Jerusalem. The Biography

beheaded. After much dynastic rivalry, the Husseinis were later succeeded as naqib by Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya whose family changed its name sometime in the century and purloined that of the prestigious Husseinis. The Ghudayyas became the new Husseinis, the most powerful of Jerusalem’s ruling families – right up into the twenty-first century. 8
    THE HUSSEINIS: RISE OF THE FAMILIES
     
    Anyone important who came to Jerusalem during the eighteenth century wished to stay with the chief of this clan, who held open house for peasants, scholars and Ottoman officials alike; it was said he had eighty guests for dinner every night. ‘Everyone visits him from near and afar,’ wrote one such guest to the ‘palace’ of Abd al-Latif al-Ghudayya who dominated Jerusalem. ‘Strangers find refuge in his home, residing there as they like.’ Abd al-Latif’s visitors left Jerusalem escorted by a squadron of his horsemen.
    The resurgence of the Husseinis marked the rise of the great Jerusalem Families. Virtually every position of honour in Jerusalem was hereditary. Most of the Families were descended from Sufi sheikhs who had been favoured by one conqueror or another. Most changed their names, invented grandiose genealogies and alternately feuded and intermarried – not unlike their Western equivalents. Each fiercely defended and strived to expand its own lucrative power-base. †
    But wealth wouldhave been vulgar without scholarship; pedigree powerless without wealth, and position impossible without Ottoman patronage. Sometimes the Families fought it out: two Nusseibehs were ambushed and killed by a Husseini posse near Abu Ghosh, but, typically, the families made peace by marrying the surviving Nusseibeh brother of the victims to the sister of the Mufti of Jerusalem.
    Yet even the Families could not ensure prosperity in a Jerusalem scarred by intermittent fighting between the 500-strong Ottoman garrison notorious for its debauchery, raiding Bedouin, rioting Jerusalemites and venal governors. The population shrank to 8,000, preyed upon by the Governor of Damascus who descended on the city annually with a small army to collect the taxes. *
    The Jews, without any European backing, suffered bitterly. ‘The Arabs’, wrote Gedaliah, an Ashkenazi from Poland, ‘often wrong the Jews publicly. If one of them gives a Jew a blow, the Jew goes away cowering. While an angry Turk would beat a Jew shamefully and dreadfully with his shoes and not one would deliver the Jew.’ They lived in squalor, banned from repairing their houses. Two hundred Jewish families took flight: with ‘the persecutions and extortions increasing every day’, wrote a Jewish pilgrim in 1766, ‘I had to flee from the city at night. Every day somebody was flung into prison.’
    The Christians hated each other much more than they hated the infidels – indeed Father Elzear Horn, a Franciscan, simply called the Greeks ‘The Vomit’. Each of the sects relished every squalid discomfort and penurious humiliation suffered by their rivals in the Church. Ottoman control and Christian competition meant the 300 permanent residents were locked inside each night; ‘more like prisoners’ than priests in Evliya’s view, living in a state of permanent siege. Food was passedthrough a hole in the door or winched up via a system of pulleys, to the windows. These monks – most of them Orthodox, Catholic or Armenian – camped in cramped, humid tension, suffering from ‘headaches, fevers, tumours, diarrhoea, dysentery.’ The latrines of the Sepulchre provided a special source of bitterness – and stench: every sect had its own lavatorial arrangements, but the Franciscans, claimed Father Horn, ‘suffer much from the smell’. The Greeks did not have lavatories at all. Meanwhile the poverty-stricken smaller sects, the Copts, Ethiopians and Syriacs, could afford their food only by performing servile tasks such as emptying the Greek slop-buckets. No wonder the French writer Constantin Volney heard Jerusalemites ‘have acquired and deserved the reputation of the most evil people in Syria’.
    When France again won the
praedominium
for the Franciscans, the Greek Orthodox hit back. On the night before Palm Sunday 1757, the Greek Orthodox ambushed the Franciscans in the Rotunda of the Sepulchre, ‘with clubs, maces, hooks, poniards, and swords’ that had been hidden behind pillars and under their habits, smashing lamps and ripping tapestries. The Franciscans fled to St