Jerusalem: The Biography

On 2 November, Herzl was finally summoned for his imperial audience – the five Zionists were so nervous that one of them suggested taking bromide. Dressing appropriately in white tie, tails and top hats, they arrived north of the Damascus Gate at the Kaiser’s encampment. This was a luxury Thomas Cook village with 230 tents, which had been transported in 120 carriages, borne by 1,300 horses, served by 100 coachmen, 600 drivers, twelve cooks and sixty waiters, all guarded by an Ottoman regiment. It was, said the tour maestro John Mason Cook, ‘the largest party gone to Jerusalem since the Crusades. We swept the country of horses and carriages and almost of food.’ Punch mocked Wilhelm as ‘Cook’s Crusader’.

Herzl found the Kaiser posing ‘in a grey colonial uniform, veiled helmet, brown gloves and holding – oddly enough – a riding crop’. The Zionist approached, ‘halted and bowed. Wilhelm held out his hand very affably’ and then lectured him, declaring, ‘The land needs water and shade. There is room for all. The idea behind your movement is a healthy one.’ When Herzl explained that laying on a water supply was feasible but expensive, the Kaiser replied, ‘Well, you have plenty of money, more money than all of us.’ Herzl proposed a modern Jerusalem, but the Kaiser then ended the meeting, saying ‘neither yes nor no’.

Ironically, both the Kaiser and Herzl loathed Jerusalem: ‘a dismal arid heap of stones,’ wrote Wilhelm, ‘spoilt by large quite modern suburbs formed by Jewish colonies. 60,000 of these people are there, greasy and squalid, cringing and abject, doing nothing but trying to fleece their neighbours for every farthing – Shylocks by the score.’^*

But he wrote to his cousin, Russian Emperor Nicholas II, that he despised the ‘fetish adoration’ of the Christians even more – ‘in leaving the Holy City I felt profoundly ashamed before the Muslims’. Herzl almost agreed: ‘When I remember you in days to come, O Jerusalem, it won’t be with delight. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in your reeking alleys.’ The Western Wall, he thought, was pervaded by ‘hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary’.

Instead Herzl dreamed that ‘if Jerusalem is ever ours, I’d clear up everything not sacred, tear down the filthy ratholes,’ preserving the Old City as a heritage site like Lourdes or Mecca. ‘I’d build an airy comfortable properly sewered, brand new city around the Holy Places.’ Herzl later decided that Jerusalem should be shared: ‘We shall extra-territorialize Jerusalem so that it will belong to nobody and everybody, its Holy Places the joint possession of all Believers.’

As the Kaiser departed down the road to Damascus, where he declared himself the protector of Islam and endowed Saladin with a new tomb, Herzl saw the future in three burly Jewish porters in kaftans: ‘If we can bring here 300,000 Jews like them, all of Israel will be ours.’

Yet Jerusalem was already very much the Jewish centre in Palestine: out of 45,300 inhabitants, 28,000 were now Jewish, a rise that was already worrying the Arab leadership. ‘Who can contest the rights of the Jews to Palestine?’ old Yusuf Khalidi told his friend Zadok Kahn, Chief Rabbi of France, in 1899. ‘God knows, historically it is indeed your country’ but ‘the brute force of reality,’ was that ‘Palestine is now an integral part of the Ottoman Empire and, what is more serious, it is inhabited by other than Israelites.’ While the letter predates the idea of a Palestinian nation – Khalidi was a Jerusalemite, an Arab, an Ottoman and ultimately a citizen of the world – and the necessity to deny the Jewish claim to Zion, he foresaw that Jewish return, ancient and legitimate as it was, would clash with the ancient and legitimate presence of the Arabs.

In April 1903, the Kishinev pogrom, backed by the tsar’s interior minister Viacheslav von Plehve, launched a spree of anti-Semitic slaughter and terror across Russia.^* In panic, Herzl travelled to St Petersburg to negotiate with Plehve himself, the ultimate anti-Semite, but, getting nowhere with the Kaiser and the sultan, he started to look for a provisional territory outside the Holy Land.