GEORGE SANDYS: THE FIRST ANGLO-AMERICAN
George Sandys, son of the Archbishop of York and a scholar who translated Virgil into English, was appalled by the decay of Jerusalem – ‘much of which lies waste, old buildings all ruined, the new, contemptible.’ Sandys was half-repulsed, half-amused by the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews he saw at the Western Walclass="underline" ‘their fantastical gestures exceed all barbarity with ridiculous nodding’, and he thought it ‘impossible not to laugh’. The God-fearing Protestant was even more disgusted by what he regarded as the vulgar hucksterism of the Orthodox and Catholics. The city was ‘once sacred and glorious, elected by God for his seat’, but she was now merely a ‘theatre of mysteries and miracles’.
That Easter, Sandys was horrified by Christians and Muslims alike: he saw the pasha of Jerusalem on his throne outside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sandys watched as thousands of pilgrims, each carrying pillow and carpet, flocked to spend the night in the Church. On Good Friday, he followed the procession of the padre of the Franciscans, who carried a life-sized waxen model of Jesus on a sheet along the Via Dolorosa before fixing it to a cross. As thousands filled the Church and camped in its courtyard, he watched the ceremony of the Holy Fire, ‘the savage clamours’, the clash of cymbals, the ‘women whistling’ – conduct ‘befitting better the solemnities of Bacchus’. When the Fire emerged, the pilgrims ran around ‘like madmen thrusting the flame among their clothes and into their bosoms, persuading strangers it will not burn them’.
Yet this composer of hymns was a passionate Protestant who revered Jerusalem just as much as the Catholics and Orthodox. Returning to the fundamentals of the Bible itself, he prayed passionately at the tomb of Christ and the graves of the Crusader kings. On his return, he dedicated his book, A Relation of a Journey begun ad 1610, to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, whose father James I had recently commissioned fifty-four scholars to create an English Bible that was entirely accessible to all. In 1611, the scholars delivered their Authorized Version, which, fusing earlier translations by William Tyndale and others, brought the divine scriptures to life in a masterpiece of translation and of poetical English. This Bible became the spiritual and literary heartland of Anglicanism, England’s singular Protestantism. The Bible became what one writer called ‘the national epic of Britain,’ a story that placed the Jews and Jerusalem at the very heart of British and, later, American life.
Sandys was one link between the real city and the Jerusalem of the New World. In 1621, he set off for America as treasurer of the Virginia Company. During his ten years in Jamestown, he led the raid against the Algonquin native Americans during which he slaughtered a considerable number: Protestants were no less capable of killing defiant infidels than any other seventeenth-century faith. Sandys was not the only Jerusalem pilgrim-adventurer to be there: Henry Timberlake was in Virginia at the same time. Their pilgrimages to the new Promised Land of America were at least partly inspired by the Protestant vision of the heavenly Jerusalem.
Sandys’ and Timberlake’s Virginians were conservative Anglicans of the sort favoured by James I and his son, Charles. However, the kings could not keep a lid on the expectations of a new fervent, radical Protestantism: the Puritans embraced the fundamental truth of the Bible but with immediate messianic expectations. The Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants only intensified the feeling that Judgement Day was near. These were strange times which encouraged wild mystical excitement in all three religions. Harvests failed. The grim reaper, in the guise of epidemics, starvation and religious war, scythed through Europe, killing millions.
Thousands of Puritans escaped Charles I’s Church to found new colonies in America. As they sailed across the Atlantic to seek religious freedom, they read of Jerusalem and the Israelites in their Bibles and saw themselves as the Chosen People blessed by God to build a new Zion in the wilderness of Canaan. ‘Come let us declare in Zion the word of God,’ prayed William Bradford as he disembarked from the Mayflower. The first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, believed ‘the God of Israel is amongst us’ and paraphrased Jeremiah and Matthew to hail his settlement as ‘a city on a hill’ – America as the new Jerusalem. Soon there would be eighteen Jordans, twelve Canaans, thirty-five Bethels and sixty-six Jerusalems or Salems.
The fear of catastrophe and the anticipation of redemption rose together: civil wars scarred France and England while simultaneously in eastern Europe, the Jews of Poland and Ukraine were slaughtered in tens of thousands by the Cossacks of the marauding Hetman Khmelnytsky. In 1649, Charles I was beheaded and Oliver Cromwell emerged as Lord Protector, a millenarian soldier convinced that his Puritans, like their brethren in New England, were the new Chosen People:
‘Truly you are called by God as Judah was, to rule with Him and for Him,’ he said. ‘You are at the edge of Promises and Prophecies.’ Cromwell was a Hebraist who believed that Christ could not come again unless the Jews returned to Zion and then converted to Christianity. Effectively, the Puritans were the first Christian Zionists. Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright even suggested the Royal Navy should ‘transport Izrael’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers for an everlasting Inheritance’.
Many Jews earnestly studied the Kabbala, dreaming that the Messiah would transform their Ukrainian tragedy into redemption. A Dutch rabbi, Menasseh ben Israel, petitioned the Lord Protector, pointing out that the Bible stated Jews had to be scattered to all corners of the world before their Return to Zion would set off the Second Coming – yet they were still banned from England. Therefore Cromwell convened a special Whitehall Conference that ruled it was wrong to exclude ‘this mean and despised people from the light and leave them among false teachers, Papists and idolators.’ Cromwell allowed the Jews to return. After his death, the monarchy was restored and his Puritanic messianism lost its power but its message endured in the American Colonies and amongst the English Nonconformists ready to blossom again in the evangelical awakening two hundred years later. Just after the Restoration, manic excitement convulsed the Jewish world: the Messiah was in Jerusalem – or was he?5
THE MESSIAH: SABBATAI ZEVI
He was Mordecai, the unbalanced son of a Smyrnan poultry-dealer who studied the Kabbala. In 1648 he declared himself the Messiah by uttering the Tetragrammaton. This was the unspeakable name of God based on the Hebrew letters YHWH, only spoken once a year on the Day of Atonement by the high priest in the Temple itself. Now he changed his named to Sabbatai Zevi and proclaimed that Judgement Day would come in 1666. He was expelled from Smyrna but gradually as he worked as a trader around the Mediterranean, he won the devotion of a network of wealthy backers. In 1660, he moved first to Cairo and then travelled on to Jerusalem where he fasted, sang songs, handed sweets to children, and performed strange and unsettling acts.
Sabbatai radiated a reckless but deranged magnetism – he was clearly a manic depressive who swung between bouts of infectious self-belief, desperate melancholia and euphoric exaltation that led him to perform demonic, sometimes shamelessly erotic antics. At any other time, he would have been condemned as an obscene and sinful madman but in those catastrophic days, many Jews were already in a state of Kabbalist anticipation. His craziness was surely the true mark of the sacred.
The Jerusalemite Jews were impoverished by Ottoman taxes so they asked Sabbatai to raise funds from his Cairene patrons, which he did. He succeeded in his mission, but not everyone was convinced as he prepared to declare himself Messiah in Jerusalem. After much debate, the rabbis placed him under a ban. Furious, he moved to Gaza which he chose as his sacred city instead of Jerusalem and then launched his messianic ministry in Aleppo.