* The Albanians never again held Jerusalem but they ruled Egypt for a century, first as khedives (nominally Ottoman viceroys but actually independent), then as sultans of Egypt and finally as kings. When Mehmet Ali became senile, Ibrahim became his regent but he himself died in 1848 just before his father. The last of the Albanian dynasty was King Farouk who was overthrown in 1952
* William Miller was one of the most popular of these new American prophets. An ex-army officer from Massachusetts, he calculated that Christ would come again in Jerusalem in 1843: 100,000 Americans became Millerites. He converted the assertion in Daniel 8.14 that the ‘sanctuary would be cleansed’ in ‘two thousand and three hundred days’ into years by claiming that a prophetic day was really a year. Hence starting in 457 BC, which Miller believed was the date of Persian King Artaxerxes I’s order to restore the Temple, he arrived at 1843. When nothing happened that year, he suggested 1844. The Millerite successor churches, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses, still number fourteen million members worldwid
* In 1658, Patriarch Nikon built the New Jerusalem Monastery in Istra, near Moscow, to promote the universal mission of Russian Orthodoxy and Autocracy. Its centrepiece was a replica of the actual Sepulchre in Jerusalem which is valuable since the original was destroyed in the fire of 1808. In 1818, before he ascended the throne, Nicholas I visited the New Jerusalem and was deeply moved, ordering its restoration. The Nazis damaged it but it is now being restored
* * The Crimean war saw another attempt to arm the Jews. In September 1855, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz travelled to Istanbul to organize Polish forces known as Ottoman Cossacks, to fight the Russians. These included the Hussars of Israel, recruited from Russian, Polish and Palestinian Jews. Mickiewicz died three months later and the Hussars were never tested in the valley of death
* * The seat of the Ottoman governors was al-Jawailiyya, built by one of Nasir Mohammad’s Mamluk amirs, on the site of Herod’s Antonia Fortress and the first station of the Via Dolorosa. Under Crusader rule, the Templars had built a chapel there and part of its domed porch stood until the 1920s. A modern school stands there today.
* * These writers were following a fashion for oriental travelogues. Between 1800 and 1875, about 5,000 books were published in English about Jerusalem. Many of these works are remarkably similar, either breathless repetitions of biblical stories by evangelicals (sometimes reinforced by archaeology) or travelogues mocking Ottoman incompetence, Jewish wailing, Arab simplicity and Orthodox vulgarity. The witty Eothen by Alexander Kinglake, who later reported on the Crimean War, is probably the best
* Dorr’s young master, plantation owner Cornelius Fellowes, decided to set off on a three-year tour of the world from Paris to Jerusalem. Fellowes offered a deal to his intelligent and literate young slave. If Dorr served him on the trip, he would be freed on his return. In his effervescent travelogue, Dorr recorded everything from the gorgeous ladies of Paris to the ‘scarce towers and charred walls’ of Jerusalem. On his return, his master refused to manumit him so Dorr escaped to the north and in 1858 published AColored Man Round the World by a Quadroon. It was the American Civil War, which started soon afterwards, that finally gave him his freedom. The winner of that war, President Abraham Lincoln, was not formally religious, but longed to visit Jerusalem, perhaps because as a young man he had lived in one of the American Jerusalems, New Salem, Illinois; he knew the Bible by heart and he had probably heard the stories of his Secretary of State, William H. Seward who had visited Jerusalem on his world tour. On the way with his wife to Ford’s Theatre, on 14 April 1865, he proposed a ‘special pilgrimage to Jerusalem’. At the theatre, moments before he was shot, he whispered: ‘How I should like to visit Jerusalem.’ Afterwards Mary Todd Lincoln decided he ‘was in the midst of the Heavenly Jerusalem’
* * Practising Jews could not sit in the House of Commons until 1858. Then a new Act of Parliament finally allowed Lionel de Rothschild to take his seat as the first practising Jew ever to sit in the House. Interestingly, Shaftesbury had repeatedly spoken against this – as a Christian Zionist, his interest was really in the return and conversion of the Jews in preparation for the Second Coming. But much later he graciously proposed to Prime Minister William Gladstone, ‘It would be a glorious day for the House of Lords when that grand old Hebrew (Montefiore) were enrolled on the lists of the hereditary legislators of England.’ But it was too soon. The first Jewish peerage was awarded to Lionel Rothschild’s son, Nathaniel, in 1885, after Montefiore’s death.
† On the way to St Petersburg he was welcomed to Vilna, a semi-Jewish city filled with so many Talmudic scholars that it was known as ‘the Jerusalem of Lithuania’, by thousands of enthusiastic Jews, but Nicholas did not moderate his polices and as Jewish life worsened, Montefiore later returned to meet Alexander II. It was said that every Jewish shack in Russia had a portrait, almost a Jewish icon, of their champion. ‘At breakfast (in Motol, a village near Pinsk) my grandpa used to tell me stories of the deeds of mighty figures,’ wrote Chaim Weizmann, a future Zionist leader. ‘I was particularly impressed by the visit of Sir Moses Montefiore to Russia, a visit only a generation before my birth but the story was already a legend. Indeed Montefiore was himself, though then still living, already a legend.’
* Montefiore was the most famous but not the richest of Jerusalem’s philanthropists. He was often the channel for Rothschild money and his almshouses were funded by Judah Touro, an American tycoon from New Orleans who in 1825 had backed a Jewish homeland on Grand Island in the Niagara river, upstate New York. The project failed and in his will, he left $60,000 for Montefiore to spend in Jerusalem. In 1854, the Rothschilds built a much-needed Jewish hospital. During his 1856 visit, Montefiore created a Jewish girls’ school, to the disapproval of the Orthodox Jews, and this was later taken over by his nephew Lionel de Rothschild who renamed it after his late daughter Evelina. But the greatest project was the Tiferet Israel Synagogue close to the Hurva in the Jewish Quarter. Funded by Jews all over the world, but chiefly by the Reuben and Sassoon families of Baghdad, this splendidly domed synagogue, the highest building in the Jewish Quarter, became the centre of Palestinian Jewry until it was destroyed in 1948. Meanwhile the Armenians had their own Rothschilds: the oil-rich Gulbenkian family regularly came on pilgrimage and created the Gulbenkian Library in the Armenian Monastery
* The Russian Compound contained the consulate, a hospital, the multidomed Holy Trinity Church with four belltowers, the archimandrite’s residence, apartments for visiting aristocrats and pilgrim hostels, to house over 3,000 pilgrims. Its buildings resembled huge but elegant modern fortresses and during the British Mandate they served as military strongholds.
* Edward Robinson, a missionary and Professor of Biblical Literature in New York, yearned to uncover the geography of the Bible. He used his knowledge of other sources such as Josephus to make some astonishing finds. In 1852, he noticed, at ground level, the top of what he guessed was one of the monumental arches across the valley into the Temple – known ever since as Robinson’s Arch. Another American, Dr James Barclay, a missionary to convert the Jews and an engineer advising the Ottomans on the preservation of the Mamluk buildings, spotted the lintel that had topped one of Herod’s gates – today’s Barclay’s Gate. The two Americans might have started as Christian missionaries, but as archaeologists they proved that the Muslim Haram al-Sharif was the Herodian Temple.