Jerusalem. The Biography

fainting-fits, enforced his rule with the
Khafiya
secret police who murdered his ex-grand vizier and one of his slavegirls amongst others. While he enjoyed the traditional privileges – his harem contained 900 odalisques – he lived in fear, checking under his bed for assassins each night, but he was also a skilled carpenter, a reader of Sherlock Holmes, and the impresario of his own theatre.
    His crackdown was immediately felt in Jerusalem: Yusuf Khalidi was expelled from Istanbul, sacked as mayor and replaced by Umar al-Husseini. When the Khalidis were down, the Husseinis were up. Meanwhile, Russia prepared finally to destroy the Ottomans. The British prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, intervened to save them.
    JERUSALEM TATTOOS:
BRITISH PRINCES AND RUSSIAN GRAND DUKES
     
    He had just bought the Suez Canal, borrowing £4 million from Lionel de Rothschild. ‘What is your security?’ asked Rothschild.
    ‘The British government,’ replied Disraeli’s secretary.
    ‘You shall have it.’ Now in 1878 at the Congress of Berlin, Disraeli guided the cabinets of Europe to curb Russia and enforce a settlement, in which Britain was able to occupy Cyprus. His performance was admired by the German chancellor Prince Bismarck, who pointing at Disraeli remarked, ‘The old Jew – he’s the man.’ The Ottomans had to give up much of their European, Christian territory and were forced to confirm the rights of Jews and other minorities. In 1882, the British took control of Egypt, which remained nominally under the Albanian dynasty. Two representatives of Britain’s forward position in the Middle East visited Jerusalem on their world tour: the young heirs to the British throne – Prince Albert Victor, known as Prince Eddy, the future Dukeof Clarence, aged eighteen, and his brother George, aged sixteen, the future George V. *
    They pitched their camp on the Mount of Olives, ‘the very same that Papa camped on,’ wrote Prince George, who thought it ‘a capital place’. The campboasted eleven luxurious tents, borne by ninety-five pack-animals and served by sixty servants – all marshalled by the king of travel agents, Thomas Cook, a Geordie Baptist minister who in 1869 had started a travel business conveying temperance campaigners from Leicester to Loughborough. Now Cook and his sons – one of whom accompanied the princes – were pioneers of the new tourism, hiring small armies of servants, guards and dragomans (translator-fixers) to protect against any attack by Bedouin or the Abu Ghosh clan, who still dominated the road from Jaffa and had to be either bribed or co-opted. These impresarios of travel laid out encampments of sumptuous silk tents, decorated in exotic reds and turquoise arabesques with dining rooms and receiving rooms, and even hot and cold water. The desired effect was to deliver an Oriental fantasy for the well-heeled English traveller – like something out of the
Thousand and One Nights
.
    Thomas Cook’s offices were at the Jaffa Gate, which was the hub of a new tourist-friendly Jerusalem, symbolized by the opening of the Grand New Hotel, just over Bathsheba’s Pool, supposedly where Uriah’s wife was seen bathing by King David, † and Joachim Fast’s hotel just outside the gate. In 1892, the railway finally reached Jerusalem, truly opening up the city to tourism.
    Photography developed alongside tourism. It was unexpected if fitting that the high priest of Jerusalem’s photographic boom was Yessayi Garabedian, the Armenian patriarch, ‘probably the handsomest potentate in the world’, who studied the art in Manchester. His two protégés left the Armenian priesthood and founded photographic studios on the Jaffa Road that offered tourists the chance to buy photographs of Arabs in ‘biblical poses’ or to pose themselves in biblical costume. In a typical moment, a group of bearded and sheepskin-clad Russian peasants gatheredin amazement to watch ‘a blue-eyed fair-haired English lady’ wearing ‘an embroidered scarlet costume’ with a brass circlet on her head and ‘tight corsets’ framing a ‘finely-developed bust,’ striking poses in front of David’s Tower. The Russians were half-horrified, half-dazzled.
    The growing New City was so architecturally eclectic that today Jerusalem has houses and entire suburbs that look as if they belong anywhere other than in the Middle East. The new Christian edifices added at the end of the century included twenty-seven French convents, ten