* There would be at least thirty-four different plans in locations as diverse as Alaska, Angola, Libya, Iraq and South America. The plan for Alaska during the Second World War was satirized by Michael Chabon in his thriller, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Politicians from Churchill and FDR to Hitler and Stalin pursued other plans: before attacking the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler planned to deport the Jews to a death-colony in Madagascar. During the 1930s and 1940s, Churchill proposed a Jewish homeland in Libya while in 1945, his colonial secretary Lord Moyne suggested East Prussia for the Jews. As we will see, Stalin actually set up a Jewish homeland and during the 1940s considered a Jewish Crimea.
* Ironically, while Westerners reread the superficial memoirs of European visitors, this superlative chronicle of the city, covering forty years up to the creation of Israel and beyond, is still published only in Arabic.
* Sergei himself, patron of the Russian presence, was long dead. In 1905, he finally resigned his post as governor-general of Moscow, but was blown to smithereens by terrorists within the Kremlin. His wife Ella rushed outside and crawled across the ground collecting the body parts of her husband, though only an armless chunk of torso and a fragment of the skull and jaw were identifiable. She visited his killer in prison before his execution. Afterwards she succeeded Sergei as president of the Palestine Society, which Nicholas II now personally supervised. But Ella fell out with her sister Empress Alexandra over the growing power of Rasputin. And tragically, she would return to Jerusalem (see footnote on p. 444).
* On his return to Russia, Rasputin resumed his intimate role in the imperial family. He published My Thoughts and Reflections: Brief Description of a Journey to the Holy Places in the midst of the Great War in 1915 when Nicholas II was commanding the Russian army, leaving Alexandra, advised by Rasputin, as effective ruler of the home front – with disastrous consequences. He was illiterate; the book reads as if it had been dictated, and it was said that the empress herself corrected it. Designed to promote his image as a respectable pilgrim when he was at the height of his power and unpopularity, it was too late: he was assassinated shortly afterwards.
* Parker’s friends were Captain Clarence Wilson, Major Foley, who had participated in the Jameson Raid in Transvaal, the Hon. Cyril Ward, third son of the Earl of Dudley, Captain Robin Duff, cousin of the Duke of Fife, and Captain Hyde Villiers, cousin of the Earl of Jersey, along with the Scandinavians Count Herman Wrangel and a certain van Bourg, a mystic who irritated the group when he suggested that the treasure might actually be on Mount Ararat, not in Jerusalem at all.
* The full story of Parker is told here for the first time, based not only on his letters and accounts but also Juvelius’ prophecies. Even in 1921, Parker’s agents in Jerusalem were still suing him for unpaid fees. The Flashman-esque Parker skulked at headquarters and avoided the trenches in the Great War, never married but kept multiple mistresses, inherited the earldom of Morley and the stately home in 1951 and proudly told his family that he meant to spend every penny of his inheritance. Even in old age, he remained in the words of one of the family ‘a vain, venal, unreliable blacksheep who left nothing, a namedropper and boaster’. He lived until 1962, but he never mentioned Jerusalem and there were no papers – until in 1975 the Parker lawyers found a file that they returned to the Sixth Earl of Morley. For many years, the papers were forgotten, but the earl and his brother Nigel Parker kindly made them available to this author. Juvelius, becoming a librarian in Vyborg, wrote a novel based on the story and died of cancer in 1922. This episode left little trace in Jerusalem, but in the tunnels of Ophel, now the site of Ronny Reich’s excavation of those huge Canaanite towers, a small cave leads to an abandoned bucket that once belonged to Monty Parker.
* Ruhi Khalidi died of typhoid later that year and many were convinced that he had been poisoned by the Young Turks.
* Jemal loathed Jewish nationalism or anything that threatened Turkish dominance but at the same time, he tried to court Jewish support: he offered Henry Morganthau, US ambassador to Istanbul, the chance to buy the Western Wall and repeated the offer to Jerusalem’s Jews.
* Leah Tennenbaum later married a Christian lawyer, Abcarius Bey, who built her a mansion, Villa Leah, in Talbieh; she was thirty years younger than him. She left him, but he rented the Villa Leah to the exiled Ethiopian emperor, Haile Selassie. Later the house belonged to Moshe Dayan.
* They took the name of the dynasty from Hashem, great-grandfather of the Prophet. They were descended from Muhammad through his daughter Fatima and grandson Hassan, hence their title of sherif. They called themselves the Hashemites, the British called them the Sherifians.
* At first Sykes had considered giving Jerusalem to Russia whose pilgrims had dominated the city until the war. Russia had already been promised Istanbul to which Sykes–Picot added swathes of eastern Anatolia, Armenia and Kurdistan.
* Hoess, the future SS Commandant of Auschwitz, where millions of Jews were gassed and cremated during the Holocaust, was considering a career in the Catholic priesthood. Jerusalem ‘played a decisive part in my subsequent renunciation of my faith. As a devout Catholic, I was disgusted by the cynical manner in which trade in allegedly holy relics was carried on by the representatives of the many churches there.’ Wounded in the knee and awarded the Iron Cross, Hoess, who ‘shunned all demonstrations of affection’, was seduced in Jerusalem by one of his German nurses: ‘I fell under the magic spell of love.’ He was hanged in April 1947. By coincidence an ‘obstreperous’ young German boy, helping the American Colony with its Casualty Clearing Station near the Notre Dame, was the son of the German Vice Consuclass="underline" Rudolf Hess was the future deputy Führer of Nazi Germany, who flew to Scotland on an insane peace mission in 1941 and spent the rest of his life as a prisoner.
* In one of Disraeli’s most popular novels, Tancred, a duke’s son travels to Jerusalem where a Jew says, prophetically, ‘The English will take this city; they will keep it.’
* Lloyd George’s mission was to win the war and everything else was subordinate to that. So it was no surprise that he was also considering a fourth Middle Eastern option: he was negotiating indirectly and very secretly with the Three Pashas over a separate Ottoman peace that would betray Jews, Arabs and French by leaving Jerusalem under the sultan. ‘Almost the same week that we’ve pledged ourselves to secure Palestine as a national home for the Jewish People,’ wrote an exasperated Curzon, ‘are we to contemplate leaving the Turkish flag flying over Jerusalem?’ The talks came to nothing.
* Jemal returned to Istanbul in 1917, but on the Ottoman surrender the following year he fled to Berlin where he wrote his memoirs. He was assassinated by Armenians in Tbilisi in 1922 as revenge for the Armenian genocide, even though he claimed, ‘I was convinced the deportations of all Armenians was bound to cause great distress,’ and it may well be true, as he said, that ‘I was able to bring nearly 150,000 to Beirut and Aleppo.’ Talaat was also assassinated; Enver was killed in battle, leading a Turkic revolt against the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.