Jerusalem. The Biography

opposite was the true Golgotha, an idea he promoted with such energy that his so-called Garden Tomb became a Protestant alternative to the Sepulchre. * Meanwhile the Overcomers were generous to the many mentally fragile pilgrims whom Bertha Spafford called ‘Simples in the Garden of Allah’. ‘Jerusalem’, she wrote in her memoirs, ‘attracts all kinds of religious fanatics and cranks of different degrees of derangement.’ There were fellow Americans who regarded themselves as ‘Elijah, John the Baptist or another of the prophets [and] there were several messiahs wandering around Jerusalem’. One of the Elijahs tried to kill Horatio Spafford with a rock; a Texan named Titus thought he was a world-conqueror but had to be restrained after he groped the maids. Then there was a rich Dutch countess designing a mansion to house the 144,000 ransomed souls of Revelation 7.4. Yet not all the Americans in Jerusalem were Christian Hebraists. Consul-General Merrill hated the Jews as much as he hated the Overcomers, calling them an arrogant, money-obsessed ‘race of weaklings of whom neither soldiers, colonists nor citizens can be made’.
    Gradually the American Colony’s cheerful hymn-singing and charitable deeds made them friends among all sects and religions, and the first port of call for every well-connected writer, pilgrim and potentate. Selma Lagerlöf, a Swedish writer who stayed with the Spaffords, made the Colony famous with her novel
Jerusalem
, winning the Nobel Literature Prize. In 1902, Baron Plato von Ustinov (grandfather of the actor Peter), who ran a hotel in Jaffa, asked if his guests could stay at the Colony, the start of its transformation into a hotel. 19 Yet if the city had been transformed by Westerners, by the end of the century she was dominated by Russia, empire of Orthodox peasants and persecuted Jews, both drawn irresistibly towards Jerusalem – and both travelling from Odessa on the same ships.

1880–98
     
    GRAND DUKE SERGEI AND GRAND DUCHESS ELLA
     
    Russian peasants, many of them women, often walked all the way from their villages southwards to Odessa for the voyage to Zion. They wore ‘deeply padded overcoats and furlined jackets with sheepskin caps’, the women adding ‘bundles of four or five petticoats and grey shawls over their heads’. They brought their death shrouds and felt, wrote Stephen Graham, an English journalist who travelled with them disguised by perfect Russian, shaggy beard and peasant smock, ‘that when they have been to Jerusalem, the serious occupations of their life are all ended. For the peasant goes to Jerusalem to
die
in a certain way in Russia – just as the whole concern of the Protestant centres round
life
.’
    They sailed in the ‘dark and filthy holds’ of subsidized ships: ‘In one storm, when the masts were broken, the hold where the peasants rolled over one another like corpses, or grasped at one another like madmen, was worse than any imagined pit, the stench worse than any fire!’ In Jerusalem, they were welcomed ‘by a giant Montenegrin guide in the magnificent uniform of the Russian Palestine Society – scarlet and cream cloak and riding knickers – and conducted through the Jerusalem streets’ crowded with ‘Arab beggars, almost naked and ugly beyond words, howling for coppers’, to the Russian Compound. There they lived in capacious, crowded dormitories for ‘threepence-a-day’ and ate
kasha
, cabbage soupand mugs of
kvass
root-beer in the refectories. There were so many Russians that the ‘Arab boys ran alongside shouting in Russian “Muscovites are good!”’
    Throughout the journey, rumours would spread: ‘There is a mysterious passenger on board.’ When they arrived, crying ‘Glory be to Thee O God!’, they would say, ‘There’s a mysterious pilgrim in Jerusalem,’ and claim to have seen Jesus at the Golden Gate or by Herod’s wall. ‘They spend a night in the Sepulchre of Christ,’ explained Graham, ‘and receiving the Holy Fire, extinguish it with their caps that they will wear in their coffins.’ Yet they were increasingly shocked by ‘Jerusalem theearthly, a pleasure-ground for wealthy sightseers’, and particularly by ‘the vast strange ruined dirty verminous’ Church, ‘the womb of death’. They would reassure themselves by reflecting, ‘We find Jesus really when we cease looking at Jerusalem and allow the Gospel to look into us.’ Yet their Holy Russia itself was changing: Alexander II’s