Jerusalem: The Biography

In the last months of the Crimean War, Sir Moses Montefiore had bought the trains and rails of the Balaclava Railway, built specially for British troops in the Crimea, to create a line between Jaffa and Jerusalem. Now, endowed with all the prestige and power of a British plutocrat after the Crimean victory, he returned to the city, the harbinger of her future.¹⁴

THE NEW CITY

1855–60

MOSES MONTEFIORE: ‘THIS CROESUS’

On 18 July 1855, Montefiore ritually ripped his clothes when he saw the lost Temple and then set up his camp outside the Jaffa Gate where he was mobbed by thousands of Jerusalemites firing off guns in the air and cheering. James Finn, whose schemes to convert Jews he had repeatedly foiled, tried to undermine his reception but the liberal-minded governor, Kiamil Pasha, sent an honour guard to present arms. When Montefiore became the first Jew to visit the Temple Mount, the pasha had him escorted by a hundred soldiers – and he was borne in a sedan-chair so he would not break the law that banned Jews from the holy mountain lest they stood on the Holy of Holies. His life’s mission of helping Jerusalem’s Jews was never easy: many of them lived on charity and were so infuriated when Montefiore tried to wean them off his handouts that they rioted in his camp. ‘Really,’ wrote his niece Jemima Sebag, who was in his entourage, ‘If this continues, we’ll scarcely be safe in our tents!’ Not all his schemes worked either: he never managed to build his Crimean railway from Jaffa, but it was this trip that changed the destiny of Jerusalem. On his way, he had persuaded the sultan to let him rebuild the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720, and even more important, to buy land in Jerusalem to settle Jews. He paid for the restoration of the Hurva and started to look for a place to buy.

Melville described Sir Moses Montefiore as ‘this Croesus – a huge man of 75 carried from Joppa on a litter borne by mules’. He was 6 foot 3 and not quite seventy-five, but he was old to make such a trip. He had already risked his life on three visits to Jerusalem and his doctors had advised him not to go again – ‘his heart was feeble and there was poison in his blood’ – but he and Judith came anyway, accompanied by an entourage of retainers, servants and even his own kosher butcher.

To the Jews of Jerusalem and across the Diaspora, Montefiore was already a legend who combined the proconsular prestige of a rich Victorian baronet at the height of the British empire with the dignity of a Jew who always rushed to the aid of his brethren and had never compromised his Judaism. It was his unique position in Britain that gave him his power: he straddled the old and new societies, as much at home with royal dukes, prime ministers and bishops as he was with rabbis and financiers. In a London dominated by staid morality and evangelical Hebraism, Montefiore was the ideal of what Victorians thought a Jew should be: ‘That grand old Hebrew’, wrote Lord Shaftesbury, ‘is better than many Christians.’

He had been born in Livorno, Italy but he made his fortune as one of the ‘Jew brokers’ on the London Stock Exchange, an ascent helped by his happy marriage to Judith Cohen, sister-in-law of the banker Nathaniel Rothschild. His social rise and wealth were only a means to help others. When he received a knighthood from Queen Victoria in 1837, she described him in her diary as ‘a Jew, an excellent man’ while in his journal, he prayed that the honour ‘may prove the harbinger of future good to the Jews generally. I had besides the pleasure of my banner with “Jerusalem” floating proudly in the hall.’ Once he was rich, he scaled down his business and, often campaigning with his brother-in-law or his nephew Lionel de Rothschild, he devoted himself to winning political rights for British Jews.^* But he was most needed abroad, where he was received like a British ambassador by emperors and sultans, displaying tireless courage and ingenuity while often in personal danger. As we have seen, it was his Damascus mission to Muhammad Ali and the sultan that made him famous.

Montefiore found himself admired even by the most eminent anti-Semites: when Nicholas I, in his crusade for Orthodoxy and Autocracy, was starting to repress the millions of Russian Jews, Montefiore travelled to St Petersburg to insist that Russian Jews were loyal, brave and honourable. ‘If they resembled you,’ replied Nicholas with ominous courtesy.^† However he was more than capable of holding his own with anyone: when he rushed to Rome to intervene in an anti-Semitic intrigue, a cardinal asked him how much of Rothschild’s gold had paid for the sultan’s ban on the ‘blood libel.’ ‘Not as much as I gave your lackey for hanging up my coat in your hall,’ Montefiore replied.