Jerusalem: The Biography

When after forty-five years on the throne Suleiman died on campaign with his army, his ministers propped him up like a waxwork in his carriage and showed him to his soldiers until the succession was safe for Selim, one of his sons by Roxelana. Selim II, known as the Drunkard, owed much to the intrigues of his friend, Joseph Nasi, the Great Jew, who, now living in splendour in his Belvedere Palace, rich from his monopolies of Polish beeswax and Moldavian wine, was promoted to Duke of Naxos. He almost became King of Cyprus. Such was his championing of persecuted or penurious Jews in Europe and Jerusalem that there were whisperings shortly before his death that this ducal Jewish Croesus must be the Messiah. But little came of his plans. Under Selim and his successors, the Ottoman empire was still expanding and, thanks to vast resources and superb bureaucracy, it remained awesomely powerful for another century – but its emperors soon struggled to control distant provinces ruled by overmighty governors and Jerusalem’s tranquillity was periodically shattered by bouts of violence.

In 1590, a local Arab rebel broke into Jerusalem and seized the city, killing the governor. The rebels were defeated and expelled. Jerusalem fell under the sway of two Balkan brothers, Ridwan and Bairam Pasha, Christian slaveboys converted to Islam and trained at the court of Suleiman, and their Circassian henchman, Farrukh. Their families dominated – and abused – Palestine for almost a century. When Farrukh’s son, Muhammad, found himself locked out of Jerusalem in 1625, he stormed the walls with 300 mercenaries then, closing the gates, he proceeded to torture Jews, Christians and Arabs alike to extort money.

Such outrages only encouraged the strongest of the Christian sects, the Armenians, to canvass and bribe the sultans and brawl in the churches of Jerusalem, all part of their campaign to vanquish the Catholics and win the praedominium

. In the first twenty years of the century, the sultans issued thirty-three decrees to defend the embattled Catholics and in just seven years, the praedominium changed hands six times. However, the Christians had become the most lucrative source of business in Palestine: every day, the Custodian of the Church, the chief of the Nusseibeh family, sat on a throne in the courtyard with his armed henchmen charging for access – and the income from the thousands of pilgrims was enormous. At Easter, which Muslims called the Festival of the Red Egg, the governor of Jerusalem set up his throne, and, accompanied by the qadi, the custodian and the entire fully-armed garrison, he charged each of the 20,000 ‘hell-destined infidels’ ten gold pieces that was shared out among the Ottomans and the

ulema.

Meanwhile something was afoot amongst the Jews. ‘Jerusalem’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim, ‘was more greatly populated than at any time since the first exile’ and as Jerusalem’s ‘fame spread, it became known we lived in peace. Scholars flocked to the gates.’ A caravan of Egyptian Jews arrived every Passover. Most of the Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardis who were secure enough to build the ‘four synagogues’ that became the centre of life in the Jewish Quarter, but some of the pilgrims were eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives – indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling – ‘the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God’. On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the ‘bride of God’, the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?

Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushes and the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America.³