Jerusalem: The Biography

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 the earthly, 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 liberation of the serfs in 1861 unleashed expectations of reform that he could not satisfy: anarchist and socialist terrorists hunted him down in his own empire. During one attack, the emperor himself drew his pistol and fired at his would-be killers. But in 1881 he was finally assassinated in St Petersburg, his legs blown off by bomb-throwing radicals.

Rumours quickly spread that Jews were implicated (there was a Jewish woman in the terrorists’ circle but none of the assassins was Jewish) and these unleashed bloody attacks against Jews across Russia, encouraged and sometimes organized by the state. These predations gave the west a new word: pogrom, from the Russian gromit – to destroy. The new emperor, Alexander III, a bearded giant with blinkered, conservative views, regarded the Jews as a ‘social cancer’ and he blamed them for their own persecution by honest Orthodox Russians. His May Laws of 1882 effectively made anti-Semitism^* a state policy, enforced by secret-police repression.

The emperor believed Holy Russia would be saved by autocracy and Orthodoxy encouraged by the cult of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He therefore appointed his brother Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich to the presidency of the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society ‘to strengthen Orthodoxy in the Holy Land’.

On 28 September 1888, Sergei and his twenty-four-year-old wife Ella, pretty granddaughter of Queen Victoria, consecrated their Church of Mary Magdalene, with white limestone and seven glistening gold onion-domes, on the Mount of Olives. Both were moved by Jerusalem. ‘You can’t imagine what a profound impression it makes’, Ella reported to Queen Victoria, ‘when entering the Holy Sepulchre. It’s such an intense joy being here and my thoughts constantly turn to you.’ Ella, born a Protestant princess of Hesse-Darmstadt, had passionately embraced her conversion to Orthodoxy. ‘How happy’ it made her to ‘see all these holy places one learns to love from tender infancy.’ Sergei and the emperor had carefully overseen the design of the church, with Ella commissioning its paintings of Magdalene. ‘It’s like a dream to see all these places where our Lord suffered for us,’ Ella told Victoria, ‘and such an intense comfort to pray here.’ Ella needed comfort.

Sergei, thirty-one years old, was a military martinet and domestic tyrant haunted by rumours of a secret gay life that clashed with his severe belief in autocracy and Orthodoxy. ‘Without redeeming features, obstinate, arrogant and disagreeable, he flaunted his peculiarities,’ claimed one of his cousins. His marriage to Ella placed him at the centre of European royalty: her sister Alexandra was about to marry the future tsar Nicholas II.

Before they left, Sergei’s interests – empire, God and archaeology – merged in his new church, the St Alexander Nevsky, right next to the Church of the Sepulchre. When he bought this prime site, Sergei and his builders had uncovered walls dating from Hadrian’s Temple and Constantine’s Basilica, and when he built his church, he incorporated these archaeological finds into the building. In the Russian Compound, he commissioned Sergei’s House, a luxury hostel with turreted neo-Gothic towers for Russian aristocrats.^* The lives of Sergei and Ella would be tragic; yet, apart from these buildings and the thousands of Russian pilgrims they attracted, his defining contribution was as one of the proponents of the official anti-Semitism that drove Russia’s Jews towards the sanctuary of Zion.

GRAND DUKE SERGEI: RUSSIAN JEWS AND THE POGROMS

In 1891, Alexander III appointed Sergei governor-general of Moscow. There, he immediately expelled 20,000 Jews from the city, surrounding their neighbourhood in the middle of the first night of Passover with Cossacks and police. ‘I can’t believe we won’t be judged for this in the future,’ Ella wrote, but Sergei ‘believes this is for our security. I see nothing in it but shame.’^†

The six million Russian Jews had always honoured Jerusalem, praying towards the eastern walls of their houses. But now the pogroms pushed them either towards revolution – many embraced socialism – or towards escape. Thus was triggered a vast exodus, the first Aliyah, a word that meant flight to a higher place, the Holy Mountain of Jerusalem. Two million Jews left Russia between 1888 and 1914, but 85 per cent of them headed not for the Promised Land but the Golden Land of America. 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