Jerusalem: The Biography

The ever-richer Families thrived. Their boys were educated with Wasif at the English St George’s, the girls at the Husseini girls’ school. Now women wore both Arab and Western fashions. The British school brought football to Jerusalem: there was a match every Saturday afternoon on a pitch outside Bab al-Sahra: the Husseini boys were especially keen players – some would play in their tarbushes. Before the Great War, Wasif was still a schoolboy, yet he was already living a Bohemian double life. He played his oud and served as trusted fixer and party-giver, perhaps even a subtle pimp for the Families, who now lived outside the walls in new mansions in Sheikh Jarrah. The grandees customarily rented an odah or garçonnière, a small apartment to play cards and keep their concubines, and they would let him have their spare keys. Wasif’s patron, the mayor’s son Hussein Effendi al-Husseini, kept the most lissom of the concubines, Persephone, a Greek-Albanian seamstress, in his

odah off the Jaffa Road, whence this entrepreneurial temptress traded in cattle and sold her own brand of medicinal thyme oil. Persephone loved to sing and she was accompanied by young Wasif on the oud. When Husseini himself became mayor in 1909, he married off Persephone.

The mistresses of the grandees had traditionally been Jewish, Armenian or Greek, but now the thousands of Russian pilgrims became the richest resource for Jerusalem’s hedonists. Wasif recorded that in the company of the future mayor Ragheb al-Nashashibi and Ismail al-Husseini he arranged secret parties ‘for the Russian ladies’. It just happened that at this time an unusual Russian pilgrim to Jerusalem was complaining about the astonishing decadence and whoring in the city of his fellow countrymen.⁴

Arriving in March 1911, this sybaritic monk was the spiritual adviser and comfort of the Russian emperor and empress, whose haemophiliac son, Alexei, only he could heal.

RASPUTIN: THE RUSSIAN NUNS BEWARE

‘I can’t describe the joyful impressions, ink is useless as your soul joyfully sings “Let God rise from the dead”,’ wrote Grigory Rasputin, a forty-four-year-old Siberian peasant turned itinerant holy man. He had first come to Jerusalem in 1903 as an unknown pilgrim and still remembered the misery of the sea voyage from Odessa, ‘stuffed in the hold like cattle, as many as 700 people at a time’. But Rasputin had risen in the world since then. This time, Nicholas II, who called Rasputin ‘our friend’, had sponsored his pilgrimage to remove him from St Petersburg and deflect the increasing criticism of this sacred sinner, who partied with prostitutes, exposed himself and urinated in restaurants. Now Rasputin stayed in style at the palatial residence of Jerusalem’s Orthodox patriarch, but he counted himself a champion of the ordinary pilgrim, expressing ‘the inexplicable joy’ of Easter: ‘It is all as it was: you see the people dressed the same as in [biblical] times, wearing the same coats and strange dress of the Old Testament. It makes me melt into tears.’ Then there was the sex and drink, on which Rasputin was an expert.

By 1911, over 10,000 Russians, mostly unruly peasants, came for Easter, staying in the ever-expanding dormitories in the Russian Compound, praying in Grand Duke Sergei’s Mary Magdalene and the new Alexander Nevsky next to the Church.^*

These visitors brought their nation into increasing disrepute: even in the early days their consul had described Bishop Cyril Naumov as ‘an alcoholic and buffoon who surrounds himself with Arab comedians and women’. As for the pilgrims, ‘Many of them live in Jerusalem in a manner that corresponds neither to the holiness of the place nor to the aim of their pilgrimage, falling prey to various temptations.’

As the numbers grew, the pilgrims, who indulged in fighting and drinking, became harder to control, and Rasputin revealed how much he hated the Catholics and Armenians, not to mention the Muslims. In 1893, the Russian bodyguard of a rich pilgrim shot and killed a Latin sacristan and three others when a Catholic asked him to make way in the Church. ‘The booze is everywhere and they drink it because it’s cheap, mostly made by Athenian nuns,’ explained Rasputin. Worse was the promiscuity: as we have seen, Russian pilgrims were easily procured by the grandees of Jerusalem for their parties, and some stayed behind as concubines. Rasputin knew what he was talking about when he warned:

Nuns mustn’t travel there! Most of them earn their living away from the Holy City itself. Not to explain further, anyone who has been there understands how many mistakes are made by young brothers and sisters! It’s very hard for the girls, they are forced to stay longer, the temptation is great, the enemy [Catholics? Muslims?] are tremendously envious. Many of them become concubines and women of the markets. It happens that they tell you ‘we have our own sugar-daddy’ and they add you to the list!^*