When Nicholas’ bullying demands were rejected, he invaded the Ottoman territories on the Danube – today’s Rumania – advancing towards Istanbul. Nicholas had convinced himself that he had charmed the British into agreement, denying he wanted to swallow Istanbul, let alone Jerusalem, but he fatally misjudged both London and Paris. Faced with Russian menace and Ottoman collapse, Britain and France threatened war. Nicholas stubbornly called their bluff because, he explained, he was ‘waging war for a solely Christian purpose, under the banner of the Holy Cross’. On 28 March, 1853, the French and British declared war on Russia. Even though most of the fighting was far away in the Crimea, this war placed Jerusalem at the centre of the world stage where she has remained ever since.*
As Jerusalem’s garrison marched off to fight the Russians, James Finn watched them present arms on the Maidan parade ground outside the Jaffa Gate where the ‘Syrian sun glistened along the moving steel for they marched with fixed bayonets’. Finn could not forget that the ‘kernel of it all lay with us in the Holy Places’ and that Nicholas ‘aimed still at an actual possession of [Jerusalem’s] Sanctuaries’.
Instead of the usual devout Russians, a new breed of often sceptical Western visitors – 10,000 a year, by 1856 – poured into the city to see the Holy Places that had sparked a European war. Yet a visit to Jerusalem was still an adventure. There were no carriages, just covered litters. She possessed virtually no hotels or banks: visitors stayed in the monasteries, the most comfortable being the Armenian with its elegant, airy courtyards. However in 1843, a Russian Jew named Menachem Mendel founded the first hotel, the Kaminitz, which was soon followed by the English Hotel; and in 1848 a Sephardic family, the Valeros, opened the first European bank in a room up some stairs off David Street. This was a still a provincial Ottoman town, usually governed by a scruffy pasha who resided in a ramshackle seraglio – residence, harem and prison – just north of the Temple Mount.* Westerners were ‘astonished at the beggarly meanness of that mansion,’ wrote Finn, and repulsed by the mangy concubines and ‘ragamuffin officials’. As visitors sipped coffee with the pasha, they could hear the clank of prisoners’ chains and groans of the tortured from the dungeons below. During the war, the pasha tried to ensure tranquillity in Jerusalem – but the Greek Orthodox monks attacked the newly appointed Catholic patriarch and herded camels into his residence, all to the delight of the great writers who came to see those very shrines for which so many soldiers were dying in the grinding battles and putrid hospitals of the Crimea. They were not impressed.
THE WRITERS: MELVILLE, FLAUBERT AND THACKERAY
Herman Melville, then aged thirty-seven, had made his name with three novels based on his own breathtaking whaling adventures in the Pacific but Moby Dick, published in 1851, had sold just 3,000 copies. Melancholic and tormented, not unlike Gogol, he arrived in Jerusalem in 1856 to restore his health – and to investigate the nature of God. ‘My object – saturation of my mind with the atmosphere of Jerusalem, offering myself as a passive subject to its weird impressions’ – and he was stimulated by the ‘wreck’ that was Jerusalem, beguiled by the ‘unleavened nakedness of desolation’. As we saw earlier, he was fascinated by the ‘fanatical energy and spirit’ and ‘Jewmania’ of the many ‘crazy’ Americans. They inspired his epic Clarel – at 18,000 lines, the longest American poem, which he wrote when he got home as he toiled in the US Customs Office.
Melville was not the only novelist looking for restoration and consolation for literary disappointment in the Orient: Gustave Flaubert, accompanied by his wealthy friend Maxime du Camp, and funded by the French government to report on trade and agriculture, was on a cultural and sexual tour to recover from the reception of his first novel. He saw Jerusalem as a ‘charnelhouse surrounded by walls, the old religions rotting in the sun’. As for the Church, ‘a dog would have been more moved than me. The Armenians curse the Greeks who detest the Latins who execrate the Copts.’ Melville agreed that the Church was a ‘half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death’ but recognized that wars were started in what he called the ‘thronged news-room and theology exchange of Jerusalem’.*
The coenobite fighting was only one aspect of the violent theatre of Jerusalem. The tensions between the new visitors – Anglo-American evangelicals and Russian Jews and Orthodox peasants on one hand, and the older world of the Ottomans, Arab Families, Sephardic Jews and Bedouin and fellahin on the other – led to a series of murders. One of James Finn’s evangelical ladies, Mathilda Creasy, was found with her head smashed in; and a Jew was found stabbed down a well. The poisoning of a richrabbi, David Herschell, led to a sensational court case but the suspects, who were his own grandsons, were acquitted for lack of evidence. The British consul James Finn was the most powerful official in Jerusalem at a time when the Ottomans were so indebted to Britain, hence he took it upon himself to intervene wherever he saw fit. Considering himself to be the Sherlock Holmes of the Holy City, he set about investigating each of these crimes, but despite his powers of detection (and the aid of six African necromancers), no killers were ever found.
Finn was the courageous champion and proselytizing irritant for the Jews who still needed his protection. Their plight was, if anything, getting worse. Most of the Jews lived in the ‘stinking ruins of the Jewish Quarter, venerable in filth’, wrote Thackeray, and their ‘wailings and lamentations of the lost glory of their city’ haunted Jerusalem on Friday nights. ‘None equals the misery and suffering of the Jews at Jerusalem,’ Karl Marx wrote in the New York Daily Tribune in April 1854, ‘inhabiting the most filthy quarter, constant object of Musulman oppression and intolerance, insulted by the Greeks, persecuted by the Latins.’ A Jew who walked past the gate leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, was, as Finn reported, ‘beaten by a mob of pilgrims’ because it was still illegal for a Jew to pass it. Another was stabbed by an Ottoman soldier. A Jewish funeral was attacked by Arabs. In each case, Finn swooped on the Ottoman governor and forced him to intervene and see British justice done.
The pasha himself was more interested in controlling the Palestinian Arabs whose rebellions and clan wars, partly a response to the centralizing reforms of the Ottoman empire, were often fought out with the gallop of camels, the swish of spears and the whistle of bullets around the walls of Jerusalem. These thrilling scenes played into the European view of Palestine as a biblical theatre crossed with a Wild West stage set, and they gathered on the walls to spectate the skirmishes which to them must have resembled surreal sporting events – with the added spice of the occasional fatality.
THE WRITERS: DAVID DORR, AN AMERICAN SLAVE ON TOUR
At their Talbieh evangelical farm for converting Jews, the Finns frequently found themselves caught in the crossfire. As bullets flew, Mrs Finn was often amazed to identify women amongst the warriors. She did her best to negotiate peace between the sheikhs. But the Bedouin were only part of the problem: the sheikhs of Hebron and Abu Ghosh fielded private armies of 500 warriors and fought full-scale wars against the Ottomans. When one of these sheikhs was captured and brought to Jerusalem in chains, the dashing warrior managed to escape and gallop away to fight again, like an Arab Robin Hood. Finally Hafiz Pasha, the aged governor of Jerusalem, had to lead an expedition with 550 troops and two brass field-guns to suppress the warlord of Hebron.