Jerusalem: The Biography

His partner in all his enterprises was the vivacious, curly-haired Judith who always called him ‘Monty’, but they were not destined to found a dynasty: despite their prayers at Rachel’s Tomb, they never had children. Yet apart from his Jewishness and the Hebrew letters of Jerusalem on his coat of arms, Montefiore had the virtues and faults of a typical Victorian grandee. He lived in splendour in a Park Lane mansion and a crenellated Gothic Revival villa in Ramsgate where he built his own synagogue and a unique if grandiose mausoleum based exactly on Rachel’s Tomb. His tone was ponderously orotund, his righteousness was scarcely leavened with humour, there was a certain vanity in his autocratic style, and behind the façade, there were mistresses and illegitimate children. Indeed his modern biographer reveals that while in his eighties, he fathered a child with a teenage maid, yet another sign of his astonishing energy.

Now his search for a place to buy in Jerusalem was helped by the Jerusalem Families whom he had always befriended: even the qadi called him ‘the pride of the people of Moses’. Ahmed Duzhdar Aga, whom he had known for twenty years, sold him a plot outside the walls between the Zion and Jaffa gates for 1,000 gold English sovereigns. Montefiore immediately moved his tents to his new land where he planned a hospital and a Kentish windmill so that Jews could make their own bread. Before he left he asked the pasha for a special favour: the stench of the Jewish Quarter, cited in every Western travelogue, was caused by a Muslim abattoir, its very presence a sign of the inferior status of the Jews. Montefiore asked for it to be moved and the pasha agreed.

In June 1857, Montefiore returned for the fifth time with the materials for his windmill and in 1859, construction started. Instead of a hospital, he built the almshouses for poor Jewish families that became known as the Montefiore Cottages, unmistakably Victorian like a red-brick, crenellated, mock-medieval clubhouse in English suburbia. In Hebrew they were called Mishkenot Shaanim – the Dwellings of Delight – but initially they were preyed on by bandits and their inhabitants were so undelighted they used to creepback into the city to sleep. The windmill did at first produce cheap bread but it soon broke down due to the lack of Judaean wind and Kentish maintenance.

Christian evangelists and Jewish rabbis alike dreamed of the Jewish return – and this was Montefiore’s contribution. The colossal wealth of the new Jewish plutocrats, especially the Rothschilds, encouraged the idea that, as Disraeli put it at just this time, the ‘Hebrew capitalists’ would buy Palestine. The Rothschilds, arbiters of international politics and finance at the height of their power, as influential in Paris and Vienna as they were in London, were unconvinced but they were happy to contribute money and helpto Montefiore whose ‘constant dream’ was that ‘Jerusalem is destined to become the seat of a Jewish empire.’ ^* In 1859, after a suggestion from the Ottoman ambassador in London, Montefiore discussed the idea of buying Palestine but he was sceptical, knowing that the rising Anglo-Jewish elite were busy buying country estates to live the English dream and had no interest in such a scheme. Ultimately Montefiore believed that his beloved ‘national restoration of the Israelites’ was beyond politics and best left to ‘Divine Agency’ – but the opening in 1860 of his little Montefiore Quarter was the beginning of the new Jewish city outside the walls. This was far from Montefiore’s last visit but after the Crimean War, Jerusalem was once again an international object of desire: Romanovs, Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs and British princes vied with one another to combine the new science of archaeology with the old game of empires.¹⁵

THE NEW RELIGION

1860–70

EMPERORS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS: INNOCENTS ABROAD

In April 1859, Emperor Alexander II’s brother Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevich was the first of the Romanovs to visit Jerusalem – ‘finally my triumphant entry’, he recorded in his laconic diary, ‘Crowds and dust’. When he walked to the Holy Sepulchre: ‘Tears and emotions’; and when he left the city, ‘we couldn’t stop crying’. The emperor and the grand duke had planned a Russian cultural offensive. ‘We must establish our presence in the East not politically but through the church,’ declared a Foreign Ministry report. ‘Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there.’ The grand duke founded a Palestine Society and the Russian Steamship Company to bring Russian pilgrims from Odessa. He inspected the 18 acres of the Russian Compound where the Romanovs were starting to build a little Muscovite town.^* Soon there were so many Russian pilgrims that tents had to be pitched to house them.