Jerusalem: The Biography

Thomas Cook’s offices were at the Jaffa Gate, which was the hub of a new tourist-friendly Jerusalem, symbolized by the opening of the Grand New Hotel, just over Bathsheba’s Pool, supposedly where Uriah’s wife was seen bathing by King David,^† and Joachim Fast’s hotel just outside the gate. In 1892, the railway finally reached Jerusalem, truly opening up the city to tourism.

Photography developed alongside tourism. It was unexpected if fitting that the high priest of Jerusalem’s photographic boom was Yessayi Garabedian, the Armenian patriarch, ‘probably the handsomest potentate in the world’, who studied the art in Manchester. His two protégés left the Armenian priesthood and founded photographic studios on the Jaffa Road that offered tourists the chance to buy photographs of Arabs in ‘biblical poses’ or to pose themselves in biblical costume. In a typical moment, a group of bearded and sheepskin-clad Russian peasants gathered in amazement to watch ‘a blue-eyed fair-haired English lady’ wearing ‘an embroidered scarlet costume’ with a brass circlet on her head and ‘tight corsets’ framing a ‘finely-developed bust,’ striking poses in front of David’s Tower. The Russians were half-horrified, half-dazzled.

The growing New City was so architecturally eclectic that today Jerusalem has houses and entire suburbs that look as if they belong anywhere other than in the Middle East. The new Christian edifices added at the end of the century included twenty-seven French convents, ten Italian and eight Russian.^*

After Britain and Prussia ended their shared Anglo-Prussian bishopric, the Anglicans constructed their own sturdily English St George’s Cathedral, the see of an Anglican bishop. But in 1892, the Ottomans were still building too: Abdul-Hamid had added new fountains, created the New Gate to allow access directly to the Christian Quarter and in 1901, celebrating his twenty-fifth jubilee, he added a belltower to the Jaffa Gate that looked as if it belonged in a suburban English railway station.

Meanwhile Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Germans were colonizing the New City outside the walls. In 1869, seven Jewish families founded the Nahalat Shiva – Quarter of the Seven – outside the Jaffa Gate; in 1874, ultra-Orthodox Jews settled in Mea Shearim, now a Hassidic quarter. By 1880, the 17,000 Jews formed a majority and there were nine new Jewish suburbs while the Arab Families built their own Husseini and Nashashibi quarters in Sheikh Jarrah, the area north of the Damascus Gate.^† The Families’ Arab mansions boasted decorated ceilings in hybrid Turkish–European styles. One Husseini built the Orient House with its entry hall painted in flowers and geometric patterns, while another, Rabah Effendi Husseini, created a mansion featuring the Pasha Room with a high dome painted celestial blue, framed by gilded acanthus leaves. Orient House became a hotel then the Palestine Authority’s Jerusalem headquarters in the 1990s and Rabah Husseini’s mansion became the home of Jerusalem’s most eminent American family.

THE AMERICAN OVERCOMERS: KEEPING JESUS’ MILK WARM

On 21 November 1873, Anna Spafford and four of her daughters were crossing the Atlantic on the Ville de Havre when it was struck by another ship. As the ship sank, all four children were drowned, but Anna survived. When she learned, after her rescue, that they were dead, she wanted to throw herself into the water after them. Instead she sent her husband, Horatio, a prosperous Chicago attorney, the heartbreaking telegram: ‘SAVED ALONE. WHAT SHALL I DO?’ What the Spaffords did was to give up their conventional life and come to Jerusalem. First they faced more tragedy: their son died of scarlet fever, leaving them one child, Bertha, out of six. Anna Spafford believed herself ‘spared for a purpose’, but the couple was also outraged by their Presbyterian Church, which regarded their fate as divine punishment. Forming their own messianic sect, which the US press called the Overcomers, they believed that good works in Jerusalem and the restoration of the Jews to Israel – followed by their conversion – would hasten the imminent Second Coming.