At the trial Cresson was found to be insane, but he appealed and was awarded a retrial. Mrs. Cresson had to “deny either her Saviour or her Husband” while he had to deny “either the One, Only God or My Wife.” The wife lost the second case, confirming American freedom of worship, and Cresson returned to Jerusalem. He created a Jewish model farm near the city, studied the Torah, divorced his American wife and married a Jewess, all the while completing his book The Key of David. He was honoured by local Jews as “the American Holy Stranger.” On his death he was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
Jerusalem was now so overrun by apocalyptic Americans that the American Journal of Insanity compared its hysteria to the California Gold Rush. When Herman Melville visited, he was fascinated yet repulsed by the “contagion” of American Christian millenarianism—“this preposterous Jewmania,” he called it, “half-melancholy, half-farcical.” “How am I to act when any crazy or distressed citizen of the U.S. comes into the country?” the American consul in Beirut asked his secretary of state. “There are several of late going to Jerusalem with strange ideas in their heads that Our Saviour is coming this year.” But Melville grasped that such majestic world-shaking hopes were impossible to satisfy: “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart-sickening.”11
Jerusalem was essential to the American and English evangelical vision of the Second Coming. Yet even their urgency was dwarfed by the obsessive Russian passion for Jerusalem. Now in the late 1840s, the Russian emperor’s aggressive ambitions were about to place Jerusalem at what the English visitor, William Thackeray, called “the centre of the world’s past and future history” and ignite a European war.
THE GENDARME OF EUROPE AND THE SHOOT-OUT IN
THE SEPULCHRE: THE RUSSIAN GOD IN JERUSALEM
On Good Friday, 10 April 1846, the Ottoman governor and his soldiers were on alert at the Church. Unusually, that year the Orthodox and Catholic Easters fell on the same day. The monks were not just priming their incense-burners: they smuggled in pistols and daggers, secreting them behind the pillars and under robes. Who would hold their service first? The Greeks won the race to place their altar-cloth on the altar of Calvary. The Catholics were just behind them—but too late. They challenged the Greeks: did they have the sultan’s authority? The Greeks challenged the Catholics—where was their sultanic firman giving them the right to pray first? There was a stand-off. Fingers must have hovered over triggers under chasubles. Suddenly, the two sides were fighting with every weapon they could improvise from the ecclesiastical paraphernalia at their disposal: they wielded crucifixes, candlesticks and lamps until cold steel flashed and the shooting started. Ottoman soldiers waded in to stop the fighting but forty lay dead around the Holy Sepulchre.
The killing resounded around the world but above all in St. Petersburg and Paris: the aggressive confidence of the coenobite brawlers reflected not just the religions but the empires behind them. New railways and steamships had eased the journey to Jerusalem from all over Europe but particularly by sea from Odessa to Jaffa: the vast majority of the 20,000 pilgrims were now Russians. A French monk noticed that in a typical year, out of 4,000 Christmas pilgrims, only four were Catholics, the rest being Russian. This Russian adoration flowed from the devout Orthodoxy to be found from the very bottom of society, the shaggy peasants in the smallest, remotest Siberian villages, to the very top, the Emperor-Tsar Nicholas I himself. The Orthodox mission of Holy Russia was shared by both.
When Constantinople fell in 1453, the grand princes of Muscovy had seen themselves as the heirs of the last Byzantine emperors, Moscow as the Third Rome. The princes adopted the Byzantine double-headed eagle and a new title, Caesar or Tsar. In their wars against the Islamic Crimean khans and then the Ottoman sultans, the tsars promoted the Russian empire as a sacred Orthodox crusade. In Russia, Orthodoxy had developed its own singularly Russian character, spread through its vastness both by tsars—and peasant hermits, all of whom specially revered Jerusalem. It was said that the distinctive onion-shaped domes of Russian churches were an attempt to copy those in paintings of Jerusalem. Russia had even built its own mini-Jerusaleme but every Russian believed that the pilgrimage to Jerusalem was an essential part of the preparation for death and salvation. As the poet Alexander Pushkin, the personification of Russia’s soul, expressed this in 1836, shortly before his death in a duel: “Is not Jerusalem the cradle of us all?”
Nicholas I had imbibed this tradition—he was very much the grandson of Catherine the Great and heir of Peter the Great, both of whom had promoted themselves as protectors of the Orthodox and the Holy Places, and the Russian peasants themselves linked the two: when Nicholas’ elder brother Alexander I died unexpectedly in 1825, they believed that he had gone to Jerusalem as an ordinary hermit, a modern version of the Last Emperor legend.
Now Nicholas, harshly conservative, deeply anti-Semitic and shamelessly philistine in all matters artistic (he had appointed himself as Pushkin’s personal censor), regarded himself as answerable only to what he called “The Russian God” in the cause of “Our Russia entrusted to Us by God.” This martinet, who prided himself on sleeping on a military cot, ruled Russia like a stern drillmaster. As a young man, the strapping, blue-eyed Nicholas had dazzled British society where one lady described him as “devilish handsome, the handsomest man in Europe!” By the 1840s, his hair was gone and a paunch bulged out of his still high-waisted and skintight military breeches. After thirty years of happy (if unfaithful) marriage to his ailing wife, he had finally taken a mistress, a young lady-in-waiting—and for all Russia’s vast power, he feared impotence, personally and politically.
For years he had cautiously wielded his personal charm to persuade Britain to agree to the partition of the Ottoman empire, which he called “the sick man of Europe,” hoping to liberate the Orthodox provinces of the Balkans and oversee Jerusalem. Now the British were no longer impressed. Twenty-five years of autocracy had desensitized him and made him impatient: “very clever, I don’t think him,” wrote the shrewd Queen Victoria, “and his mind is an uncivilized one.”
In Jerusalem, the streets glittered with the gold braid and shoulderboards of Russian uniforms, worn by princes and generals, while teeming with the sheepskins and smocks of thousands of peasant pilgrims, all encouraged by Nicholas who also despatched an ecclesiastical mission to compete with the other Europeans. The British consul warned London that “the Russians could in one night during Easter arm 10,000 pilgrims within the walls of Jerusalem” and seize the city. Meanwhile the French pursued their own mission to protect the Catholics. “Jerusalem,” reported Consul Finn in 1844, “is now a central point of interest to France and Russia.”
GOGOL: THE JERUSALEM SYNDROME
Not all Russia’s pilgrims were soldiers or peasants and not all found the salvation they sought. On 23 February 1848, a Russian pilgrim entered Jerusalem who was both typical in his soaring religious fever and utterly atypical in his flawed genius. The novelist Nikolai Gogol, famed for his play The Inspector-General and for his novel Dead Souls, arrived by donkey in a quest for spiritual ease and divine inspiration. He had envisaged Dead Souls as a trilogy, yet he was struggling to write the second and third parts. God was surely blocking his writing to punish his sins. As a Russian, only one place offered redemption: “until I’ve been to Jerusalem,” he wrote, “I’ll be incapable of saying anything comforting to anyone.”
The visit was disastrous: he spent a single night praying beside the Sepulchre, yet he found it filthy and vulgar. “Before I had time to pull my wits together, it was over.” The gaudiness of the holy sites and the barrenness of the hills crushed him: “I have never been so little content with the state of my heart as in Jerusalem and afterwards.” On his return, he refused to talk about Jerusalem but fell under the power of a mystic priest who convinced him that his works were sinful. Gogol manically destroyed his manuscripts then starved him
self to death—or at least into a coma, for when his coffin was opened in the twentieth century, his body was found face down.
The special madness of Jerusalem had been called “Jerusalem fever” but in the 1930s, it was recognized as Jerusalem Syndrome, “a psychotic decompensation related to religious excitement induced by proximity to the holy places of Jerusalem.” The British Journal of Psychiatry, in 2000, diagnosed this demented disappointment as: “Jerusalem Syndrome Subtype Two: those who come with magical ideas of Jerusalem’s healing powers—such as the writer Gogol.”12
In a sense, Nicholas was suffering from his own strain of Jerusalem Syndrome. There was madness in his family: “as the years have passed,” wrote the French ambassador to Petersburg, “it is now the qualities of [his father Emperor] Paul which come more to the fore.” The mad Paul had been assassinated (as had his grandfather Peter III). If Nicholas was far from insane, he started to display some of his father’s obstinately impulsive over-confidence. In 1848, he planned to make the pilgrimage to Jerusalem but he was forced to cancel when revolutions broke out across Europe. He triumphantly crushed the Hungarian revolt against his neighbour, the Habsburg emperor: he enjoyed the prestige of being the “Gendarme of Europe” but Nicholas, wrote the French ambassador, became “spoiled by adulation, success and the religious prejudices of the Muscovite nation.”
On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.
In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on the other hand, saw the crisis as the chance to crown his reign by saving the Holy Places for “the Russian God.” For these two very different emperors, Jerusalem was the key to glory in heaven and on earth.
JAMES FINN AND THE CRIMEAN WAR:
MURDERED EVANGELISTS AND MARAUDING BEDOUIN
The sultan, squeezed between the French and Russians, tried to settle the dispute with his decree of 8 February 1852, confirming the Orthodox paramountcy in the Church, with some concessions to the Catholics. But the French were no less committed than the Russians. They traced their claims back to the great Napoleon’s invasion, the alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the French Crusader kings of Jerusalem, and to Charlemagne. When Napoleon III threatened the Ottomans, it was no coincidence that he sent a gunboat called the Charlemagne. In November, the sultan buckled and granted the paramountcy to the Catholics. Nicholas was outraged. He demanded the restoration of Orthodox rights in Jerusalem and an “alliance” that would reduce the Ottoman empire to a Russian protectorate.
When Nicholas’ bullying demands were rejected, he invaded the Ottoman territories on the Danube—today’s Rumania—advancing towards Istanbul. Nicholas had convinced himself that he had charmed the British into agreement, denying he wanted to swallow Istanbul, let alone Jerusalem, but he fatally misjudged both London and Paris. Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was “waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross.” On 28 March 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.f
As Jerusalem’s garrison marched off to fight the Russians, James Finn watched them present arms on the Maidan parade ground outside the Jaffa Gate where the “Syrian sun glistened along the moving steel for they marched with fixed bayonets.” Finn could not forget that the “kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places” and that Nicholas “aimed still at an actual possession of [Jerusalem’s] Sanctuaries.”
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.g 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 U.S. 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 newsroom and theology exchange of Jerusalem.”h
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 rich rabbi, 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.
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