Jerusalem: The Biography

* His ideal character, featured in his best novel Coningsby, was Sidonia, a Sephardic millionaire who is friends with the emperors, kings and ministers in all the cabinets of Europe. Sidonia was an amalgam of Lionel de Rothschild and Moses Montefiore, both of whom Disraeli knew well

* The Wahabis were the followers of an eighteenth-century fundamentalist Salafi preacher Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahab who in 1744 allied himself with the Saudi family. Despite their setback at the hands of Mehmet Ali, the Saudis soon re-established a small state. During the First World War and the 1920s, their chieftain Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, funded by British subsidies and backed by his fanatical Wahabi army, reconquered Mecca and Arabia. In 1932, he proclaimed himself king of Saudi Arabia, where Wahabi Islam still rules. Ibn Saud fathered at least seventy children and his son Abdullah became king in 2005

* William Thomson later wrote one of the Evangelical classics that encouraged the American obsession with Jerusalem. The Land and the Book, reprinted in thirty editions, presented Palestine as a mystical Eden where the Bible was alive.

* Anthony Ashley-Cooper, descendant of the first earl, that shrewd minister who had served everyone from Cromwell to William III, still held the courtesy title Lord Ashley and sat in the House of the Commons, succeeding as the 7th earl in 1851. But for simplicity we call him Shaftesbury throughout

* Shaftesbury borrowed the notorious phrase ‘a land without a people’ from a Scottish minister, Alexander Keith, and it was later attributed (probably mistakenly) to Israel Zang-will, a Zionist who did not believe in settling Palestine, precisely because it was already inhabited by Arabs

* 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