Jerusalem: The Biography

The Montefiores were the first of a new breed of powerful and proud European Jews, determined to help their benighted brethren in Jerusalem. They were fêted by the city’s governor but stayed with a Moroccan former slave-trader within the walls and started their philanthropic work by restoring Rachel’s Tomb near Bethlehem, Judaism’s third holiest shrine after the Temple and the Patriarch’s Tombs in Hebron, but, like the other two, also holy to Islam. The Montefiores were childless and Rachel’s Tomb was said to help women conceive. Jerusalem’s Jews welcomed them ‘almost like the coming of the Messiah’, but begged them not to give too much because the Turks would simply cripple them with higher taxes after they had gone.

Moses Montefiore arrived as an Italian-born, self-made English gentleman and international financier, brother-in-law of Nathaniel Rothschild, but he was not particularly religious. The trip to Jerusalem changed his life. He left as a reborn Jew, having prayed all through his last night there. For him Jerusalem was simply ‘the city of our forefathers, the great and long-desired object of our wishes and journey’. He believed it was every Jew’s duty to make the pilgrimage: ‘I humbly pray to the God of my forefathers that I may henceforth become a more righteous and better man as well as a better Jew.’^* He would return to the Holy City many times and he henceforth contrived to combine the life of an English grandee with that of an Orthodox Jew.⁷

No sooner had Montefiore left than a Byronic poseur rode into town: both men were English Sephardic Jews of Italian descent. They did not yet know about each other – but one day both would promote Britain’s advance into the Middle East.

DISRAELI: THE SACRED AND THE ROMANTIC

‘You should see me in the costume of a Greek pirate. A blood red shirt with silver studs as big as shillings, an immense scarf, girdle full of pistols and daggers, a red cap, red slippers, blue broad striped jacket and trousers. Excessively wicked!’ This was how Benjamin Disraeli, the twenty-six-year-old fashionable novelist (already author of The Young Duke), failed speculator and aspiring politician, dressed on his Oriental tour. Such jaunts were the new version of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, combining romantic posturing, Classical sightseeing, the smoking of hookah pipes, avid whoring and visits to Istanbul and Jerusalem.

Disraeli had been raised as a Jew but was baptized at thirteen. He regarded himself, he later told Queen Victoria, as ‘the blank page between the Old and New Testaments’. He looked the part. Slim and pale with a head of black ringleted hair, Disraeli rode through the Judaean hills, ‘well mounted and well armed’. When he saw the walls:

I was thunderstruck. I saw before me apparently a gorgeous city. In the front is the magnificent mosque built on the site of the Temple with its beautiful garden and fantastic gates – a variety of domes and towers arise. Nothing can be conceived more wild and terrible and barren than the surrounding scenery. I never saw anything more essentially striking.

Dining on the roof of the Armenian Monastery, where he was staying, Disraeli was enraptured by the romance of Jewish history as he gazed out at ‘Jehovah’s lost capital’ and was intrigued by that of Islam: he could not resist trying to visit the Temple Mount. A Scottish physician and later an Englishwoman had both penetrated the esplanade – but only in strict disguise. Disraeli was less adept: ‘I was detected and surrounded by a crowd of turbaned fanatics and escaped with difficulty!’ He regarded the Jews and the Arabs as one people – the Arabs were surely ‘Jews on horseback’ – and he asked the Christians: ‘Where is your Christianity if you don’t believe in their Judaism?’

While he was in Jerusalem, he started to write his next novel, Alroy, about the doomed twelfth-century ‘Messiah’ whose uprising he called a ‘gorgeous incident in the annals of that sacred and romantic people from whom I derive my blood and name’.

His Jerusalem visit helped him refine his unique hybrid mystique as a Tory aristocrat and exotic Jewish panjandrum,^* convinced him that Britain had a role in the Middle East – and let him dream of a return to Zion. In his novel, David Alroy’s adviser declares, ‘You ask what I wish. My answer is a national existence. You ask what I wish. My answer is Jerusalem.’ In 1851, Disraeli the rising politican reflected that ‘restoring the Jews to their land, which could be bought from the Ottomans, was both just and feasible’.

Disraeli claimed Alroy’s adventure was ‘his ideal ambition’ but actually he was far too ambitious to risk his career for anything Jewish: he wanted to be prime minister of the greatest empire on earth. Over thirty years later when he had reached the ‘topof the greasy pole’, Disraeli did guide British power into the region by gaining Cyprus and buying the Suez Canal.⁸