Jerusalem. The Biography

Italian and eight Russian. * After Britain and Prussia ended their shared Anglo-Prussian bishopric, the Anglicans constructed their own sturdily English St George’s Cathedral, the see of an Anglican bishop. But in 1892, the Ottomans were still building too: Abdul-Hamid had added new fountains, created the New Gate to allow access directly to the Christian Quarter and in 1901, celebrating his twenty-fifth jubilee, he added a belltower to the Jaffa Gate that looked as if it belonged in a suburban English railway station.
    Meanwhile Jews and Arabs, Greeks and Germans were colonizing the New City outside the walls. In 1869, seven Jewish families founded the Nahalat Shiva – Quarter of the Seven – outside the Jaffa Gate; in 1874, ultra-Orthodox Jews settled in Mea Shearim, now a Hassidic quarter. By 1880, the 17,000 Jews formed a majority and there were nine new Jewish suburbs while the Arab Families built their own Husseini and Nashashibi quarters in Sheikh Jarrah, the area north of the Damascus Gate. † The Families’ Arab mansions boasted decorated ceilings in hybrid Turkish–European styles. One Husseini built the Orient House with its entry hall painted in flowers and geometric patterns, while another, Rabah Effendi Husseini, created a mansion featuring the Pasha Room with a high dome painted celestial blue, framed by gilded acanthus leaves. Orient House became a hotel then the Palestine Authority’s Jerusalem headquarters in the 1990s and Rabah Husseini’s mansion became the home of Jerusalem’s most eminent American family.
    THE AMERICAN OVERCOMERS: KEEPING JESUS’ MILK WARM
     
    On 21 November 1873, Anna Spafford and four of her daughters were crossing the Atlantic on the
Ville de Havre
when it was struck by another ship. As the ship sank, all four children were drowned, but Anna survived. When she learned, after her rescue, that they were dead, she wanted to throw herself into the water after them. Instead she sent her husband, Horatio, a prosperous Chicago attorney, the heartbreaking telegram: ‘SAVED ALONE. WHAT SHALL I DO?’ What the Spaffords did was to give up their conventional life and come to Jerusalem. First they faced more tragedy: their son died of scarlet fever, leaving them one child, Bertha, out of six. Anna Spafford believed herself ‘spared for a purpose’, but the couple was also outraged by their Presbyterian Church, which regarded their fate as divine punishment. Forming their own messianic sect, which the US press called the Overcomers, they believed that good works in Jerusalem and the restoration of the Jews to Israel – followed by their conversion – would hasten the imminent Second Coming.
    In 1881, the Overcomers – thirteen adults and three children, who became the nucleus of the American Colony – settled in a large house just inside the Damascus Gate until, in 1896, they were joined by the farmers of the Swedish Evangelical Church and needed a larger headquarters. They then leased Rabbah Husseini’s mansion in Sheikh Jarrah on the road to Nablus. Horatio died in 1888, but the sect thrived as they preached the Second Coming, converted Jews and developed their colony into a philanthropic, evangelical beehive of hospitals, orphanages, soup-kitchens, a shop, their own photography studio and a school. Their success attracted the hostility of the long-serving American consul-general, Selah Merrill, an anti-Semitic Massachusetts Congregationalist clergyman, Andover professor and inept archaeologist. For twenty years Merrill tried to destroy the Colonists, accusing them of charlatanism, anti-Americanism, lewdness and child-kidnapping. He threatened to send his guards to horsewhip them.
    The US press claimed that the Colonists made tea on the Olivet every day ready for the Second Coming: ‘They keepmilk warm at all times’, explained the
Detroit News
, ‘in case the Lord and Master should arrive and asses are kept saddled in case Jesus appeared and some said they would never die.’ They also played a special part in the city’s archaeology: in 1882, they befriended a British imperial hero who symbolized the empire’s embrace of Bible and sword.
    After helping suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China and governingthe Sudan, General Charles ‘Chinese’ Gordon settled in John the Baptist’s village, Ein Kerem. But he came into town to study the Bible and enjoy the view from the roof of the Colony’s original house. There he became convinced that the skull-like hill