Jerusalem: The Biography

* As the British contemplated limiting immigration to Zion, Joseph Stalin was building his own Soviet Jerusalem. ‘The Tsar gave the Jews no land but we will,’ he announced. His views on the Jews were contradictory. In a famous 1913 article on nationality, Stalin declared that Jews were not a nation but ‘mystical, intangible and otherworldly’. Once in power, he banned anti-Semitism, which he called ‘cannibalism’, and in 1928, approved the creation of a secular Jewish homeland with Yiddish and Russian as official languages. Inaugurated in May 1934, Stalin’s Zion, the Jewish Autonomous Region, was a wasteland, Birobidzhan, on the Chinese border. After the Second World War and the Holocaust, his foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and others backed the creation of another Jewish homeland in the more attractive Crimea – a Stalinist California – which ultimately aroused Stalin’s vicious anti-Semitism. Yet by 1948 Birobidzhan contained 35,000 Jews. Today it survives with a few thousand Jews and all its signs still in Yiddish.

* The Woodhead Commission of 1938 stated that between 1919 and 1938, the Arab population of Palestine had increased by 419,000; the Jewish population by 343,000.

* Antonius, son of a rich Christian Lebanese cotton-trader, born in Alexandria and educated at Victoria College and Cambridge and a friend of E. M. Forster, was assistant education director for the Mandate. He was chronicling the Arab Revolt and the British betrayal in his book the The Arab Awakening, one of the seminal texts of Arab nationalism. Antonius advised both the mufti and the British high commissioners. Antonius’ daughter Soraya later wrote probably the best novel about this period based on her parents’ milieu Where the Jinn Consult.

* Jerusalem was still filled with White Russians but one Grand Duchess returned post-humously. In 1918, the widow of Grand Duke Sergei, Ella, who had become a nun, was arrested by the Bolsheviks. Her skull was smashed in and she was tossed down a mineshaft in Alapaevsk, just hours after the Bolsheviks had also murdered her sister, Empress Alexandra, Emperor Nicholas II and all their children. When the Whites took Alapaevsk, they discovered the bodies: Ella’s had scarcely decayed. Her body and that of her devoted fellow nun Sister Barbara travelled via Peking, Bombay and Port Said to Jerusalem where they were received in January 1921 by Sir Harry Luke who had to change their route through the city to avoid pro-Bolshevik protests by Jewish immigrants. ‘Two unadorned coffins were lifted from the train. The little cavalcade wound its way sadly, unobtrusively to the Olivet’, wrote Louis, Marquess of Milford Haven who, with his wife Victoria, helped bear the coffins. ‘Russian peasant women, stranded pilgrims, sobbing and moaning, were almost fighting to get some part of the coffin.’ The Milford Havens were the grandparents of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Elizabeth the New Martyr was canonized and rests in a glass-topped white marble sarcophagus in the Church of Mary Magdalene she and her husband had built. Some of her saintly relics have been returned to her Martha and Mary Convent in Moscow.

* He was a member of one of the grandest Families. The Alamis’ house remains the most extraordinary in Jerusalem: in the seventeenth century the family bought a house right next to the Church which actually shares and owns part of its roof; the view from there is astonishing. The building, with Byzantine, Crusader and Mamluk vestiges, is still owned by Mohammad al-Alami. A cousin still serves as sheikh of Saladin’s Salahiyya khanqah next door.

† Hamas, the Islamic Palestinian organization in Gaza, was inspired by Qassam hence it named its armed wing the Qassam Brigade, and its missiles are Qassam rockets.

* Wingate had made his name in Palestine. He was admired by Churchill who later backed his career. In 1941, Wingate’s Gideon Force helped liberate Ethiopia from the Italians and then as a major general, he created and commanded the Chindits, the largest Allied special forces of the war, to fight behind Japanese lines in Burma. He was killed in a plane crash in 1944.