There were shoemakers from China, armourers and perfume dealers from Persia, horse dealers from Afghanistan and furniture makers from Lahore. ‘Here indeed is a “mart of all nations’’ where the genius of traffic reigns triumphant, and the merchandise and produce of all the nations of the East seem garnered in one common store, awaiting an escort to the lands where the arts and manufactures of civilized life will increase the value of nature’s gifts,’ wrote Marianne Postans, one of the city’s first biographers.5 ‘Piles of rich gums and aromatic spices, carboys of oil and rose water, pure ivory from the forests of Ceylon, rhinoceros hides from the burning coast of Zanzibar, the richest procure of Africa, India, Persia, and Arabia, is here cast in large heaps, mingling with coir cables, huge blocks, and ponderous anchors, the requisite material of island exportation.’
Jacob spent his first day wandering through the bazaars, looking in vain for an old shopkeeper or a long-bearded Muslim, who, he hoped, might understand a little Arabic. As darkness fell, he lay down to sleep on the stone steps of a great mosque, tired and hungry.
The following day, he approached the stall of a man selling sweetmeats. Desperate for food, but unable to speak the language, he picked up the item he wanted to buy with what little money he had. ‘As soon as I touched the sweetmeats, the man became very angry and, bounding from his seat, called his neighbours together, and they all shouted and screamed at me, and called a man I thought to be a soldier, though he looked more like an ape in his long loose trousers of dirty black, and his untidy red turban, under which cumbrous garments, his thin and stunted frame seemed even blacker and more contemptible than nature had made them.’ In the melee that followed, Jacob was arrested and brought before a court, where his attempts to explain his actions in Persian and Arabic fell on deaf ears. He then noticed an old man with a long beard who turned out to be an Arab and who offered to be his interpreter. Instead of fining Jacob, the English magistrate took pity on him. ‘Not yet hardened by the despotic ways of Eastern life, he generously paid the fine himself, and gave me a rupee as a present into the bargain. It was only two shillings, but as I had not had so much money for months I was as grateful as though it had been a hundred. If I ever meet him I will requite him, for I owe him all I now possess.’6
Soon after, the old Arab who had befriended Jacob in court found him work pulling the punkah of an English lawyer who, in turn, recommended him for a position as a scribe and Arabic translator in the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad. According to one story, he travelled to Hyderabad in the company of a caravan of women destined for the ruler’s harem. Jacob insisted that he was ‘so very poor’ that he walked all the way from Bombay to Hyderabad, a distance of more than a thousand miles.
Whatever the means, the journey proved fortuitous. He was about to begin an apprenticeship in the palace of India’s most powerful Prince, Afzal ud-Daula. The fifth Nizam of Hyderabad was heir to the Asaf Jahi dynasty—the richest in India. His palaces were brimming with diamonds unearthed in the mines of Golconda, and precious stones and jewellery plundered over centuries of war. As an old man, Jacob would reminisce about the Nizam’s ‘palace of eight thousand wives and the bazaar they kept for their royal master, of Treasury officials and eunuchs of the harem, of paupers who were ennobled in a day, and nobles whose state went from them at the wave of an Imperial hand.’7 It was an apprenticeship that would open undreamed-of doors to a runaway boy from a small city in south-eastern Turkey.
Jacob’s story begins in 1849. What few facts I discovered about his family and his past came from the pen of one ‘Mr Frost the Englishman’. Little is known about Frost other than that he was an Oxford scholar at the House of Arts who, in the late 1880s, hung up his mortar board and embarked on a Grand Tour of the Middle East, a popular pastime for the English upper classes now that railways had opened up the region. ‘When I finished teaching mathematics I wanted to benefit from my spare time, so, after my Russian classes ended, I decided to study the Arabic language,’ he later wrote. ‘I travelled to the East, to the Syrian countries and Palestine to visit all the Holy Places.’
For Frost, the journey unveiled a new world of art, culture and literature. Impressed ‘at the qualities of this righteous language … and by the imagination of its wonderful poets’, he decided to study Arabic when he returned to England. His teacher, recently appointed by the Prince of Wales to the Imperial Institute in London, was John Louis Sabunji, Jacob’s older brother.
Frost was clearly in awe of Sabunji. ‘I read the poems that my eminent teacher wrote with pleasure in his spare time, and I appreciated them. Then I asked him permission to print them and publish them, in return for the support that he gave me while I was mastering Arabic. He complied with my request. I then felt that I should publish the collection of poetry together with a summary of his biography, and he showed me his good will again.’8
Only the first part of Frost’s biography, recently discovered in an antiquarian bookshop in Istanbul, exists. Given his infatuation with his teacher, it was not surprising that he paid only scant attention to the rest of the family. There is a passing reference to a brother who did not enjoy ‘the grace of God’ and died during an outbreak of the plague in Diyarbakir sometime in the 1840s.
While in Istanbul, I came across letters written by Sabunji that mentioned a sister named Sophie who lived in Calcutta. There are also letters to a younger brother, Georges Effendi, who later joined him in Beirut, and started one of the city’s first photography studios, before going on to become the official court photographer to the Sultan of Syria.
It was not until I stumbled upon a secret British Foreign Office cable written in 1880 that I could link Sabunji to Jacob. Sabunji, who was living in England and working as a journalist at the time, had come to the attention of the Foreign Office for spreading anti-Ottoman propaganda in the bazaars of Delhi. The cable mentioned he was being helped by a brother referred to only as ‘a well-known diamond merchant of Simla’—an unmistakable reference to Jacob.
Frost traces the family’s origins to Urfa, a city near Turkey’s border with Syria. Urfa had once been a great centre of Christian learning with 300 churches and a cathedral that, in the tenth century, was rated one of the four wonders of the world. He described Urfa as ‘one of the towns of the island of lovers located between the Tigris and Euphrates’. Early cartographers noted that the land between the two rivers above their confluence at the Shatt al-Arab on the western extremity of the Persian Gulf was shaped like a man and a woman embracing. Christian and Muslim scholars identified it as the original Garden of Eden and the birthplace not only of Adam and Eve, but also Abraham. Noah was said to have left his ark on the mountains of al-Jawda near the source of the Tigris.
This part of the Middle East was also a meeting point of Christian sects: Jacobites and Chaldeans, Nestorians, Protestants, Maronites and Druze, as well as Armenians and Greeks divided between the Catholic and the Orthodox faiths. Jacob’s family belonged to the Syrian Catholic Church which originated after a split in the Jacobite church caused by the activities of Roman Catholic missionaries in Aleppo in the seventeenth century. Despite strong opposition from their patriarchs, a number of Jacobite clergy went over to the Catholic faith. Jacobite opposition to the Syrian Catholics received the backing of the Ottoman authorities who refused to recognize it as a separate church. Followers were routinely arrested, beaten, tortured and fined for their beliefs. Despite this persecution, the church grew stronger, particularly in Aleppo where the first Syrian Catholic bishop was consecrated in 1766. It was finally recognized by the Ottoman authorities in 1830 and its numbers quickly grew from then.
In the early 1800s, Jacob’s father Yakub took his family to Mardin in what is now south-eastern Turkey. They occupied one of the sandstone-coloured Arab-style houses below the city’s prominent citadel which stands guard over the plains of Mesopotamia. ‘A righteous and God-fearing man’, Yakub was employed as ‘engineer, architect/builder, and civil servant in the Ottoman State, in or
der to construct public buildings’, Frost recorded.
After leaving the services of the Ottomans, Yakub took the family north to Diyarbakir sometime in the 1830s where he set up a factory making soap out of olive oil. The choice of Diyarbakir was obvious. It was an important trade centre on the main transport route from Constantinople to Mosul, Baghdad and beyond. It had a larger percentage of Christians than any other city in the Ottoman Empire, and the olive groves around Derik and Mardin produced bumper crops of the raw material he needed.
Based on the dates given in his passport applications, Jacob was born in June or July 1849 and christened Iskandar Meliki bin Ya’qub al-Birri. At that time, Diyarbakir was a thriving commercial centre of around 30,000 people—a kaleidoscope of different ethnic groups and Christian sects. Founded in Roman times, it had been named Kara Amida or Black Amida because of its dark defensive walls made of basalt that overlook the Tigris River at the northernmost point of the river’s navigability. ‘The mountains, the walls, the dogs and even the hearts of Diyarbakir are all black’,9 went an ancient Mesopotamian proverb.
The Tigris is so broad at this point that the Romans had to construct a stone bridge with ten arches to span it. Over the millennia, the river has provided sustenance to the surrounding lands. So rich is the soil that watermelons grow to a metre in circumference. Today, Diyarbakir’s bazaars are stocked with agricultural implements; cloth merchants ply Kurdish tweeds and woollens. Men with massive hessian bags of raw green olives sit at street corners, next to vendors of walnuts and pomegranates.
Approaching Diyarbakir from the south in 1850, the year after Jacob’s birth, the American missionary Grattan Geary gave the city a mixed review. ‘In the distance, the Roman walls and towers which surround the city look black and grim, justifying the epithet “kara”, which the Turks apply to the sombre town. But when seen from close at hand the basalt of which the walls are built is found to be a dark grey rather than black. Above the fortifications are seen the tall and graceful minarets of the Turkish mosques and a number of square Roman church towers which have survived the vicissitudes of centuries and, in most cases, outlasted the churches to which they were attached. They owe their preservation to the fact that the Mohammedan conquerors turned them to account as minarets, placing little round towers on the top where the muezzins walk when calling the faithful to prayer.’10
The English traveller, Major E.B. Soane, wrote that, aside from a large Armenian community engaged mainly in the manufacture of copper pots, there were ‘Greeks, relics of the rule of Byzantium, divided into three or four sects, Syrians, or Christian Arabs, as they prefer to call themselves, some belonging to the Syrian Church and others, Catholics. There are Chaldeans, who glory in the assertion (never disproved) that they are lineal descendants of Nebuchadnezzar and the later Assyrians, speaking an ancient dialect which is nearer to the inscription language than any other.’11
Today, there are only a few hundred Christians left in Diyarbakir with the numbers of some communities, such as the Chaldeans, down to less than a dozen families. Most of the remaining Syrian Catholics are jewellers whose brightly lit shops selling gold brooches, necklaces and ornaments favoured by Kurdish women are found in the bazaar behind the Hasan Pasa caravanserai.
Jacob’s family lived in what was once the Catholic quarter of the old city to the east of the Kasum Padishah mosque. A maze of narrow streets with high blind walls and hidden courtyards, it is today almost entirely populated by Kurds. Locating the Surp Giragos Armenian Catholic church where Jacob’s family worshipped and where, as a young boy, he attended school, is almost impossible without a guide.
When I visited the church in late 2010 it was a building site. A sign stated that the cost of reconstruction was 548,900 Turkish Lira or about $300,000. The completion date was August 2009, but the work was obviously years behind schedule. From the outside, the building looked like an unappealing rectangular box, but the interior revealed a series of graceful arches and elaborate naves. The church was surprisingly roomy and would have easily accommodated two hundred worshippers with a separate gallery at the back where women could sit. Embedded in the ground was a tombstone carved in Aramaic script with the date 1851 clearly visible in Roman numerals.
Restoration work hadn’t even started on the building that had once been the school. It appeared to be a single-storeyed structure built above what looked like storerooms and was not much larger than a typical modern classroom. The number of Syrian Catholics in Diyarbakir was so small in the 1850s—a few hundred at the most—that doctrinal differences with Armenian Catholics were set aside and the two communities shared the school and the church.
At the time, Diyarbakir was enjoying a period of relative prosperity after a couple of decades marred by violence and hunger. An insurrection by Kurdish tribes who had revolted against the previous Sultan’s policy of forcibly enlisting them in the army was subdued in 1839. It was followed by a famine that forced Kurds to flee their villages to the city where they died in thousands on the streets.
The Reverend Horatio Southgate, who visited Diyarbakir at around the time Jacob’s family moved there in the mid-1840s, blamed the deaths on the neglect of the ‘hardheartedness of the Christians’.12 But he was also forced to admit that the Christians had suffered greatly from sudden ‘bursts of fanaticism’ at the hands of the city’s Kurds. In the late 1830s, they were forced to hide in their homes as ‘men of note were being hunted down like wild beasts’ and shops and churches were ransacked.13
For Jacob, the constant threat of insurrection, persecution and disease would have been hard to bear. His older brothers John and Georges had left many years earlier. Despite the risk of no longer having the relative protection of his family’s wealth and status, the urge to follow in their footsteps must have been very strong.
As an old man in Bombay in the 1910s, he told his friend, the author and folklorist Alice Elizabeth Dracott, the story of a practical joke he had played in the church I had just visited. Before evening mass, when hardly any light emanated from the oil lamps that hung from the high ceilings, he poured ink in the holy water font.14 As each worshipper touched his or her forehead, the ink left an unsightly and conspicuous black smear. Panic ensued among the congregation and the service was cancelled. He later confessed to the priest as being the perpetrator of the schoolboy prank. But instead of honouring the confessional seal, the priest denounced the eight-year-old in front of his class. ‘Jacob could no longer endure the disgrace and fled from his home to become from that hour a wanderer over the face of the earth,’ wrote Dracott.
I could imagine Jacob playing such a prank, but I doubted he would have left home on such a flimsy pretext. The more I read about him the more I recognized his wicked humour, sharp temper and impatient nature. He was a risk-taker, a hustler and a schemer. He was also a master storyteller.
A second version of leaving Diyarbakir was first told to the American writer Francis Marion Crawford in 1879. Crawford met Jacob in Simla when he was editor of an Indian newspaper. To him, the story sounded so incredible he utilized it in the plot of Mr Isaacs: A Tale of Modern India, a best-selling occult thriller that would launch Crawford’s writing career and turn Jacob into a celebrity. In Crawford’s retelling of the story, Jacob was turned out of his home at the age of twelve and sold in a slave market in Constantinople. Fortunately, his master was ‘a kindly intelligent man’ who made him ‘a pupil instead of a servant to carry his coffee and pipe, or a slave to bear the heavier burden of his vices’. He taught him about Eastern life, literature, philosophy, occultism and astrology. Jacob became fluent in Arabic and was eventually able to recite the Koran by heart.
Slavery was highly institutionalized in Ottoman Turkey. Boys as young as ten were taken from Christian families to replenish the ranks of the Janissaries, the Sultan’s élite infantry troops, or were trained for positions as high ranking government officials. During the sixteenth century, when Istanbul was the largest city in Europe and West Asia, slaves a
nd former slaves made up a fifth of the population.
Strict rules laid out in the early seventeenth century text, The Laws of the Janissaries, governed which boys could be taken as slaves. Those who needed to work for their families, were the children of shepherds or were too ‘uneducated’ were exempted. Married boys were ineligible because ‘their eyes had been opened, and those cannot become a slave of the Sultan’. Similarly, orphans and boys who were in any way physically defective were exempted as were those who lived in Constantinople ‘for they do not have a sense of shame’.15
The system became a route for non-Muslims to make it to the highest strata of Ottoman society. Those who went to the Imperial capital were inspected, circumcised and converted to Islam. The smartest were sent for education in the palace school, for work in the Sultan’s gardens or were given to Ottoman dignitaries. Some Christian families willingly gave their sons to the Sultan, seeing it as a way of breaking out of a cycle of poverty and discrimination
When Jacob’s master died suddenly, he feared that he would be resold as a slave, and he escaped. Now twenty-one, he travelled alone and on foot until he fell in with a party of pilgrims making their way to Mecca. Pretending to be a Muslim, he earned the respect of fellow pilgrims who offered him ‘handfuls of rice and dates’ to give him strength to complete the arduous journey.
The account was taken up by the Pall Mall Gazette in an article titled, ‘Romance of an Oriental Jewel Merchant’,16 published in 1891, which purported to reveal, ‘once and for all’, the true story of Jacob’s life. The article caused a sensation. Dozens of newspapers around the world republished excerpts, but not all the coverage was favourable. The Englishman, a Calcutta daily, attacked the newspaper for its ‘crass ignorance, mingled with almost theatrical imagination’. The article, it said, had about as much truth in it as the ‘stories told by Shehezarade in the Arabian Nights’.17
The Mysterious Mr Jacob: Diamond Merchant, Magician and Spy Page 3
