Jerusalem: The Biography

‘Ah the sadness of Jerusalem,’ sighed Finn who had to admit that the city seemed ‘monastically dull to a person imbued with the gay habits of other places. French visitors have been known to utter the ejaculation which ever accompanies the shrug of the shoulders at the contrast between Jerusalem and Paris.’ This was certainly not the sort of ejaculation which the priapic Flaubert expected and he expressed his frustration at the Jaffa Gate, ‘I let a fart escape as I crossed the threshold,’ even if ‘I was annoyed by the Voltaireanism of my anus.’ That sexual gourmand Flaubert celebrated escape from Jerusalem with a five-girl orgy in Beirut: ‘I screwed three women and came four times – three times before lunch and once after dessert. Young Du Campcame only once, his member still sore with the remnant of a chancre given him by a Wallachian whore.’

One unique American visitor, David Dorr, a young black slave from Louisiana who called himself a ‘quadroon’, agreed with Flaubert: on tour with his master, he arrived ‘with submissive heart’ filled with awe for Jerusalem but soon changed his mind: ‘When I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots than pay homage. After seventeen days in Jerusalem, I leave never wishing to return again.’^*

Yet for all their irreverence, the writers could not help but be awed by Jerusalem. Flaubert considered her ‘diabolically grand’. Thackeray sensed ‘there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.’ Melville almost admired the ‘plague-stricken splendour’ of the place. Standing at the Golden Gate, gazing out at Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, Melville saw a ‘city besieged by armies of the dead’ and asked himself: ‘is the desolation the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?’¹³

As Russian forces were repeatedly defeated in the Crimea, Nicholas fell ill under the strain and died on 18 February 1855. In September, the Russian naval base at Sebastopol fell to the British and French. Russia had been thoroughly humiliated. After staggering military incompetence on all sides in a campaign that cost 750,000 lives, the new Russian emperor, Alexander II, sued for peace, surrendering his imperial ambitions for Jerusalem, but winning at least a restoration of the dominant Orthodox rights in the Sepulchre, the status quo that still remains in force today.

On 14 April 1856, the cannons of the Citadel saluted the signing of peace. But twelve days later, James Finn, attending the Holy Fire, watched ‘Greek pilgrims, provided with sticks, stones and cudgels, concealed beforehand behind the columns and dropped from the gallery,’ attack the Armenians. ‘Dreadful conflict ensued,’ he observed, ‘missiles were flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps, glass and oil pouring down upon heads.’ When the pasha rushed down from his throne in the gallery, he ‘received blows to the head’ and had to be carried out before his soldiers charged in with fixed bayonets. Minutes later, the Orthodox patriarch appeared with the Holy Fire to screams of exultation, the beating of chests, and flickering of flames.

The garrison celebrated the sultan’s victory with a parade on the Maidan which was ironic because soon afterwards, Alexander II bought this parade ground, once the site of Assyrian and Roman camps, to build a Russian Compound. Henceforth Russia would pursue cultural dominance in Jerusalem.

The victory was bitter sweet for the Ottomans, their weak Islamic realm saved by Christian soldiers. To show his gratitude and keep the West at bay, Sultan Abdulmecid was forced, in measures known as Tanzimat – reform – to centralize his administration, decree absolute equality for all minorities regardless of religion, and allow the Europeans all manner of once-inconceivable liberties. He presented St Anne’s, the Crusader church that had become Saladin’s madrassa, to Napoleon III. In March 1855, the Duke of Brabant, the future King Leopold II of Belgium, exploiter of the Congo, was the first European allowed to visit the Temple Mount: its guards – club-wielding Sudanese from Darfur – had to be locked in their quarters for fear they would attack the infidel. In June, Archduke Maximilian, the heir to the Habsburg empire – and ill-fated future Emperor of Mexico – arrived with the officers of his flagship. The Europeans started to build hulking imperial-style Christian edifices in a Jerusalem building boom. Ottoman statesmen were unsettled and there would be a violent Muslim backlash but, after the Crimean War, the West had invested too much to leave Jerusalem alone.