Jerusalem. The Biography

to sell their monastery St Saviour’s to the Franciscans and that was just the beginning. In 1685, the impoverished Georgians lost their headquarters, the Monastery of the Cross, said to be the origins of the wood for Jesus’s cross, to the Orthodox. After the fall of Crusader Jerusalem in 1187, Queen Tamara of Georgia had sent an official, Shota Rustaveli, the author of the national epic,
The Knight in the Panther Skin
, to embellish the Monastery: he is probably buried there and his portrait appeared in its frescoes. But in 2004, Rustaveli’s berobbed, white-bearded and high-hatted portrait was vandalized just as the Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili arrived on a state visit to inspect it. The Russian Orthodox were suspected but nothing was proved. The Serbs passed their last monastery to their Greek brethern in the seventeenth century. The Maronites still maintain a convent near the Jaffa Gate, though the Georgians, Maronites and Serbs have all long since lost their share of the Church.

† These clans were known in English as the Notables, to the Turks as the Effendiya, to the Arabs as the Aya. The Nusseibehs were Custodians of the Church; the Dajanis presided over David’s Tomb; the Khalidis ran the
sharia
lawcourts; the Husseinis usually dominated as Naqib al-Ashraf, Mufti and Sheikh of the Haram as well as leading the Nabi Musa festival. The Abu Ghosh, warlords of the mountains around Jerusalem, guardians of the pilgrim route from Jaffa, were allies of the Husseinis. Only recent research by Professor Adel Manna has revealed the true story of how the Ghudayyas took over the identity of the Husseinis. The Nusseibehs changed their name from Ghanim; the Khalidis from Deiri; the Jarallahs (who competed for the muftiship with the Husseinis) from Hasqafi. ‘It is disorienting and perplexing to have to endure a change of name,’ admits one of these grandees, Hazem Nusseibeh, ex-Foreign Minister of Jordan, in his memoir
The Jerusalemites
,
‘
even though it occurred seven centuries ago.’

* The powerful Vali (Governor) of the Vilayet (Province) of Damascus usually ruled Jerusalem and was often the Amir al-Haj, Commander of the annual caravan to Mecca which he funded through his
dawra
, an armed expedition. At other times, Jerusalem was controlled by the Vali of Sidon who ruled from Acre. Jerusalem was a small district, a Sanjak, under a Sanjak Bey or Mutasallim. Yet Jerusalem’s status changed repeatedly over the next centuries, sometimes becoming an independent district. Ottoman governors ruled with the aid of the qadi, a city judge appointed in Istanbul, and the mufti (the leader appointed by the Grand Mufti of the empire, the Sheikh al-Islam in Istanbul, who wrote
fatwa
judgements on religious questions) drawn from Jerusalem’s Families. The pashas of Damascus and Sidon were rivals who sometimes fought mini-wars for control of Palestine.

* In 1804, William Blake, poet, painter, engraver and radical, opened his poem
Milton
with the prefatory verses ‘And did those feet in ancient times…’ which ends ‘Till we have built Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.’ The poem, printed in about 1808, praises the brief heyday of a heavenly Jerusalem in pre-industrial England, inspired by the mythical visit of young Jesus accompanying Joseph of Arimathea to inspect the latter’s Cornish tin-mines. The poem remained little known until 1916 when the Poet Laureate Robert Bridges asked the composer Sir Hubert Parry to set it to music for a patriotic meeting. Edward Elgar later orchestrated it. King George V said he preferred it to ‘God Save the King’, and it has become an alternative anthem, with universal appeal to plangent patriots, churchgoers, Promenaders, sports fans, socialist idealists and generations of drunken, floppy-haired undergraduates. Blake never called it ‘Jerusalem’ for he also wrote an epic entitled
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

* During his voyage home, a fearsome storm struck the Montefiores’ ship. The sailors feared that the vessel would sink. Montefiore carried, for luck, from the previous year’s Passover, a piece of unleavened matzah, known as the
afikoman
, which, at the height of the tempest, he cast into the waves. The sea instantly became miraculously quiet. Montefiore believed that this was God’s blessing on a Jerusalem pilgrimage. The Montefiore family today read his account of this event every Passover

* His ideal character, featured