Jerusalem: The Biography

Wasif’s every night was an adventure: ‘I only went home to change my clothes, sleeping in a different house every night, my body totally exhausted from drinking and merrymaking. In the morning I’m picnicking with the Jerusalem Notable Families, next I’m holding an orgy with thugs and gangsters in the alleys of the Old City.’ One night Wasif Jawhariyyeh found himself in a convoy of four limousines, containing the governor, his Jewish mistress from Salonica, various Ottoman beys and Family grandees including Mayor Hussein Husseini, being driven out to Artas near Bethlehem for an ‘international picnic’ at the Latin monastery: ‘It was a lovely day for everyone during the hard time when hunger and war were making people suffer. No one hung on ceremony, everyone drank wine, and the ladies were so beautiful that night, there was no time to eat and they all sang like one choir.’

The governor’s Jewish mistress ‘so adored Arabic music’ that Wasif agreed to teach her the oud. He seems to have existed in a dizzy parade of orgies with his patrons, attended by ‘the most beautiful Jewish women’ and sometimes Russian girls trapped in Jerusalem by the war. Once, the Fourth Army quartermaster, Raushen Pasha, got ‘so drunk that the beautiful Jewish women made him lose consciousness!’

Wasif did not need to work because the grandees, first Hussein Husseini and later Ragheb Nashashibi, arranged sinecures for him in the city administration. Husseini was head of the Red Crescent charity. As so often, charity was the shameless pretext for extravagance and social climbing: the ‘attractive ladies’ of Jerusalem were asked to dress up in fetchingly figure-hugging Ottoman military uniforms decorated with Red Crescents, a look that proved irresistible for the supremo Jemal: his mistress was Leah Tennenbaum, whom Wasif considered ‘one of the most beautiful women in Palestine’. Sima al-Magribiyyah, another Jewess, became mistress of the garrison commander; an Englishwoman, Miss Cobb, serviced the governor.

Sometimes, the oud-player himself enjoyed a tidbit from high table. When he and his band were invited to play at a party in a Jewish house, he found a ‘huge hall, and a group of [Ottoman] officers prowling around the ladies’, who included a certain Miss Rachel. Suddenly the drunken Turks started to fight, shooting their pistols first at the lights and then at each other. The demi-mondaines and musicians ran for their lives. Wasif’s beloved lute was broken but the pretty Miss Rachel pulled him into a cupboard that led through a hidden doorway into another house – ‘she saved my life’, and, perhaps just as joyously, ‘I stayed the night with her.’

On 27 April 1915, the anniversary of Sultan Mehmet’s succession, Jemal invited Ottoman and German commanders and the Jerusalemite grandees to staff headquarters in the commandeered Notre Dame outside the New Gate: fifty ‘prostitutes’ accompanied the Ottoman officers while the grandees brought their wives.

Even as Jerusalem deteriorated, Count Ballobar’s dinner parties for Jemal remained banquets: the menu for one feast on 6 July 1916 included Turkish soup, fish, steak, meat pies and stuffed turkey, followed by ice cream, pineapple and fruit. While they ate, Jemal talked about girls, power and his new Jerusalem. He fancied himself a city planner and wanted to knock down the walls of Jerusalem and cut a boulevard through the Old City from the Jaffa Gate to the Temple Mount. Then he boasted that he had married the glamorous Leah Tennenbaum.^*

Jemal often turned up chez Ballobar without warning – and, as things got more desperate, the Spaniard used his influence to restrain the Slaughterman’s despotism.

While Jemal oversaw this evanescent Jerusalem, his colleague, Vice-Generalissimo Enver, lost 80,000 men in his inept Russian offensive. He and Talaat blamed their disasters on the Christian Armenians, who were systematically deported and killed. A million perished in a barbaric crime that would later encourage Hitler to begin the Holocaust: ‘No one now remembers the Armenians,’ he reflected. Jemal claimed to disapprove of this massacre. Certainly he allowed refugees to settle in Jerusalem, and the number of Armenians there doubled during the war.