Jerusalem: The Biography (62 page)

THE
OUD
- PLAYER OF JERUSALEM

1905–1914

DAVID GRÜN BECOMES DAVID BEN-GURION

David Grün’s father was already a local leader of the Lovers of Zion, forerunner of the Zionist movement, and a keen Hebraist, so the boy was taught Hebrew from an early age. But David, like many other Zionists, was shocked when he read that Herzl had accepted the Ugandan offer. At the Sixth Zionist Congress, Herzl tried to sell his so-called Ugandaism but he succeeded only in splitting his movement. His rival, the English playwright Israel Zangwill, coiner of the phrase ‘melting pot’ to describe the assimilation of immigrants in America, decamped to found his Jewish Territorialist Organization and pursue an array of quixotic non-Palestinian Zions. The Austrian plutocrat Baron Maurice de Hirsch was financing Jewish colonies in Argentina, and the New York financier Jacob Schiff was promoting the Galveston Plan, a Lone Star Zion for Russian Jews in Texas. There was more support for El Arish because it was close to Palestine and Zionism was nothing without Zion, but none of these schemes
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flourished and Herzl, exhausted by his peripatetic travels, died soon afterwards, aged just forty-four. He had successfully established Zionism as one of the solutions to the Jewish plight, particularly in Russia.

Young David Grün mourned his hero Herzl even though ‘we concluded the most effective way to combat Ugandaism was by settling in the Land of Israel’. In 1905, Emperor Nicholas II faced a revolution that almost cost him the throne. Many of the revolutionaries were Jews – Leon Trotsky being the most prominent – yet they were actually internationalists who despised both race and religion. Nonetheless, Nicholas felt that the forged anti-Semitic tract,
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, was coming true: ‘How prophetic!’ he wrote, ‘This year 1905 had been truly dominated by the Jewish Elders.’ Forced to accept a constitution, he tried to restore his damaged autocracy by encouraging anti-Semitic massacres by nationalistic revanchists nicknamed the Black Hundreds.

The pogroms encouraged David Grün, a member of the socialist party Poalei Zion – Workers of Zion – to board one of the pilgrim ships from Odessa and set out for the Holy Land. The boy from
was typical of the Second Aliyah, a wave of secular pioneers, many of them socialist, who regarded Jerusalem as a nest of medieval superstition. In 1909, these settlers founded Tel Aviv on the sand dunes next to the ancient port of Jaffa; in 1911, they created a new collective farm – the first kibbutz – in the north.

Grün did not visit Jerusalem for many months after his arrival; instead he worked in the fields of Galilee, until, in mid-1910 the twenty-four-year-old moved to Jerusalem to write for a Zionist newspaper. Diminutive, skinny, curly-haired and always clad in a Russian
rubashka
smock to emphasize his socialist credentials, he adopted the nom de plume ‘Ben-Gurion’, borrowed from one of Simon bar Kochba’s lieutenants. The old shirt and the new name revealed the two sides of the emerging Zionist leader.

Ben-Gurion believed, like most of his fellow Zionists at this time, that a socialist Jewish state would be created without violence and without dominating or displacing the Palestinian Arabs; rather it would exist alongside them. He was sure that the Jewish and Arab working classes would cooperate. After all, the Ottoman
vilayets
of Sidon and Damascus and the
sanjak
of Jerusalem – as Palestine was then known – were poverty-stricken backwaters, sparsely populated by the 600,000 Arabs. There was much space to be developed. The Zionists hoped the Arabs would share the economic benefits of Jewish immigration. But there was little mixing between the two and it did not occur to the Zionists that most of these Arabs had no wish for the benefits of their settlement.

In Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion rented a windowless cellar but he spent his time in the Arab cafés of the Old City listening to the gramophones that played the latest Arabic songs.
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At the same time, a Christian Arab boy, a native Jerusalemite already a connoisseur of beauty and pleasure, was listening to the same songs in the same cafés and learning to play them on his lute.

THE
OUD
- PLAYER: WASIF JAWHARIYYEH

Wasif Jawhariyyeh started to learn the lute – or
oud
– as a boy, and soon he was the best
oud
-player in a town that lived for music: it gave him access to everyone, high and low. Born in 1897, the son of a respected Greek Orthodox town councillor, close to the Families, he was too felinely artistic to develop into a local worthy. He was apprenticed as a barber but soon defied his parents to become a musician. Witnessing everything and knowing everybody, from the Jerusalemite grandees and Ottoman pashas to Egyptian chanteuses, hash-smoking musicians and promiscuous Jewesses, useful to the elite but not quite of it, Wasif Jawhariyyeh started to write a diary at the age of seven that is one of the masterpieces of Jerusalem’s literature.
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When he began his diary, his father still rode to work on a white donkey, but he saw the first horseless conveyance, a Ford automobile driven by one of the American Colonists on the Jaffa Road; having been used to a life without electricity, soon he loved watching the new cinematograph in the Russian Compound (‘entry fee was one Ottoman bishlik paid at the door’).

Wasif revelled in the cultural mix. A Christian educated at the English public school of St George’s, he studied the Koran and enjoyed picnics on the Temple Mount. Regarding Sephardic Jews as ‘Yahud, awlad Arab’ (Jews, son of Arabs), he dressed up for Jewish Purim and attended the annual Jewish Picnic at Simon the Just’s tomb, where he sang Andalusian songs to
oud
and tambourine. At a typical gig, he played a Jewish version of a well-known Arab song to accompany an Ashkenazi choir in the house of a Jewish tailor in the Montefiore Quarter.

In 1908, Jerusalem celebrated the Young Turk Revolution which overthrew the tyrannical Abdul-Hamid and his secret police. The Young Turks – the Committee of Union and Progress – restored the 1876 Constitution and called parliamentary elections. In the excitement, Albert Antebi, a local businessman known to his fans as the Jewish Pasha and to his enemies as Little Herod, threw hundreds of free loaves to the delighted crowds at the Jaffa Gate. Children acted out the Young Turk coup in street plays.

The Arabs believed that at last they would be liberated from Ottoman despotism. The early Arab nationalists were unsure if they wanted a kingdom centred in Arabia or a Greater Syria, but already the Lebanese writer Najib Azouri had noticed how Arab and Jewish aspirations were developing simultaneously – and were bound to collide. Jerusalem elected the grandees Uthman al-Husseini and Yusuf Khalidi’s nephew, Ruhi, a writer, politician and man of the world, as Members of Parliament. In Istanbul, Ruhi Khalidi became deputy speaker, using his position to campaign against Zionism and Jewish land purchases.

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.
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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!
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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’.