Jerusalem: The Biography

The messianic Fatimids, the new masters of Jerusalem, were unlike any other Islamic dynasty for they not only declared themselves caliphs, they were also sacred kings, the Living Imams, almost suspended between man and heaven. Visitors to their courts were shown through courtyards of increasingly eye-watering luxury before they came to a gold-curtained throne at which they prostrated themselves and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Living Imam in golden robes. Their sect was secretive, their beliefs mystical, redemptionist and esoteric, and their rise to power mysterious, clandestine and filled with adventure. In 899, a rich merchant in Syria, Ubayd Allah, declared himself the Living Imam, direct descendant of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, via the Imam Ismail, hence they were known as Ismaili Shiites. His secret agents, the so-called dawa

, fanned out across the east, conquering Yemen and converting some Berber tribesmen in Tunisia; but the Abbasids tried to kill him, so he vanished. Some years later, he or someone claiming to be him reappeared in Tunisia as al-Mahdi, the Chosen, founding his own caliphate which started to conquer a new empire with a sacred mission: to overthrow the false Abbasids of Baghdad and redeem the world. In 973, the Caliph Muizz, now ruler of swathes of north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, moved to his new capital, al-Qahira al-Muizziyya – the Conquest of Muizz, known today as Cairo.

His successor, Aziz, appointed their consigliere, Ibn Killis, as grand vizier, chief minister of the empire which he ruled until his death almost twenty years later. Apart from his immense wealth – he owned 8, 000 female slaves, he was a scholar who debated religion with Jewish and Christian clerics and his career personifies the tolerance of the Fatimids, being sectarians themselves, towards Jews and Christians that was immediately felt in Jerusalem.

The Jews in Jerusalem were divided, poor and desperate, while their Egyptian brethren flourished under the Fatimids. They started to provide the doctors for the caliphs of Cairo: these were more than just royal physicians. They tended to be scholar-merchants who became influential courtiers and were usually appointed chief of the Jews of the Fatimid empire, a post known as the nagid

, the prince. A Jew of mysterious origins named Paltiel was probably the first of these doctor-courtier-princes. A protégé of Jawhar, the Fatimid conqueror of Jerusalem, he immediately intervened to help the Jews in the Holy City.

After years of Abbasid neglect and the inconsistent patronage of Turkish rulers, Jerusalem was diminished and unstable. The constant wars between the caliphs of Cairo and Baghdad discouraged pilgrims; Bedouin raids sometimes overran the city for short periods; and in 974, the dynamic Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes captured Damascus and galloped into Galilee, promising his ‘intent to deliver the Holy Sepulchre of Christ our God from the bondage of the Muslim’. He was close; Jerusalem waited, but he never came.

The Fatimids encouraged the pilgrimages of their fellow Ismailis and Shiites to the Mosque of Jerusalem but the wars against Baghdad cut off the city from Sunni pilgrims. The very isolation of Jerusalem somehow intensified her sanctity: Islamic writers now compiled more popular anthologies of Jerusalem’s ‘merits’ – the Fadail – and they gave her new names: she was still Iliya and Bayt al-Maqdis, the Holy House, but she now became al-Balat, the Palace, too. Yet Christian pilgrims were becoming richer and more numerous than the ruling Muslims – Franks sailed from Europe and rich caravans arrived every Easter from Egypt.

The Jews too looked to their saviours in Cairo where Paltiel now persuaded the Caliph to pay a subsidy to the impoverished gaon and Academy of Jerusalem. He won the right for Jews there to buy a synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to gather close to Abolsom’s Pillar and also to pray at the Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. At festivals the Jews were allowed to encircle the old Temple seven times but their main synagogue remained ‘the inner altar of the sanctuary at the western wall’: the Cave. The Jews had been scarcely tolerated under the Abbasids but now, poor as they were, they had more freedom than they had enjoyed for two centuries. Sadly, the Rabbanites and Karaites, who were specially favoured by the Fatimids, fellow sectarians, held separate services on the Mount of Olives that led to scuffles and soon these threadbare scholars were at war with each other in the dusty, ramshackle synagogues and holy underground caverns of Jerusalem. And their freedoms only exacerbated Muslim frustration.