Jerusalem: The Biography

Guidebooks warned against ‘squalid Polish Jews’, and a ‘miasma of filth’, but to some it was the Protestant pilgrims who tainted the place.¹⁷ ‘Lepers, cripples, the blind and idiotic, assail you on every hand,’ observed Samuel Clemens, the journalist from Missouri who wrote as ‘Mark Twain’. Travelling the Mediterranean aboard the Quaker City, Twain, celebrated as the ‘Wild Humorist’, was on a pilgrim cruise called the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion which he renamed the Grand Holy Land Funeral Expedition. He treated pilgrimage as a farce, mocking the sincerity of American pilgrims whom he called ‘innocents abroad’. ‘It’s a relief to steal a walk for a hundred yards’, he wrote, without encountering another ‘site’. He was most amused to find the column in the Church that was the centre of the world made of the dust from which Adam was conjured: ‘No man has been able to prove that the dirt was NOT procured here.’ Overall he hated the Church’s ‘trumpery, geegaws and tawdry ornamentation’, and the city: ‘Renowned Jerusalem, the stateliest name in history has become a pauper village – mournful dreary and lifeless – I wouldn’t want to live here.’^*

Yet even the Wild Humorist quietly bought his mother a Jerusalem Bible and sometimes reflected, ‘I am sitting where a god has stood.’

The tourists, whether religious or secular, Christian or Jewish, Chateaubriand, Montefiore or Twain, were good at seeing where gods had stood but almost blind when it came to seeing the actual people who lived there. Throughout her history, Jerusalem existed in the imagination of devotees who lived faraway in America or Europe. Now that these visitors were arriving on steamships in their thousands, they expected to find the exotic and dangerous, picturesque and authentic images they had imagined with the help of their Bibles, their Victorian stereotypes of race, and, once they arrived, their translators and guides. They saw only the diversity of costumes in the streets and dismissed the images they did not like as Oriental filth and what Baedeker called ‘wild superstition and fanaticism’. Instead, they would build the ‘authentic’ grand Holy City they had expected to find. It was these views that would drive the imperial interest in Jerusalem. As for the rest – the vibrant, half-veiled, ancient world of the Arabs and Sephardic Jews – they could scarcely see it. But it was very much there.¹⁸

ARAB CITY, IMPERIAL CITY

1870–80

YUSUF KHALIDI: MUSIC, DANCING, DAILY LIFE

The real Jerusalem was like a Tower of Babel in fancy dress with a hierarchy of religions and languages. Ottoman officers wore embroidered jackets coupled with European uniforms; Ottoman Jews, Armenians and Arab Christians and Muslims sported frock-coats or white suits with a new piece of headgear that symbolized the new reformed Ottoman empire: the tarbush, or fez; the Muslim ulema wore turbans and robes that were almost identical to those worn by many of the Sephardic Jews and Orthodox Arabs; the growing numbers of penurious Polish Hasidic Jews^* wore gaberdine coats and fedoras; the kavasses – the bodyguards of the Europeans – were often Armenians who still wore scarlet jackets, white pantaloons and packed big pistols. Shoeless black slaves served ice sherbet to their masters, the old Arab or Sephardic families whose men often wore a smattering of all the above costumes – turbans or fezzes but with long coats tied with a sash, wide Turkish trousers and a black Western jacket on top. The Arabs spoke Turkish and Arabic; the Armenians Armenian, Turkish and Arabic; Sephardis, Ladino, Turkish and Arabic; the Hasids, Yiddish, that mitteleuropean argot of German and Hebrew which spawned its own great literature.

If this seemed chaotic to the outsiders, the sultan-caliph presided over a Sunni empire: the Muslims were at the top; the Turks ruled; then came the Arabs. The Polish Jews, much mocked for their poverty, ‘wailing’ and the trance-like rhythms of their prayers, were at the bottom; but in between, in a half-submerged folk culture, there was much blending, despite the stringent rules of each religion.