Jerusalem: The Biography (58 page)

In February 1867, Lieutenant of Royal Engineers Charles Warren, twenty-seven years old, began the Society’s survey of Palestine. However, the Jerusalemites were hostile to any excavations around the Temple Mount so he hired plots nearby and sank twenty-seven shafts deep into the rock. He uncovered the first real archaeological artefacts in Jerusalem, the pottery of Hezekiah marked ‘Belonging to the King’; forty-three cisterns under the Temple Mount; Warren’s Shaft in the Ophel hill that he believed was King David’s conduit into the city; and his Warren’s Gate in the tunnels along the Western Wall was one of Herod’s main entrances to the Temple – and later the Jewish Cave. This adventurous archaeologist personified the glamour of the new science. In one of his subterranean exploits he uncovered the ancient Struthion Pool and sailed on it on a raft made of doors. Fashionable Victorian ladies were lowered in baskets down his shafts, swooning at the biblical sights as they loosened their corsets.

Warren sympathized with the Jews, angered by the boorish European tourists who mocked their ‘most solemn gathering’ at the Wall as if it were a ‘farce’. On the contrary, the ‘country must be governed for them’ so that ultimately ‘the Jewish principality might stand by itself as a separate kingdom guaranteed by the Great Powers’.
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The French were just as aggressive in their archaeological aspirations – though their chief archaeologist, Félicien de Saulcy, was a bungler who declared that the Tomb of Kings just north of the walls belonged to King David. In fact it was the tomb of the Queen of Adiabene dating from a thousand years later.

In 1860, Muslims massacred Christians in Syria and Lebanon, furious at the sultan’s laws in favour of Christians and Jews, but this only attracted further Western advances: Napoleon III sent troops to save the Maronite Christians of the Lebanon, refreshing French claims to the area that had survived from Charlemagne, the Crusades and King Francis in the sixteenth century. In 1869, Egypt, backed by French capital, opened the Suez Canal at a ceremony attended by the French empress Eugénie, the Prussian crown prince Frederick and the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph. Not to be outdone by the British and Russians, the Prussian Frederick sailed up to Jaffa and rode to Jerusalem, where he vigorously promoted a Prussian presence in the race to grab churches and archaeological prizes: he bought the site of the Crusader St Mary of the Latins, close to the Church, and Frederick (the father of the future Kaiser Wilhelm II) backed the aggressive archaeologist Titus Tobler, who declared: ‘Jerusalem must be ours.’ As Frederick headed back to Jaffa, he almost rode into Franz Joseph, the Emperor of Austria and titular King of Jerusalem, who had only recently been defeated by the Prussians at the Battle of Sadowa. They greeted one another coldly.

Franz Joseph galloped into Jerusalem escorted by a thousand Ottoman guards, including Bedouin with lances, Druze with rifles, and cameleers, and accompanied by an enormous silver bed, a present from the sultan. ‘We dismounted,’ the emperor recorded, ‘and I knelt in the road and kissed the earth’ as the cannon of David’s Tower boomed a salute. He was overcome by ‘how everything seemed to be just like one imagined it from one’s childhood stories and the Bible’
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But the Austrians, like all the Europeans, were buying buildings to promote a new Christian city: the emperor inspected the huge earth-works to build an Austrian Hospice on the Via Dolorosa.

‘I shall never concede any road improvements to these crazy Christians,’ wrote the Ottoman grand vizier Fuad Pasha, ‘as they would then transform Jerusalem into a Christian madhouse.’ But the Ottomans did build a new Jaffa road especially for Franz Joseph. The momentum of the ‘Christian madhouse’ was unstoppable.

MARK TWAIN AND THE ‘PAUPER VILLAGE’

Captain Charles Warren, the young archaeologist, was passing the Jaffa Gate when he was amazed to witness a beheading. The execution was horribly botched by a clumsy headman: ‘You’re hurting me,’ cried the victim as the executioner hacked at his neck sixteen times until he just climbed on to the unfortunate’s back and sawed through his spinal column as if he was sacrificing a sheep. Jerusalem had at least two faces and a multiple personality disorder: the gleaming, imperial edifices, built by the Europeans in pith helmets and redcoats as they rapidly Christianized the Muslim Quarter, existed alongside the old Ottoman city where black Sudanese guards protected the Haram and guarded condemned prisoners whose heads still rolled in public executions. The gates were still closed each sundown; Bedouin surrendered their spears and swords when they came into the city. A third of the city was a wasteland and a photograph (taken by the Armenian Patriarch no less) showed the Church surrounded by open country in the midst of the city. The two worlds frequently clashed: when in 1865, the first telegraph opened between Jerusalem and Istanbul, the Arab horseman who charged the telegraph-pole was arrested and hanged from it.

In March 1866, Montefiore, now a widower of eighty-one, arrived on his sixth visit and could not believe the changes. Finding that the Jews at the Western Wall were exposed not only to the rain but to occasional pelting from the Temple Mount above, he received permission to set up an awning there – and tried unsuccessfully to buy the Wall, one of many attempts by the Jews to own their holy site. As he left Jerusalem, he felt ‘more deeply than ever impressed’. It was not his last trip: when he returned in 1875 aged ninety-one, ‘I beheld almost a new Jerusalem springing up with buildings, some of them as fine as any in Europe.’ As he left for the last time, he could not help but muse that ‘surely we’re approaching the time to witness the realization of God’s hallowed promises unto Zion.’
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Guidebooks warned against ‘squalid Polish Jews’, and a ‘miasma of filth’, but to some it was the Protestant pilgrims who tainted the place.
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‘Lepers, cripples, the blind and idiotic, assail you on every hand,’ observed Samuel Clemens, the journalist from Missouri who wrote as ‘Mark Twain’. Travelling the Mediterranean aboard the
Quaker City
, Twain, celebrated as the ‘Wild Humorist’, was on a pilgrim cruise called the Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion which he renamed the Grand Holy Land Funeral Expedition. He treated pilgrimage as a farce, mocking the sincerity of American pilgrims whom he called ‘innocents abroad’. ‘It’s a relief to steal a walk for a hundred yards’, he wrote, without encountering another ‘site’. He was most amused to find the column in the Church that was the centre of the world made of the dust from which Adam was conjured: ‘No man has been able to prove that the dirt was NOT procured here.’ Overall he hated the Church’s ‘trumpery, geegaws and tawdry ornamentation’, and the city: ‘Renowned Jerusalem, the stateliest name in history has become a pauper village – mournful dreary and lifeless – I wouldn’t want to live here.’
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Yet even the Wild Humorist quietly bought his mother a Jerusalem Bible and sometimes reflected, ‘I am sitting where a god has stood.’

The tourists, whether religious or secular, Christian or Jewish, Chateaubriand, Montefiore or Twain, were good at seeing where gods had stood but almost blind when it came to seeing the actual people who lived there. Throughout her history, Jerusalem existed in the imagination of devotees who lived faraway in America or Europe. Now that these visitors were arriving on steamships in their thousands, they expected to find the exotic and dangerous, picturesque and authentic images they had imagined with the help of their Bibles, their Victorian stereotypes of race, and, once they arrived, their translators and guides. They saw only the diversity of costumes in the streets and dismissed the images they did not like as Oriental filth and what Baedeker called ‘wild superstition and fanaticism’. Instead, they would build the ‘authentic’ grand Holy City they had expected to find. It was these views that would drive the imperial interest in Jerusalem. As for the rest – the vibrant, half-veiled, ancient world of the Arabs and Sephardic Jews – they could scarcely see it. But it was very much there.
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ARAB CITY, IMPERIAL CITY

1870–80

YUSUF KHALIDI: MUSIC, DANCING, DAILY LIFE

The real Jerusalem was like a Tower of Babel in fancy dress with a hierarchy of religions and languages. Ottoman officers wore embroidered jackets coupled with European uniforms; Ottoman Jews, Armenians and Arab Christians and Muslims sported frock-coats or white suits with a new piece of headgear that symbolized the new reformed Ottoman empire: the tarbush, or fez; the Muslim
ulema
wore turbans and robes that were almost identical to those worn by many of the Sephardic Jews and Orthodox Arabs; the growing numbers of penurious Polish Hasidic Jews
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wore gaberdine coats and fedoras; the kavasses – the bodyguards of the Europeans – were often Armenians who still wore scarlet jackets, white pantaloons and packed big pistols. Shoeless black slaves served ice sherbet to their masters, the old Arab or Sephardic families whose men often wore a smattering of all the above costumes – turbans or fezzes but with long coats tied with a sash, wide Turkish trousers and a black Western jacket on top. The Arabs spoke Turkish and Arabic; the Armenians Armenian, Turkish and Arabic; Sephardis, Ladino, Turkish and Arabic; the Hasids, Yiddish, that mitteleuropean argot of German and Hebrew which spawned its own great literature.

If this seemed chaotic to the outsiders, the sultan-caliph presided over a Sunni empire: the Muslims were at the top; the Turks ruled; then came the Arabs. The Polish Jews, much mocked for their poverty, ‘wailing’ and the trance-like rhythms of their prayers, were at the bottom; but in between, in a half-submerged folk culture, there was much blending, despite the stringent rules of each religion.

At the end of the Ramadan fast, all the religions celebrated with a feast and a fair outside the walls, with merry-go-rounds and horseraces, while vendors exhibited obscene peepshows and sold Arab sweets, Maidens Hair and Turkish Delight. During the Jewish festival of Purim, Muslim and Christian Arabs dressed up in the traditional Jewish costumes, and all three religions attended the Jewish Picnic held at the tomb of Simon the Just north of the Damascus Gate. Jews presented their Arab neighbours with matzah and invited them to the Passover Seder dinner, while the Arabs returned the favour by giving the Jews newly baked bread when the festival ended. Jewish
mohel
s often circumcised Muslim children. Jews held parties to welcome their Muslim neighbours back from the
haj
. The closest relations were between Arabs and Sephardic Jews. Indeed the Arabs called the Sephardis ‘
Yahud, awlad Arab
– Jews, son of Arabs’, their own Jews and some Muslim women even learned Ladino. During droughts, the
ulema
asked the Sephardic rabbis to pray for rain. The Sephardic, Arab-speaking Valeros, the city’s leading bankers, were business partners with many of the Families. Ironically, the Arab Orthodox Christians were the most hostile to Jews, whom they insulted in traditional Easter songs and lynched as they approached the Church.

Although Baedeker warned tourists that ‘there are no places of public amusement in Jerusalem’, this was a city of music and dancing. The locals met in the coffee houses and cellar bars to smoke
narghileh
water pipes, play backgammon, watch wrestling matches and belly dancing. At weddings and festivals, there was circle-dancing (
dabkah
), while singers performed such love songs as ‘My lover, your beauty hurt me’. Arab love songs alternated with the Andalusian Ladino songs of the Sephardis. Dervishes danced their
zikr
wildly to the
mazhar
drums and cymbals. In private houses, music was played by mixed Jewish and Arab musicians on the lute (
oud
), fiddle (
rabbaba
) double clarinets (
zummara
and
arghul
) and kettledrum (
inaqqara
). These instruments echoed through the six hammam bathhouses that were central to Jerusalem life. The men (who used them between 2 a.m. and midday) enjoyed massages and had their moustaches trimmed; the women dyed their hair with henna and drank coffee. The brides of Jerusalem were led by singing, drumming girlfriends to the hammam where all their body hair was festively removed using
zarnikh
, a pitch-like syrup. The wedding night itself started at the baths, then the groom and his party collected the bride from her home and, if this was a wedding of the Families, they walked under a canopy held by servants, illuminated by torches and followed by a drummer and a band of pipers, up to the Temple Mount.

The Families were the apex of Jerusalem society. The first municipal leader was a Dajani, and in 1867, Yusuf al-Diya al-Khalidi, aged twenty-five, became the first mayor of Jerusalem. Henceforth the post was always held by the Families – there would be six Husseinis, four Alamis, two Khalidis, three Dajanis. Khalidi, whose mother was a Husseini, had run away as a boy to attend Protestant school in Malta. Later he worked for the liberal grand vizier in Istanbul. He regarded himself first as an ‘Utsi’ – a Jerusalemite (he called Jerusalem his ‘homeland’) – second as an Arab (and a Shami, an inhabitant of Shams al-Bilad, greater Syria), third as an Ottoman. He was an intellectual, one of the stars of the
nahda
, the Arab literary renaissance that saw the opening of cultural clubs, newspapers and publishers.
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Yet the first mayor discovered his was a fighting as well as municipal job: the governor despatched him with forty horsemen to suppress fighting at Kerak, perhaps the only mayor of modern history to lead a cavalry expedition.