Jerusalem. The Biography

The Albanians crushed the rebels and retook Jerusalem; the Husseinis of Jerusalem were exiled to Egypt. The rebels rose again, but Ibrahim the Red slaughtered them outside Nablus, sacked Hebron, despoiled the countryside, beheaded his captives – and launched a reign of terror inJerusalem. Returning to the city, he appointed the chieftain Jaber Abu Ghosh as a poacher-turned-gamekeeper governor, and beheaded anyone found with a weapon. The walls were bedecked with severed heads; prisoners rotted in the new Kishleh jail near the Jaffa Gate, since used by the Ottomans, British and Israelis.
    The Albanians were enthusiastic modernizers who needed European backing if they were to conquer the Ottoman empire. Ibrahim allowed the minorities to repair their smashed buildings: the Franciscans restored St Saviour’s; the Sephardic Jews started to rebuild the ben Zakkai Synagogue, one of the four synagogues of the Jewish Quarter; the Ashkenazis returned to the Hurva Synagogue, destroyed in 1720. Although the Jewish Quarter was now poverty-stricken, a few Russian Jews, persecuted at home, started to settle there.
    In 1839, Ibrahim made his bid for Istanbul, smashing the Ottoman armies. King Louis Philippe’s France backed the Albanians, but Britain feared French and Russian influence if the Ottomans fell. The sultan and his enemy Ibrahim both bid for Western support. The teenaged Sultan Abdulmecid issued a Noble Rescript promising equality for minorities, while Ibrahim invited the Europeans to establish consulates in Jerusalem – and, for the first time since the Crusades, permitted the ringing of church bells.
    In 1839, the first British vice-consul, William Turner Young, arrived in Jerusalem not only to represent London’s new power but to convert the Jews and accelerate the Second Coming.

1840–1855
     
    PALMERSTON AND SHAFTESBURY: THE IMPERIALIST AND THE EVANGELIST
     
    The diplomatic policy relating to Jerusalem was the work of Lord Palmerston, the foreign secretary, but the Godly mission was the achievement of his evangelical stepson-in-law, the Earl of Shaftesbury. * Palmerston, aged fifty-five, was not a Victorian prig or evangelical but an unrepentant Regency buck known as Lord Cupid for his sexual escapades (which he jovially recorded in his diary), as Lord Pam for his jaunty vigour, and as Lord Pumicestone for his gunboat diplomacy. Indeed Shaftesbury joked that Palmerston ‘didn’t know Moses from Sir Sidney Smith’. His interest in the Jews was pragmatic: the French advanced their power by protecting the Catholics, the Russians by protecting the Orthodox, but there were few Protestants in Jerusalem. Palmerston wanted to diminish French and Russian influence, and saw that British power could be advanced by protecting the Jews. The other mission – the conversion of the Jews – was the result of his son-in-law’s evangelical ardour.
    Shaftesbury, thirty-nine years old, curly haired and bewhiskered, personified the new Victorian Britain. A pure-hearted aristocrat dedicated to improving the lives of workers, children and lunatics, he was also a fundamentalist who believed that the Bible ‘is God’s word written from the very first syllable down to the very last’. He was sure that dynamic Christianity would promote a global moral renaissance and an improvement of humanity itself. In Britain, Puritan millenarianism had long since been overwhelmed by the rationalism of the Enlightenment but it had survived among the Nonconformists. Now it returned to the mainstream: the French Revolution with its guillotine, and the Industrial Revolution with its mobs of workers, had shaped a new British middleclass that welcomed the certainties of piety, respectability and the Bible, the antidote to the raging materialism of Victorian prosperity.
    The London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews, known as the Jews Society, founded in 1808, now flourished, thanks in part to Shaftesbury. ‘All the young people are growing mad about religion,’ grumbled another elderly Regency roué, Lord Melbourne, prime minister at Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837. Convinced that eternal salvation was attainable through the personal experience of Jesus and his good news (
evangelion
in Greek), these evangelicals expected the Second Coming. Shaftesbury believed, like the Puritans two centuries before, that the return and conversion of the Jews would create an Anglican Jerusalem and the Kingdom of Heaven. He prepared a