Jerusalem: The Biography

* Not all the synagogues had been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat,Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a geniza or storehouse for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s,Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English,American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume Mediterranean Society.

* This was the age of Jewish ministers for Islamic monarchs. In Egypt, the scion of a trading family of Persian Karaites,Abu Saad al-Tustari became a purveyor of luxuries to Zahir, to whom he then sold a black slave girl. On the caliph’s death in 1036, she became the Walida, mother of Caliph Mustansir, with Tustari as the power behind the throne. He amassed colossal wealth, once giving al-Walida a silver ship and tent worth 130,000 dirhams. He never converted to Islam. The poet Rida ibn Thawb wrote: ‘People of Egypt,I have good advice for you / Turn Jew, for Heaven itself has become Jewish.’ In 1048,Tustari was murdered by Turkish troops, much mourned by the Goan of Jerusalem. Meanwhile the vizier of Islamic Granada in Spain was another patron of Jerusalem: Samuel ibn Nagrela, ‘The Prince’, a polymathic doctor, poet,Talmudic scholar and general, perhaps the only practising Jew to command Islamic armies in battle. His son succeeded him but was murdered in 1066 in a massacre of Jews in Granada.

* When the captive emperor was brought before the victorious Alp Arslan, whose moustaches were so long he draped them over his shoulders, asked, ‘What would you do if I was brought before you as a prisoner?’ ‘Perhaps I’d kill you, or exhibit you in the streets of Constantinople,’ replied Romanos IV Diogenes. ‘My punishment is far heavier,’ replied Alp Arslan. ‘I forgive you, and set you free.’ But the Lion did not last long himself. When he saw the approach of an assassin, he waved aside his bodyguards in order to display his skill as an archer by bringing down the attacker. But his foot slipped, and the asssassin stabbed him. Dying, he warned his son Malik Shah, ‘Remember well the lessons learned, and do not allow your vanity to overreach your good sense.’ His tomb in Merv reads with Ozymandian irony: ‘O those who saw the sky-high grandeur of Alp Arslan, behold! He is under the black soil now.’

* A dispute over the Fatimid succession gave rise to a murderous breakaway sect of Ismaili Shiites led by Hassan al-Sabbah. He and his Nizaris fled to Persia, where he seized the mountain fortress of Alamut and later they gained fortresses in Lebanon. He made up for his small numbers by launching a spectacular campaign of terrorism against his Sunni enemies. His team of killers, who terrorized the Middle East for over a century, were supposedly under the influence of hashish, and came to be called the Hashishim, or Assassins. The Muslims, though, called them Batini, seekers after secret esoteric knowledge.

† In 1095, the Sunni philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali sought refuge in Jerusalem from the Assassins. ‘I shut myself up in the precinct of the Dome of the Rock,’ he said, in a tiny chamber atop the Golden Gate, to write the Revivification of the Science of Religion. This reinvigorated Sunni Islam by separating the logic of philosophy – Greek metaphysics – from the ecstatic revelation of religious truth, while giving each its due. Ultimately his demolition of scientific cause and effect (in his Incoherence of the Philosophers) in favour of divine revelation ended the golden age of Arabic learning in Baghdad and helped undermine Arab science and philosophy.

* 70,000 is the traditional figure for Jerusalem’s population but this is an implausible exaggeration. In the eleventh century, Constantinople had 600,000 inhabitants; Baghdad and Cairo, the great cities of Islam: 400,000–500,000; Rome, Venice and Florence 30,000–40,000; Paris and London 20,000. As for the Greek Fire, ‘God’s flame’, a petroleum-based concoction fired through siphons, had once saved Constantinople. Now the Muslims, not the Christians, had it.