Jerusalem: The Biography

† The Husseinis and the other Families such as the newer Nashashibis became much richer, embracing the commercial boom; one of the Husseinis provided the wooden sleepers for the new railway. In 1858, the Ottoman Land Law privatized many of the ancient waqfs, which suddenly made the Families into rich landowners and traders in grain. The losers were the Arab fellahin, the peasants, now at the mercy of feudal absentee landlords. Hence Rauf Pasha, the last Hamidian governor, called the Families ‘parasites’.

* His year in Jerusalem was cut short by the Mahdi’s rebellion in Sudan. Recalled to govern Sudan, Gordon was besieged and then killed in Khartoum, reputedly holding his Bible. The Garden Tomb was not the only archaeological achievement of the Colony: as we saw much earlier, it was Jacob Eliahu, the child of a Jew converted by the London Jews Society who defected to the Colony, who found the inscription left by the workers in the Siloam tunnel.

* This word was coined in 1879 by Wilhelm Marr, a German journalist, in his book The Victory of Judaism over Germandom, in time to describe the new racial breed of hatred that was replacing the old religious version.

* Sergei’s House remained technically owned by Sergei until President Putin admired it on his 2005 visit to Israel and was said to have been so moved that he wept. Israel returned the hostel to Russia in 2008.

† Alexander III died in 1894 and was succeeded by his inexperienced, inept and unlucky son Nicholas II, who shared his father’s rigid belief in autocracy. He liked and trusted ‘Uncle Sergei’. As governor-general, Sergei was responsible for the coronation festivities in Moscow during which thousands of celebrating peasants died in a stampede. Sergei advised his nephew to continue with the celebrations and evaded responsibility.

* Jerusalem’s so-called ‘Polish Jews’ were mainly Hasidim from the Russian empire but some of their sects were opposed to Zionism, believing it was sacrilege for mere men to decide God’s timing for the Return and Judgement Day.

* Wilhelm’s unpredictable behaviour frequently alarmed his own entourage. His early sex life with its outré tastes, including glove-wearing and sado-masochistic fetishes, had to be concealed. One courtier, a middle-aged Prussian general, died of a heart attack while dancing for the Kaiser in nothing but a tutu and feather-boa, and another entertained him dressed as a begging poodle ‘in shaved tights with, under a real poodle-tail, a marked rectal opening. I can already see His Majesty laughing with us.’ Ultimately his friend Eulenburg was destroyed in a sex scandal when his secret gay life was exposed. Yet Wilhelm was also a priggish Victorian when it came to the morals of others: he never spoke to Eulenburg again.

* The Kaiser’s Teutonic gigantism changed the modern Jerusalem skyline. His Augusta Victoria Hospice, a German medieval fortress with a hideous tower so high that it was visible from the Jordan, dominated the Mount of Olives, and his Catholic Dormition Church, on Mount Zion, modelled outside on Worms Cathedral and inside on Charlemagne’s chapel at Aachen, had ‘massive towers more suited to the Rhine Valley’.

* It was around this time that one of the tsar’s top secret policemen, the Okhrana director in Paris, Piotr Rachkovsky, ordered the forging of a book claiming to be a secret record of Herzl’s Congress in Basle in 1897: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was adapted (and much of it lifted directly) from an 1844 French satire against Emperor Napoleon III and an 1868 anti-Semitic German novel by Hermann Goedsche. The Protocols was a preposterous though diabolical plan for Jews to infiltrate governments, churches and the media and incite wars and revolution, in order to create a world empire ruled by a Davidic autocrat. Published in 1903, it was designed to provoke anti-Semitism within Russia where tsardom was threatened by Jewish revolutionaries.

* There would be at least thirty-four different plans in locations as diverse as Alaska, Angola, Libya, Iraq and South America. The plan for Alaska during the Second World War was satirized by Michael Chabon in his thriller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Politicians from Churchill and FDR to Hitler and Stalin pursued other plans: before attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler planned to deport the Jews to a death-colony in Madagascar. During the 1930s and 1940s, Churchill proposed a Jewish homeland in Libya while in 1945, his colonial secretary Lord Moyne suggested East Prussia for the Jews. As we will see, Stalin actually set up a Jewish homeland and during the 1940s considered a Jewish Crimea.

* Ironically, while Westerners reread the superficial memoirs of European visitors, this superlative chronicle of the city, covering forty years up to the creation of Israel and beyond, is still published only in Arabic.