Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  That Easter, Sandys was horrified by Christians and Muslims alike: he saw the pasha of Jerusalem on his throne outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sandys watched as thousands of pilgrims, each carrying pillow and carpet, flocked to spend the night in the Church. On Good Friday, he followed the procession of the padre of the Franciscans, who carried a life-sized waxen model of Jesus on a sheet along the Via Dolorosa before fixing it to a cross. As thousands filled the Church and camped in its courtyard, he watched the ceremony of the Holy Fire, “the savage clamours,” the clash of cymbals, the “women whistling”—conduct “befitting better the solemnities of Bacchus.” When the Fire emerged, the pilgrims ran around “like madmen thrusting the flame among their clothes and into their bosoms, persuading strangers it will not burn them.”

  Yet this composer of hymns was a passionate Protestant who revered Jerusalem just as much as the Catholics and Orthodox. Returning to the fundamentals of the Bible itself, he prayed passionately at the tomb of Christ and the graves of the Crusader kings. On his return, he dedicated his book, A Relation of a Journey Begun AD 1610, to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, whose father James I had recently commissioned fifty-four scholars to create an English Bible that was entirely accessible to all. In 1611, the scholars delivered their Authorized Version, which, fusing earlier translations by William Tyndale and others, brought the divine scriptures to life in a masterpiece of translation and of poetical English. This Bible became the spiritual and literary heartland of Anglicanism, England’s singular Protestantism. The Bible became what one writer called “the national epic of Britain,” a story that placed the Jews and Jerusalem at the very heart of British and, later, American life.

  Sandys was one link between the real city and the Jerusalem of the New World. In 1621, he set off for America as treasurer of the Virginia Company. During his ten years in Jamestown, he led the raid against the Algonquin Native Americans during which he slaughtered a considerable number: Protestants were no less capable of killing defiant infidels than any other seventeenth-century faith. Sandys was not the only Jerusalem pilgrim-adventurer to be there: Henry Timberlake was in Virginia at the same time. Their pilgrimages to the new Promised Land of America were at least partly inspired by the Protestant vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.

  Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.

  Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,” prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the Mayflower. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed “the God of Israel is amongst us” and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as “a city on a hill”—America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.

  The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:

  “Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,” he said. “You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.” Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should “transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance.”

  Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to all corners of the world before their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming—yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude “this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.” Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem—or was he?5

  THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI

  He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.

  Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism—he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.

  The Jerusalemite Jews were impoverished by Ottoman taxes so they asked Sabbatai to raise funds from his Cairene patrons, which he did. He succeeded in his mission, but not everyone was convinced as he prepared to declare himself Messiah in Jerusalem. After much debate, the rabbis placed him under a ban. Furious, he moved to Gaza which he chose as his sacred city instead of Jerusalem and then launched his messianic ministry in Aleppo.

  If his revelation had started as a slow burn, his fame now exploded and spread like quickfire. Jews across the Diaspora, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, celebrated the arrival of the Messiah. In Ukraine, a pretty Jewish girl named Sarah was orphaned by the Cossack massacres but rescued by Christians and taken to Livorno. There she worked as a prostitute which did not shake her conviction that she was destined to marry the Messiah. When Sabbatai heard about her, he married her (in order to emulate the prophet Hosea, who wed a prostitute) and the two toured the Mediterranean together while Jews across Europe were divided between sceptics and frenzied fans who packed their belongings for the journey to greet the Messiah in Jerusalem, whipped themselves, fasted, and rolled naked in mud and snow. In late 1666, the messianic couple rolled into Istanbul where Jews hailed them. Assuming imperial-universal authority, the King of the Jews had appointed his brothers as kings of Rome and Turkey. Now Sabbatai’s ambition to wear the sultan’s crown led to his arrest. The Sultan made the “King of the Jews” an offer he could not r
efuse: either to perform the miracle of surviving a volley of arrows or to convert to Islam. He chose conversion.

  For most, this apostasye marked the death of the dream even before Sabbatai died in Montenegrin exile—and Jerusalem’s Jews were happy to see the back of this disruptive charlatan.6 The era of Cromwell and Sabbatai was also the golden age of Islamic mysticism in Jerusalem where the Ottoman sultans were patrons of all the leading orders of Sufis whom the Turks called Dervishes. We have seen how Christians and Jews saw the city. Now a most unconventional Ottoman courtier, Dervish scholar, raconteur and bon vivant named Evliya lovingly describes the city’s idiosyncracies from the Islamic angle with the often hilarious flair that makes him probably the greatest of all Islamic travel-writers.

  EVLIYA: THE OTTOMAN PEPYS AND FALSTAFF

  Even then, Evliya must have been utterly unique: this wealthy traveller, writer, singer, scholar and warrior was the son of the sultan’s goldsmith, born in Istanbul, raised at court, educated by the imperial ulema, and was advised by Muhammad in a dream to travel the world. He became, in his own words, “The World Traveller and Boon Companion to Mankind” and travelled not only the length of the vast Ottoman realm but into Christendom too, obsessively chronicling his adventures in an astonishing ten volumes. Just as Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries in London, Evliya, whether in Istanbul, Cairo or Jerusalem, was compiling his Book of Travels, “the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature.” No Islamic writer wrote as poetically about Jerusalem, or as wittily about life.

  Evliya lived literally on his wits for he won the favour of Mehmet IV with his irresistible jokes, rhyming couplets, mischievous songs and wrestling and he was able to travel by joining the entourages of Ottoman grandees who recruited him for his religious knowledge and for his exuberant entertainment. His books are partly almanacs of amassed facts, partly anthologies of amazing stories: Evliya Celebi (a title that just means “gentleman”) both fought the Habsburgs and met the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, impressing him with his personal knowledge of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. In battle, he self-deprecatingly recorded his own Falstaffian flight—“fleeing is also an act of courage”—and probably the most “strange and comic” scatological scene in military history.f

  He never married, and refused to take any job in the imperial service that interfered with his free-spirited travelling. He was often given slave-girls and was as witty about sex as he was about everything else: he called it “the sweet calamity,” and the “nice wrestling-match,” cheerfully recording his bout of impotence which was finally cured by an Egyptian snakebroth. He daringly joked that sex was the “greater jihad,” and the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today.

  Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. As a “wandering Dervish,’ he was fascinated by Jerusalem “the ancient qibla” which “is at present the Kaaba of the poor (or of the dervishes)”—the capital, the very Mecca of Sufism: he counted seventy Dervish convents, with the largest near the Damascus Gate, varying in origin from India to the Crimea, and described how a contingent from each order performed ecstatic songs and dances of the zikr all night until dawn.

  Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was “the object of desire of the kings of all nations” but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: “This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.” In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that “the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray.”

  In the Dome “all pilgrims circumambulate the Rock outside the railing,” while the Temple Mount had become a “promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales” and he happily embraced most of its legends—that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon “being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction.” Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the ulema: “Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?”

  Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just “pandemonium” and the Church “lacks spirituality, more like a tourist attraction” but he chatted to a Protestant there who blamed it on the Orthodox Greeks, “a stupid and credulous people.”

  Evliya returned several times before he retired to finish his books in Cairo but he never saw anything to compare with the Dome of the Rock—“verily a replica of a pavilion in paradise.” Not everyone agreed: conservative Muslims were horrified by all the Sufi dancing, miracle-working and the saintly cults that Evliya so enjoyed. “Some of the women unveil their faces, displaying their beauty, their ornaments and perfumes. By God, they were sitting cheek-to-jowl among men!” observed Qashashi, denouncing “excited clamours and dancing,” the playing of tambourines and merchants selling sweets. “These are the days of the wedding-feast of Satan.”

  The Ottomans were now in full decline, the sultans shoved back and forth between the demands of European powers, each of them backing their own Christian sect. When the Catholic Austrians and French won the praedominium for the Franciscans, the Russians, a brash new power in Europe and in Jerusalem, lobbied and bribed the Ottomans until they had regained it for the Orthodox. The Franciscans soon got it back again, but three times actual fighting broke out in the Church.g In 1699, the Ottomans, defeated on the battlefield, signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, which allowed the Great Powers to protect their brethren in Jerusalem—a disastrous concession.7

  Meanwhile Istanbul’s governors had so repressed Palestine that the peasants rebelled. In 1702, the new Governor of Jerusalem crushed the rebellion and decorated the walls with the heads of his victims. But when he destroyed a village owned by the religious leader—the mufti—of Jerusalem, the city’s qadi denounced him at Friday prayers in al-Aqsa and opened the gates to the rebels.

  a Ferdinand, who later claimed the title King of Jersualem, may have smiled because these ideas coincided with his own messianic-crusader vision: he himself planned to conquer the Holy City by crusading his way along the coast of North Africa. His Maghrebi expeditions, led by a tough cardinal on a mule waving a silver cross, managed to take Oran then Tripoli (in today’s Libya) in 1510. Ferdinand and Isabella’s grandson, Emperor Charles V, heir to Spain, much of the New World and the Burgundian and Habsburg lands, inherited this crusading ambition, and his talk of a campaign to liberate the city was one of the reasons that Suleiman the Magnificent rebuilt her walls.

  b They had to sell their monastery St. Saviour’s to the Franciscans and that was just the beginning. In 1685, the impoverished Georgians lost their headquarters, the Monastery of the Cross, said to be the origins of the wood for Jesus’ cross, to the Orthodox. After the fall of Crusader Jerusalem in 1187, Queen Tamara of Georgia had sent an official, Shota Rustaveli, the author of the national epic, The Knight in the Panther Skin, to embellish the Monastery: he is probably buried there and his portrait appeared in its frescoes. But in 2004, Rustaveli’s berobbed, white-bearded and high-hatted portrait was vandalized just as the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili arrived on a
state visit to inspect it. The Russian Orthodox were suspected but nothing was proved. The Serbs passed their last monastery to their Greek brethern in the seventeenth century. The Maronites still maintain a convent near the Jaffa Gate, though the Georgians, Maronites and Serbs have all long since lost their share of the Church.

  c Both Jews and Christians were infected by apocalyptic expectations. In 1523, a dwarfish young Jew, David Reuveni, caused a stir in Jerusalem by declaring himself an Arabian prince leading the Ten Tribes back to Zion, but the Islamic qadi spared him as a lunatic and he then sailed to Rome, where the pope received him, but ultimately Christendom proved less tolerant than Islam and he died in the early 1530s in a Spanish dungeon. In 1534 a radical Protestant sect of Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster which they declared to be the New Jerusalem. Their leader John of Leiden, an illegitimate tailor’s apprentice, pronounced himself King of Jerusalem, heir to King David. After eighteen months, this new Zion was recaptured and the Anabaptist leaders executed.

  d These human bonfires in the courtyard of the Church were not infrequent. In 1557 a Sicilian monk, Brother Juniper, twice invaded the Aqsa before he was killed by the qadi himself—and then incinerated before the Church. A Spanish Franciscan denounced Islam inside al-Aqsa and was beheaded on the Temple Mount before another bonfire. Yet as the case of Reuveni had shown, death was not always the end of the story, and Christianity in Europe was no more civilized: almost 400 heretics were burned in England during the sixteenth century.

  e Some of his followers regarded this as the ultimate sacred paradox—and their Sabbatarian Judaeo-Islamic sect, the Donmeh (Turncoats, though they called themselves Mamin, the Believers), particularly the many who lived in Salonica, were to play a role in the Young Turk revolutions between 1908 and the First World War. They still exist in Turkey.