Jerusalem: The Biography (56 page)

On 31 October 1847, the silver star on the marble floor of the Grotto of Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, was cut out and stolen. The star had been donated by France in the eighteenth century; now it had obviously been stolen by the Greeks. The monks fought in Bethlehem. In Istanbul, the French claimed the right to replace the Bethlehem star and to repair the roof of the Church in Jerusalem; the Russians claimed it was their right; each cited eighteenth-century treaties. The row simmered until it became a duel of two emperors.

In December 1851, the French president Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the inscrutably bland yet politically agile nephew of the great Napoleon, overthrew the Second Republic in a coup d’état and prepared to crown himself Emperor Napoleon III. This womanizing adventurer whose sharply-waxed moustaches could not distract attention from an oversized head and an undersized torso was in some ways the first modern politician and he knew his brash, fragile new empire required Catholic prestige and victory abroad. Nicholas, on the other hand, saw the crisis as the chance to crown his reign by saving the Holy Places for ‘the Russian God’. For these two very different emperors, Jerusalem was the key to glory in heaven and on earth.

JAMES FINN AND THE CRIMEAN WAR:
MURDERED EVANGELISTS AND MARAUDING BEDOUIN

The sultan, squeezed between the French and Russians, tried to settle the dispute with his decree of 8 February 1852, confirming the Orthodox paramountcy in the Church, with some concessions to the Catholics. But the French were no less committed than the Russians. They traced their claims back to the great Napoleon’s invasion, the alliance with Suleiman the Magnificent, the French Crusader kings of Jerusalem, and to Charlemagne. When Napoleon III threatened the Ottomans, it was no coincidence that he sent a gunboat called the
Charlemagne
. In November, the sultan buckled and granted the paramountcy to the Catholics. Nicholas was outraged. He demanded the restoration of Orthodox rights in Jerusalem and an ‘alliance’ that would reduce the Ottoman empire to a Russian protectorate.

When Nicholas’ bullying demands were rejected, he invaded the Ottoman territories on the Danube – today’s Rumania – advancing towards Istanbul. Nicholas had convinced himself that he had charmed the British into agreement, denying he wanted to swallow Istanbul, let alone Jerusalem, but he fatally misjudged both London and Paris. Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was ‘waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross’. On 28 March, 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.
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As Jerusalem’s garrison marched off to fight the Russians, James Finn watched them present arms on the Maidan parade ground outside the Jaffa Gate where the ‘Syrian sun glistened along the moving steel for they marched with fixed bayonets’. Finn could not forget that the ‘kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places’ and that Nicholas ‘aimed still at an actual possession of [Jerusalem’s] Sanctuaries’.

Instead of the usual devout Russians, a new breed of often sceptical Western visitors – 10,000 a year, by 1856 – poured into the city to see the Holy Places that had sparked a European war. Yet a visit to Jerusalem was still an adventure. There were no carriages, just covered litters. She possessed virtually no hotels or banks: visitors stayed in the monasteries, the most comfortable being the Armenian with its elegant, airy courtyards. However in 1843, a Russian Jew named Menachem Mendel founded the first hotel, the Kaminitz, which was soon followed by the English Hotel; and in 1848 a Sephardic family, the Valeros, opened the first European bank in a room up some stairs off David Street. This was a still a provincial Ottoman town, usually governed by a scruffy pasha who resided in a ramshackle seraglio – residence, harem and prison – just north of the Temple Mount.
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Westerners were ‘astonished at the beggarly meanness of that mansion,’ wrote Finn, and repulsed by the mangy concubines and ‘ragamuffin officials’. As visitors sipped coffee with the pasha, they could hear the clank of prisoners’ chains and groans of the tortured from the dungeons below. During the war, the pasha tried to ensure tranquillity in Jerusalem – but the Greek Orthodox monks attacked the newly appointed Catholic patriarch and herded camels into his residence, all to the delight of the great writers who came to see those very shrines for which so many soldiers were dying in the grinding battles and putrid hospitals of the Crimea. They were not impressed.

THE WRITERS: MELVILLE, FLAUBERT AND THACKERAY

Herman Melville, then aged thirty-seven, had made his name with three novels based on his own breathtaking whaling adventures in the Pacific but
Moby Dick
, published in 1851, had sold just 3,000 copies. Melancholic and tormented, not unlike Gogol, he arrived in Jerusalem in 1856 to restore his health – and to investigate the nature of God. ‘My object – saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself as a passive subject to its weird impressions’ – and he was stimulated by the ‘wreck’ that was Jerusalem, beguiled by the ‘unleavened nakedness of desolation’. As we saw earlier, he was fascinated by the ‘fanatical energy and spirit’ and ‘Jewmania’ of the many ‘crazy’ Americans. They inspired his epic
Clarel –
at 18,000 lines, the longest American poem, which he wrote when he got home as he toiled in the US Customs Office.

Melville was not the only novelist looking for restoration and consolation for literary disappointment in the Orient: Gustave Flaubert, accompanied by his wealthy friend Maxime du Camp, and funded by the French government to report on trade and agriculture, was on a cultural and sexual tour to recover from the reception of his first novel. He saw Jerusalem as a ‘charnelhouse surrounded by walls, the old religions rotting in the sun’. As for the Church, ‘a dog would have been more moved than me. The Armenians curse the Greeks who detest the Latins who execrate the Copts.’ Melville agreed that the Church was a ‘half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death’ but recognized that wars were started in what he called the ‘thronged news-room and theology exchange of Jerusalem’.
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The coenobite fighting was only one aspect of the violent theatre of Jerusalem. The tensions between the new visitors – Anglo-American evangelicals and Russian Jews and Orthodox peasants on one hand, and the older world of the Ottomans, Arab Families, Sephardic Jews and Bedouin and
fellahin
on the other – led to a series of murders. One of James Finn’s evangelical ladies, Mathilda Creasy, was found with her head smashed in; and a Jew was found stabbed down a well. The poisoning of a richrabbi, David Herschell, led to a sensational court case but the suspects, who were his own grandsons, were acquitted for lack of evidence. The British consul James Finn was the most powerful official in Jerusalem at a time when the Ottomans were so indebted to Britain, hence he took it upon himself to intervene wherever he saw fit. Considering himself to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Holy City, he set about investigating each of these crimes, but despite his powers of detection (and the aid of six African necromancers), no killers were ever found.

Finn was the courageous champion and proselytizing irritant for the Jews who still needed his protection. Their plight was, if anything, getting worse. Most of the Jews lived in the ‘stinking ruins of the Jewish Quarter, venerable in filth’, wrote Thackeray, and their ‘wailings and lamentations of the lost glory of their city’ haunted Jerusalem on Friday nights. ‘None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem,’ Karl Marx wrote in the
New York Daily Tribune
in April 1854, ‘inhabiting the most filthy quarter, constant object of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins.’ A Jew who walked past the gate leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was, as Finn reported, ‘beaten by a mob of pilgrims’ because it was still illegal for a Jew to pass it. Another was stabbed by an Ottoman soldier. A Jewish funeral was attacked by Arabs. In each case, Finn swooped on the Ottoman governor and forced him to intervene and see British justice done.

The pasha himself was more interested in controlling the Palestinian Arabs whose rebellions and clan wars, partly a response to the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman empire, were often fought out with the gallop of camels, the swish of spears and the whistle of bullets around the walls of Jerusalem. These thrilling scenes played into the European view of Palestine as a biblical theatre crossed with a Wild West stage set, and they gathered on the walls to spectate the skirmishes which to them must have resembled surreal sporting events – with the added spice of the occasional fatality.

THE WRITERS: DAVID DORR, AN AMERICAN SLAVE ON TOUR

At their Talbieh evangelical farm for converting Jews, the Finns frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire. As bullets flew, Mrs Finn was often amazed to identify women amongst the warriors. She did her best to negotiate peace between the sheikhs. But the Bedouin were only part of the problem: the sheikhs of Hebron and Abu Ghosh fielded private armies of 500 warriors and fought full-scale wars against the Ottomans. When one of these sheikhs was captured and brought to Jerusalem in chains, the dashing warrior managed to escape and gallop away to fight again, like an Arab Robin Hood. Finally Hafiz Pasha, the aged governor of Jerusalem, had to lead an expedition with 550 troops and two brass field-guns to suppress the warlord of Hebron.

Yet despite such melodrama, on summer evenings, Jerusalemites of all creeds – Muslim and Christian Arabs along with the Sephardic Jews – picnicked on the Damascus road. The American explorer, Lieutenant William Lynch, observed a ‘picturesque scene – hundreds of Jews enjoying the fresh air, seated outside the walls under enormous olive trees, the woman all in white shrouds, the men in broad-brimmed black hats’. James Finn and the other consuls, preceded by Ottoman soldiers and kavasses with silver-mounted batons, promenaded with their wives. ‘As the sun set, everyone hurried inside the walls that were still locked every night.’

‘Ah the sadness of Jerusalem,’ sighed Finn who had to admit that the city seemed ‘monastically dull to a person imbued with the gay habits of other places. French visitors have been known to utter the ejaculation which ever accompanies the shrug of the shoulders at the contrast between Jerusalem and Paris.’ This was certainly not the sort of ejaculation which the priapic Flaubert expected and he expressed his frustration at the Jaffa Gate, ‘I let a fart escape as I crossed the threshold,’ even if ‘I was annoyed by the Voltaireanism of my anus.’ That sexual gourmand Flaubert celebrated escape from Jerusalem with a five-girl orgy in Beirut: ‘I screwed three women and came four times – three times before lunch and once after dessert. Young Du Campcame only once, his member still sore with the remnant of a chancre given him by a Wallachian whore.’

One unique American visitor, David Dorr, a young black slave from Louisiana who called himself a ‘quadroon’, agreed with Flaubert: on tour with his master, he arrived ‘with submissive heart’ filled with awe for Jerusalem but soon changed his mind: ‘When I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots than pay homage. After seventeen days in Jerusalem, I leave never wishing to return again.’
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Yet for all their irreverence, the writers could not help but be awed by Jerusalem. Flaubert considered her ‘diabolically grand’. Thackeray sensed ‘there’s not a spot at which you may look but where some violent deed has been done, some massacre, some visitors murdered, some idol worshipped with bloody rites.’ Melville almost admired the ‘plague-stricken splendour’ of the place. Standing at the Golden Gate, gazing out at Muslim and Jewish cemeteries, Melville saw a ‘city besieged by armies of the dead’ and asked himself: ‘is the desolation the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity?’
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As Russian forces were repeatedly defeated in the Crimea, Nicholas fell ill under the strain and died on 18 February 1855. In September, the Russian naval base at Sebastopol fell to the British and French. Russia had been thoroughly humiliated. After staggering military incompetence on all sides in a campaign that cost 750,000 lives, the new Russian emperor, Alexander II, sued for peace, surrendering his imperial ambitions for Jerusalem, but winning at least a restoration of the dominant Orthodox rights in the Sepulchre, the status quo that still remains in force today.

On 14 April 1856, the cannons of the Citadel saluted the signing of peace. But twelve days later, James Finn, attending the Holy Fire, watched ‘Greek pilgrims, provided with sticks, stones and cudgels, concealed beforehand behind the columns and dropped from the gallery,’ attack the Armenians. ‘Dreadful conflict ensued,’ he observed, ‘missiles were flung upwards to the galleries, demolishing rows of lamps, glass and oil pouring down upon heads.’ When the pasha rushed down from his throne in the gallery, he ‘received blows to the head’ and had to be carried out before his soldiers charged in with fixed bayonets. Minutes later, the Orthodox patriarch appeared with the Holy Fire to screams of exultation, the beating of chests, and flickering of flames.

The garrison celebrated the sultan’s victory with a parade on the Maidan which was ironic because soon afterwards, Alexander II bought this parade ground, once the site of Assyrian and Roman camps, to build a Russian Compound. Henceforth Russia would pursue cultural dominance in Jerusalem.