THE WRITERS: DAVID DORR, AN AMERICAN SLAVE ON TOUR
At their Talbieh evangelical farm for converting Jews, the Finns frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire. As bullets flew, Mrs. Finn was often amazed to identify women amongst the warriors. She did her best to negotiate peace between the sheikhs. But the Bedouin were only part of the problem: the sheikhs of Hebron and Abu Ghosh fielded private armies of 500 warriors and fought full-scale wars against the Ottomans. When one of these sheikhs was captured and brought to Jerusalem in chains, the dashing warrior managed to escape and gallop away to fight again, like an Arab Robin Hood. Finally Hafiz Pasha, the aged governor of Jerusalem, had to lead an expedition with 550 troops and two brass field-guns to suppress the warlord of Hebron.
Yet despite such melodrama, on summer evenings, Jerusalemites of all creeds—Muslim and Christian Arabs along with the Sephardic Jews—picnicked on the Damascus road. The American explorer, Lieutenant William Lynch, observed a “picturesque scene—hundreds of Jews enjoying the fresh air, seated outside the walls under enormous olive trees, the women all in white shrouds, the men in broad-brimmed black hats.” James Finn and the other consuls, preceded by Ottoman soldiers and kavasses with silver-mounted batons, promenaded with their wives. “As the sun set, everyone hurried inside the walls that were still locked every night.”
“Ah the sadness of Jerusalem,” sighed Finn who had to admit that the city seemed “monastically dull to a person imbued with the gay habits of other places. French visitors have been known to utter the ejaculation which ever accompanies the shrug of the shoulders at the contrast between Jerusalem and Paris.” This was certainly not the sort of ejaculation which the priapic Flaubert expected and he expressed his frustration at the Jaffa Gate: “I let a fart escape as I crossed the threshold,” even if “I was annoyed by the Voltaireanism of my anus.” That sexual gourmand Flaubert celebrated escape from Jerusalem with a five-girl orgy in Beirut: “I screwed three women and came four times—three times before lunch and once after dessert. Young Du Camp came only once, his member still sore with the remnant of a chancre given him by a Wallachian whore.”
One unique American visitor, David Dorr, a young black slave from Louisiana who called himself a “quadroon,” agreed with Flaubert: on tour with his master, he arrived “with submissive heart” filled with awe for Jerusalem but soon changed his mind: “When I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots than pay homage. After seventeen days in Jerusalem, I leave never wishing to return again.”i
Yet for all their irreverence, the writers could not help but be awed by Jerusalem. Flaubert considered her “diabolically grand.” Thackeray sensed “there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.” Melville almost admired the “plague-stricken splendour” of the place. Standing at the Golden Gate, gazing out at Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, Melville saw a “city besieged by armies of the dead” and asked himself: “is the desolation the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?”13
As Russian forces were repeatedly defeated in the Crimea, Nicholas fell ill under the strain and died on 18 February 1855. In September, the Russian naval base at Sebastopol fell to the British and French. Russia had been thoroughly humiliated. After staggering military incompetence on all sides in a campaign that cost 750,000 lives, the new Russian emperor, Alexander II, sued for peace, surrendering his imperial ambitions for Jerusalem, but winning at least a restoration of the dominant Orthodox rights in the Sepulchre, the status quo that still remains in force today.
On 14 April 1856, the cannons of the Citadel saluted the signing of peace. But twelve days later, James Finn, attending the Holy Fire, watched “Greek pilgrims, provided with sticks, stones and cudgels, concealed beforehand behind the columns and dropped from the gallery,” attack the Armenians. “Dreadful conflict ensued,” he observed, “missiles were flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps, glass and oil pouring down upon heads.” When the pasha rushed down from his throne in the gallery, he “received blows to the head” and had to be carried out before his soldiers charged in with fixed bayonets. Minutes later, the Orthodox patriarch appeared with the Holy Fire to screams of exultation, the beating of chests, and flickering of flames.
The garrison celebrated the sultan’s victory with a parade on the Maidan which was ironic because soon afterwards, Alexander II bought this parade ground, once the site of Assyrian and Roman camps, to build a Russian Compound. Henceforth Russia would pursue cultural dominance in Jerusalem.
The victory was bitter sweet for the Ottomans, their weak Islamic realm saved by Christian soldiers. To show his gratitude and keep the West at bay, Sultan Abdulmecid was forced, in measures known as Tanzimat—reform—to centralize his administration, decree absolute equality for all minorities regardless of religion, and allow the Europeans all manner of once-inconceivable liberties. He presented St. Anne’s, the Crusader church that had become Saladin’s madrassa, to Napoleon III. In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, exploiter of the Congo, was the first European allowed to visit the Temple Mount: its guards—club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur—had to be locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg empire—and ill-fated future Emperor of Mexico—arrived with the officers of his flagship. The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom. Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone.
In the last months of the Crimean War, Sir Moses Montefiore had bought the trains and rails of the Balaclava Railway, built specially for British troops in the Crimea, to create a line between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Now, endowed with all the prestige and power of a British plutocrat after the Crimean victory, he returned to the city, the harbinger of her future.14
a 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.
b 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 Zangwill, a Zionist who did not believe in settling Palestine, precisely because it was already inhabited by Arabs.
c 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.
d 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 worldwide.
e In 1656, 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, Nicho
las I visited the New Jerusalem and was deeply moved, ordering its restoration. The Nazis damaged it but it is now being restored.
f 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.
g 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.
h 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.
i 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 slave. 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 A Colored 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.”
CHAPTER 38
The New City
1855–1860
MOSES MONTEFIORE: “THIS CROESUS”
On 18 July 1855, Montefiore ritually ripped his clothes when he saw the lost Temple and then set up his camp outside the Jaffa Gate where he was mobbed by thousands of Jerusalemites firing off guns in the air and cheering. James Finn, whose schemes to convert Jews he had repeatedly foiled, tried to undermine his reception but the liberal-minded governor, Kiamil Pasha, sent an honour guard to present arms. When Montefiore became the first Jew to visit the Temple Mount, the pasha had him escorted by a hundred soldiers—and he was borne in a sedan-chair so he would not break the law that banned Jews from the holy mountain lest they stood on the Holy of Holies. His life’s mission of helping Jerusalem’s Jews was never easy: many of them lived on charity and were so infuriated when Montefiore tried to wean them off his handouts that they rioted in his camp. “Really,” wrote his niece Jemima Sebag, who was in his entourage, “If this continues, we’ll scarcely be safe in our tents!” Not all his schemes worked either: he never managed to build his Crimean railway from Jaffa, but it was this trip that changed the destiny of Jerusalem. On his way, he had persuaded the sultan to let him rebuild the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720, and even more important, to buy land in Jerusalem to settle Jews. He paid for the restoration of the Hurva and started to look for a place to buy.
Melville described Sir Moses Montefiore as “this Croesus—a huge man of 75 carried from Joppa on a litter borne by mules.” He was 6 foot 3 and not quite seventy-five, but he was old to make such a trip. He had already risked his life on three visits to Jerusalem and his doctors had advised him not to go again—“his heart was feeble and there was poison in his blood”—but he and Judith came anyway, accompanied by an entourage of retainers, servants and even his own kosher butcher.
To the Jews of Jerusalem and across the Diaspora, Montefiore was already a legend who combined the proconsular prestige of a rich Victorian baronet at the height of the British empire with the dignity of a Jew who always rushed to the aid of his brethren and had never compromised his Judaism. It was his unique position in Britain that gave him his power: he straddled the old and new societies, as much at home with royal dukes, prime ministers and bishops as he was with rabbis and financiers. In a London dominated by staid morality and evangelical Hebraism, Montefiore was the ideal of what Victorians thought a Jew should be: “That grand old Hebrew,” wrote Lord Shaftesbury, “is better than many Christians.”
He had been born in Livorno, Italy, but he made his fortune as one of the “Jew brokers” on the London Stock Exchange, an ascent helped by his happy marriage to Judith Cohen, sister-in-law of the banker Nathaniel Rothschild. His social rise and wealth were only a means to help others. When he received a knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1837, she described him in her diary as “a Jew, an excellent man” while in his journal, he prayed that the honour “may prove the harbinger of future good to the Jews generally. I had besides the pleasure of my banner with ‘Jerusalem’ floating proudly in the hall.” Once he was rich, he scaled down his business and, often campaigning with his brother-in-law or his nephew Lionel de Rothschild, he devoted himself to winning political rights for British Jews.a But he was most needed abroad, where he was received like a British ambassador by emperors and sultans, displaying tireless courage and ingenuity while often in personal danger. As we have seen, it was his Damascus mission to Mehmet and the sultan that made him famous.
Montefiore found himself admired even by the most eminent anti-Semites: when Nicholas I, in his crusade for Orthodoxy and Autocracy, was starting to repress the millions of Russian Jews, Montefiore travelled to St. Petersburg to insist that Russian Jews were loyal, brave and honourable. “If they resembled you,” replied Nicholas with ominous courtesy.b However he was more than capable of holding his own with anyone: when he rushed to Rome to intervene in an anti-Semitic intrigue, a cardinal asked him how much of Rothschild’s gold had paid for the sultan’s ban on the “blood libel.” “Not as much as I gave your lackey for hanging up my coat in your hall,” Montefiore replied.
His partner in all his enterprises was the vivacious, curly-haired Judith who always called him “Monty,” but they were not destined to found a dynasty: despite their prayers at Rachel’s Tomb, they never had children. Yet apart from his Jewishness and the Hebrew letters of Jerusalem on his coat of arms, Montefiore had the virtues and faults of a typical Victorian grandee. He lived in splendour in a Park Lane mansion and a crenellated Gothic Revival villa in Ramsgate where he built his own synagogue and a unique if grandiose mausoleum based exactly on Rachel’s Tomb. His tone was ponderously orotund, his righteousness was scarcely leavened with humour, there was a certain vanity in his autocratic style, and behind the façade, there were mistresses and illegitimate children. Indeed his modern biographer reveals that while in his eighties, he fathered a child with a teenage maid, yet another sign of his astonishing energy.
Now his search for a place to buy in Jerusalem was helped by the Jerusalem Families whom he had always befriended: even the qadi called him “the pride of the people of Moses.” Ahmed Duzhdar Aga, whom he had known for twenty years, sold him a plot outside the walls between the Zion and Jaffa gates for 1,000 gold English sovereigns. Montefiore immediately moved his tents to his new land where he planned a hospital and a Kentish windmill so that Jews could make their own bread. Before he left he asked the pasha for a special favour: the stench of the Jewish Quarter, cited in every Western travelo
gue, was caused by a Muslim abattoir, its very presence a sign of the inferior status of the Jews. Montefiore asked for it to be moved and the pasha agreed.
In June 1857, Montefiore returned for the fifth time with the materials for his windmill and in 1859, construction started. Instead of a hospital, he built the almshouses for poor Jewish families that became known as the Montefiore Cottages, unmistakably Victorian like a red-brick, crenellated, mock-medieval clubhouse in English suburbia. In Hebrew they were called Mishkenot Shaanim—the Dwellings of Delight—but initially they were preyed on by bandits and their inhabitants were so undelighted they used to creep back into the city to sleep. The windmill did at first produce cheap bread but it soon broke down due to the lack of Judaean wind and Kentish maintenance.
Christian evangelists and Jewish rabbis alike dreamed of the Jewish return—and this was Montefiore’s contribution. The colossal wealth of the new Jewish plutocrats, especially the Rothschilds, encouraged the idea that, as Disraeli put it at just this time, the “Hebrew capitalists” would buy Palestine. The Rothschilds, arbiters of international politics and finance at the height of their power, as influential in Paris and Vienna as they were in London, were unconvinced but they were happy to contribute money and help to Montefiore whose “constant dream” was that “Jerusalem is destined to become the seat of a Jewish empire.”c In 1859, after a suggestion from the Ottoman ambassador in London, Montefiore discussed the idea of buying Palestine but he was sceptical, knowing that the rising Anglo-Jewish elite were busy buying country estates to live the English dream and had no interest in such a scheme. Ultimately Montefiore believed that his beloved “national restoration of the Israelites” was beyond politics and best left to “Divine Agency”—but the opening in 1860 of his little Montefiore Quarter was the beginning of the new Jewish city outside the walls. This was far from Montefiore’s last visit but after the Crimean War, Jerusalem was once again an international object of desire: Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs and British princes vied with one another to combine the new science of archaeology with the old game of empires.15
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