Jerusalem: The Biography (49 page)

When after forty-five years on the throne Suleiman died on campaign with his army, his ministers propped him up like a waxwork in his carriage and showed him to his soldiers until the succession was safe for Selim, one of his sons by Roxelana. Selim II, known as the Drunkard, owed much to the intrigues of his friend, Joseph Nasi, the Great Jew, who, now living in splendour in his Belvedere Palace, rich from his monopolies of Polish beeswax and Moldavian wine, was promoted to Duke of Naxos. He almost became King of Cyprus. Such was his championing of persecuted or penurious Jews in Europe and Jerusalem that there were whisperings shortly before his death that this ducal Jewish Croesus must be the Messiah. But little came of his plans. Under Selim and his successors, the Ottoman empire was still expanding and, thanks to vast resources and superb bureaucracy, it remained awesomely powerful for another century – but its emperors soon struggled to control distant provinces ruled by overmighty governors and Jerusalem’s tranquillity was periodically shattered by bouts of violence.

In 1590, a local Arab rebel broke into Jerusalem and seized the city, killing the governor. The rebels were defeated and expelled. Jerusalem fell under the sway of two Balkan brothers, Ridwan and Bairam Pasha, Christian slaveboys converted to Islam and trained at the court of Suleiman, and their Circassian henchman, Farrukh. Their families dominated – and abused – Palestine for almost a century. When Farrukh’s son, Muhammad, found himself locked out of Jerusalem in 1625, he stormed the walls with 300 mercenaries then, closing the gates, he proceeded to torture Jews, Christians and Arabs alike to extort money.

Such outrages only encouraged the strongest of the Christian sects, the Armenians, to canvass and bribe the sultans and brawl in the churches of Jerusalem, all part of their campaign to vanquish the Catholics and win the
praedominium
. In the first twenty years of the century, the sultans issued thirty-three decrees to defend the embattled Catholics and in just seven years, the
praedominium
changed hands six times. However, the Christians had become the most lucrative source of business in Palestine: every day, the Custodian of the Church, the chief of the Nusseibeh family, sat on a throne in the courtyard with his armed henchmen charging for access – and the income from the thousands of pilgrims was enormous. At Easter, which Muslims called the Festival of the Red Egg, the governor of Jerusalem set up his throne, and, accompanied by the qadi, the custodian and the entire fully-armed garrison, he charged each of the 20,000 ‘hell-destined infidels’ ten gold pieces that was shared out among the Ottomans and the
ulema
.

Meanwhile something was afoot amongst the Jews. ‘Jerusalem’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim, ‘was more greatly populated than at any time since the first exile’ and as Jerusalem’s ‘fame spread, it became known we lived in peace. Scholars flocked to the gates.’ A caravan of Egyptian Jews arrived every Passover. Most of the Jews were Ladino-speaking Sephardis who were secure enough to build the ‘four synagogues’ that became the centre of life in the Jewish Quarter, but some of the pilgrims were eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives – indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling – ‘the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God’. On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the ‘bride of God’, the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?

Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushes and the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America.
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When the English sea captain and merchant Henry Timberlake arrived, the Ottoman governors had never heard of Protestantism or his Queen Elizabeth and he was thrown into jail next to the Holy Sepulchre, released only on payment of a fine. The exuberant memoir of his adventures,
A True and Strange Discourse
, became a bestseller in Jacobean London. Another of these audacious Englishmen, John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, paid his fee to the Turks to enter the Church but was attacked by the Franciscan monks, whose padre ‘accused me to be a Jew’. The Turks then arrested him, tried to convert him to Islam and took him before the qadi, who searched him and then released him as a Christian.

Acts of fanaticism, both Christian and Muslim, unleashed violence that reveals the real limits of the much-vaunted Ottoman tolerance: the Ottoman governor forcibly closed down the beloved Ramban synagogue at the request of the
ulema
: Jews were forbidden to pray there and it was converted into a warehouse. When the Franciscans quietly extended their Mount Zion property, rumours spread that they were burrowing to Malta to let in the Christian armies: they were attacked by the qadi and the mob and only rescued by the Ottoman garrison. A Portuguese nun who baptized Muslim children and denounced Islam was burned on a pyre in the courtyard of the Church.
^*
4

At Easter 1610, a young Englishman arrived who represented not only the new Protestantism but the New World too.

GEORGE SANDYS: THE FIRST ANGLO-AMERICAN

George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a scholar who translated Virgil into English, was appalled by the decay of Jerusalem – ‘much of which lies waste, old buildings all ruined, the new, contemptible.’ Sandys was half-repulsed, half-amused by the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews he saw at the Western Wall: ‘their fantastical gestures exceed all barbarity with ridiculous nodding’, and he thought it ‘impossible not to laugh’. The God-fearing Protestant was even more disgusted by what he regarded as the vulgar hucksterism of the Orthodox and Catholics. The city was ‘once sacred and glorious, elected by God for his seat’, but she was now merely a ‘theatre of mysteries and miracles’.

That Easter, Sandys was horrified by Christians and Muslims alike: he saw the pasha of Jerusalem on his throne outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sandys watched as thousands of pilgrims, each carrying pillow and carpet, flocked to spend the night in the Church. On Good Friday, he followed the procession of the padre of the Franciscans, who carried a life-sized waxen model of Jesus on a sheet along the Via Dolorosa before fixing it to a cross. As thousands filled the Church and camped in its courtyard, he watched the ceremony of the Holy Fire, ‘the savage clamours’, the clash of cymbals, the ‘women whistling’ – conduct ‘befitting better the solemnities of Bacchus’. When the Fire emerged, the pilgrims ran around ‘like madmen thrusting the flame among their clothes and into their bosoms, persuading strangers it will not burn them’.

Yet this composer of hymns was a passionate Protestant who revered Jerusalem just as much as the Catholics and Orthodox. Returning to the fundamentals of the Bible itself, he prayed passionately at the tomb of Christ and the graves of the Crusader kings. On his return, he dedicated his book,
A Relation of a Journey begun
ad
1610
, to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, whose father James I had recently commissioned fifty-four scholars to create an English Bible that was entirely accessible to all. In 1611, the scholars delivered their Authorized Version, which, fusing earlier translations by William Tyndale and others, brought the divine scriptures to life in a masterpiece of translation and of poetical English. This Bible became the spiritual and literary heartland of Anglicanism, England’s singular Protestantism. The Bible became what one writer called ‘the national epic of Britain,’ a story that placed the Jews and Jerusalem at the very heart of British and, later, American life.

Sandys was one link between the real city and the Jerusalem of the New World. In 1621, he set off for America as treasurer of the Virginia Company. During his ten years in Jamestown, he led the raid against the Algonquin native Americans during which he slaughtered a considerable number: Protestants were no less capable of killing defiant infidels than any other seventeenth-century faith. Sandys was not the only Jerusalem pilgrim-adventurer to be there: Henry Timberlake was in Virginia at the same time. Their pilgrimages to the new Promised Land of America were at least partly inspired by the Protestant vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.

Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.

Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. ‘Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,’ prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the
Mayflower
. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed ‘the God of Israel is amongst us’ and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as ‘a city on a hill’ – America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.

The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:

‘Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,’ he said. ‘You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.’ Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should ‘transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance’.

Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to
all
corners of the world
before
their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming – yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude ‘this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.’ Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem – or was he?
⁵

THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI

He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.

Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism – he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.