Jerusalem: The Biography

Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.

Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. ‘Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,’ prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the Mayflower. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed ‘the God of Israel is amongst us’ and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as ‘a city on a hill’ – America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.

The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:

‘Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,’ he said. ‘You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.’ Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should ‘transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance’.

Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to all

corners of the world before their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming – yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude ‘this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.’ Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem – or was he?⁵

THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI

He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.

Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism – he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.