Jerusalem. The Biography

Hebrew for Spain) fled eastwards to the more tolerant Holland, Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman empire where they were welcomed by Suleiman, both to boost his economy and to expose how Christianity had denied its Jewish heritage. The Diaspora moved east. From now until the early twentieth century, the streets of Istanbul, Salonica and Jerusalem would ring withthe lyrical tones of their new Judaeo-Spanish language, Ladino.
    In 1553, Suleiman’s Jewish doctor introduced him to Joseph Nasi, whose family had been forced into a fake conversion to Christianity before they fled via Holland and Italy to Istanbul. There, he won the sultan’s trust and became the confidential agent of his son and heir. Joseph, known to European diplomats as the Great Jew, ran a complex business empire, and served as a sultanic envoy and international man of mystery, an arbiter of war and finance, a mediator between east and west. Joseph believed in the return of the Jews to the Promised Land, and Suleiman granted him the lordship of Tiberias in Galilee where he settled Italian Jews, rebuilt the town and planted mulberry trees to foster a silk industry, the first Jew to settle Jews in the Holy Land. He would build his Jerusalem in Galilee because that ultra-sensitive connoisseur of power knew that the real Jerusalem was the reserve of Suleiman.
    Nonetheless Joseph patronized the Jewish scholars in Jerusalem where Suleiman promoted the superiority of Islam and diminished the status of the other two religions with a meticulous care that still guides the city now. Suleiman was fighting Emperor Charles V so that his attitude to the Christians was somewhat tempered by the cynical requirements of European diplomacy. The Jews, on the other hand, mattered little.
    They still prayed around the walls of the Temple Mount and on the slopes of the Mount of Olives as well as in their main synagogue, the Ramban, but the sultan favoured order in all things. Discouraging anything that diminished the Islamic monopoly on the Temple Mount, he assigned the Jews a 9-foot street along the supporting wall of King Herod’s Temple for their prayers. This made some sense, because it was adjacent to their old Cave synagogue and next to the Jewish Quarter where the Jews had started to settle in the fourteenth century, today’s Jewish Quarter. But the site was overshadowed by the Islamic Maghrebi neighbourhood; Jewish worship there was carefully regulated; and Jews were later required to have a permit to pray there at all. The Jews soon called this place ha-Kotel, the Wall, outsiders called it the Western or Wailing Wall and henceforth its golden, ashlar stones became the symbol of Jerusalem and the focus of holiness.
    Suleiman brought the Christians down to size by expelling the Franciscans from David’s Tomb where his inscription declares: ‘The Emperor Suleiman ordered this place to be purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque.’ Sacred to all three religions, this Byzantine-Crusader site, an early Jewish synagogue and the Christian Coenaculum, now became the Islamic shrine of Nabi Daoud, the Prophet David, where Suleimanappointed a family of Sufi sheikhs called the Dajanis as hereditary guardians, a position they held until 1948.
    The politics of the outside world would always reflect back onto the religious life of Jerusalem: Suleiman soon had reason to favour the Franciscans. In the battle for central Europe, he found that he needed Christian allies – the French – to fight the Habsburgs, and the Franciscans were backed by the kings of France. In 1535, the sultan granted France trading privileges and recognized the Franciscans as the custodians of the Christian shrines. This was the first of the so-called capitulations – concessions to European powers – that later undermined the Ottoman empire.
    The Franciscans set up headquarters in St Saviour’s, close to the Church which ultimately would become a colossal Catholic city-within-a-city, but their rise disturbed the Orthodox. The hatred between Catholics and Orthodox was already venomous but both claimed the paramount custodianship of the Holy Places: the
praedominium
. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was now shared between eight sects in a Darwinian struggle in which only the strongest could survive. Some were going up, some were going down: the Armenians remained powerful because they were well represented in Istanbul, the Serbs and Maronites were in decline – but the Georgians, who had lost