Jerusalem: The Biography (50 page)

The Jerusalemite Jews were impoverished by Ottoman taxes so they asked Sabbatai to raise funds from his Cairene patrons, which he did. He succeeded in his mission, but not everyone was convinced as he prepared to declare himself Messiah in Jerusalem. After much debate, the rabbis placed him under a ban. Furious, he moved to Gaza which he chose as his sacred city instead of Jerusalem and then launched his messianic ministry in Aleppo.

If his revelation had started as a slow burn, his fame now exploded and spread like quickfire. Jews across the Diaspora, from Istanbul to Amsterdam, celebrated the arrival of the Messiah. In Ukraine, a pretty Jewish girl named Sarah was orphaned by the Cossack massacres but rescued by Christians and taken to Livorno. There she worked as a prostitute which did not shake her conviction that she was destined to marry the Messiah. When Sabbatai heard about her, he married her and the two toured the Mediterranean together while Jews across Europe were divided between sceptics and frenzied fans who packed their belongings for the journey to greet the Messiah in Jerusalem, whipped themselves, fasted, and rolled naked in mud and snow. In late 1666, the messianic couple rolled into Istanbul where Jews hailed them, but Sabbatai’s ambition to wear the sultan’s crown led to his arrest and forced conversion to Islam.

For most, this apostasy
^*
marked the death of the dream even before Sabbatai died in Montenegrin exile – and Jerusalem’s Jews were happy to see the back of this disruptive charlatan.
⁶
The era of Cromwell and Sabbatai was also the golden age of Islamic mysticism in Jerusalem where the Ottoman sultans were patrons of all the leading orders of Sufis whom the Turks called Dervishes. We have seen how Christians and Jews saw the city. Now a most unconventional Ottoman courtier, Dervish scholar, raconteur and bon vivant named Evliya lovingly describes the city’s idiosyncracies from the Islamic angle with the often hilarious flair that makes him probably the greatest of all Islamic travel-writers.

EVLIYA: THE OTTOMAN PEPYS AND FALSTAFF

Even then, Evliya must have been utterly unique: this wealthy traveller, writer, singer, scholar, and warrior was the son of the sultan’s goldsmith, born in Istanbul, raised at court, educated by the imperial
ulema
, who was advised by Muhammad in a dream to travel the world. He became, in his own words, ‘The World Traveller and Boon Companion to Mankind’ and travelled not only the length of the vast Ottoman realm but into Christendom too, obsessively chronicling his adventures in an astonishing ten volumes. Just as Samuel Pepys was writing his diaries in London, Evliya, whether in Istanbul, Cairo or Jerusalem, was compiling his
Book of Travels
, ‘the longest and fullest travel account in Islamic literature, perhaps in world literature’. No Islamic writer wrote as poetically about Jerusalem, or as wittily about life.

Evliya lived literally on his wits for he won the favour of Mehmet IV with his irresistible jokes, rhyming couplets, mischievous songs and wrestling and he was able to travel by joining the entourages of Ottoman grandees who recruited him for his religious knowledge and for his exuberant entertainment. His books are partly almanacs of amassed facts, partly anthologies of amazing stories: Evliya Celebi (a title that just means ‘gentleman’) both fought the Habsburgs and met the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna, impressing him with his personal knowledge of Jerusalem’s Holy Sepulchre. In battle, he self-deprecatingly recorded his own Falstaffian flight – ‘fleeing is also an act of courage’ – and probably the most ‘strange and comic’ scatological scene in military history.
^*

He never married, and refused to take any job in the imperial service that interfered with his free-spirited travelling. He was often given slave-girls and was as witty about sex as he was about everything else: he called it ‘the sweet calamity,’ and the ‘nice wrestling-match,’ cheerfully recording his bout of impotence which was finally cured by an Egyptian snakebroth. He daringly joked that sex was the ‘greater jihad’, and the most striking thing about him to the modern reader is that here was a devout Muslim who constantly made jokes about Islam that would be unthinkable today.

Though this scholar could recite the entire Koran in eight hours and act as muezzin, unusually he was clean-shaven, irreverent, open-minded and an enemy of fanaticism, whether Islamic, Jewish or Christian. As a ‘wandering Dervish,’ he was fascinated by Jerusalem ‘the ancient
qibla
’ which ‘is at present the Kaaba of the poor (or of the dervishes)’ – the capital, the very Mecca of Sufism: he counted seventy Dervish convents, with the largest near the Damascus Gate, varying in origin from India to the Crimea, and described how a contingent from each order performed ecstatic songs and dances of the
zikr
all night until dawn.

Evliya wrote that the city, which boasted 240 prayer-niches and forty madrassas, was ‘the object of desire of the kings of all nations’ but he was most dazzled by the breathtaking beauty and sanctity of the Dome: ‘This humble one has travelled for thirty-eight years through seventeen empires and viewed countless buildings but I’ve never seen one that so resembled paradise. When a person enters, one stands dumbfounded and amazed with finger to mouth.’ In al-Aqsa, where the preacher mounted the pulpit every Friday brandishing the sword of Caliph Omar and the rituals were serviced by a staff of 800, Evliya observed how the mosaics reflected the rays of the sun so that ‘the mosque becomes light upon light and the congregants’ eyes shine with reverence as they pray’.

In the Dome ‘all pilgrims circumabulate the Rock outside the railing’, while the Temple Mount had become a ‘promenading place embellished with roses, hyacinths, myrtle filled with the intoxicating twitter of nightingales’ and he happily embraced most of its legends – that King David had started building al-Aqsa while Solomon ‘being Sultan of all creatures ordered the demons to complete the construction’. Nonetheless, when he was shown ropes that Solomon had supposedly woven 3,000 years earlier, he could not resist exclaiming to the
ulema
: ‘Do you mean to tell me that the ropes used to bind the demons haven’t rotted?’

Naturally he visited the Church at Easter where his reaction resembled that of the English Protestants. He worked out the secret of the Holy Fire, claiming that a hidden zinc jar of naphtha was dripped down a chain by a hidden monk to deliver the annual miracle. The festival itself was just ‘pandemonium’ and the Church ‘ lacks spirituality, more like a tourist attraction’ but he chatted to a Protestant there who blamed it on the Orthodox Greeks, ‘a stupid and credulous people’.

Evliya returned several times before he retired to finish his books in Cairo but he never saw anything to compare with the Dome of the Rock – ‘verily a replica of a pavilion in paradise’. Not everyone agreed: conservative Muslims were horrified by all the Sufi dancing, miracle-working and the saintly cults that Evliya so enjoyed. ‘Some of the women unveil their faces, displaying their beauty, their ornaments and perfumes. By God, they were sitting cheek-to-jowl among men!’ observed Qashashi, denouncing ‘excited clamours and dancing’, the playing of tambourines and merchants selling sweets. ‘These are the days of the wedding-feast of Satan.’

The Ottomans were now in full decline, the sultans shoved back and forth between the demands of European powers, each of them backing their own Christian sect. When the Catholic Austrians and French won the
praedominium
for the Franciscans, the Russians, a brash new power in Europe and in Jerusalem, lobbied and bribed the Ottomans until they had regained it for the Orthodox. The Franciscans soon got it back again, but three times actual fighting broke out in the Church.
^*
In 1699, the Ottomans, defeated on the battlefield, signed the Treaty of Karlowitz, which allowed the Great Powers to protect their brethren in Jerusalem – a disastrous concession.
⁷

Meanwhile Istanbul’s governors had so repressed Palestine that the peasants rebelled. In 1702, the new Governor of Jerusalem crushed the rebellion and decorated the walls with the heads of his victims. But when he destroyed a village owned by the religious leader – the mufti – of Jerusalem, the city’s qadi denounced him at Friday prayers in al-Aqsa and opened the gates to the rebels.

THE FAMILIES

1705–1799

THE HUSSEINIS: THE REVOLT OF THE NAQIB AL-ASHRAF
AND THE CANINE POGROM

Armed peasants marauded through the streets. The qadi – the chief judge – backed by the garrison, stormed the prison and took command of Jerusalem. In one of her stranger moments, the city found herself independent: the qadi, in return for bribes, appointed Muhammad ibn Mustafa al-Husseini as head of the city.

Husseini was the chief of Jerusalem’s pre-eminent clan who had risen on the coat-tails of the Farrukhs a century earlier, but he was also the Naqib al-Ashraf, the leader of the families descended from the Prophet, via his grandson Hussein: only the Ashraf could wear the green turban and be addressed as Sayyid.

The Ottomans despatched troops to suppress the revolt who camped outside the walls. Husseini showed that he was ready for a siege, and the troops retreated to Gaza. Inside Jerusalem the rebellion had replaced one tyranny with another. Jews were forbidden to wear white on the Sabbath or Muslim headgear or to have nails in their shoes; Christians suffered similar sartorial restrictions; and both had to make way for Muslims in the streets. Outrageous fines were collected with violence. A messianic sect of 500 Polish Jews from Grodno, led by Judah the Pious, had just arrived. But their rabbi died, and they spoke only Polish or Yiddish, leaving them particularly helpless. They were soon impoverished.

When a stray dog wandered on to the Temple Mount, the qadi ordered the killing of every canine in Jerusalem. As a special humiliation, every Jew and Christian had to deliver dead dogs to a collection point outside the Zion Gate. Gangs of children killed dogs and then gave the carcasses to the nearest infidel.

When a stronger Ottoman army approached, the garrison and the Sufi mystics turned against the rebellion and seized the Tower of David. Husseini fortified himself in his mansion, and they fired arrows at each other for three days. In the ensuing battle, the northern streets of the Old City were strewn with corpses – and Husseini lost more support. Outside, the Ottomans bombarded the Temple Mount. In the middle of the night on 28 November 1705, Husseini realized his game was up and escaped, pursued by the Ottomans. The reign of extortion continued under the new governor. Many Jews, robbed again, simply left, and the Polish Ashkenazis were broken, finally in 1720 facing imprisonment, banishment and bankruptcy, their synagogue in the Jewish Quarter burned down.
^*
The Sephardis – the small, old Jewish community at home in the Arab and Ottoman world – survived.

Husseini was captured and beheaded. After much dynastic rivalry, the Husseinis were later succeeded as naqib by Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya whose family changed its name sometime in the century and purloined that of the prestigious Husseinis. The Ghudayyas became the new Husseinis, the most powerful of Jerusalem’s ruling families – right up into the twenty-first century.
⁸

THE HUSSEINIS: RISE OF THE FAMILIES

Anyone important who came to Jerusalem during the eighteenth century wished to stay with the chief of this clan, who held open house for peasants, scholars and Ottoman officials alike; it was said he had eighty guests for dinner every night. ‘Everyone visits him from near and afar,’ wrote one such guest to the ‘palace’ of Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya who dominated Jerusalem. ‘Strangers find refuge in his home, residing there as they like.’ Abd al-Latif’s visitors left Jerusalem escorted by a squadron of his horsemen.

The resurgence of the Husseinis marked the rise of the great Jerusalem Families. Virtually every position of honour in Jerusalem was hereditary. Most of the Families were descended from Sufi sheikhs who had been favoured by one conqueror or another. Most changed their names, invented grandiose genealogies and alternately feuded and intermarried – not unlike their Western equivalents. Each fiercely defended and strived to expand its own lucrative power-base.
^†

But wealth would have been vulgar without scholarship; pedigree powerless without wealth, and position impossible without Ottoman patronage. Sometimes the Families fought it out: two Nusseibehs were ambushed and killed by a Husseini posse near Abu Ghosh, but, typically, the families made peace by marrying the surviving Nusseibeh brother of the victims to the sister of the Mufti of Jerusalem.

Yet even the Families could not ensure prosperity in a Jerusalem scarred by intermittent fighting between the 500-strong Ottoman garrison notorious for its debauchery, raiding Bedouin, rioting Jerusalemites and venal governors. The population shrank to 8,000, preyed upon by the Governor of Damascus who descended on the city annually with a small army to collect the taxes.
^*

The Jews, without any European backing, suffered bitterly. ‘The Arabs’, wrote Gedaliah, an Ashkenazi from Poland, ‘often wrong the Jews publicly. If one of them gives a Jew a blow, the Jew goes away cowering. While an angry Turk would beat a Jew shamefully and dreadfully with his shoes and not one would deliver the Jew.’ They lived in squalor, banned from repairing their houses. Two hundred Jewish families took flight: with ‘the persecutions and extortions increasing every day’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim in 1766, ‘I had to flee from the city at night. Every day somebody was flung into prison.’