But his troublesome charges also served a very useful function. In constant contact with Jerusalem’s most unsavory residents, the oilmen were like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine, the first recipients of every dark rumor floating through the city—and with the spreading war in Europe, those rumors were turning exceedingly dark. It was precisely at tense times like these that the rich mosaic of the Ottoman world—a mosaic composed of a myriad of religious and tribal and ethnic groups—could quite easily become a grim counterimage of itself, a place where the various communities drew protectively inward, and where ancient feuds and suspicions and jealousies exploded into violence. Not surprisingly, this danger was greatest in the most “mixed” corners of the empire, and with its mélange of Arab and Turk and Armenian, of Muslim and Jew and Christian, all living cheek by jowl, there was no more cosmopolitan city in the Near East than Jerusalem.
By the end of August, stories were floating in from the countryside of Muslim vigilante armies forming, of Jews and Armenians being attacked, and while most of these tales proved false, they fed the ever-thickening air of tension. In the Old City, shopkeepers were raising prices and hoarding their wares, ever more convinced that Constantinople would soon enter the war. What was still not at all clear, though, was which side it might join, and another fault line formed between those hoping for the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia and those desiring the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
On September 8, the sense of menace took more personal form for Yale and the other foreigners remaining in the city. Taking advantage of the chaos in Europe, the Young Turk government announced an end to the Capitulations, the humiliating concessions extracted by Western powers over the previous four centuries that largely exempted foreigners from Ottoman law. Yale noticed the effect immediately. Previously obsequious local officials became haughty, demanding. On Jerusalem’s narrow sidewalks, residents no longer automatically stepped to the street at the approach of a Western “white man.” On one occasion, when Yale and a couple of other foreign residents were visiting the Mount of Olives, a group of young boys pelted them with stones. To Yale, Jerusalem more and more felt like a pile of tinder in search of a match.
FOR OTHERS IN Palestine, the revoking of the Capitulations took on far more ominous import than a little stone-throwing. Left particularly vulnerable were the tens of thousands of Jewish émigrés who had come into the region over the previous thirty years.
Most had come in two successive waves. The first, of which the Aaronsohn family had been a part, had been an exodus out of central and southeastern Europe in the 1880s. This was followed by a second aliyah (literally “ascent” in Hebrew) in the early 1900s, mainly composed of Russian Jews escaping a new round of czarist political persecution and state-sanctioned pogroms. Although culturally these groups were very different—most of the first-wave émigrés tended to be religious and socially conservative, while many in the second were secular socialists—what they shared was that under the terms of the Capitulations many remained citizens of their birthplace.
That arrangement had historically worked to the benefit of both the émigrés and the Western powers. With it, the Jews had recourse to the protection of their former homelands, just as those foreign governments were given legal pretext to meddle in Ottoman affairs under the guise of tending to their transplanted citizens. While this bizarre system gave rise to a number of paradoxes, surely none was more grotesque than the spectacle of czarist Russia stoutly defending the rights and well-being of its Jewish citizens in Palestine, while systematically brutalizing that same religious minority inside Russia. With the revoking of the Capitulations, all this was coming to an end. Additionally, if Turkey did finally join the war, at least one portion of this Jewish community was likely headed for an unpleasant future; with thousands of the first-wave émigrés still holding Austro-Hungarian passports, and thousands from the second holding Russian ones, one group or the other was going to end up being classified as “belligerent nationals.” As had already happened to countless innocent civilians across the breadth of Europe, the losers in this lottery could then be subject to deportation or internment.
In all this, most of the residents of Zichron Yaakov, including the Aaronsohn family, actually benefited from a different paradox. These Romanian Jews had come to Palestine after being effectively barred from citizenship in an independent Romania. By default, they thus remained citizens of Romania’s preindependence master, namely the Ottoman Empire. Unlike other Jews in Palestine, then, Aaron Aaronsohn and other Zichron residents could look upon the revocation of the Capitulations with a measure of equanimity, perhaps even a touch of schadenfreude.
That sentiment was extremely short-lived, however, for the very next day, September 9, Constantinople announced a general mobilization of its armed forces. Under the curious rationale that this was necessary to “preserve Ottoman neutrality,” the mobilization called for male citizens between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five to show up for military conscription. Worse, this edict extended to most all citizens—traditionally, Jews and a number of Christian sects had been exempt—and the regime was further rescinding the age-old system whereby the affluent could escape service by payment of a special bedel, or tax.
Aaron Aaronsohn was sufficiently acquainted with the Ottoman way of governance to know that this last clause meant nothing of the sort—it simply meant that obtaining an exemption now would entail paying more bribes to more officials—but the mobilization deeply worried the agronomist on a broader level. As recent events in Europe illustrated, an army called up almost always meant an army going to war; once the machinery and bureaucracy of war had been set in motion and popular hysteria properly ginned up, there was simply no easy way to shut it all down again. Ever since the outbreak of the European conflict, Aaronsohn had heard a rash of conflicting rumors from his friends in the Ottoman military and political hierarchy over what Constantinople might do, and this cloudiness was exacerbated by the vague picture to be gleaned of what was occurring in Europe. In the face of such uncertainty, Aaronsohn, like most of the Jewish residents of Palestine, simply clung to the hope that reason might yet prevail and the war be avoided.
Interestingly, it appears his apprehensions had less to do with which side Turkey might join than with the act of joining itself. Part of this may have stemmed from a common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades—no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer—but it was also born of a particular feature of Ottoman war-making. In the event of conflict, both military and civilian authorities would suddenly have license to embark on a wholesale requisitioning spree—“pillaging” might be a more apt term—as they grabbed up whatever they deemed necessary for the war effort. While this campaign was sure to affect Arab and Jewish villages alike, it would naturally be more zealous in those modern or prosperous places that had more to offer—places like Zichron Yaakov and Athlit, for example. Already by mid-September 1914, the Aaronsohn family and their neighbors in Zichron began hiding away whatever they had of value, braced for the ruinous arrival of the requisition officer.
ON THE AFTERNOON of September 4, 1914, Curt Prüfer was in a room of the Hotel Germania in Constantinople meeting with a burly, blond-haired German man in his thirties named Robert Mors. Until recently, Mors had been a policeman in the Egyptian coastal city of Alexandria, and their main topic of conversation that afternoon was how they might destroy the British administration in Egypt through a campaign of bombings, assassinations, and Islamic insurrection. The two men even bandied about ideas on how best to blow up the Suez Canal.
Their meeting was remarkable on both a personal and political level. Just a month earlier, Prüfer had been scratching out a modest living delivering lectures on Oriental languages in Munich; now he was a key operative in an intelligence mission so secretive that its existence was known to probably fewer than three dozen people in the world. That’s because th
e ultimate purpose of this mission was to bring the still-neutral Ottoman Empire into the war, and among those with no inkling of Prüfer’s activities in Constantinople could be included virtually the entire Young Turk political leadership. Credit for this peculiar set of circumstances belonged to Prüfer’s old mentor, Max von Oppenheim, and to one of the stranger diplomatic accords ever put to paper.
As the war clouds had thickened over Europe during that long summer of 1914, a clear majority of the thirty or so senior members of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the junta that controlled the empire, wanted to stay clear of the coming European firestorm. A small faction, however, had energetically sought to form an alliance with the Triple Entente, while another, led by thirty-two-year-old war minister Enver Pasha, tried to do the same with the Central Powers. Enver won out. In a case of exquisitely poor timing, he had signed a mutual defense treaty with Germany on the afternoon of August 2, just hours before Germany declared war on Russia and the conflict began.
Except, as it turned out, Enver Pasha had conducted these negotiations without ever consulting most of his CUP colleagues; indeed, at the time of the accord’s signing, only three or four of Enver’s closest confederates were aware of it. Even more astounding, Enver continued to withhold this information from the rest of the Turkish government throughout the first weeks of the war. As the young war minister told his impatient German allies, he needed more time to lay the groundwork before dropping this little surprise on his ministerial colleagues. To that end, a precipitating event, something that might turn both the nation and the rest of the Young Turk leadership away from the prevailing neutralist sentiment, could prove very handy.
Enver had come to the right people for, as neutral Belgium had recently learned, precipitating events was something of a German specialty. To help out his secret Turkish ally, Kaiser Wilhelm II could think of no better guide than Max von Oppenheim and his preachings on pan-Islamic revolt. If Islamic insurrection could be fostered in the various Muslim territories controlled by the British—and most especially in that land Britain had stolen from Constantinople, Egypt—surely it would be obvious to both the leadership and populace of the Ottoman Empire that they needed to come into the war.
But if the ultimate goal was to bring Turkey in, at least some in the German high command that autumn saw an upside to it remaining neutral just a bit longer. So long as it did, the Ottoman Empire could serve as the ideal launch pad for German destabilization efforts, a kind of Trojan horse from which to carry out attacks on the surrounding British colonies with very little risk of repercussion. That neutrality could also serve as a convenient shield while Germany laid the groundwork for the most important military operation to be conducted in the region, an assault on the Suez Canal. In mid-August, the kaiser signed a secret directive calling for the creation of the Nachrichtenstelle für den Orient (Intelligence Bureau for the East), to be based in Constantinople and to serve as the central clearinghouse for Germany’s subversion campaigns in the Near East. The director of that bureau was to be Max von Oppenheim. Among Oppenheim’s first acts upon assuming the post was to put out an offer of employment to his former protégé, Curt Prüfer.
Oppenheim’s confidence in his apprentice was certainly deserved. No sooner had he checked into the Hotel Germania on the evening of September 3 than Prüfer set to work. Early the next morning, he met with one of Enver Pasha’s chief lieutenants, a young Turkish staff officer named Omar Fawzi Bey, and together they worked up a whole list of prospective projects to strike at British Egypt: hiring Bedouin tribesmen to attack isolated British garrisons along the Suez Canal; sneaking so-called komitadji units of underground fighters into the country to foment Islamic insurrection; launching a terror campaign of targeted assassinations and indiscriminate bombings. Even if he remained dubious of some of the more novel schemes put forward by Fawzi Bey and his confederates—one involved scuttling a cement-laden freighter at the narrowest point of the Suez Canal—Prüfer appreciated the enthusiasm and creative thinking that went into them.
When not plotting with Fawzi Bey or Sheikh Shawish, an Egyptian firebrand hated and feared by the British, Prüfer was in regular conference with the four or five other Nachrichtenstelle operatives who had already arrived in the Turkish capital. At these meetings, often also attended by the three or four German embassy officials clued to Oppenheim’s scheme, ambitious plans were laid for sabotage and subversion campaigns throughout the Muslim world: in Egypt, in Russian Central Asia, in Afghanistan, even as far away as India.
It was at the conclusion of one such meeting on the afternoon of September 7 that Prüfer was brought before the man who had made it all possible, Minister of War Enver Pasha. Small, extravagantly uniformed, and extraordinarily handsome—“the handsomest man in the Turkish army,” the New York Times gushed—Enver had piercing dark eyes and a dramatic mustache, upturned and waxed in the Prussian style. That was not coincidence. As the military liaison to Germany in the early 1910s, he had quickly assumed the manner and style of its military elite, and now fancied himself more Prussian than the Prussians. Although Curt Prüfer was never much given to psychoanalysis, the few words he scribbled into his diary that night in describing the thirty-two-year-old Enver—by four months Prüfer’s junior—offer one of the more incisive portraits of the man who was to practically single-handedly destroy the Ottoman Empire: “A man of stone. A face immovable, well-formed, beautiful in the feminine sense. Groomed to the point of foppishness. Along with a streak of shocking hardness. ‘We can be more cruel than the British.’ The man wants something, but the something does not come.”
But of all the meetings he attended and the schemes he heard in those first few days in Constantinople, Prüfer was most intrigued by the unique situation facing Robert Mors, the cashiered Alexandria policeman. Mors had happened to be out of Egypt when the war began and, not surprisingly in light of his German citizenship, been summarily dismissed from his post by the British authorities. But in one of those quaint touches of “gentlemen’s war” that still typified World War I in its early days, the British were granting Mors safe passage back to Alexandria in order to collect his stranded family. To Prüfer, this made Mors the ideal conduit for launching his subversion campaign. Given his status as a privileged European, Mors was also far more likely than a local to be able to secrete contraband articles among his personal possessions—and here Prüfer was thinking of bomb-making components—and smuggle them into the country. To impress the former policeman on the importance of his mission, Prüfer arranged an audience with Enver Pasha the day before Mors was to sail for Alexandria with bombing detonators hidden in his luggage. The Turkish war minister warmly thanked Mors for his service.
Even though the British quickly suspected some sort of pact had been struck between Enver and the German high command, they remained utterly in the dark as to the specifics. Their apprehensions grew, however, once Prüfer and Oppenheim’s other intelligence bureau operatives began showing up in Constantinople. “Even without [Turkey joining the] war,” British ambassador Louis Mallet cabled to London on September 15, “German machinations are so various here that I should not be surprised if they managed to engineer some scheme against the Canal, either by means of a so-called neutral ship from [the] Syrian coast, or by agents on land.”
Against this were the constant assurances the British ambassador was given by Ottoman government officials. From the sultan and prime minister on down, Mallet heard the steady refrain that Turkey had no militarist intentions and only wished to stay out of the European conflict. While certainly some of these protesting senior officials were dissembling, others were not; incredibly, many still had no inkling of Enver’s August 2 accord with Germany.
Mallet took his suspicions directly to Enver on October 5. Along with his other talents, however, Enver was a skilled liar. Not only did he deny any sinister intent behind the troop movements in Palestine but, according to Mallet, “laughed at [the] idea of individual Germans undertakin
g irresponsible enterprises against [the] Canal or elsewhere.”
Except the Turkish war minister was about to get caught out. A few days prior to Mallet’s meeting with Enver, Robert Mors had been arrested at Alexandria harbor with his bombing detonators. Facing possible execution under Egypt’s martial law statutes, he soon told his interrogators all he knew of the German-Turkish plots against Egypt, as well as of his best-wishes audience with Enver Pasha on the eve of his voyage. Mors was especially expansive when it came to his relationship with Omar Fawzi Bey and Curt Prüfer. For Prüfer, the most damning part came when the foiled smuggler readily admitted that the detonators in his luggage had been intended for use with bombs being manufactured in Egypt. When asked how he knew that, Mors replied, “Because once I found Sheikh Shawish sitting with Dr. Prüfer in the latter’s room at the Hotel Germania. They were copying in Arabic a recipe for making bombs.… [It] contained directions, a list of the component chemicals, and a sketch of a bomb in the right-hand bottom corner.”
The British in Cairo showed considerable forbearance in the Mors incident, presumably in hopes that the more moderate elements in the Constantinople regime might yet rein in the adventurist Enver and keep Turkey out of the war. At his hastily held court-martial, Mors was sentenced to life in prison, while all mention of his meeting with the Turkish war minister was withheld from the public record. Cairo authorities were less forgiving of the man who had once lived in their midst. For his central role in the Mors affair, Curt Prüfer was to soon have a British bounty on his head.
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