Jerusalem: The Biography

* In Greece, a princess with a special link to Jerusalem was one of those brave gentiles who protected Jews. Princess Andrew of Greece, born Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, risked her life by hiding the Cohen family of three while 60,000 Greek Jews were murdered. In 1947, her son Prince Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, married Princess Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne four years later. Princess Andrew became a nun and founded her own order, like her aunt Grand Duchess Ella. She lived in London but decided to be buried in Jerusalem. When her daughter grumbled that this was a long trip for visitors, the princess retorted, ‘Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul!’ She died in 1969, but not until 1988 was she buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene close to her aunt Ella. In 1994, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that honoured his mother as one of the ‘Righteous among the nations’.

* ‘He entered into the Nazis’ criminal delirium about “the Jews”’, writes Professor Gilbert Achcar in his book Arabs and the Holocaust, ‘as it burgeoned into the greatest of all crimes against humanity.’ Achcar adds, ‘it is undeniable that the mufti espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine which was easily compatible with a fanatical anti-Judaism cast in the Pan-Islamic mould.’ In a speech in Berlin on the 1943 anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, he said ‘they live rather as parasites amongst the peoples, suck their blood, pervert their morals … Germany has very clearly resolved to find a definitive solution for the Jewish danger that will eliminate the scourge that the Jews represent in the world.’ In his memoirs written in his Lebanese exile, he revelled in the fact that Jewish ‘losses in the course of the Second World War represented more than 30 per cent of the total number of their people whereas the Germans’ losses were less significant’ and, citing the Protocols and the World War One ‘stab in the back’ myth, he justified the Holocaust since there was no other way to scientifically reform the Jews.

* In the 1930s, the emperor, known as Ras Tafar before his accession, inspired the Rastafarians, founded in Jamaica and made famous by the reggae singer Bob Marley, who hailed him as the Lion of Judah and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Ethiopia and Africa were the new Zion. Haile Selassie was murdered by the Marxist Dergue in 1974.

* The description is that of Arthur Koestler, the writer who had come to Jerusalem as a Revisionist Zionist in 1928 but had soon left. In 1948, Koestler returned to cover the War of Independence and interviewed Begin and Ben-Gurion.

* That summer, Churchill wrote to Stalin suggesting an allied conference in Jerusalem – ‘There are first class hotels, Government houses etc. Marshal Stalin could come by special train with every form of protection from Moscow to Jerusalem’ – and the British prime minister helpfully enclosed the route: ‘Moscow Tbilisi Ankara Beirut Haifa Jerusalem’. Instead they met (with President Roosevelt) at Yalta.

* This is now a museum to the Jewish resistance fighters who were imprisoned there. The Nikolai Hostel was the last Russian pilgrim hostel to be built, with room for 1,200 pilgrims, opened by the Romanov Prince Nikolai in 1903.

* One of those killed was Julius Jacobs, a cousin of the author and a British civil servant who happened to be Jewish.

* Farran remained a war hero to British security forces. He failed to win a Scottish seat in Parliament as a Conservative in 1949 and then moved to Canada. There he took up farming, was elected to the Alberta legislature, becoming minister of telephones, solicitor-general and a professor of political science. He died in 2006 aged eighty-six. A street in East Talpiot, Jerusalem, was recently named after Rubowitz.

* Two Husseini cousins served as foreign and defence ministers, Anwar Nusseibeh as cabinet secretary – and the mufti as president of the Palestine National Council.

* In a classic example of Jerusalem’s religious competitiveness and its ability to create sanctity out of necessity, Jewish pilgrims, robbed of the Wall, prayed at the Tomb of David on Mount Zion and created the country’s first Holocaust Museum there.

* But Ragheb Nashashibi was dying of cancer. The king visited him in the Augusta Victoria Hospital. ‘In this building,’ said Abdullah, ‘in the spring of 1921, I had my first meeting with Winston Churchill.’ In April 1951, Nashashibi died and was buried in a small tomb near his villa – which was later knocked down to build the Ambassador Hotel.

* The largest court, the Ger, named after a village in Poland and ruled by the Alter family, wear shtreimel fur hats; the Belzers, from Ukraine, wear kaftans and fur hats; the Breslavers worship with mystic and exhibitionistic dancing and singing, and are known as the ‘Hasidic hippies’.