Jerusalem: The Biography

* The powerful Vali (Governor) of the Vilayet (Province) of Damascus usually ruled Jerusalem and was often the Amir al-Haj, Commander of the annual caravan to Mecca which he funded through his dawra, an armed expedition. At other times, Jerusalem was controlled by the Vali of Sidon who ruled from Acre. Jerusalem was a small district, a Sanjak, under a Sanjak Bey or Mutasallim. Yet Jerusalem’s status changed repeatedly over the next centuries, sometimes becoming an independent district. Ottoman governors ruled with the aid of the qadi, a city judge appointed in Istanbul, and the mufti (the leader appointed by the Grand Mufti of the empire, the Sheikh al-Islam in Istanbul, who wrote fatwa judgements on religious questions) drawn from Jerusalem’s Families. The pashas of Damascus and Sidon were rivals who sometimes fought mini-wars for control of Palestine.

* Potemkin devised the ‘Greek Project’ for Catherine – the Russian conquest of Constantinople (which Russians called Tsargrad) to be ruled by Catherine’s grandson, especially named Constantine. Catherine’s partitioning of Poland brought millions of Jews into the Russian empire for the first time, most of whom were confined in miserable poverty to a Pale of Settlement. But Potemkin, one of the most philo-Semitic leaders in Russian history, was a Christian Zionist who saw the liberation of Jerusalem as part of his Greek Project. In 1787, he created the Israelovsky Regiment of Jewish cavalry to take Jerusalem. A witness, the Prince de Ligne, mocked these ringleted cavalrymen as ‘monkeys on horseback’. Potemkin died before he could put his schemes into action.

* * He was a Christian slaveboy from Bosnia who, escaping after committing a murder, sold himself to the slave-markets of Istanbul. There he was bought by an Egyptian ruler who converted him to Islam and used him as his chief executioner and hitman. He began his rise as governor of Cairo but made his name defending Beirut against Catherine the Great’s navy. Beirut was honourably surrendered to the Russians after a long siege and the sultanrewarded the Butcher with promotion to Governor of Sidon, and sometimes also that of Damascus. He visited Jerusalem, unofficially in his sphere of influence, where the Husseinis owed him allegiance.

* Napoleon blamed his defeat on Smith, ‘the man who made me miss my destiny’, but he left one legacy in Jerusalem. On taking Jaffa, his sick soldiers (those whom he later had killed) were nursed by Armenian monks, whom he thanked by presenting them with his tent. The Armenians converted it into chasubles, now used in St Jameses Cathedral in Jerusalem’s Armenian Quarter

* Godfrey’s spurs and sword, along with a brick from his French chateau, hang today in the Latin sacristy of the Holy Sepulchre. As for the Crusader tombs, only fragments of the sarcophagus of the boy-king Baldwin V survived this act of sectarian vandalism

* In 1804, William Blake, poet, painter, engraver and radical, opened his poem Milton with the prefatory verses ‘And did those feet in ancient times…’ which ends ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ The poem, printed in about 1808, praises the brief heyday of a heavenly Jerusalem in pre-industrial England, inspired by the mythical visit of young Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to inspect the latter’s Cornish tin-mines. The poem remained little known until 1916 when the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked the composer Sir Hubert Parry to set it to music for a patriotic meeting. Edward Elgar later orchestrated it. King George V said he preferred it to ‘God Save the King’, and it has become an alternative anthem, with universal appeal to plangent patriots, churchgoers, Promenaders, sports fans, socialist idealists and generations of drunken, floppy-haired undergraduates. Blake never called it ‘Jerusalem’ for he also wrote an epic entitled Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

* In 1818, on Suleiman Pasha’s death, Abdullah had taken power in Acre and executed the very wealthy, one-eyed, one-eared and noseless Haim Farhi, who had effectively run much of Palestine for thirty years. Abdullah ruled until 1831. The Farhi family still live in Israel

* During his voyage home, a fearsome storm struck the Montefiores’ ship. The sailors feared that the vessel would sink. Montefiore carried, for luck, from the previous year’s Passover, a piece of unleavened matzah, known as the afikoman, which, at the height of the tempest, he cast into the waves. The sea instantly became miraculously quiet. Montefiore believed that this was God’s blessing on a Jerusalem pilgrimage. The Montefiore family today read his account of this event every Passover