Jerusalem

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  b 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.

  CHAPTER 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.a 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 attainable 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.”b

  “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 forever but now, in return for hereditary rule in Egypt, he abandoned Syria and the Holy City.c 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 w
ho 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 because German Protestants too were experiencing an evangelical awakening. 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 Jerusalem 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 team 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

  Meanwhile the consuls were joined by perhaps the most extraordinary diplomat in American history. “I doubt,” observed William Thackeray, the English author of Vanity Fair, who was visiting Jerusalem, “that any government has received or appointed so queer an ambassador.”

  WARDER CRESSON, U.S. CONSUL:

  THE AMERICAN HOLY STRANGER

  On 4 October 1844, Warder Cresson arrived in Jerusalem as the U.S. consul-general of Syria and Jerusalem—his chief qualification for the job being his certainty that the Second Coming was due in 1847. Cresson took the consular hauteur of his European colleagues to a new level: he galloped around Jerusalem in a “cloud of dust” surrounded by “a little American army” who belonged in a “troop of knights and paladins” from a Walter Scott novel—“a party of armed and glittering horsemen led by an Arab followed by two Janissaries with silver maces shining in the sun.”

  At his interview with the pasha, Cresson explained that he had arrived for the coming Apocalypse and the return of the Jews. A Philadelphian landowner, child of rich Quakers, Cresson had spent twenty years spinning from one apocalyptic cult to another: after writing his first manifesto, Jerusalem, the Centre of the Joy of the Whole World, and abandoning his wife and six children, Cresson persuaded Secretary of State John Calhoun to appoint him consul: “I left everything near and dear to me on earth in pursuit of truth.” The U.S. president John Tyler was soon informed by his diplomats that his first Jerusalem consul was a “religious maniac and madman,” but Cresson was already in Jerusalem. And he was not alone in his apocalyptic views: he was an American of his time.

  The American Constitution was secular, carefully not mentioning Christ and separating state and faith, yet on the Great Seal, the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, had depicted the Children of Israel led by cloud and fire towards the Promised Land. Cresson personified how that cloud and fire were attracting many Americans to Jerusalem. Indeed the separation of Church and state liberated American faith and generated a blossoming of new sects and fresh millennial prophecies.

  The early Americans, inheriting the Hebraist fervour of the English Puritans, had enjoyed a Great Awakening of religious joy. Now, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Second Awakening was driven by the evangelical energy of the frontier. In 1776, some 10 percent of Americans were churchgoers; by 1815, it was a quarter; by 1914, it was half. Their passionate Protestantism was American in character—gritty, exuberant and swashbuckling. At its heart was the belief that a person could save himself and accelerate the Second Coming by righteous action and heartfelt joy. America was itself a mission disguised as a nation, blessed by God, not unlike the way Shaftesbury and the English evangelicals saw the British empire.

  In little wooden churches in one-horse mining towns, farmsteads on boundless prairies and gleaming new industrial cities, the preachers in the New Promised Land of America cited the literal biblical revelations of the Old. “In no country,” wrote Dr. Edward Robinson, an evangelical academic who became the founder of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem, “are the Scriptures better known.” The first American missionaries believed that the Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel and that every Christian must perform acts of righteousness in Jerusalem and help the Return and Restoration of the Jews: “I really wish the Jews again in Judaea an independent nation,” wrote the second U.S. president John Adams. In 1819, two young missionaries in Boston prepared to put this into action: “Every eye is fixed on Jerusalem,” preached Levi Parsons in Boston, “indeed the centre of the world.” Their congregation wept as Pliny Fisk announced: “I go bound in spirit to Jerusalem.” They made it there but their early deaths in the East did not discourage others because “Jerusalem,” insisted William Thomson, the American missionary whose wife died there during the revolt of 1834, “is the common property of the whole Christian world.”

  Consul Cresson had ridden the wave of this flowering of prophecies: he had been a Shaker, a Millerite, a Mormon and a Campbellite before a local rabbi in Pennsylvania convinced him that “salvation was of the Jews” whose return would bring the Second Coming.d One of the first to arrive in Jerusalem was Harriet Livermore. Dau
ghter and granddaughter of New England congressmen, she set off in 1837, after years preaching to the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes that they were the Lost Tribes of Israel who should accompany her back to Zion. She rented rooms on Mount Zion to prepare her sect, the Pilgrim Strangers, for the Apocalypse that she expected in 1847—but it did not come and she ended up begging in Jerusalem’s streets. At the same time, Joseph Smith, prophet of the new revelation of Latter Day Saints—the Mormons—sent his Apostle to Jerusalem: he built an altar on the Olivet to prepare “to restore Israel with Jerusalem as capital.”

  By the time Cresson became the U.S. consul, a growing number of American evangelists were visiting Jerusalem to prepare for the End Days. The U.S. government eventually dismissed him, but he continued defiantly to issue visas of protection to Jews for several years and then, changing his name to Michael Boaz Israel, converted to Judaism. For his long-abandoned wife this was a revelation too far. She sued to have Cresson declared insane, citing his pistol-waving, street-haranguing, financial incompetence, cultic eclecticism, plans to rebuild the Jewish Temple and sexual deviance. He sailed back from Jerusalem for the Inquisition of Lunacy in Philadelphia, a cause célèbre, for Mrs. Cresson was challenging the constitutional right of American citizens to believe whatever they wished, the essence of Jeffersonian liberty.