Jerusalem: The Biography

Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests ‘will wear impressive robes’; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem. The Rothschilds, initially sceptical of any Jewish state, rejected Herzl’s approaches, but these early notes soon matured into something more practical. ‘Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home,’ he proclaimed in The Jewish State in February 1896. ‘The Maccabees will rise again. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes.’

There was nothing new about Zionism – even the word had already been coined in 1890 – but Herzl gave political expression and organization to a very ancient sentiment. Jews had envisaged their very existence in terms of their relationship to Jerusalem since King David and particularly since the Babylonian Exile. Jews prayed towards Jerusalem, wished each other ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ each year at Passover, and commemorated the fallen Temple by smashing a glass at their weddings and keeping a corner of their houses undecorated. They went on pilgrimage there, wished to be buried there and prayed whenever possible around the Temple walls. Even when they were grievously persecuted, Jews continued to live in Jerusalem and were absent only when they were banned on pain of death.

The new European nationalism inevitably provoked racial hostility towards this supranational and cosmopolitan people – but simultaneously the same nationalism, along with the liberty won by the French Revolution, was bound to inspire the Jews too. Prince Potemkin, Emperor Napoleon and US President John Adams all believed in the return of the Jews to Jerusalem as had Polish and Italian nationalists, and of course the Christian Zionists in America and Britain. Yet the Zionist pioneers were Orthodox rabbis who saw the Return in the light of messianic expectation. In 1836, an Ashkenazi rabbi in Prussia, Zvi Hirsch Kalischer, approached the Rothschilds and Montefiores to fund a Jewish nation, and later wrote his book Seeking Zion

. After the Damascus ‘blood-libel’, Rabbi Yehuda Hai Alchelai, a Sephardic rabbi in Sarajevo, suggested Jews in the Islamic world should elect leaders and buy land in Palestine. In 1862, Moses Hess, a comrade of Karl Marx, predicted that nationalism would lead to racial anti-Semitism, in Rome and Jerusalem: the Last National Question, which proposed a socialist Jewish society in Palestine. Yet it was the Russian pogroms that were decisive.

‘We must re-establish ourselves as a living nation,’ wrote Leo Pinsker, an Odessan physician, in his book, Auto-Emancipation, writing at the same time as Herzl. He inspired a new movement of Russian Jews, ‘The Lovers of Zion’, Hovevei Zion

, to develop agricultural settlements in Palestine. Even though many of them were secular, ‘our Jewishness and our Zionism,’ explained a young believer, Chaim Weizmann, ‘were interchangeable’. In 1878, Palestinian Jews had founded Petah Tikvah (Gateway of Hope) on the coast but now even the Rothschilds, in the person of the French Baron Edmond, started to fund agricultural villages such as Rishon-le-Zion (First in Zion) for Russian immigrants – altogether he would donate the princely sum of £6.6 million. Like Montefiore, he tried to buy the Wall in Jerusalem. In 1887, the mufti, Mustafa al-Husseini, agreed a deal but it fell through. When Rothschild tried again in 1897, the Husseini Sheikh al-Haram blocked it.

In 1883, long before Herzl’s book, 25,000 Jews started to arrive in Palestine in the first wave – Aliyah – of immigration. Most but not all were from Russia. But Jerusalem also attracted Persians in the 1870s, Yemenites in the 1880s. They tended to live together in their own communities: Jews from Bokhara, including the Moussaieff family of jewellers who had cut diamonds for Genghis Khan, settled their own Bokharan Quarter that was carefully laid out in a grid, its grand often neo-Gothic, neo-Renaissance, sometimes Moorish mansions designed to resemble those of Central Asian cities.^*