Jerusalem: The Biography

In 1881, the Overcomers – thirteen adults and three children, who became the nucleus of the American Colony – settled in a large house just inside the Damascus Gate until, in 1896, they were joined by the farmers of the Swedish Evangelical Church and needed a larger headquarters. They then leased Rabbah Husseini’s mansion in Sheikh Jarrah on the road to Nablus. Horatio died in 1888, but the sect thrived as they preached the Second Coming, converted Jews and developed their colony into a philanthropic, evangelical beehive of hospitals, orphanages, soup-kitchens, a shop, their own photography studio and a school. Their success attracted the hostility of the long-serving American consul-general, Selah Merrill, an anti-Semitic Massachusetts Congregationalist clergyman, Andover professor and inept archaeologist. For twenty years Merrill tried to destroy the Colonists, accusing them of charlatanism, anti-Americanism, lewdness and child-kidnapping. He threatened to send his guards to horsewhip them.

The US press claimed that the Colonists made tea on the Olivet every day ready for the Second Coming: ‘They keepmilk warm at all times’, explained the Detroit News, ‘in case the Lord and Master should arrive and asses are kept saddled in case Jesus appeared and some said they would never die.’ They also played a special part in the city’s archaeology: in 1882, they befriended a British imperial hero who symbolized the empire’s embrace of Bible and sword.

After helping suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China and governing the Sudan, General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon settled in John the Baptist’s village, Ein Kerem. But he came into town to study the Bible and enjoy the view from the roof of the Colony’s original house. There he became convinced that the skull-like hill opposite was the true Golgotha, an idea he promoted with such energy that his so-called Garden Tomb became a Protestant alternative to the Sepulchre.^*

Meanwhile the Overcomers were generous to the many mentally fragile pilgrims whom Bertha Spafford called ‘Simples in the Garden of Allah’. ‘Jerusalem’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘attracts all kinds of religious fanatics and cranks of different degrees of derangement.’ There were fellow Americans who regarded themselves as ‘Elijah, John the Baptist or another of the prophets [and] there were several messiahs wandering around Jerusalem’. One of the Elijahs tried to kill Horatio Spafford with a rock; a Texan named Titus thought he was a world-conqueror but had to be restrained after he groped the maids. Then there was a rich Dutch countess designing a mansion to house the 144,000 ransomed souls of Revelation 7.4. Yet not all the Americans in Jerusalem were Christian Hebraists. Consul-General Merrill hated the Jews as much as he hated the Overcomers, calling them an arrogant, money-obsessed ‘race of weaklings of whom neither soldiers, colonists nor citizens can be made’.

Gradually the American Colony’s cheerful hymn-singing and charitable deeds made them friends among all sects and religions, and the first port of call for every well-connected writer, pilgrim and potentate. Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish writer who stayed with the Spaffords, made the Colony famous with her novel Jerusalem, winning the Nobel Literature Prize. In 1902, Baron Plato von Ustinov (grandfather of the actor Peter), who ran a hotel in Jaffa, asked if his guests could stay at the Colony, the start of its transformation into a hotel.¹⁹ Yet if the city had been transformed by Westerners, by the end of the century she was dominated by Russia, empire of Orthodox peasants and persecuted Jews, both drawn irresistibly towards Jerusalem – and both travelling from Odessa on the same ships.

RUSSIANS

1880–98

GRAND DUKE SERGEI AND GRAND DUCHESS ELLA

Russian peasants, many of them women, often walked all the way from their villages southwards to Odessa for the voyage to Zion. They wore ‘deeply padded overcoats and furlined jackets with sheepskin caps’, the women adding ‘bundles of four or five petticoats and grey shawls over their heads’. They brought their death shrouds and felt, wrote Stephen Graham, an English journalist who travelled with them disguised by perfect Russian, shaggy beard and peasant smock, ‘that when they have been to Jerusalem, the serious occupations of their life are all ended. For the peasant goes to Jerusalem to die in a certain way in Russia – just as the whole concern of the Protestant centres round life.’