Jerusalem. The Biography

Nonetheless thousands looked to Jerusalem. By 1890, Russian Jewish immigration was starting to change the city: there were now 25,000 Jews out of 40,000 Jerusalemites. In 1882 the sultan banned Jewish immigration and in 1889 decreed that Jews were not allowed to stay in Palestine more than three months, measures scarcely enforced. The Arab Families, led by Yusuf Khalidi, petitioned Istanbul against Jewish immigration, but the Jews kept coming.
    Ever since the writers of the Bible created their narrative of Jerusalem, and ever since that biography of the city had become the universal story, her fate had been decided faraway – in Babylon, Susa, Rome, Mecca, Istanbul, London and St Petersburg. In 1895, an Austrian journalist published the book that would define twentieth-century Jerusalem:
The Jewish State
. 20

ZIONISM
     
    O Jerusalem: the one man who has been present all this while, the lovable dreamer of Nazareth, has done nothing but increase the hate.
    Theodore Herzl,
Diary
    The angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape, and plunder than any other place on this earth.
    Arthur Koestler
    If a land can have a soul, Jerusalem is the soul of the land of Israel.
    David Ben-Gurion, press interview
    No two cities have counted more with mankind than Athens and Jerusalem.
    Winston Churchill,
The Second World War
, vol 6:
Triumph and Tragedy
    It’s not easy to be a Jerusalemite. A thorny path runs alongside its joys. The great are small inside the Old City. Popes, patriarchs, kings all remove their crowns. It is the city of the King of Kings; and earthly kings and lords are not its masters. No human can ever possess Jerusalem.
    John Tleel, ‘I am Jerusalem’,
Jerusalem Quarterly
And burthened Gentiles
o’er the main
Must bear the weight
of Israel’s hate
Because he is not
brought again
In triumph to Jerusalem.
    Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’

1898–1905
     
    HERZL
     
    Theodor Herzl, a literary critic in Vienna, was said to be ‘extraordinarily handsome’, his eyes were ‘almond-shaped with heavy, black melancholy lashes’, his profile that of ‘an Assyrian Emperor’. An unhappily married father of three, he was a thoroughly assimilated Jew who wore winged collars and frock-coats; ‘he was not of the people’, and had little connection to the shabby, ringletted Jews of the
shtetl
s. He was a lawyer by training, spoke no Hebrew or Yiddish, put up Christmas trees at home and did not bother to circumcise his son. But the Russian pogroms of 1881 fundamentally shocked him. When, in 1895, Vienna elected the anti-Semitic rabble-rouser Karl Lueger as mayor, Herzl wrote: ‘The mood among the Jews is one of despair.’ Two years later, he was in Paris covering the Dreyfus Affair, in which an innocent Jewish army officer was framed as a German spy, and he watched Parisian mobs shrieking ‘Mort aux Juifs’ in the country that had emancipated Jews. This reinforced his conviction that assimilation had not only failed but was provoking more anti-Semitism. He even predicted that anti-Semitism would one day be legalized in Germany.
    Herzl concluded that Jews could never be safe without their own homeland. At first, this half-pragmatist, half-utopian dreamed of a Germanic aristocratic republic, a Jewish Venice ruled by a senate with a Rothschild as princely doge and himself as chancellor. His vision was secular: the high priests ‘will wear impressive robes’; the Herzl army would boast cuirassiers with silver breastplates; his modern Jewish citizens would play cricket and tennis in a modern Jerusalem. The Rothschilds, initially sceptical of any Jewish state, rejected Herzl’s approaches, but these early notes soon matured into something more practical. ‘Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home,’ he proclaimed in
The Jewish State
in February 1896. ‘The Maccabees will rise again. We shall live at last as free men on our own soil and die peacefully in our own homes.’
    There was nothing new about Zionism – even the word had already been coined in 1890 – but Herzl gave political expression and organization to a very ancient sentiment. Jews had envisaged their very existence in terms of their relationship to Jerusalem since King David and particularly since the Babylonian Exile. Jews prayed towards Jerusalem, wished each other ‘Next Year in Jerusalem’ each year at Passover, and commemorated the fallen Temple by smashing a glass at their