Our dear God knows even better than we do that the Jews killed Our Saviour and he punished them accordingly. It shouldn’t be forgotten that, considering the immense and extremely dangerous power which International Jewish capital represents, it would be a huge advantage to Germany if the Hebrews looked up to it in gratitude.
Here was the good news for Herzclass="underline" ‘Everywhere the hydra of the ghastliest anti-Semitism is raising its dreadful head and the terrified Jews are looking around for a protector. Well then, I shall intercede with the Sultan.’ Herzl was ecstatic: ‘Wonderful, wonderful.’
On 11 October 1898, the Kaiser and Kaiserin embarked on the imperial train with a retinue including his foreign minister, twenty courtiers, two doctors and eighty maids, servants and bodyguards. Anxious to impress the world, he had personally designed a special white-grey uniform with a full-length white Crusader-style veil. On 13 October, Herzl, with four Zionist colleagues, set out from Vienna on the Orient Express, packing a wardrobe that included white tie and tails as well as pith-helmet and safari suit.
In Istanbul, Wilhelm finally received the Zionist, whom he judged to be ‘an idealist with an aristocratic mentality, clever, very intelligent with expressive eyes’. The Kaiser said he supported Herzl because ‘there are usurers at work. If these people went to settle in the colonies, they could be more useful.’ Herzl protested at this calumny. The Kaiser inquired what he should ask the sultan for. ‘A chartered company under German protection,’ replied Herzl. The Kaiser invited Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem.
Herzl was impressed. The Hohenzollern personified imperial power with ‘his great sea blue eyes, his fine serious face, frank, genial and yet bold’, but the reality was different. Wilhelm was certainly intelligent, knowledgeable and energetic, but he was also so restless and inconsistent that even Eulenburg feared he was mentally ill. After sacking Prince Bismarck as chancellor, he took control of German politics, but he was too unstable to sustain it. His personal diplomacy was disastrous; his written notes to his ministers were so outrageous that they had to be locked in a safe; his alarmingly articulate speeches, in which he encouraged his troops to shoot German workers or to massacre enemies like Huns, were embarrassing.* Already by 1898, Wilhelm was regarded as half-buffoon, half-warmonger.
Nonetheless he proposed the Zionist plan to Abdul-Hamid. The sultan rejected it firmly, telling his daughter, ‘The Jews may spare their millions. When my empire is divided, perhaps they will get Palestine for nothing. But only our corpse can be divided.’ Meanwhile Wilhelm, dazzled by the vigour of Islam, lost interest in Herzl.1
At 3 p.m. on 29 October 1898, the Kaiser rode through a breach specially opened in the wall next to the Jaffa Gate and entered Jerusalem on a white charger.
THE KAISER AND HERZL:
THE LAST CRUSADER AND THE FIRST ZIONIST
The Kaiser sported the white uniform with the full-length gold-threaded burnous veil sparkling in the sunlight, flowing from a spiked helmet surmounted with a burnished golden eagle, escorted by a cavalcade of giant Prussian hussars in steel helmets waving Crusader-style banners and the Sultan’s lancers in red waistcoats, blue pantaloons and green turbans and armed with lances. The Kaiserin, in a patterned silk dress with a sash and a straw hat, followed on behind him in a carriage with her two ladies-in-waiting.
Herzl watched the Kaiser’s performance from a hotel filled with German officers. The Kaiser had grasped that Jerusalem was the ideal stage on which to advertise his newly minted empire, but not everyone was impressed: the Dowager Russian Empress thought his performance ‘revolting, perfectly ridiculous, disgusting!’ The Kaiser was the first head of state to appoint an official photographer for a state visit. The Crusader uniform and the pack of photographers revealed what Eulenburg called the Kaiser’s ‘two totally different natures – the knightly, reminiscent of the finest days of the Middle Ages, and the modern’.
The crowds, reported the New York Times, were ‘dressed in holiday clothes, the city men in white turbans, gaily striped tunics, the wives of Turkish army officers in gorgeous silken milayes, the well-to-do peasants in flowing kaftans of flaming red’, while Bedouin on fine steeds ‘wore large clumsy red boots, a leather girdle over a tunic filled with an arsenal of small arms’ and a keffiyeh. Their sheikhs carried spears with a burst of ostrich feathers around the blade.
At the Jewish triumphal arch, the chief Sephardic rabbi, a bearded nonagenarian in white kaftan and blue turban, and his Ashkenazi counterpart presented Wilhelm with a copy of the Torah, and he was welcomed by the mayor, Yasin al-Khalidi, in a royal purple cloak and a gold-encircled turban. Wilhelm dismounted at David’s Tower, and from there he and the empress walked into the city, the crowds cleared for fear of anarchist assassins (Empress Elisabeth of Austria had recently been assassinated). As the patriarchs in the effulgence of their jewel-encrusted regalia showed him the Sepulchre, the Kaiser’s heart was beating ‘faster and more fervently’ as he trod in Jesus’ footsteps.
While Herzl waited for his summons and explored the city, the Kaiser dedicated the Church of the Redeemer with its Romanesque tower, a structure that he had personally designed ‘with particular care and love’. When he visited the Temple Mount, the Kaiser, another enthusiastic archaeologist, asked the mufti to allow excavations, but the latter politely demurred.
On 2 November, Herzl was finally summoned for his imperial audience – the five Zionists were so nervous that one of them suggested taking bromide. Dressing appropriately in white tie, tails and top hats, they arrived north of the Damascus Gate at the Kaiser’s encampment. This was a luxury Thomas Cook village with 230 tents, which had been transported in 120 carriages, borne by 1,300 horses, served by 100 coachmen, 600 drivers, twelve cooks and sixty waiters, all guarded by an Ottoman regiment. It was, said the tour maestro John Mason Cook, ‘the largest party gone to Jerusalem since the Crusades. We swept the country of horses and carriages and almost of food.’ Punch mocked Wilhelm as ‘Cook’s Crusader’.
Herzl found the Kaiser posing ‘in a grey colonial uniform, veiled helmet, brown gloves and holding – oddly enough – a riding crop’. The Zionist approached, ‘halted and bowed. Wilhelm held out his hand very affably’ and then lectured him, declaring, ‘The land needs water and shade. There is room for all. The idea behind your movement is a healthy one.’ When Herzl explained that laying on a water supply was feasible but expensive, the Kaiser replied, ‘Well, you have plenty of money, more money than all of us.’ Herzl proposed a modern Jerusalem, but the Kaiser then ended the meeting, saying ‘neither yes nor no’.
Ironically, both the Kaiser and Herzl loathed Jerusalem: ‘a dismal arid heap of stones,’ wrote Wilhelm, ‘spoilt by large quite modern suburbs formed by Jewish colonies. 60,000 of these people are there, greasy and squalid, cringing and abject, doing nothing but trying to fleece their neighbours for every farthing – Shylocks by the score.’* But he wrote to his cousin, Russian Emperor Nicholas II, that he despised the ‘fetish adoration’ of the Christians even more – ‘in leaving the Holy City I felt profoundly ashamed before the Muslims’. Herzl almost agreed: ‘When I remember you in days to come, O Jerusalem, it won’t be with delight. The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in your reeking alleys.’ The Western Wall, he thought, was pervaded by ‘hideous, miserable, scrambling beggary’.