Rumours quickly spread that Jews were implicated (there was a Jewish woman in the terrorists’ circle but none of the assassins was Jewish) and these unleashed bloody attacks against Jews across Russia, encouraged and sometimes organized by the state. These predations gave the west a new word: pogrom, from the Russian gromit – to destroy. The new emperor, Alexander III, a bearded giant with blinkered, conservative views, regarded the Jews as a ‘social cancer’ and he blamed them for their own persecution by honest Orthodox Russians. His May Laws of 1882 effectively made anti-Semitism* a state policy, enforced by secret-police repression.
The emperor believed Holy Russia would be saved by autocracy and Orthodoxy encouraged by the cult of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He therefore appointed his brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich to the presidency of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society ‘to strengthen Orthodoxy in the Holy Land’.
On 28 September 1888, Sergei and his twenty-four-year-old wife Ella, pretty granddaughter of Queen Victoria, consecrated their Church of Mary Magdalene, with white limestone and seven glistening gold onion-domes, on the Mount of Olives. Both were moved by Jerusalem. ‘You can’t imagine what a profound impression it makes’, Ella reported to Queen Victoria, ‘when entering the Holy Sepulchre. It’s such an intense joy being here and my thoughts constantly turn to you.’ Ella, born a Protestant princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, had passionately embraced her conversion to Orthodoxy. ‘How happy’ it made her to ‘see all these holy places one learns to love from tender infancy.’ Sergei and the emperor had carefully overseen the design of the church, with Ella commissioning its paintings of Magdalene. ‘It’s like a dream to see all these places where our Lord suffered for us,’ Ella told Victoria, ‘and such an intense comfort to pray here.’ Ella needed comfort.
Sergei, thirty-one years old, was a military martinet and domestic tyrant haunted by rumours of a secret gay life that clashed with his severe belief in autocracy and Orthodoxy. ‘Without redeeming features, obstinate, arrogant and disagreeable, he flaunted his peculiarities,’ claimed one of his cousins. His marriage to Ella placed him at the centre of European royalty: her sister Alexandra was about to marry the future tsar Nicholas II.
Before they left, Sergei’s interests – empire, God and archaeology – merged in his new church, the St Alexander Nevsky, right next to the Church of the Sepulchre. When he bought this prime site, Sergei and his builders had uncovered walls dating from Hadrian’s Temple and Constantine’s Basilica, and when he built his church, he incorporated these archaeological finds into the building. In the Russian Compound, he commissioned Sergei’s House, a luxury hostel with turreted neo-Gothic towers for Russian aristocrats.* The lives of Sergei and Ella would be tragic; yet, apart from these buildings and the thousands of Russian pilgrims they attracted, his defining contribution was as one of the proponents of the official anti-Semitism that drove Russia’s Jews towards the sanctuary of Zion.
GRAND DUKE SERGEI: RUSSIAN JEWS AND THE POGROMS
In 1891, Alexander III appointed Sergei governor-general of Moscow. There, he immediately expelled 20,000 Jews from the city, surrounding their neighbourhood in the middle of the first night of Passover with Cossacks and police. ‘I can’t believe we won’t be judged for this in the future,’ Ella wrote, but Sergei ‘believes this is for our security. I see nothing in it but shame.’†
The six million Russian Jews had always honoured Jerusalem, praying towards the eastern walls of their houses. But now the pogroms pushed them either towards revolution – many embraced socialism – or towards escape. Thus was triggered a vast exodus, the first Aliyah, a word that meant flight to a higher place, the Holy Mountain of Jerusalem. Two million Jews left Russia between 1888 and 1914, but 85 per cent of them headed not for the Promised Land but the Golden Land of America. Nonetheless thousands looked to Jerusalem. By 1890, Russian Jewish immigration was starting to change the city: there were now 25,000 Jews out of 40,000 Jerusalemites. In 1882 the sultan banned Jewish immigration and in 1889 decreed that Jews were not allowed to stay in Palestine more than three months, measures scarcely enforced. The Arab Families, led by Yusuf Khalidi, petitioned Istanbul against Jewish immigration, but the Jews kept coming.
Ever since the writers of the Bible created their narrative of Jerusalem, and ever since that biography of the city had become the universal story, her fate had been decided faraway – in Babylon, Susa, Rome, Mecca, Istanbul, London and St Petersburg. In 1895, an Austrian journalist published the book that would define twentieth-century Jerusalem: The Jewish State.20
PART NINE
ZIONISM
O Jerusalem: the one man who has been present all this while, the lovable dreamer of Nazareth, has done nothing but increase the hate.
Theodore Herzl, Diary
The angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape, and plunder than any other place on this earth.
Arthur Koestler
If a land can have a soul, Jerusalem is the soul of the land of Israel.
David Ben-Gurion, press interview
No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem.
Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol 6: Triumph and Tragedy
It’s not easy to be a Jerusalemite. A thorny path runs alongside its joys. The great are small inside the Old City. Popes, patriarchs, kings all remove their crowns. It is the city of the King of Kings; and earthly kings and lords are not its masters. No human can ever possess Jerusalem.
John Tleel, ‘I am Jerusalem’, Jerusalem Quarterly
And burthened Gentiles
o’er the main
Must bear the weight
of Israel’s hate
Because he is not
brought again
In triumph to Jerusalem.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’
THE KAISER
1898–1905
HERZL
Theodor Herzl, a literary critic in Vienna, was said to be ‘extraordinarily handsome’, his eyes were ‘almond-shaped with heavy, black melancholy lashes’, his profile that of ‘an Assyrian Emperor’. An unhappily married father of three, he was a thoroughly assimilated Jew who wore winged collars and frock-coats; ‘he was not of the people’, and had little connection to the shabby, ringletted Jews of the shtetls. He was a lawyer by training, spoke no Hebrew or Yiddish, put up Christmas trees at home and did not bother to circumcise his son. But the Russian pogroms of 1881 fundamentally shocked him. When, in 1895, Vienna elected the anti-Semitic rabble-rouser Karl Lueger as mayor, Herzl wrote: ‘The mood among the Jews is one of despair.’ Two years later, he was in Paris covering the Dreyfus Affair, in which an innocent Jewish army officer was framed as a German spy, and he watched Parisian mobs shrieking ‘Mort aux Juifs’ in the country that had emancipated Jews. This reinforced his conviction that assimilation had not only failed but was provoking more anti-Semitism. He even predicted that anti-Semitism would one day be legalized in Germany.