Jerusalem: The Biography

The traffic in pleasure travelled both ways. Stephen Graham, the English journalist who accompanied the peasant pilgrims at roughly the same time as Rasputin was there, described how ‘Arab women found their way into the hostelry in Holy Week despite the regulations and sold bottles of gin and cognac to the peasants. Jerusalem began to overflow with pilgrims and sightseers and also with mountebanks, showmen and hawkers, Montenegrin policemen, mounted Turkish gendarmes, pilgrims on asses, pilgrims on carts,’ Englishmen and Americans, but ‘the Holy City is delivered into the hand of Russians, Armenians, Bulgarians and Christian Arabs’.

Russian hucksters debauched the visitors. Philip, ‘a tall peasant, broad-shouldered but fat, with a large dirty black-haired unshaven face, a bushy moustache that hung in a sensual sort of droop over thick red sluggish lips’ was typical – ‘a pander to the monks, a tout for ecclesiastical shopkeepers, a smuggler of goods, an immoralist and a trader in articles of religion’ manufactured in a so-called Jew Factory. Fallen priests ended their Jerusalem days in ‘drunkenness, religious hysteria and corpse-washing’ – for many Russians died (happily) in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, just to add to this incendiary mix, Marxist propagandists preached revolution and atheism to the Russian peasants.

On the Palm Sunday of Graham’s visit, as Turkish soldiers beat back the pilgrims, the crowds poured out of the Church to ‘much shrieking and skirling from the Orthodox Arabs, crying out in religious frenzy’ until suddenly they were attacked by ‘a band of redcapped Turks and beturbaned Muslims who made a loud whoop and struck their way with blows, threw themselves on the bearer of the olive branch and gained possession, broke the branch to bits and ran off. An American girl snapped her Kodak. The Christian Arabs swore vengeance.’ Afterwards the Russians awaited the Second Coming of ‘the great conqueror’ at the Golden Gate. But the climax as ever was the Holy Fire: when the flame emerged, ‘exalted easterners plunged sheaves of lighted candles into their bosoms, and cried out in joy and ecstasy. They sang as if under the influence of some extraordinary drug’ with ‘one guiding cry: KYRIE ELEISON: CHRIST IS RISEN!’ But ‘there was a regular stampede’ that had to be suppressed with the whips and rifle butts.

That night Graham recorded how his companions – ‘excited, feverish, and fluttering like so many children’ – filled their bags with Jerusalem earth, Jordan water, palms, death shrouds, stereoscopes – ‘and we kissed each other all over again!’

What embracing and kissing there were this night; smacking of hearty lips and tangling of beards and whiskers. There commenced a day of uproarious festivity. The quantity of wine, cognac and arak [aniseed-flavoured liqueur] consumed would appal most English. And the drunken dancing would be rather foreign to Jesus!

That year, Easter coincided with Passover and Nabi Musa. While Rasputin policed the morals of the Orthodox sisterhood whom Wasif was busy debauching, an English aristocrat unleashed riots and made headlines across the world.⁵

THE HON. CAPTAIN MONTY PARKER

AND THE ARK OF THE COVENANT

Monty Parker, a twenty-nine-year-old nobleman with a plumage of luxuriant moustaches and pointed Edward VII beard, expensive tastes and minimal income, was an opportunistic but credulous rogue, always on the lookout for an easy way to make his fortune – or at least find someone else to pay for his luxuries. In 1908, this Old Etonian son of a Cabinet minister in Gladstone’s last government, younger brother of the Earl of Morley, ex-Grenadier Guards officer and veteran of the Boer War, encountered a Finnish hierophant who convinced him that together they could discover in Jerusalem the most valuable treasure of world history.

The Finn was Dr Valter Juvelius, a teacher, poet and spiritualist with a taste for dressing up in biblical robes and deciphering biblical codes. After working for years on the Book of Ezekiel, encouraged by séances with a Swedish psychic, Juvelius believed he had uncovered what he called ‘The Cipher of Ezekiel’. This revealed that in 586 bc, when Nebuchadnezzar was about to destroy Jerusalem, the Jews had hidden what he dubbed ‘the Temple Archive’ – the Ark of the Covenant – in a tunnel south of the Temple Mount. But he needed a man of action who could also help him raise the funds required to find the Ark. Who better than a dim but energetic English aristocrat with the best connections in Edwardian London?

Juvelius showed his secret prospectus to Parker, who excitedly read this revelation: