The first plane to land in Jerusalem, 1913. The local Turkish governor had a hard job managing multiple foreign interests in the Holy Land while keeping a lid on competition between the Jewish majority in the city and the Arab majority in the surrounding countryside.
This city of three religions could never just be another Ottoman town in 1913, its distant rulers recognised. Its symbolic power was too great, the presence of foreigners too pronounced, and their sense of ownership over the city too well developed. Rights of access to Christian sites had provided the Russian pretext for the Crimean War sixty years before, the French had intervened in Lebanon fifty years ago to protect Maronite Christians, and the defence of Christians still provided an excuse for Russian interests in both eastern Turkey and in the Balkans. Why should Jerusalem be immune to such logic in the future? It was in part for this reason that, for the last forty years, the Ottoman governor or mutassarif of the district – uniquely in the Ottoman Empire – did not report to the authorities of the larger province of which the district was a part (traditionally, the vilayet of Syria) but rather directly to Constantinople, the capital of the empire as a whole.3 Jerusalem was a prize – but also a political problem to be managed, delicate and difficult.
From the tower of the Protestant Church of the Redeemer, opened in 1898 by German Emperor Wilhelm II on a grand visit to the city, one could see, virtually at one’s feet, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site from which Jesus Christ was said to have risen into heaven. Down one hill and up another, on the Temple Mount, stood the golden Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa Mosque: the former said to be built directly over the site of the stone where heaven and earth meet, the very spot where Adam was created; the latter the third-holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina, which had for a while been the direction (qibla) towards which all Muslims were to pray. Out of view lay the Western Wall, one side of the Temple Mount and all that remained of the ancient Jewish temple, the home of God himself, which had been destroyed by the Romans some eighteen centuries previously.4 How could such a city, invested with such spiritual power, ever be normal? How could it ever be owned by one people, or by a single religion?
Selma Ekrem, the daughter of the Ottoman mutassarif, recalled the string of visitors to visit her father when he first arrived in Jerusalem in 1906, each proclaiming their unswerving loyalty and undying friendship.5 First came the French Consul at 9.30 p.m., declaring himself ‘the greatest friend of the Governor’, the words Holy Sepulchre, Bethlehem, Gethsemane overheard during an hour of conversation. Then came the Russian – ‘a new friend of my father, how many proofs of his friendship he brings forth!’ After him, the Italian Consul – ‘Could the governor find a better and more disinterested friend?’ Then, as the hours stretched into the early morning, came a representative of the Armenian Church and then of the Greek Orthodox Church, both declaring their devotion to the Ottoman Empire. But the procession was not finished:
Twenty minutes to two, arrival of a queer personality, wearing an odd costume with two curls falling on both cheeks. He is cold, restrained but courteous. He is the representative of the foreign Jews, who are not subject to the Turks.
At last the poor governor has found a real friend! The foreign Jews, but they are the most disinterested and the quietest people in Jerusalem.
Three o’clock lets in another Jew. An old man with a long beard, eyes speckled with mischief but amiable and oily mannered. He is the representative of the Turkish Jews.
‘Take care, your Excellency’, he begins, ‘of that rogue of a Jew who was just leaving and have confidence only in your humble slave’.
Four o’clock: my father runs away at last and goes to bed. But can he sleep? He is up at dawn. He goes before the window. What a splendid city is stretched before him, with its old fortress, its churches and its two big domes of Omar’s mosque and the Holy Sepulchre. The houses are all of stones and olive trees cluster round. The sun is reflected on the gilded towers of the great Moscovite church and throws a golden light all over the city.
‘Ah’, sighs my father, ‘if only I did not have so many friends in Jerusalem.’6
On another occasion Selma Ekrem remembered a conversation with her mother, when, as curious and precocious children do, she and her sister had sought to untangle the mysteries of how the three Abrahamic religions of Jerusalem are both related to and divided from each other. Forced to answer the question why Jesus is accepted as a prophet by Muslims but Mohammed is not viewed as a prophet by Christians, Selma’s mother replied exasperatedly: ‘It shows their [the Christians’] prejudice’.7 Such things were perhaps too complicated to go into with any longer explanation.
Yet within the Arab population of Jerusalem, Christian and Muslim grew up knowing each other’s religion well, understanding which tolling of bells and which procession signified which particular holiday for this or that sect. Such events were the timeless rhythm of Jerusalem, after all. Secular pleasures, such as taking a picnic together in the shade of olive trees on the hills outside the city in the summer, could be shared. Christian and Muslim Arabs alike would go to the Bi’r Ayyub to watch the spring waters in full flow. Wasif Jawhariyyeh, an Arab Christian boy growing up in Jerusalem in these years, went to a school where English, French and Turkish were taught, received lessons on the Qur’an from a local faqih (a scholar of Islamic jurisprudence) and ascribed his later career as a singer, sometimes in rather louche circumstances, to the mastery of classical Arabic he had acquired by dint of being taught it through the holy book of Islam.8 Music was itself a common language of the city. Jawhariyyeh remembered summer evenings spent lolling about amongst the Jerusalemite crowds gathered on the street corners in front of the Austrian Hospice to listen to the singer and oud-player Muhammad al-Ashiq, all ‘drinking juice and coffee and smoking argileh, motionless and mesmerised’.9
Jews and Arabs, meanwhile, rubbed shoulders on the streets of Jerusalem in 1913 as they always had. Granted, there was more suspicion now than in the past. After all, the Yishuv – the community of Jews in Palestine – had grown considerably over the last decades, not only through the inward migration of religiously motivated Jews but through the migration of those inspired by a new secular philosophy, Zionism, the political ambitions and implications of which were as yet unclear. Palestine had a modern Jewish Zionist city, Tel Aviv. There were scattered settlements of Zionists across the land. Fresh Jewish acquisition of land, controversial for decades, was actively discussed, debated and (mostly) criticised in Arab newspapers – though this did not prevent willing Arab sellers and organised Jewish purchasers from finding ways to circumvent Ottoman regulations, and the steady process of Jewish colonisation continuing as a result.
But what any of this really meant for the future was unknown. Arab voices raised in concern did not yet add up to a certainty of broader conflict. Though much less so in the new suburbs, in the Old City of Jerusalem the traditions of an open city were to the fore. Different quarters seeped into one another rather than being sharply divided by a particular alleyway or street. In the city’s cafés, representatives of different communities could wait together for an Ottoman official to answer a petition, sign a document or grant a licence, united in their experience of sullen Ottoman bureaucracy. After 1908 – when censorship was lifted in the Ottoman Empire, more newspapers were published, and the political forms of the empire seemed more up for grabs – the café was where politics was discussed or debated. Some argued that Arabs should have more autonomy in the Ottoman Empire now, and that Jews could be their allies in the process; others argued that the Ottoman identity required all to submit to the central rule of Constantinople, and others that Jewish immigration was undermining the economic and political balance of their part of the world, that the new government in Constantinople was doing too little to prevent it and was perhaps in hock to the Jews. In the Seraii Café in the perfumers’ market, such conversations took place under a large mulberry tree.10 At the Qalonia Café, a nod would guide th
e visitor to an area for gambling at the back.
All the while, the city was being modernised and expanded. The Arab mayor, Hussein al-Husseini, implemented plans to pave Jerusalem’s streets, supported by Muslims, Christians and Ottoman Jews alike. (The re-election of the mayor in 1914 was declared by the Sephardi Jewish newspaper Ha-Herut to be the ‘only beam of light’ in the council elections that year.11) A tramway was in the offing. Outside the walls of the Old City, new suburbs were being built and older ones expanded: Mea Shearim and Yemin Moshe as largely Jewish suburbs, and Musrara and Sheikh Jarrah as the preferred new suburbs of well-to-do Palestinian Arabs. For Jawhariyyeh, a young boy from a middle-class Arab family, everyday life was becoming more comfortable, more up-to-date:
During the summer months [of 1904] we would sit around the lowered table for the main meal. Food was served in enameled zinc plates. That year we stopped eating with wooden spoons from Anatolia and Greece and replaced them with brass ones that were oxidized periodically. We replaced the common drinking taseh [bowl] tied to the pottery jar with individualized crystal glasses. In 1906 my father acquired single iron beds for each of my siblings, thus ending the habit of sleeping on the floor. What a delight it was to get rid of the burden of having to place our mattresses into the wall enclaves every night.12
Jawhariyyeh remembered seeing the one-handed doorman of the Notre Dame de France church turning on the electric lights of the building – the first to be electrified in Jerusalem, Jawhariyyeh claimed – and astonishment that, ‘in less than a blink of an eye’, the place went from total darkness to being bathed in white.13
Though changing all the time in some ways, Jerusalem was nonetheless unchanging in others: exalted by three religions, its particular spirit intact, its texture unique. Over the years, the city had been conquered by Persians, Romans, Arabs, Christians and Ottoman Turks, but though their control of Jerusalem had by 1913 lasted nearly 400 years, even the Ottomans were only custodians of the place. What role could day-to-day vicissitudes of the outside world play, or petty struggles between families or religious groups, or even the onset of modernity, when compared to Jerusalem as an eternal realm of the spirit and the soul, the common heritage of the whole world?
For Christian Europeans and Americans, Jerusalem was a city of pilgrimage. A city inaccessible except to the most hardy and the most motivated a generation or two earlier had now become a destination for tens of thousands each year. It was overrun with pilgrims, the paraphernalia of pilgrimage – wooden crosses, tattoos of the saints, bead-embroidered Madonnas, praying-beads, icons – and the local hucksters and guides who preyed on pilgrims’ religiosity and credulity to extract a few piastres here and there.
The travellers came from all corners. Over the last decades, locals noted, each Christian group and each European nationality had established its own particular church or its own hostel or its own tour groups – a single faith divided by nationality, language and rites. Different countries even had their own postal services, circumventing the Ottoman telegraph service, which was widely thought to be a nest of spies reporting communications back to Constantinople. On the outskirts of the city the Russians had built a huge compound with its own cathedral, hospital and three hospices, visited in 1911 by Rasputin, Nicholas II’s pleasure-seeking starets.14 Near the Damascus Gate, on the Via Dolorosa itself, stood the Austrian Hospice, decorated as if it were on a hillside outside Salzburg, adorned with loving portraits of the moustachioed Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph – the first reigning Catholic monarch to visit Jerusalem since the Crusades when he came in 1869 – and his wife. The Protestant Church of the Redeemer laid down a German marker, intended by Wilhelm II to help re-establish Germany as a power in the Holy Land, matched by the German Catholic Dormition Church, dedicated only in 1910. Finally, of course, came the representatives of the confessions which claimed a share in the control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre – Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac – and who squabbled endlessly about their respective rights towards it.
‘Whoever has wished to go has already started on the pilgrimage’, wrote Stephen Graham, beginning his account of his own travel to the Holy City in 1912, ‘and once you have started, every step upon the road is a step toward Jerusalem’.15 In the event, Graham’s journey was undertaken in the company of a group of 500 Russian Orthodox peasants, himself disguised as a peasant. He joined them halfway, on a storm-wracked journey from Constantinople across the Mediterranean on a boat no larger than a Thames steamer and considerably more crowded. Relieved to arrive in one piece two weeks later, the pilgrims rested for a night in Jaffa on the straw-covered floor of a Greek monastery, before the next day travelling to Jerusalem. Those who could afford it took the train; those who could not prepared for a long walk. Eventually they reached the Holy City itself:
All whispering prayers to ourselves and making religious exclamations, we flocked after one another through the Jerusalem streets; in outward appearance jaded, woe-begone and beaten, following one another’s backs like cattle that have been driven from afar; but in reality excited, feverish, and fluttering like so many children that have been kept up far too late to meet their father come home from long travel.16
The very act of pilgrimage, Graham realised, was itself a spiritual, equalising experience, building a communion of the faithful through shared suffering and joy. ‘There was no feeling of comparison, of superiority, among any of us’, he wrote, ‘though some were rich, some poor; some lettered, some illiterate; some with clean bodies, new clothes and naked feet, feeling it was necessary to take off their boots for the ground whereon they trod was holy; others who had not the idea even to wash their faces’. In Jerusalem, gradations of identity so important at home could be forgotten in a single, common faith. Some were overcome with emotion; others with drink. After midnight on Easter Sunday – with only the Jews asleep, remarked a Russian pilgrim – the experience of pilgrimage descended into singing, embracing, ‘tangling of beards and whiskers’, feasting and the consumption of the alcohol bought from Arab hawkers over the previous few days:
Every monk or priest I met saluted us with ‘Christ is risen!’ and we replied ‘Yes, He is risen!’ and kissed one another. There commenced a day of uproarious festivity. The quantity of wine, of cognac, and arakha consumed at the Rasgovenie, the breaking of the fast, would no doubt appal most English. And the drunken dancing and singing would be thought rather foreign to the idea of Jesus. But I don’t know. To my eyes it was all an expression of genuine joy … At the thought of all their pilgrimage behind them, and of the glorious Easter morning at last achieved, something melted in the heart of every pilgrim. Their faces caught the radiance of a vision, the gleam which shows itself on the countenance of the dying when they catch a glimpse of something of heaven.17
Besides the exuberant Russians, and more ascetic pilgrims from other parts of Europe and America, there were the tourists. How different, Graham mused, was his experience as a Russian pilgrim from that of a German with a Kodak camera who took a photograph of him passing by – a photograph which would no doubt be later presented to friends back home as a true likeness of a genuine Russian peasant. How different from the American and English tourists, ‘hundreds of them, with their Arab guides and red handbooks’, hands clasped tightly over their jackets to protect themselves from pickpockets.18 Graham recognised a few of the English, though he passed undetected by them. At one point, just past the office of Thomas Cook’s the travel agents, he paused with a Russian pilgrim in front of a busty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed English girl, who was having her photo taken in ‘local’ clothes – ‘an ancient embroidered scarlet costume that would serve as a representation of Babylon at a fancy dress ball’ – posing sweetly for the camera, a head taller than the surrounding crowd. This was Jerusalem not so much as destination of pilgrimage as an exotic backdrop; Jerusalem as a stage set of half-remembered Bible stories.
By 1913, Christian pilgrims and tourists fr
om Europe and America were perhaps as much the fabric of Jerusalem as the Arab and Jewish residents, some of whom could trace their ancestry back generations into the past. Though transient in one sense, the European and American pilgrims and tourists had become a permanent, indeed a crucial, aspect of the city’s economy. Though visitors, their visits expressed deeper and enduring claims to the city and to its meaning. Jerusalem was theirs as well, their presence confirmed.
And of course some pilgrims stayed. Pilgrimage had been the starting point for what became known as the American Colony, begun a few decades previously by the Spafford family and millenarian Christians from Chicago, and since then added to by converts – Jacob Eliahu, a Sephardic Jew from Ramallah – and, in 1896, by a large number of Swedish Evangelicals.19 Weaving their own tablecloths, baking their own bread, organising hymn-singing on Sundays, and forming a literary club, choir and band, the American Colony became a prominent part of Jerusalem society, intermixing Jews and Muslims and Christians. Christmas became a festival of gifts from the city’s Arabs, Jews and foreigners alike, one of the Spaffords recalled:
Ahmed Effendi sent a sheep; Sheikh Mohammed a basket of rice, the same came from the Mayor of Jerusalem, two turkeys from Hussain, two ducks and two geese and four baskets of oranges from Faidi Effendi al Alami. From others (I can’t remember the names) we got four trays of ‘buklaway’ (Arabic sweetmeat), one tray of geribi (like Scotch shortbread), one tray of ‘mamoul’ and another of ‘Karabidj Halab’ (whips of Aleppo – a delicious sweetmeat). Suliman sent a large tray of candy for the tree. A beautiful large tree came from Mr Baldensperger, and many other gifts which I cannot remember.20
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