Jerusalem: The Biography

* Both Jews and Christians were infected by apocalyptic expectations. In 1523, a dwarfish young Jew, David Reuveni, caused a stir in Jerusalem by declaring himself an Arabian prince leading the Ten Tribes back to Zion, but the Islamic qadi spared him as a lunatic and he then sailed to Rome, where the pope received him, but ultimately Christendom proved less tolerant than Islam and he died in the early 1530s in a Spanish dungeon. In 1534 a radical Protestant sect of Anabaptists seized the German town of Munster which they declared to be the New Jerusalem. Their leader John of Leiden, an illegitimate tailor’s apprentice, pronounced himself King of Jerusalem, heir to King David. After eighteen months, this new Zion was recaptured and the Anabaptist leaders executed.

* These human bonfires in the courtyard of the Church were not infrequent. In 1557 a Sicilian monk, Brother Juniper, twice invaded the Aqsa before he was killed by the qadi himself – and then incinerated before the Church. A Spanish Franciscan denounced Islam inside al-Aqsa and was beheaded on the Temple Mount before another bonfire. Yet as the case of Reuvent had shown, death was not always the end of the story, and Christianity in Europe was no more civilized: almost 400 heretics were burned in England during the sixteenth century.

* Some of this followers regarded this as the ultimate sacred paradox – and their Sabbatarian Judaeo-Islamic sect, the Donmeh (Turncoats, though they called themselves Mamin, the Believers), particularly the many who lived in Salonica, were to play a role in the Young Turk revolutions between 1908 and the First World War. They still exist in Turkey

* During one of the battles in Transylvania against the Habsburgs, he slipped away from the fray to evacuate his bowels only to be ambushed by an Austrian soldier, ‘so I plopped right into my own filth.’ As they fought, they rolled ‘topsy-turvy’ in our hero’s excrement until ‘I almost became the shitty martyr.’ Evliya finally killed the infidel, and managed to pull up his pantaloons ‘but I was soaked in blood as well as shit and I had to laugh, seeing that I’d become the shitty Ghazi (Islamic warrior).’ Afterwards he presented the Austrian’s head to his Pasha, who said, ‘My Evliya, you smell strangely of shit!’ The officers ‘laughed uproariously’ and the Pasha gave him fifty gold pieces and a silver turban-crest.

* Henry Maundrell, Chaplain of the English Levant Company, who visited in 1697, watched the ‘fury’ of the monks as they fought bloodily in the Church. He also described the mania of the Holy Fire as even more demented than it had been a century earlier when Sandys visited: the pilgrims ‘began to act in such an indecent manner as to expose their nudities, they tumbled about the Sepulchre after the manner of tumblers on stage’ lighting their beards – it was ‘like Bedlam itself’. As for the priests, Maundrell just called them ‘miracle-mongers’

* This became known as the Ruin – Hurva – Synagogue, and remained a wreck for over a century. It was reconstructed in the nineteenth century – but destroyed by the Jordanians in 1967.

† 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.’