Jerusalem: The Biography

In 1847, a Christian Arab boy attacked a Jewish youth who threw back a pebble which grazed the Arab boy’s foot. The Greek Orthodox traditionally the most anti-Semitic community, quickly backed by the Muslim mufti and qadi, accused the Jews of procuring Christian blood to bake the Passover biscuits: the blood libel had come to Jerusalem, but the sultan’s ban, granted to Montefiore after the Damascus affair, proved decisive.¹⁰

Meanwhile the consuls were joined by perhaps the most extraordinary diplomat in American history. ‘I doubt,’ observed William Thackeray, the English author of Vanity Fair, who was visiting Jerusalem, ‘that any government has received or appointed so queer an ambassador.’

WARDER CRESSON, US CONSUL:

THE AMERICAN HOLY STRANGER

On 4 October 1844, Warder Cresson arrived in Jerusalem as the US consul-general of Syria and Jerusalem – his chief qualification for the job being his certainty that the Second Coming was due in 1847. Cresson took the consular hauteur of his European colleagues to a new level: he galloped around Jerusalem in a ‘cloud of dust’ surrounded by ‘a little American army’ who belonged in a ‘troop of knights and paladins’ from a Walter Scott novel – ‘a party of armed and glittering horsemen led by an Arab followed by two Janissaries with silver maces shining in the sun’.

At his interview with the pasha, Cresson explained that he had arrived for the coming Apocalypse and the return of the Jews. A Philadelphian landowner, child of rich Quakers, Cresson had spent twenty years spinning from one apocalyptic cult to another: after writing his first manifesto, Jerusalem, the Centre of the Joy of the Whole World, and abandoning his wife and six children, Cresson persuaded Secretary of State John Calhoun to appoint him consul: ‘I left everything near and dear to me on earth in pursuit of truth.’ The US president John Tyler was soon informed by his diplomats that his first Jerusalem consul was a ‘religious maniac and madman’, but Cresson was already in Jerusalem. And he was not alone in his apocalyptic views: he was an American of his time.

The American Constitution was secular, carefully not mentioning Christ and separating state and faith, yet on the Great Seal, the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, had depicted the Children of Israel led by cloud and fire towards the Promised Land. Cresson personified how that cloud and fire were attracting many Americans to Jerusalem. Indeed the separation of Church and state liberated American faith and generated a blossoming of new sects and fresh millennial prophecies.

The early Americans, inheriting the Hebraist fervour of the English Puritans, had enjoyed a Great Awakening of religious joy. Now, in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Second Awakening was driven by the evangelical energy of the frontier. In 1776, some 10 per cent of Americans were church-goers; by 1815, it was a quarter; by 1914, it was half. Their passionate Protestantism was American in character – gritty, exuberant and swashbuckling. At its heart was the belief that a person could save himself and accelerate the Second Coming by righteous action and heartfelt joy. America was itself a mission disguised as a nation, blessed by God, not unlike the way Shaftesbury and the English evangelicals saw the British empire.

In little wooden churches in one-horse mining towns, farmsteads on boundless prairies and gleaming new industrial cities, the preachers in the New Promised Land of America cited the literal biblical revelations of the Old. ‘In no country,’ wrote Dr Edward Robinson, an evangelical academic who became the founder of biblical archaeology in Jerusalem, ‘are the Scriptures better known.’ The first American missionaries believed that the Native Americans were the Lost Tribes of Israel and that every Christian must perform acts of righteousness in Jerusalem and help the Return and Restoration of the Jews: ‘I really wish the Jews again in Judaea an independent nation,’ wrote the second US president John Adams. In 1819, two young missionaries in Boston prepared to put this into action: ‘Every eye is fixed on Jerusalem,’ preached Levi Parsons in Boston, ‘indeed the centre of the world.’ Their congregation wept as Pliny Fisk announced: ‘I go bound in spirit to Jerusalem.’ They made it there but their early deaths in the east did not discourage others because ‘Jerusalem’, insisted William Thomson, the American missionary whose wife died there during the revolt of 1834, ‘is the common property of the whole Christian world.’