Jerusalem: The Biography (63 page)

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:

I now believe I have empirically proved the extremely ingenious deduction that the entrance to the Temple Archive is the Akeldama and that Temple Archive stands untouched in its hiding place. It ought to be a simple matter to produce the Archive of the Temple from its 2500 year old hiding-place. The existence of the Cipher proves the Temple Archive remains untouched.

Parker was convinced by this crank’s closely argued thesis – even if it was scarcely more rational than the plot of
The Da Vinci Code
. At a time when even the Kaiser was attending séances and when many believed in the Jewish conspiracy, Juvelius had no trouble finding converts. As one of his adepts wrote to him, ‘the Jews are a somewhat secretive race’ – so naturally they had hidden the Ark rather well.

Parker had Juvelius’ document translated from Finnish and bound in a glossy brochure. Then he told his pals, a disreputable crew of indebted aristocrats and military mountebanks,
^*
about this astonishing opportunity to make a fortune: surely this cache would be worth $200 million? Parker was a glib salesman who soon attracted more investors than he could handle. British, Russian and Swedish aristocrats threw money at him, as did wealthy Americans such as Consuelo Vanderbilt, the Duchess of Marlborough. Parker’s syndicate needed free access to the Temple Mount and the City of David, which he was convinced could be arranged ‘by dint of liberal baksheesh!’ In spring 1909, Parker, Juvelius and their Swedish bodyguard-cum-fixer Captain Hoffenstahl visited the sites in Jerusalem, then sailed for Istanbul where Monty, offering ministers 50 per cent of the treasure and cash up front, managed to corrupt much of the new Young Turk regime from the grand vizier down, signing a contract between Djavid Bey, the finance minister, and ‘Honourable M. Parker of the Turf Club, London’.

The Sublime Porte advised Parker to hire an Armenian called Mr Macasadar as his fixer and sent two commissioners to supervise the dig. In August 1909 Captain Hoffenstahl collected the ‘Cipher’ from Juvelius then headed to meet Parker and his friends in Jerusalem, where they made their headquarters in the Kaiser’s Augusta Victoria Fortress on the Mount of Olives and stayed at the Hotel Fast (the best in town). Monty and his friends behaved like a stag-party of hearty public-schoolboys, giving ‘gay dinners’and holding shooting competitions using oranges for target-practice. ‘One morning, we heard unusual noises,’ remembered Bertha Spafford, the American Colonist, ‘and saw the worthy archaeologists playing at being donkeyboys, running alongside the donkeys and imitating the yelling, usually made by Arab boys who were mounted in the Englishmen’s place.’ Parker’s gang bribed many of the potentates of Jerusalem, suborned the governor Azmey Pasha, hired a huge retinue of workers, guides, maids and bodyguards and started to excavate on the Ophel hill. This was and remains the archaeological fulcrum in the quest for ancient Jerusalem: here Charles Warren had dug in 1867. Later the American archaeologists Frederick Bliss and Archibald Dickie found more tunnels which together suggested that this was the site of King David’s Jerusalem. Parker was guided spiritually from afar by Juvelius, and by another member of the expedition, the Irish ‘thought-reader, Lee’. Even when he found nothing, Parker did not lose his faith in Juvelius.

Jerusalem’s Jews, backed by Baron Edmond de Rothschild (who was himself financing a dig for the Ark of the Covenant), claimed that Parker was abusing sacred Jewish ground. Muslims too were anxious, but the Ottomans kept them at arm’s length. To ease their suspicions, Parker hired the archaeological scholar Père Vincent of the Ecole Biblique to supervise his excavation – which did in fact find more evidence that this was the site of a very early settlement. Vincent was oblivious to the real purpose of the dig.

In late 1909, the rains halted Parker’s work, but in 1910 he sailed back into Jaffa on Clarence Wilson’s yacht, the
Water Lily
, and continued his excavations. The Arab workers went on strike several times. When the courts threatened to back the Arabs, Monty and his partners decided that only a dazzling display of British Trooping of the Colour pageantry would overawe the natives: they decided to confront the mayor (Wasif the
oud
-player’s patron) ‘in full uniform’. Captain Duff, wearing helmet, cuirass and the white gauntlets of the Life Guards, and Monty Parker in scarlet tunic and bearskin were, recalled Major Foley, ‘the star turns. We created a sensation!’

When the strikers were dismissed, this farcical parade headed triumphantly through the Old City, led, in Foley’s words, by ‘a troop of Turkish lancers, then the Mayor and Commandant, some holy men, then Duff, Parker, me, Wilson, Macasadar and Turkish gendarmes in the rear.’ Suddenly Duff’s mule bolted through the bazaars with the captain hanging on until he was thrown into a shop and buried in peanuts, much to the hilarity of his friends. ‘An old Jew’, said Foley, ‘thought it was the end of the world and started to wail in Yiddish.’

This display – or more likely ‘liberal baksheesh’ – worked for now. Parker meticulously sent secret reports to the syndicate, covertly named FJMPW after some of its members, and accounts for the bribes, which on his first visit cost £1,900. He spent £3,400 in the first year, and when he had to return in 1910 his accounts reveal ‘Payments to Jerusalem officials: £5,667’. The mayor, Hussein Husseini, received £100 a month. These lavish bribes must have been a blessing for the Jerusalem grandees, but Parker realized that the Young Turk government was in flux and that Jerusalem was a sensitive place: ‘The utmost caution must be used for the smallest mistake may involve serious difficulties!’ he reported. Yet even he did not really understand that he was playing on a volcano. When he resumed digging in the spring of 1911, Parker paid out even more but he was now desperate: he decided to dig on the Temple Mount, bribing Sheikh Khalil al-Ansari, hereditary Custodian of the Haram, and his brother.

Parker and his gang, disguised in pantomime Arab garb, crept on to the Temple Mount and, in the precinct of the Dome itself, they broke open the pavement to dig into the secret tunnels beneath. However, on the night of 17 April, a Muslim nightwatchman, unable to sleep in his crowded home, decided to camp out on the Haram, where he surprised the English and ran into the streets, shouting that disguised Christians were digging up the Dome of the Rock.

The mufti turned back the entire Nabi Musa procession and denounced this wicked Ottoman and British conspiracy. A mob, reinforced by the pilgrims of Nabi Musa raced to defend the Noble Sanctuary. Captain Parker and his friends galloped for their lives to Jaffa. The crowd, which for the one and only time combined Muslims and Jews, both equally outraged, tried to lynch Sheikh Khalil and Macasadar whose lives were saved only when the Ottoman garrison intervened and arrested them. They and Parker’s police guards were all imprisoned in Beirut. In Jaffa, Monty Parker just made it on board the
Water Lily
. But the police there were alerted that he might have the Ark of the Covenant about his person. They searched him and his baggage, but found no Ark. Parker knew he had to escape – so, bamboozling the Ottoman gendarmes by playing the English gentleman, he illuminated the
Water Lily
and announced that he was going ‘to hold a reception on board for the Jaffa officials’. He then sailed away as they were about to board.

Back in Jerusalem, the crowds threatened to kill the governor and slaughter anyone British as rumours spread that Parker had stolen the Crown of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant and the Sword of Muhammad. The governor was in hiding for fear of his life. By the morning of 19 April, the London
Times
reported, ‘there was a tremendous row throughout the city. Shops closed, peasants bolting out of the place and rumours spreading’. The Christians were terrified that ‘Mahomedan pilgrims from Nabi Musa’ were coming ‘to assassinate all Christians’. Simultaneously the Muslims were petrified that ‘8,000 Russian pilgrims were armed to massacre the Mahomedans’. All sides believed that ‘the Solomonic regalia’ had been ‘transferred to Captain Parker’s yacht’.

Europeans stayed indoors and locked their gates. ‘The wrath of the people of Jerusalem was so great’, remembered Bertha Spafford, ‘that patrols were posted on every street.’ Then on the last day of the Nabi Musa, with 10,000 Jerusalemites on the Temple Mount, the mob ‘stampeded. A fearful panic ensued, peasant women and pilgrims pouring out of the walls and running toward the city gates crying “Massacre!” Every family armed itself and barricaded its home. The “Parker fiasco”,’ wrote Spafford, ‘came nearer to causing anti-Christian massacre than anything that happened during our long residence in Jerusalem.’ The
New York Times
informed the world: ‘Gone with Treasure that was Solomon’s. English Party Vanishes on Yacht After Digging under Mosque of Omar: SAID TO HAVE FOUND KING’S CROWN. Turkish Government Sends High Officials to Jerusalem to Investigate!’

Monty Parker, who never grasped the gravity of all this, sailed back to Jaffa that autumn but was advised not to land ‘or else there might be more trouble’. He told the syndicate that he would ‘proceed to Beirut’ to visit the prisoners. His plan was then to go on: ‘To Jerusalem to quiet the press and get hold of the Notables to see a little bit of reason. Once all is quiet, get the Governor to write to the Grand Vizier and say it’s safe for us to return!’ Jerusalem never did ‘see a little bit of reason’ but Parker kept trying until 1914.
^*

There were diplomatic complaints between London and Istanbul, Jerusalem’s governor was sacked, Parker’s accomplices were tried but acquitted (because nothing had been stolen), the money was gone, the treasure chimerical, and the ‘Parker fiasco’ brought down the curtain on fifty years of European archaeology and imperialism.
⁶