ‘an extremely intelligent Oriental despot’.
Jemal ruled his fiefdom almost independently: ‘That man of limitless influence’ relished his power, asking jovially: ‘What are laws? I make them and unmake them!’ The Three Pashas were rightly suspicious of Arab loyalty. Enjoying a cultural renaissance, a flowering of nationalistic aspirations, the Arabs hated the new Turkish chauvinism. Yet they formed 40 per cent of the Ottoman population, and many of the Ottoman regiments were entirely Arab. Jemal’s mission was to hold the Arab provinces and suppress any Arab – or for that matter Zionist – stirrings, using first menacing charm and then just menace.