Jerusalem. The Biography

eastern Europeans from the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, known as Ashkenazis (named for Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, said to be the progenitor of the northern peoples). The turbulence of the world outside encouraged their mysticism: a rabbi named Isaac Luri was teaching the Kabbala, the study of the Torah’s secret codes that would bring them closer to the Godhead. Luri was born in Jerusalem but he made his base in the magical mountain city of Safed in Galilee. The trauma of the Spanish persecutions had forced many Jews to fake conversion to Christianity and live clandestine lives – indeed Kabbala’s holy text, the Book of Zohar, was written in thirteenth-century Castile. The Kabbalists sought Majesty, Fear and Trembling – ‘the ecstatic experience, the tremendous uprush and soaring of the soul to its highest plane, union with God’. On Fridays, the Kabbalists, wearing white robes, would greet the ‘bride of God’, the Shekinah, outside the city and then escort the divine presence back to their homes. But inevitably the Kabbalists speculated that the Jewish trauma along with their secret codes and incantations contained the key to redemption: surely the Messiah would soon come to Jerusalem?
    Notwithstanding occasional anti-Christian riots, Bedouin ambushesand the extortion of Ottoman governors, the city was left to her own rituals. Yet the feuding of the Orthodox, Armenians and Catholics in this Ottoman backwater only served to confirm the prejudices of a new breed of visitor, part-pilgrim, part-merchant-adventurer: the Protestants had arrived. They tended to be English traders, burning with hostility towards the Catholics, and often with links to the new colonies in America. 3
    When the English sea captain and merchant Henry Timberlake arrived, the Ottoman governors had never heard of Protestantism or his Queen Elizabeth and he was thrown into jail next to the Holy Sepulchre, released only on payment of a fine. The exuberant memoir of his adventures,
A True and Strange Discourse
, became a bestseller in Jacobean London. Another of these audacious Englishmen, John Sanderson, factor of the Levant Company, paid his fee to the Turks to enter the Church but was attacked by the Franciscan monks, whose padre ‘accused me to be a Jew’. The Turks then arrested him, tried to convert him to Islam and took him before the qadi, who searched him and then released him as a Christian.
    Acts of fanaticism, both Christian and Muslim, unleashed violence that reveals the real limits of the much-vaunted Ottoman tolerance: the Ottoman governor forcibly closed down the beloved Ramban synagogue at the request of the
ulema
: Jews were forbidden to pray there and it was converted into a warehouse. When the Franciscans quietly extended their Mount Zion property, rumours spread that they were burrowing to Malta to let in the Christian armies: they were attacked by the qadi and the mob and only rescued by the Ottoman garrison. A Portuguese nun who baptized Muslim children and denounced Islam was burned on a pyre in the courtyard of the Church. * 4
    At Easter 1610, a young Englishman arrived who represented not only the new Protestantism but the New World too.
    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 – ‘muchof 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 Wall: ‘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,