Jerusalem: The Biography

The Ottomans despatched troops to suppress the revolt who camped outside the walls. Husseini showed that he was ready for a siege, and the troops retreated to Gaza. Inside Jerusalem the rebellion had replaced one tyranny with another. Jews were forbidden to wear white on the Sabbath or Muslim headgear or to have nails in their shoes; Christians suffered similar sartorial restrictions; and both had to make way for Muslims in the streets. Outrageous fines were collected with violence. A messianic sect of 500 Polish Jews from Grodno, led by Judah the Pious, had just arrived. But their rabbi died, and they spoke only Polish or Yiddish, leaving them particularly helpless. They were soon impoverished.

When a stray dog wandered on to the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver dead dogs to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave the carcasses to the nearest infidel.

When a stronger Ottoman army approached, the garrison and the Sufi mystics turned against the rebellion and seized the Tower of David. Husseini fortified himself in his mansion, and they fired arrows at each other for three days. In the ensuing battle, the northern streets of the Old City were strewn with corpses – and Husseini lost more support. Outside, the Ottomans bombarded the Temple Mount. In the middle of the night on 28 November 1705, Husseini realized his game was up and escaped, pursued by the Ottomans. The reign of extortion continued under the new governor. Many Jews, robbed again, simply left, and the Polish Ashkenazis were broken, finally in 1720 facing imprisonment, banishment and bankruptcy, their synagogue in the Jewish Quarter burned down.^* The Sephardis – the small, old Jewish community at home in the Arab and Ottoman world – survived.

Husseini was captured and beheaded. After much dynastic rivalry, the Husseinis were later succeeded as naqib by Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya whose family changed its name sometime in the century and purloined that of the prestigious Husseinis. The Ghudayyas became the new Husseinis, the most powerful of Jerusalem’s ruling families – right up into the twenty-first century.⁸

THE HUSSEINIS: RISE OF THE FAMILIES

Anyone important who came to Jerusalem during the eighteenth century wished to stay with the chief of this clan, who held open house for peasants, scholars and Ottoman officials alike; it was said he had eighty guests for dinner every night. ‘Everyone visits him from near and afar,’ wrote one such guest to the ‘palace’ of Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya who dominated Jerusalem. ‘Strangers find refuge in his home, residing there as they like.’ Abd al-Latif’s visitors left Jerusalem escorted by a squadron of his horsemen.

The resurgence of the Husseinis marked the rise of the great Jerusalem Families. Virtually every position of honour in Jerusalem was hereditary. Most of the Families were descended from Sufi sheikhs who had been favoured by one conqueror or another. Most changed their names, invented grandiose genealogies and alternately feuded and intermarried – not unlike their Western equivalents. Each fiercely defended and strived to expand its own lucrative power-base.^†

But wealth would have been vulgar without scholarship; pedigree powerless without wealth, and position impossible without Ottoman patronage. Sometimes the Families fought it out: two Nusseibehs were ambushed and killed by a Husseini posse near Abu Ghosh, but, typically, the families made peace by marrying the surviving Nusseibeh brother of the victims to the sister of the Mufti of Jerusalem.

Yet even the Families could not ensure prosperity in a Jerusalem scarred by intermittent fighting between the 500-strong Ottoman garrison notorious for its debauchery, raiding Bedouin, rioting Jerusalemites and venal governors. The population shrank to 8,000, preyed upon by the Governor of Damascus who descended on the city annually with a small army to collect the taxes.^*

The Jews, without any European backing, suffered bitterly. ‘The Arabs’, wrote Gedaliah, an Ashkenazi from Poland, ‘often wrong the Jews publicly. If one of them gives a Jew a blow, the Jew goes away cowering. While an angry Turk would beat a Jew shamefully and dreadfully with his shoes and not one would deliver the Jew.’ They lived in squalor, banned from repairing their houses. Two hundred Jewish families took flight: with ‘the persecutions and extortions increasing every day’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim in 1766, ‘I had to flee from the city at night. Every day somebody was flung into prison.’