Jerusalem: The Biography

* Edward Robinson, a missionary and Professor of Biblical Literature in New York, yearned to uncover the geography of the Bible. He used his knowledge of other sources such as Josephus to make some astonishing finds. In 1852, he noticed, at ground level, the top of what he guessed was one of the monumental arches across the valley into the Temple – known ever since as Robinson’s Arch. Another American, Dr James Barclay, a missionary to convert the Jews and an engineer advising the Ottomans on the preservation of the Mamluk buildings, spotted the lintel that had topped one of Herod’s gates – today’s Barclay’s Gate. The two Americans might have started as Christian missionaries, but as archaeologists they proved that the Muslim Haram al-Sharif was the Herodian Temple.

* After Jerusalem, Warren became famous as the inept Metropolitan Police Commissioner who failed to catch Jack the Ripper and as a dud military commander during the Boer War. His successors, Lieutenants Charles Conder and Herbert Kitchener (the latter subsequently the conqueror of Sudan), surveyed the country so successfully that General Allenby used their maps to conquer Palestine in 1917.

* Montefiore died in 1885 aged over 100. He and Judith were buried with Jerusalem earth in their own Rachel’s Tomb in Ramsgate. The Montefiore Windmill still stands and the Montefiore Quarter, know as Yemin Moshe, is one of the city’s most elegant Neighbourhoods and one of five named after him. His baronetcy was inherited by his nephew Sir Abraham who was childless (his wife went insane on their wedding night) but Moses left his estates to his Moroccan-born nephew Joseph Sebag who became Sebag-Montefiore. The Ramsgate mansion burned down in the 1930s. An almost forgotten figure (except in Israel), his tomb was neglected for a long time, threatened by urban sprawl and graffiti, but in the twenty-first century, his tomb has become a shrine: thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews make a pilgrimage there on the anniversary of his death.

* Ironically Twain stayed in the Mediterranean Hotel in the Muslim Quarter, the very building which the Israeli Likud leader and general Ariel Sharon bought in the late 1980s in his bid to judaize the Muslim Quarter. Today it is a Jewish seminary. Twain’s book The Innocents Abroad was an instant classic for sceptics: when ex-President Ulysses Grant visited Jerusalem, he used it as his guidebook.

* The Hasidim – ‘the pious’ in Hebrew – are a growing presence in Jerusalem. The inheritors of seventeenth-century mysticism they still wear the distinctive black garb of that era. In the 1740s, a faith-healer in Ukraine named Israel ben Eliezer, adopting the name Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), created a mass movement that challenged Talmudic studies, advocating trance-like movements in prayer, singing, dancing and mystical practices to get closer to God. Their chief opponent was the Vilna Gaon who rejected all this as folk superstition and stressed the need for traditional Talmudic studies. Their conflict resembles that between the mystical Sufis and the harsh Islamic conservatives of, say, the Saudi Wahabis.

* Ever since the 1760s, the Khalidis had been forming a library – collecting 5,000 Islamic books, some dating from the tenth century, and 1,200 manuscripts. In 1899, Raghib Khalidi merged his collection with those of Yusuf and his cousins and opened the Khalidi Library the next year around the Mamluk tomb of Barka Khan on Silsila Street, where it remains.

* Guided around Jerusalem by Captains Charles Wilson and Conder, archaeologists of the Palestine Exploration Fund, the princes attended a Sephardic Passover dinner, and were ‘much impressed by the complete domesticity’ of this ‘happy family gathering’. They were even more excited by their tattoos. ‘I was tattooed’, wrote Prince George, ‘by the same man who tattooed Papa [the Prince of Wales].’

† The sign outside Cook’s office read: ‘Thomas Cook and Son have the largest staff of dragomans and muleteers, the best landaus, carriages, camp, saddlery etc in Palestine!’ The building of the Grand New Hotel revealed Roman remains: a part of the Second Wall, tiles inscribed with the Tenth Legion’s insignia and a column erected by a legate of Augustus, used for decades as the base of a streetlamp.

* The German architect and archaeologist Conrad Schick was the most prolific architect of his time, but his buildings defy any pigeon-holing – his home, Thabor House, and chapel contain vestiges of Germanic, Arab and Graeco-Roman styles.