God's Gold (8 page)

As soon as I was back in England I locked myself away in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, to tackle Gershon Salomon's leads. The director of the Temple Mount Faithful had introduced me to three travelers who had allegedly viewed firsthand the Temple treasure of Jerusalem imprisoned in the Vatican: Benjamin of Tudela, Benjamin II, and David Hareuveni. I was able to discount the last two figures very swiftly. Benjamin II was a nineteenth-century traveler who was born in Moldavia and recorded his wanderings across the Near East, Asia, and Africa from 1846 to 1851 in search of the lost tribes of Israel in
Cinq années en Orient,
published in 1856. Actually born Israel Joseph Benjamin, he assumed the name Benjamin II in mimicry of Benjamin of Tudela. However, I. J. Benjamin was living in times when travel was far easier and much of his testimony had already been comprehensively covered in earlier travelogues. There was nothing about Rome he could add to his namesake's far earlier testimony.

Although David Hareuveni was a relatively early and thus revealing source, his highly subjective religious agenda makes him positively unreliable. In the 1520s David declared himself the messiah and his brother king of lost ancient Jewish tribes living in Africa. So soon after the Spanish Inquisition trials and the forced conversion of Jews to Catholicism between 1486 and 1492, Europe's literary and religious circles were intrigued by Hareuveni's originality and boldness. Although he did engineer a meeting with the pope to propose a military alliance
between the tribes of Reuben and the pope's army against Islam, David Hareuveni was an extremist whose testimony is inadmissible.

Of all three characters, Rabbi Benjamin Ben Jonah of Tudela is by far the most important historical source. A Jewish merchant from modern Navarre in Spain, he spent significant time in Rome after the election of Pope Alexander III in 1159 and again from November 1165 until 1167. Rabbi Benjamin was a true pioneer, whose mission was to record the lifestyle of Sephardic Jews across Europe and Africa. His travels took him from Spain to France, Italy, Turkey, the Near East, including Beirut and Jerusalem, and as far as Babylon—an incredible feat for the age.

Inside the Oriental Reading Room in Oxford's Bodleian Library I consulted two versions of
The Itinerary of Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela,
one translated by A. Asher in 1840, the other published by Marcus N. Adler in 1904. Both commentators held their subject in high esteem. Adler observed, “In every place which he entered, he made a record of all that he saw, or was told of by trustworthy persons—matters not previously heard of in the land of Sepharad.” Asher's praise for Rabbi Benjamin was even more glowing:

The traveler's text is easy to follow and it didn't take long for me to find the appropriate passage referring to Temple treasure in Rome. After mentioning the existence of two hundred Jews in the Eternal City, who pay no tribute to the state and occupy an honorable position within society, including the great Hebrew scholars Rabbi Daniel, the chief rabbi, and Rabbi Jechiel (a papal official), Rabbi Benjamin reported thus:

The Jews of Rome told me that every year upon the 9th of Ab they found the columns exuding moisture like water. There also is the cave where Titus the son of Vespasian stored the Temple vessels which he brought from Jerusalem…. In front of St. John in the Lateran there are statues of Samson in marble, with a spear in his hand, of Absalom also the son of King David.

Everything written and resolutely placing the Temple treasure of Jerusalem in Rome today comes down to this single sentence written almost 850 years ago. To say the least, I was sorely disappointed: Rabbi Benjamin offered no validation of why or how the spoils had ended up there or been retained. In fact, reading between the lines it was patently obvious that Rabbi Benjamin made no pretensions at all: he was just passing on a piece of folklore, undoubtedly based on a kernel of truth rooted in Josephus's
Jewish War
and on historical memories of Vespasian's Temple of Peace. Exactly the same folklore undoubtedly also underlies the mosaic inscription of 1291 later built into the same church complex.

Nowhere does the rabbi explicitly state that he saw with his own eyes the treasure in the Lateran or elsewhere. While pondering this text I casually skimmed the rest of his
Itinerary
and soon realized that as a pioneer Benjamin was very much an innocent abroad. In an age preceding the widespread translation of ancient writers and scholarly commentators, knowledge of antiquity was largely based on word of mouth, which always leaves ample scope for misinterpretation. One particular passage convinced me that while Rabbi Benjamin should be much respected, his testimony cannot be trusted as true history. Around Sorrento in Italy, he described how “from this place a man can travel fifteen miles along a road under the mountains, a work executed by King Romulus who built the city of Rome. He was prompted to this by fear of
King David and Joab his general.”

Not only is Romulus a mythical figure for whom no concrete proof exists for such an ancestor of true flesh and blood, but the relocation of the biblical King David to Iron Age Italy is historical nonsense. With dedication I had chased the Israeli government, the Vatican, and Gershon Salomon all down to their major source, which had come up wanting. Frustratingly, I had been on one very time-consuming wild-goose chase. But I did have my answer. The “undeniable facts” placing the Second Temple Jewish treasure in Rome and the Vatican was a fable, an elaborate castle in the air.

My experiences with the Temple Mount Faithful had brought home just how time and faded memory have distorted the truth about the Temple treasure and replaced it with alternative pseudo-histories from the logical to the absurd. Historically, each generation rewrites the past to dovetail with its own particular ideologies. But which, if any, might be accurate? Four very different legends vied for the trophy of truth. As I had just learned, Rabbi Benjamin could be discounted. But what did the Parker Expedition to Jerusalem discover beneath the Temple Mount in 1909? Alternatively, did God's gold really end up in rural southern France, discovered by a parish priest in the village of Rennes-le-Château? Or as many scholars still stake their reputations on today, did one of the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, the Copper Scroll found in Cave 3, hold the ultimate secret to my quest? Not all of these questions could be explored through physical exploration. Rather, their answers lay amid the dusty papers and books of Oxford's Bodleian Library.

The earliest physical quest to uncover the great legacy of the Temple treasure was ill-advised fantasy based on very shaky grounds. In 1908, the eccentric Finnish biblical scholar and master philosopher, Valter H. Juvelius, supposedly unraveled a coded passage in the book of Ezekiel in a library in Constantinople describing the precise location of Solomon's treasure—or so he claimed. Juvelius believed that a fabulous $200 million windfall awaited him beneath the Temple, where it was hidden when King Nebuchadnezzar conquered Jerusalem and burned down the First Temple in 586 BC.

After much hunting for a suitable project leader, Juvelius was fortunate to come across a former soldier, bored and itching for adventure. A thirty-year-old Englishman, Montague Brownslow Parker, the son of the Earl of Morley, had served with distinction in the Boer War, rising young to the rank of captain in the Grenadier Guards. An eager Parker was easily convinced by Juvelius's mouthwatering scheme. After raising $125,000 from various wealthy donors, the Parker Expedition left for the Holy Land and two years of excitement, toil, and trouble.

In August 1909 the team anchored off Jaffa, the port of call for Jerusalem. In Constantinople, Parker had already greased the wheels of the expedition by promising the commissioners of the Ottoman government 50 percent of any treasure uncovered. Meanwhile, Juvelius had secured the services of a Danish clairvoyant to “guide” the search, and had bought up land around the slopes of the hill of Ophel immediately
south of the Temple Mount, where his new employee and partner had advised him to dig.

The instructions of the Danish clairvoyant were strictly followed to the letter, and a shaft first dug by Charles Warren of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1867, leading down to the so-called Virgin's Well, was reopened. The expedition believed this would expose a secondary tunnel veering straight to the Temple and its underlying treasure. Here Parker made his first bad move. The unwanted curiosity and attention of the local inhabitants was immediately aroused by the stationing of bodyguards and soldiers around the excavation. The city's cosmopolitan archaeologists, resident in the city's European and American archaeological institutions, were suspicious of the cloak-and-dagger secrecy of the project and why it was not bothering to record the ancient remains scientifically.

Complaints were formally submitted to Jerusalem's Turkish governor. Parker responded shrewdly by inviting Père Louis Hughes Vincent of the Dominican Fathers in Jerusalem to join the team as archaeological adviser. As the director of the French École Biblique et Archéologique de Saint Étienne, and one of the most respected authorities on ancient Jerusalem, Vincent was a perfect front to dampen protest. And for Père Vincent, this was a golden opportunity to study more of the biblical past. Everyone seemed content with this marriage, even though Parker conveniently kept the French priest in the dark over the true objectives of the mission.

By early 1910 heavy winter rains forced the team to retreat home to England empty-handed. The poor weather was compounded by further bad news: back in Jerusalem the local Jews had accused Parker of violating King David and Solomon's tombs, a profound offense with extremely disturbing implications. By August, however, he was back in the Holy City, reinforced with the more efficient skills of British engineers who had worked on the recently opened London Underground. By now the honeymoon period extended to the expedition by the Ottoman government was over. The Turkish patrons were bored by the absence of treasure and had given up hope of any discoveries.

To make matters worse, the excavators now had heavyweight competition in the form of Baron Edmond de Rothschild, who supported the Jews' claims of ancestral disturbance by buying up land around Parker's excavation. Faced with this political containment and isolation, Parker now had to contend with the Turks announcing the project's closure at the end of summer 1911. The team only had eleven months to find the legendary treasure.

Even though the engineers did manage to clear out the entire length of Hezekiah's Tunnel, recording some curious Bronze Age burial caves along way, the secret passage to the Temple never materialized. Time was running out fast. At this stage Parker played his last hand, taking a huge gamble by bribing the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, Azmey Bey, with $25,000 to let him excavate on the Temple Mount itself, sacred to Judaism and the second holiest place on earth to Islam, whose holy ground was closed to Westerners. The image of Parker and a select team dressed in Arab costume sneaking over the walls of this religious compound is straight out of an Indiana Jones Hollywood film. Yet for a week they did excavate the southeast corner of the Temple Mount under the shadow of nightfall. This time, the Danish clairvoyant assured the expedition that the riches were close by, awaiting them beneath Solomon's Stables.

Despite the change in location, the team was still getting nowhere. Utter desperation spread and as time finally ran out Parker made one final desperate decision. On the night of April 17, 1911, the engineers entered the sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock itself—epicenter of the religious world—to explore a natural cavern beneath the sacred rock where, according to legend, Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice to God and where Mohammed ascended to heaven. Hardly surprisingly, the ungodly sound of pick and shovel awoke a mosque attendant, who shrieked in horror at the scene of sacrilege he discovered, and ran into the city like a banshee to expose the violation.

Rumor quickly spread that the English had dug up and stolen the Crown and Ring of Solomon, the Ark of the Covenant, and the Sword of Muhammed. Jerusalem was in uproar, and several days of violent ri
oting broke out. Governor Azmey Bey was mobbed, spat at, and called a pig for his complicity, and the Parker Expedition sped off to their yacht at Jaffa in fear for their lives. Even though their personal baggage was impounded by customs officers, the team managed to escape by sea, only to return to a seven-column headline in the
London Illustrated News
inquiring, “Have Englishmen Discovered the Ark of the Covenant?”

The answer to the question was a resounding no. Public ridicule put Parker in an impossible situation with his sponsors. Even though he successfully arranged for Père Vincent to publish the “scientific” results in the book
Underground Jerusalem
in an act of damage control, the scaffolding around the project was giving way. Even Vincent couldn't help but remark in his book that “subterranean tunnels have always been a favourite element in oriental romance, and their popularity in contemporary folklore has certainly shown no signs of diminution.” Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, a Turkish Commission of Inquiry appointed a new sheikh as guardian of the Dome of the Rock, and Azmey Bey was dismissed as governor. The Turkish commissioners who had brokered a deal with Parker in Constantinople were censured and the entire event hushed up.

From the critical distance of the modern day, it is easy to discount the Parker Expedition for the Temple treasure of Jerusalem as a fatally flawed caper. After all, clairvoyants, government bribery, illegal excavations, and wild Arabs brandishing swords are the stuff of Hollywood films and novels, not of science. Obviously the background and methodology of this project were flawed from the outset. The team hadn't even bothered to assess the true character and history of the treasure they lusted after. So how could it really know what to look for?

But how different was their dream from modern quests that still try to find Noah's Ark on remote Turkish hilltops and Atlantis off the coast of Crete? Renowned institutions that ought to know better still dig deep into their pockets to sponsor such “scientific” ventures. At one level I cannot help but admire the political manipulation, logistical know-how, and energy of the Parker project. Also, when it comes to this particular Temple, we must bear in mind one very particular x-factor: passions here always run very high, strangling logic and common sense.

 

T
he Parker Expedition is a potent reminder that we should be extremely wary of quests that first concoct an idea, nail it to a wall, and then set about proving it. Putting the donkey in front of the cart in the world of treasure hunting has absolutely no chance of success.

Yet even more disturbing and ill founded are theories obsessed with the intrinsic power of ancient treasure to heavily influence political history, even hundreds of years later. To many people, the Jewish icons from Jerusalem's Temple are saturated with such power because of their unique divine history. Guy Patton's and Robin Mackness's
Sacred Treasure, Secret Power: The True History of the Web of Gold
really sets the alarm bells ringing because of the sweeping assumptions it makes about the Temple treasure. The authors believe that the spoils of Jerusalem were seized by the Visigoth leader Alaric during the sack of Rome in AD 410 and carried off into the French Pyrenees around AD 415 by his successor, Ataulphus. When threatened by the Franks and the rise of early Islam, the Visigoths allegedly retreated to their last stronghold at Rennes-le-Château in the Languedoc region of southern France, where the treasure was hidden underground.

Patton and Mackness weave a fantastic conspiracy theory, which strings together a web of coincidences linking the Temple treasure to numerous infamous historical organizations from the Knights Templar to the Nazis. In the shadows lurks the veiled institution of the secretive Priory of Sion, supposedly a medieval order that succeeded the Templars and remains dedicated to this day to protecting the blood-line of the Merovingian kings of Gaul, who ruled from the fifth to eighth centuries. With its shadowy Grand Masters, allegedly including Leonardo da Vinci and Sir Isaac Newton, the priory is also considered by some to be the guardian of the secret of the Temple treasure of Jerusalem.

For all their meandering argument, and its far-reaching and long-term implications, Patton and Mackness neglect to characterize the nature of the very “treasure” that apparently greatly influenced many major acts of history—exactly like Valter Juvelius and Montague Parker ninety years earlier. Again, I was mystified how the transferable powers
or scales of wealth of a treasure can be understood without its composition being clear.

In all fairness, the Rennes-le-Château enigma has long been a favorite stomping ground for treasure hunters and conspiracy theorists. Over the decades its association with the Knights Templar and the Priory of Sion has spawned a minor industry, yielding nearly three hundred books and three television programs. According to legend, in 1885 Bérenger Saunière was appointed parish priest of Rennes. One fine day he chanced upon a folded ancient parchment crammed inside the carved-out hollow of a Visigothic pillar used as an altar in his church. This coded Latin text spoke of a treasure belonging to a seventh-century AD Merovingian king, Dragobert II (died AD 679).

Soon after this discovery, Saunière sped off to Paris with his “treasure map” to seek scholarly advice, and is said to have returned home having purchased three paintings, including
The Shepherds of Arcady
by Nicolas Poussin. Within this painting the shepherds point to an inscription on a tomb apparently resembling one still standing at Arques, a few miles east of Rennes. Part of Saunière's deciphered code was said to read “Poussin holds the key.” So
The Shepherds of Arcady
painting was a coded treasure map literally pointing the way to the treasure of Jerusalem.

The foundations of the Rennes Temple treasure legend lie in the Abbé Saunière's extraordinary building program initiated in 1891. Out of nowhere this man of the cloth somehow found the funds to set up new statues, rebuild much of the village, and provide it with a new water supply and access road. Oddly for a man of sworn humility, the priest also built himself a luxurious villa alongside the church with elaborate gardens, an orangery, and a mysterious locked tower. On his deathbed in 1917, Saunière's final confession was apparently so shocking that the priest who heard it is said to have never smiled again for the rest of his life. Where did this humble parish priest, overseeing a small village community of 298 inhabitants, get the funds for these ambitious renovations?

Perhaps the most fascinating intrigue surrounding the myth of the
Rennes-le-Château treasure is the character of Noel Corbu, founder and proprietor of the Tower Hotel in Rennes, and self-styled biographer of Saunière and his bizarre antics. Corbu claimed that the priest accessed treasure worth 18.5 million francs, but later upped his estimate to a staggering 4 trillion francs. When Corbu first exposed the tale of the treasure, the story was dynamite. The hotelier quickly invited a journalist called Albert Salamon to visit Rennes and record his testimony.

Salamon and hundreds of other devotees swallowed Corbu's story hook, line, and sinker. But something stank of fraud beneath the veneer of Templars, Jewish treasure, and secretive priests. In 2003, Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood convincingly lifted the lid on the truth in
The Treasure of Rennes-le-Château: A Mystery Solved
. Noel Corbu, it turned out, was not a quietly dedicated local historian. Really he was an entrepreneur who had written his own detective story and dabbled in the black market. Most of his historical narrative was a literary invention designed with one specific aim in mind: to put the area on the map and bring fame and fortune to his humble hotel.

Saunière's own bookkeeping shows that his building renovations actually cost 193,000 francs, the equivalent of about $2.9 million today. While this is a considerable sum for a rural parish priest to get his hands on, it is hardly an immense golden treasure. The priest did have good reason to behave secretively, but this had nothing to do with the discovery of the long-lost treasure of Jerusalem, but everything to do with pious fraud. Quite simply, Saunière was trafficking mass for the dead, personally giving fifty-five masses a day and also taking payment for further masses not rendered. Ecclesiastical law set the limits of saying mass for the dead at three a day. The priest was keen for his illicit moonlighting not to come to light. There is no doubt that Putnam and Wood are correct in calling the Rennes/Jerusalem treasure link pseudo-history and “fantastic in the extreme.”