Jerusalem: The Biography

In Istanbul, Wilhelm finally received the Zionist, whom he judged to be ‘an idealist with an aristocratic mentality, clever, very intelligent with expressive eyes’. The Kaiser said he supported Herzl because ‘there are usurers at work. If these people went to settle in the colonies, they could be more useful.’ Herzl protested at this calumny. The Kaiser inquired what he should ask the sultan for. ‘A chartered company under German protection,’ replied Herzl. The Kaiser invited Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem.

Herzl was impressed. The Hohenzollern personified imperial power with ‘his great sea blue eyes, his fine serious face, frank, genial and yet bold’, but the reality was different. Wilhelm was certainly intelligent, knowledgeable and energetic, but he was also so restless and inconsistent that even Eulenburg feared he was mentally ill. After sacking Prince Bismarck as chancellor, he took control of German politics, but he was too unstable to sustain it. His personal diplomacy was disastrous; his written notes to his ministers were so outrageous that they had to be locked in a safe; his alarmingly articulate speeches, in which he encouraged his troops to shoot German workers or to massacre enemies like Huns, were embarrassing.^* Already by 1898, Wilhelm was regarded as half-buffoon, half-warmonger.

Nonetheless he proposed the Zionist plan to Abdul-Hamid. The sultan rejected it firmly, telling his daughter, ‘The Jews may spare their millions. When my empire is divided, perhaps they will get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse can be divided.’ Meanwhile Wilhelm, dazzled by the vigour of Islam, lost interest in Herzl.¹

At 3 p.m. on 29 October 1898, the Kaiser rode through a breach specially opened in the wall next to the Jaffa Gate and entered Jerusalem on a white charger.

THE KAISER AND HERZL:

THE LAST CRUSADER AND THE FIRST ZIONIST

The Kaiser sported the white uniform with the full-length gold-threaded burnous veil sparkling in the sunlight, flowing from a spiked helmet surmounted with a burnished golden eagle, escorted by a cavalcade of giant Prussian hussars in steel helmets waving Crusader-style banners and the Sultan’s lancers in red waistcoats, blue pantaloons and green turbans and armed with lances. The Kaiserin, in a patterned silk dress with a sash and a straw hat, followed on behind him in a carriage with her two ladies-in-waiting.

Herzl watched the Kaiser’s performance from a hotel filled with German officers. The Kaiser had grasped that Jerusalem was the ideal stage on which to advertise his newly minted empire, but not everyone was impressed: the Dowager Russian Empress thought his performance ‘revolting, perfectly ridiculous, disgusting!’ The Kaiser was the first head of state to appoint an official photographer for a state visit. The Crusader uniform and the pack of photographers revealed what Eulenburg called the Kaiser’s ‘two totally different natures – the knightly, reminiscent of the finest days of the Middle Ages, and the modern’.

The crowds, reported the New York Times

, were ‘dressed in holiday clothes, the city men in white turbans, gaily striped tunics, the wives of Turkish army officers in gorgeous silken milayes, the well-to-do peasants in flowing kaftans of flaming red’, while Bedouin on fine steeds ‘wore large clumsy red boots, a leather girdle over a tunic filled with an arsenal of small arms’ and a keffiyeh. Their sheikhs carried spears with a burst of ostrich feathers around the blade.

At the Jewish triumphal arch, the chief Sephardic rabbi, a bearded nonagenarian in white kaftan and blue turban, and his Ashkenazi counterpart presented Wilhelm with a copy of the Torah, and he was welcomed by the mayor, Yasin al-Khalidi, in a royal purple cloak and a gold-encircled turban. Wilhelm dismounted at David’s Tower, and from there he and the empress walked into the city, the crowds cleared for fear of anarchist assassins (Empress Elisabeth of Austria had recently been assassinated). As the patriarchs in the effulgence of their jewel-encrusted regalia showed him the Sepulchre, the Kaiser’s heart was beating ‘faster and more fervently’ as he trod in Jesus’ footsteps.

While Herzl waited for his summons and explored the city, the Kaiser dedicated the Church of the Redeemer with its Romanesque tower, a structure that he had personally designed ‘with particular care and love’. When he visited the Temple Mount, the Kaiser, another enthusiastic archaeologist, asked the mufti to allow excavations, but the latter politely demurred.