Jerusalem: The Biography

Warren sympathized with the Jews, angered by the boorish European tourists who mocked their ‘most solemn gathering’ at the Wall as if it were a ‘farce’. On the contrary, the ‘country must be governed for them’ so that ultimately ‘the Jewish principality might stand by itself as a separate kingdom guaranteed by the Great Powers’.^* The French were just as aggressive in their archaeological aspirations – though their chief archaeologist, Félicien de Saulcy, was a bungler who declared that the Tomb of Kings just north of the walls belonged to King David. In fact it was the tomb of the Queen of Adiabene dating from a thousand years later.

In 1860, Muslims massacred Christians in Syria and Lebanon, furious at the sultan’s laws in favour of Christians and Jews, but this only attracted further Western advances: Napoleon III sent troops to save the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, refreshing French claims to the area that had survived from Charlemagne, the Crusades and King Francis in the sixteenth century. In 1869, Egypt, backed by French capital, opened the Suez Canal at a ceremony attended by the French empress Eugénie, the Prussian crown prince Frederick and the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph. Not to be outdone by the British and Russians, the Prussian Frederick sailed up to Jaffa and rode to Jerusalem, where he vigorously promoted a Prussian presence in the race to grab churches and archaeological prizes: he bought the site of the Crusader St Mary of the Latins, close to the Church, and Frederick (the father of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II) backed the aggressive archaeologist Titus Tobler, who declared: ‘Jerusalem must be ours.’ As Frederick headed back to Jaffa, he almost rode into Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and titular King of Jerusalem, who had only recently been defeated by the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa. They greeted one another coldly.

Franz Joseph galloped into Jerusalem escorted by a thousand Ottoman guards, including Bedouin with lances, Druze with rifles, and cameleers, and accompanied by an enormous silver bed, a present from the sultan. ‘We dismounted,’ the emperor recorded, ‘and I knelt in the road and kissed the earth’ as the cannon of David’s Tower boomed a salute. He was overcome by ‘how everything seemed to be just like one imagined it from one’s childhood stories and the Bible’¹⁶

But the Austrians, like all the Europeans, were buying buildings to promote a new Christian city: the emperor inspected the huge earth-works to build an Austrian Hospice on the Via Dolorosa.

‘I shall never concede any road improvements to these crazy Christians,’ wrote the Ottoman grand vizier Fuad Pasha, ‘as they would then transform Jerusalem into a Christian madhouse.’ But the Ottomans did build a new Jaffa road especially for Franz Joseph. The momentum of the ‘Christian madhouse’ was unstoppable.

MARK TWAIN AND THE ‘PAUPER VILLAGE’

Captain Charles Warren, the young archaeologist, was passing the Jaffa Gate when he was amazed to witness a beheading. The execution was horribly botched by a clumsy headman: ‘You’re hurting me,’ cried the victim as the executioner hacked at his neck sixteen times until he just climbed on to the unfortunate’s back and sawed through his spinal column as if he was sacrificing a sheep. Jerusalem had at least two faces and a multiple personality disorder: the gleaming, imperial edifices, built by the Europeans in pith helmets and redcoats as they rapidly Christianized the Muslim Quarter, existed alongside the old Ottoman city where black Sudanese guards protected the Haram and guarded condemned prisoners whose heads still rolled in public executions. The gates were still closed each sundown; Bedouin surrendered their spears and swords when they came into the city. A third of the city was a wasteland and a photograph (taken by the Armenian Patriarch no less) showed the Church surrounded by open country in the midst of the city. The two worlds frequently clashed: when in 1865, the first telegraph opened between Jerusalem and Istanbul, the Arab horseman who charged the telegraph-pole was arrested and hanged from it.

In March 1866, Montefiore, now a widower of eighty-one, arrived on his sixth visit and could not believe the changes. Finding that the Jews at the Western Wall were exposed not only to the rain but to occasional pelting from the Temple Mount above, he received permission to set up an awning there – and tried unsuccessfully to buy the Wall, one of many attempts by the Jews to own their holy site. As he left Jerusalem, he felt ‘more deeply than ever impressed’. It was not his last trip: when he returned in 1875 aged ninety-one, ‘I beheld almost a new Jerusalem springing up with buildings, some of them as fine as any in Europe.’ As he left for the last time, he could not help but muse that ‘surely we’re approaching the time to witness the realization of God’s hallowed promises unto Zion.’^*