In Cairo, the fragrant eunuch was now ailing. After the death of the last of the Ikhshids, Kafur ascended the throne in his own right. The first Muslim king to be born a slave – or for that matter to be a eunuch – employed a Jewish minister who would become the mastermind of an Islamic revolution and of a new empire over Jerusalem.12
THE FATIMIDS: TOLERANCE AND LUNACY
969–1099
IBN KILLIS: THE JEWISH VIZIER AND THE FATIMID CONQUEST
The son of a Jewish merchant from Baghdad, Yaqub ben Yusuf, known as Ibn Killis, had enjoyed a rollercoaster career, from bankrupt mountebank in Syria to financial adviser to Kafur in Egypt. ‘Were he a Muslim,’ said Kafur, ‘he’d have been the right man for vizier [chief minister].’ Ibn Killis took the hint and converted, but the eunuch died, being buried in Jerusalem, * and Ibn Killis was imprisoned. Having bribed his way out of jail, he secretly travelled westwards to the Shiite kingdom in modern Tunisia ruled by the Fatimid family. The ever-flexible Ibn Killis converted to Shia and advised the Fatimid caliph Muizz that the time was ripe to take Egypt.13 In June 969, Muizz’s general Jawhar al-Siqilli conquered Egypt and then advanced north to take Jerusalem.14
PALTIEL AND THE FATIMIDS: JEWISH DOCTOR-PRINCES AND THE LIVING IMAMS
The messianic Fatimids, the new masters of Jerusalem, were unlike any other Islamic dynasty for they not only declared themselves caliphs, they were also sacred kings, the Living Imams, almost suspended between man and heaven. Visitors to their courts were shown through courtyards of increasingly eye-watering luxury before they came to a gold-curtained throne at which they prostrated themselves and the curtains were drawn to reveal the Living Imam in golden robes. Their sect was secretive, their beliefs mystical, redemptionist and esoteric, and their rise to power mysterious, clandestine and filled with adventure. In 899, a rich merchant in Syria, Ubayd Allah, declared himself the Living Imam, direct descendant of Ali and Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter, via the Imam Ismail, hence they were known as Ismaili Shiites. His secret agents, the so-called dawa, fanned out across the east, conquering Yemen and converting some Berber tribesmen in Tunisia; but the Abbasids tried to kill him, so he vanished. Some years later, he or someone claiming to be him reappeared in Tunisia as al-Mahdi, the Chosen, founding his own caliphate which started to conquer a new empire with a sacred mission: to overthrow the false Abbasids of Baghdad and redeem the world. In 973, the Caliph Muizz, now ruler of swathes of north Africa, Sicily, Egypt, Palestine and Syria, moved to his new capital, al-Qahira al-Muizziyya – the Conquest of Muizz, known today as Cairo.
His successor, Aziz, appointed their consigliere, Ibn Killis, as grand vizier, chief minister of the empire which he ruled until his death almost twenty years later. Apart from his immense wealth – he owned 8, 000 female slaves, he was a scholar who debated religion with Jewish and Christian clerics and his career personifies the tolerance of the Fatimids, being sectarians themselves, towards Jews and Christians that was immediately felt in Jerusalem.
The Jews in Jerusalem were divided, poor and desperate, while their Egyptian brethren flourished under the Fatimids. They started to provide the doctors for the caliphs of Cairo: these were more than just royal physicians. They tended to be scholar-merchants who became influential courtiers and were usually appointed chief of the Jews of the Fatimid empire, a post known as the nagid, the prince. A Jew of mysterious origins named Paltiel was probably the first of these doctor-courtier-princes. A protégé of Jawhar, the Fatimid conqueror of Jerusalem, he immediately intervened to help the Jews in the Holy City.
After years of Abbasid neglect and the inconsistent patronage of Turkish rulers, Jerusalem was diminished and unstable. The constant wars between the caliphs of Cairo and Baghdad discouraged pilgrims; Bedouin raids sometimes overran the city for short periods; and in 974, the dynamic Byzantine Emperor John Tzimiskes captured Damascus and galloped into Galilee, promising his ‘intent to deliver the Holy Sepulchre of Christ our God from the bondage of the Muslim’. He was close; Jerusalem waited, but he never came.
The Fatimids encouraged the pilgrimages of their fellow Ismailis and Shiites to the Mosque of Jerusalem but the wars against Baghdad cut off the city from Sunni pilgrims. The very isolation of Jerusalem somehow intensified her sanctity: Islamic writers now compiled more popular anthologies of Jerusalem’s ‘merits’ – the Fadail – and they gave her new names: she was still Iliya and Bayt al-Maqdis, the Holy House, but she now became al-Balat, the Palace, too. Yet Christian pilgrims were becoming richer and more numerous than the ruling Muslims – Franks sailed from Europe and rich caravans arrived every Easter from Egypt.
The Jews too looked to their saviours in Cairo where Paltiel now persuaded the Caliph to pay a subsidy to the impoverished gaon and Academy of Jerusalem. He won the right for Jews there to buy a synagogue on the Mount of Olives, to gather close to Abolsom’s Pillar and also to pray at the Golden Gate on the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. At festivals the Jews were allowed to encircle the old Temple seven times but their main synagogue remained ‘the inner altar of the sanctuary at the western wall’: the Cave. The Jews had been scarcely tolerated under the Abbasids but now, poor as they were, they had more freedom than they had enjoyed for two centuries. Sadly, the Rabbanites and Karaites, who were specially favoured by the Fatimids, fellow sectarians, held separate services on the Mount of Olives that led to scuffles and soon these threadbare scholars were at war with each other in the dusty, ramshackle synagogues and holy underground caverns of Jerusalem. And their freedoms only exacerbated Muslim frustration.
When Paltiel died in 1011, his son brought his body to be buried in Jerusalem but the rich cortège was attacked by Muslim ruffians. Even after Paltiel, the Jews of Cairo despatched caravans with money to fund the Academy and a mystical sect called the Mourners of Zion who prayed for the restoration of Israel, in effect, religious Zionists. But the help was never enough: ‘the city is widowed, orphaned, deserted and impoverished with its few scholars,’ wrote a Jewish Jerusalemite in a fundraising letter. ‘Life here is extremely hard, food scarce. Help us, save us, redeem us.’15 Now the Jews were ‘a pitiful assembly, constantly harassed’.
Yet the Sunni Muslims were increasingly scandalized by the excesses and liberties of the infidels. ‘Everywhere, the Christians and Jews have the upper hand,’ grumbled Muqaddasi, the travel writer whose very name means ‘Born in Jerusalem’.
MUQADDASI: THE JERUSALEMITE
‘All the year round, never are her streets empty of strangers.’ Around 985, at the height of Fatimid rule, Muhammad ibn Ahmed Shams al-Din al-Muqaddasi had come home to the city he called al-Quds, the Holy.* Now in his forties, he had been travelling for twenty years, ‘seeking knowledge’ through travel that was so much part of the training of every Islamic savant, combining piety with the scientific observation practised in the House of Wisdom. In his masterpiece The Soundest Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions, he reveals his irrepressible curiosity and sense of adventure: