Jerusalem: The Biography
* Potemkin devised the ‘Greek Project’ for Catherine – the Russian conquest of Constantinople (which Russians called Tsargrad) to be ruled by Catherine’s grandson, especially named Constantine. Catherine’s partitioning of Poland brought millions of Jews into the Russian empire for the first time, most of whom were confined in miserable poverty to a Pale of Settlement. But Potemkin, one of the most philo-Semitic leaders in Russian history, was a Christian Zionist who saw the liberation of Jerusalem as part of his Greek Project. In 1787, he created the Israelovsky Regiment of Jewish cavalry to take Jerusalem. A witness, the Prince de Ligne, mocked these ringleted cavalrymen as ‘monkeys on horseback’. Potemkin died before he could put his schemes into action.
* * He was a Christian slaveboy from Bosnia who, escaping after committing a murder, sold himself to the slave-markets of Istanbul. There he was bought by an Egyptian ruler who converted him to Islam and used him as his chief executioner and hitman. He began his rise as governor of Cairo but made his name defending Beirut against Catherine the Great’s navy. Beirut was honourably surrendered to the Russians after a long siege and the sultanrewarded the Butcher with promotion to Governor of Sidon, and sometimes also that of Damascus. He visited Jerusalem, unofficially in his sphere of influence, where the Husseinis owed him allegiance.
* Napoleon blamed his defeat on Smith, ‘the man who made me miss my destiny’, but he left one legacy in Jerusalem. On taking Jaffa, his sick soldiers (those whom he later had killed) were nursed by Armenian monks, whom he thanked by presenting them with his tent. The Armenians converted it into chasubles, now used in St Jameses Cathedral in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter
* Godfrey’s spurs and sword, along with a brick from his French chateau, hang today in the Latin sacristy of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the Crusader tombs, only fragments of the sarcophagus of the boy-king Baldwin V survived this act of sectarian vandalism
* In 1804, William Blake, poet, painter, engraver and radical, opened his poem Milton with the prefatory verses ‘And did those feet in ancient times…’ which ends ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ The poem, printed in about 1808, praises the brief heyday of a heavenly Jerusalem in pre-industrial England, inspired by the mythical visit of young Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to inspect the latter’s Cornish tin-mines. The poem remained little known until 1916 when the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked the composer Sir Hubert Parry to set it to music for a patriotic meeting. Edward Elgar later orchestrated it. King George V said he preferred it to ‘God Save the King’, and it has become an alternative anthem, with universal appeal to plangent patriots, churchgoers, Promenaders, sports fans, socialist idealists and generations of drunken, floppy-haired undergraduates. Blake never called it ‘Jerusalem’ for he also wrote an epic entitled Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion
* In 1818, on Suleiman Pasha’s death, Abdullah had taken power in Acre and executed the very wealthy, one-eyed, one-eared and noseless Haim Farhi, who had effectively run much of Palestine for thirty years. Abdullah ruled until 1831. The Farhi family still live in Israel
* During his voyage home, a fearsome storm struck the Montefiores’ ship. The sailors feared that the vessel would sink. Montefiore carried, for luck, from the previous year’s Passover, a piece of unleavened matzah, known as the afikoman, which, at the height of the tempest, he cast into the waves. The sea instantly became miraculously quiet. Montefiore believed that this was God’s blessing on a Jerusalem pilgrimage. The Montefiore family today read his account of this event every Passover
* His ideal character, featured in his best novel Coningsby, was Sidonia, a Sephardic millionaire who is friends with the emperors, kings and ministers in all the cabinets of Europe. Sidonia was an amalgam of Lionel de Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, both of whom Disraeli knew well
* The Wahabis were the followers of an eighteenth-century fundamentalist Salafi preacher Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab who in 1744 allied himself with the Saudi family. Despite their setback at the hands of Mehmet Ali, the Saudis soon re-established a small state. During the First World War and the 1920s, their chieftain Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, funded by British subsidies and backed by his fanatical Wahabi army, reconquered Mecca and Arabia. In 1932, he proclaimed himself king of Saudi Arabia, where Wahabi Islam still rules. Ibn Saud fathered at least seventy children and his son Abdullah became king in 2005
* William Thomson later wrote one of the Evangelical classics that encouraged the American obsession with Jerusalem. The Land and the Book, reprinted in thirty editions, presented Palestine as a mystical Eden where the Bible was alive.
* Anthony Ashley-Cooper, descendant of the first earl, that shrewd minister who had served everyone from Cromwell to William III, still held the courtesy title Lord Ashley and sat in the House of the Commons, succeeding as the 7th earl in 1851. But for simplicity we call him Shaftesbury throughout
* Shaftesbury borrowed the notorious phrase ‘a land without a people’ from a Scottish minister, Alexander Keith, and it was later attributed (probably mistakenly) to Israel Zang-will, a Zionist who did not believe in settling Palestine, precisely because it was already inhabited by Arabs
* The Albanians never again held Jerusalem but they ruled Egypt for a century, first as khedives (nominally Ottoman viceroys but actually independent), then as sultans of Egypt and finally as kings. When Mehmet Ali became senile, Ibrahim became his regent but he himself died in 1848 just before his father. The last of the Albanian dynasty was King Farouk who was overthrown in 1952
* William Miller was one of the most popular of these new American prophets. An ex-army officer from Massachusetts, he calculated that Christ would come again in Jerusalem in 1843: 100,000 Americans became Millerites. He converted the assertion in Daniel 8.14 that the ‘sanctuary would be cleansed’ in ‘two thousand and three hundred days’ into years by claiming that a prophetic day was really a year. Hence starting in 457 BC, which Miller believed was the date of Persian King Artaxerxes I’s order to restore the Temple, he arrived at 1843. When nothing happened that year, he suggested 1844. The Millerite successor churches, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, still number fourteen million members worldwid
* In 1658, Patriarch Nikon built the New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra, near Moscow, to promote the universal mission of Russian Orthodoxy and Autocracy. Its centrepiece was a replica of the actual Sepulchre in Jerusalem which is valuable since the original was destroyed in the fire of 1808. In 1818, before he ascended the throne, Nicholas I visited the New Jerusalem and was deeply moved, ordering its restoration. The Nazis damaged it but it is now being restored
* * The Crimean war saw another attempt to arm the Jews. In September 1855, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz travelled to Istanbul to organize Polish forces known as Ottoman Cossacks, to fight the Russians. These included the Hussars of Israel, recruited from Russian, Polish and Palestinian Jews. Mickiewicz died three months later and the Hussars were never tested in the valley of death
* * The seat of the Ottoman governors was al-Jawailiyya, built by one of Nasir Mohammad’s Mamluk amirs, on the site of Herod’s Antonia Fortress and the first station of the Via Dolorosa. Under Crusader rule, the Templars had built a chapel there and part of its domed porch stood until the 1920s. A modern school stands there today.
* * These writers were following a fashion for oriental travelogues. Between 1800 and 1875, about 5,000 books were published in English about Jerusalem. Many of these works are remarkably similar, either breathless repetitions of biblical stories by evangelicals (sometimes reinforced by archaeology) or travelogues mocking Ottoman incompetence, Jewish wailing, Arab simplicity and Orthodox vulgarity. The witty Eothen by Alexander Kinglake, who later reported on the Crimean War, is probably the best
* Dorr’s young master, plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes, decided to set off on a three-year tour of the world from Paris to Jerusalem. Fellowes offered a deal to his intelligent and literate young s
lave. If Dorr served him on the trip, he would be freed on his return. In his effervescent travelogue, Dorr recorded everything from the gorgeous ladies of Paris to the ‘scarce towers and charred walls’ of Jerusalem. On his return, his master refused to manumit him so Dorr escaped to the north and in 1858 published AColored Man Round the World by a Quadroon. It was the American Civil War, which started soon afterwards, that finally gave him his freedom. The winner of that war, President Abraham Lincoln, was not formally religious, but longed to visit Jerusalem, perhaps because as a young man he had lived in one of the American Jerusalems, New Salem, Illinois; he knew the Bible by heart and he had probably heard the stories of his Secretary of State, William H. Seward who had visited Jerusalem on his world tour. On the way with his wife to Ford’s Theatre, on 14 April 1865, he proposed a ‘special pilgrimage to Jerusalem’. At the theatre, moments before he was shot, he whispered: ‘How I should like to visit Jerusalem.’ Afterwards Mary Todd Lincoln decided he ‘was in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem’
* * Practising Jews could not sit in the House of Commons until 1858. Then a new Act of Parliament finally allowed Lionel de Rothschild to take his seat as the first practising Jew ever to sit in the House. Interestingly, Shaftesbury had repeatedly spoken against this – as a Christian Zionist, his interest was really in the return and conversion of the Jews in preparation for the Second Coming. But much later he graciously proposed to Prime Minister William Gladstone, ‘It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords when that grand old Hebrew (Montefiore) were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England.’ But it was too soon. The first Jewish peerage was awarded to Lionel Rothschild’s son, Nathaniel, in 1885, after Montefiore’s death.
† On the way to St Petersburg he was welcomed to Vilna, a semi-Jewish city filled with so many Talmudic scholars that it was known as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’, by thousands of enthusiastic Jews, but Nicholas did not moderate his polices and as Jewish life worsened, Montefiore later returned to meet Alexander II. It was said that every Jewish shack in Russia had a portrait, almost a Jewish icon, of their champion. ‘At breakfast (in Motol, a village near Pinsk) my grandpa used to tell me stories of the deeds of mighty figures,’ wrote Chaim Weizmann, a future Zionist leader. ‘I was particularly impressed by the visit of Sir Moses Montefiore to Russia, a visit only a generation before my birth but the story was already a legend. Indeed Montefiore was himself, though then still living, already a legend.’
* Montefiore was the most famous but not the richest of Jerusalem’s philanthropists. He was often the channel for Rothschild money and his almshouses were funded by Judah Touro, an American tycoon from New Orleans who in 1825 had backed a Jewish homeland on Grand Island in the Niagara river, upstate New York. The project failed and in his will, he left $60,000 for Montefiore to spend in Jerusalem. In 1854, the Rothschilds built a much-needed Jewish hospital. During his 1856 visit, Montefiore created a Jewish girls’ school, to the disapproval of the Orthodox Jews, and this was later taken over by his nephew Lionel de Rothschild who renamed it after his late daughter Evelina. But the greatest project was the Tiferet Israel Synagogue close to the Hurva in the Jewish Quarter. Funded by Jews all over the world, but chiefly by the Reuben and Sassoon families of Baghdad, this splendidly domed synagogue, the highest building in the Jewish Quarter, became the centre of Palestinian Jewry until it was destroyed in 1948. Meanwhile the Armenians had their own Rothschilds: the oil-rich Gulbenkian family regularly came on pilgrimage and created the Gulbenkian Library in the Armenian Monastery
* The Russian Compound contained the consulate, a hospital, the multidomed Holy Trinity Church with four belltowers, the archimandrite’s residence, apartments for visiting aristocrats and pilgrim hostels, to house over 3,000 pilgrims. Its buildings resembled huge but elegant modern fortresses and during the British Mandate they served as military strongholds.
* Edward Robinson, a missionary and Professor of Biblical Literature in New York, yearned to uncover the geography of the Bible. He used his knowledge of other sources such as Josephus to make some astonishing finds. In 1852, he noticed, at ground level, the top of what he guessed was one of the monumental arches across the valley into the Temple – known ever since as Robinson’s Arch. Another American, Dr James Barclay, a missionary to convert the Jews and an engineer advising the Ottomans on the preservation of the Mamluk buildings, spotted the lintel that had topped one of Herod’s gates – today’s Barclay’s Gate. The two Americans might have started as Christian missionaries, but as archaeologists they proved that the Muslim Haram al-Sharif was the Herodian Temple.
* After Jerusalem, Warren became famous as the inept Metropolitan Police Commissioner who failed to catch Jack the Ripper and as a dud military commander during the Boer War. His successors, Lieutenants Charles Conder and Herbert Kitchener (the latter subsequently the conqueror of Sudan), surveyed the country so successfully that General Allenby used their maps to conquer Palestine in 1917.
* Montefiore died in 1885 aged over 100. He and Judith were buried with Jerusalem earth in their own Rachel’s Tomb in Ramsgate. The Montefiore Windmill still stands and the Montefiore Quarter, know as Yemin Moshe, is one of the city’s most elegant Neighbourhoods and one of five named after him. His baronetcy was inherited by his nephew Sir Abraham who was childless (his wife went insane on their wedding night) but Moses left his estates to his Moroccan-born nephew Joseph Sebag who became Sebag-Montefiore. The Ramsgate mansion burned down in the 1930s. An almost forgotten figure (except in Israel), his tomb was neglected for a long time, threatened by urban sprawl and graffiti, but in the twenty-first century, his tomb has become a shrine: thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews make a pilgrimage there on the anniversary of his death.
* Ironically Twain stayed in the Mediterranean Hotel in the Muslim Quarter, the very building which the Israeli Likud leader and general Ariel Sharon bought in the late 1980s in his bid to judaize the Muslim Quarter. Today it is a Jewish seminary. Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad was an instant classic for sceptics: when ex-President Ulysses Grant visited Jerusalem, he used it as his guidebook.
* The Hasidim – ‘the pious’ in Hebrew – are a growing presence in Jerusalem. The inheritors of seventeenth-century mysticism they still wear the distinctive black garb of that era. In the 1740s, a faith-healer in Ukraine named Israel ben Eliezer, adopting the name Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), created a mass movement that challenged Talmudic studies, advocating trance-like movements in prayer, singing, dancing and mystical practices to get closer to God. Their chief opponent was the Vilna Gaon who rejected all this as folk superstition and stressed the need for traditional Talmudic studies. Their conflict resembles that between the mystical Sufis and the harsh Islamic conservatives of, say, the Saudi Wahabis.
* Ever since the 1760s, the Khalidis had been forming a library – collecting 5,000 Islamic books, some dating from the tenth century, and 1,200 manuscripts. In 1899, Raghib Khalidi merged his collection with those of Yusuf and his cousins and opened the Khalidi Library the next year around the Mamluk tomb of Barka Khan on Silsila Street, where it remains.
* Guided around Jerusalem by Captains Charles Wilson and Conder, archaeologists of the Palestine Exploration Fund, the princes attended a Sephardic Passover dinner, and were ‘much impressed by the complete domesticity’ of this ‘happy family gathering’. They were even more excited by their tattoos. ‘I was tattooed’, wrote Prince George, ‘by the same man who tattooed Papa [the Prince of Wales].’
† 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.
* 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.
† 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’.
* 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.