Jerusalem: The Biography

Consul Cresson had ridden the wave of this flowering of prophecies: he had been a Shaker, a Millerite, a Mormon and a Campbellite before a local rabbi in Pennsylvania convinced him that ‘salvation was of the Jews’ whose return would bring the Second Coming.^* One of the first to arrive in Jerusalem was Harriet Livermore. Daughter and granddaughter of New England congressmen, she set off in 1837, after years preaching to the Sioux and Cheyenne tribes that they were the Lost Tribes of Israel who should accompany her back to Zion. She rented rooms on Mount Zion to prepare her sect, the Pilgrim Strangers, for the Apocalypse that she expected in 1847 – but it did not come and she ended up begging in Jerusalem’s streets. At the same time, Joseph Smith, prophet of the new revelation of Latter Day Saints – the Mormons – sent his Apostle to Jerusalem: he built an altar on the Olivet to prepare ‘to restore Israel with Jerusalem as capital.’

By the time Cresson became the US consul, a growing number of American evangelists were visiting Jerusalem to prepare for the End Days. The US government eventually dismissed him, but he continued defiantly to issue visas of protection to Jews for several years and then, changing his name to Michael Boaz Israel, converted to Judaism. For his long-abandoned wife this was a revelation too far. She sued to have Cresson declared insane, citing his pistol-waving, street-haranguing, financial incompetence, cultic eclecticism, plans to rebuild the Jewish Temple and sexual deviance. He sailed back from Jerusalem for the Inquisition of Lunacy in Philadelphia, a cause célèbre, for Mrs Cresson was challenging the constitutional right of American citizens to believe whatever they wished, the essence of Jeffersonian liberty.

At the trial Cresson was found to be insane, but he appealed and was awarded a retrial. Mrs Cresson had to ‘deny either her Saviour or her Husband’ while he had to deny ‘either the One, Only God or My Wife’. The wife lost the second case, confirming American freedom of worship, and Cresson returned to Jerusalem. He created a Jewish model farm near the city, studied the Torah, divorced his American wife and married a Jewess, all the while completing his book The Key of David. He was honoured by local Jews as ‘the American Holy Stranger’. On his death he was buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

Jerusalem was now so overrun by apocalyptic Americans that the American Journal of Insanity compared its hysteria to the California Gold Rush. When Herman Melville visited, he was fascinated yet repulsed by the ‘contagion’ of American Christian millenarianism – ‘this preposterous Jewmania’, he called it, ‘half-melancholy, half-farcical’. ‘How am I to act when any crazy or distressed citizen of the US comes into the country?’ the American consul in Beirut asked his secretary of state. ‘There are several of late going to Jerusalem with strange ideas in their heads that Our Saviour is coming this year.’ But Melville grasped that such majestic world-shaking hopes were impossible to satisfy: ‘No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart-sickening.’¹¹

Jerusalem was essential to the American and English evangelical vision of the Second Coming. Yet even their urgency was dwarfed by the obsessive Russian passion for Jerusalem. Now in the late 1840s, the Russian emperor’s aggressive ambitions were about to place Jerusalem at what the English visitor, William Thackeray, called ‘the centre of the world’s past and future history’ and ignite a European war.

THE GENDARME OF EUROPE AND THE SHOOT-OUT

IN THE SEPULCHRE: THE RUSSIAN GOD IN JERUSALEM

On Good Friday, 10 April 1846, the Ottoman governor and his soldiers were on alert at the Church. Unusually, that year the Orthodox and Catholic Easters fell on the same day. The monks were not just priming their incense-burners: they smuggled in pistols and daggers, secreting them behind the pillars and under robes. Who would hold their service first? The Greeks won the race to place their altar-cloth on the altar of Calvary. The Catholics were just behind them – but too late. They challenged the Greeks: did they have the sultan’s authority? The Greeks challenged the Catholics – where was their sultanic firman giving them the right to pray first? There was a stand-off. Fingers must have hovered over trigger sunder chasubles. Suddenly, the two sides were fighting with every weapon they could improvise from the ecclesiastical paraphernalia at their disposal: they wielded crucifixes, candlesticks and lamps until cold steel flashed and the shooting started. Ottoman soldiers waded in to stop the fighting but forty lay dead around the Holy Sepulchre.