OTTOMAN CITY

THE PEOPLE of Jerusalem welcomed the Ottomans with relief. As the Mamluk empire had declined, the city had been neglected: waqf endowments had lapsed, the economy was depressed, and the roads were terrorized by the Bedouin. The Ottomans were already experienced empire builders and had established a strong, centralized administration. Like the Mamluks, they were a predominantly military power; at the heart of their army and their state were the Janissaries, an elite infantry corps, whose great strength was their willingness to use firearms. By the mid-sixteenth century, when the empire was at the height of its power, there were between twelve thousand and fifteen thousand Janissaries. The Ottomans brought law and order back to Palestine: the Bedouin were held in check, and once they had stopped wasting the countryside, agriculture could improve. The Ottomans were generous to the Arab provinces in the early years. They introduced an efficient administration, the economy improved, and trade and commerce flourished. Palestine was divided into three districts (sanjaks) based on Jerusalem, Nablus, and Gaza. These were all part of the province (eyālet) of Damascus. There was no attempt to repopulate Jerusalem with Turks. The Ottomans merely sent a governor (pasha), civil officials, and a small military force which was garrisoned in the citadel.

The fortunes of Jerusalem improved dramatically under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–66). He fought wars in Europe, expanded the empire to the west, and then concentrated on its internal development. Under Suleiman, the Ottoman empire enjoyed a cultural revival, and Jerusalem was one of his chief beneficiaries. The Turkish wars had naturally led to a renewal of hatred of Islam in Europe. There was talk of a new Crusade, and it is said that Suleiman had a dream in which the Prophet Muḥammad commanded him to organize the defense of Jerusalem. At all events, in 1536 Suleiman ordered that the city walls be rebuilt. It was a massive project, involving huge expenditure and great skill. There were few other places where the Ottomans built such elaborate fortifications. The wall, which is still standing today, was two miles long and about forty feet high. It completely encircled the city and included thirty-four towers and seven open gates. The great court architect Sinan passed through the city during the construction and is said to have personally designed the Damascus Gate in the north of the city. When the wall was finished in 1541, Jerusalem was properly fortified for the first time in over three hundred years.

Suleiman also invested large sums in Jerusalem’s water system. Six beautiful fountains were built in the city, canals and pools were excavated, and the “Sultan’s Pool,” southwest of the city, was renovated and its aqueducts repaired. To strengthen Jerusalem still further, Suleiman tried to persuade his subjects to settle there, particularly the Jewish refugees who had settled in the Ottoman empire after their expulsion from Christian Spain in 1492. From the population censuses taken by the Ottomans, we can see that the population almost trebled by the mid-sixteenth century. In 1553, there were approximately 13,384 inhabitants. The Jewish and Christian communities each numbered about 1,650 souls. Most of the Muslims were local Arab Sunnis, though there were also Muslims from North Africa, Egypt, Persia, Iraq, Bosnia, India, and Central Asia. The city now enjoyed a new prosperity. The markets had been developed and enlarged; the price of goods increased, a sign of an improvement in the general standard of living. There were five chief industries in the city, involving the manufacture of food, textiles, soap, leather, and metalwork. Soap was exported to Egypt and grain to Egypt, Rhodes, and Dubrovnik. Textiles and rice were imported from Egypt, clothes and coffee from Damascus, and textiles and rugs from Istanbul, China, and the Hijaz. The various industries and professions in Jerusalem were organized into about forty guilds (taifa), each with a sheikh and his deputy. Even singers and dancers had their own taifa. Because of the increase in population and income and also because of the religious prestige of the city, Jerusalem was promoted administratively in the second half of the sixteenth century. It was now a mutasarriflik, an enlarged administrative unit which included thesanjaks of Nablus and Gaza. The pasha who governed Jerusalem had the title mutasarrif; the jurisdiction of the qā˙ī of al-Quds was much larger, stretching from Gaza to Haifa. Consequently these two officials were paid the same salary.

The early Ottoman commitment to Jerusalem is clear in the majestic city walls built by Suleiman; they are still one of the most famous landmarks of the Old City.

Suleiman did not neglect the Ḥaram. The mosaic on the upper part of the exterior wall of the Dome of the Rock was restored and the lower part encased in marble. The Dome of the Chain was also given a beautiful faience covering, and Suleiman built a superb ablutions fountain in the forecourt of the Aqsā. The waqf for the Ḥaram was built up again, as also was that of some of the madāris. The sultan waived his claim to the entrance fee paid by pilgrims to finance a year-long reading of the Qurān in the Dome of the Rock. The restored and enlarged waqf provided jobs and charity, and the sultan’s Russian-born wife Roxelana built the Takiyya Hospice in Jerusalem in 1551, a large complex comprising a mosque, a ribāt, a madrasah, an inn (khān), and a kitchen, which provided free meals to students, Sufis, and the poor. Endowed with a very large waqf, which included several villages and farms in the Ramallah area, the hospice became the most important charitable institution in Palestine.

The new stability brought by the Ottomans also improved the lot of the dhimmis. Most Jews still preferred to settle in Tiberias or Safed, but the Jewish community grew in Jerusalem under Suleiman. There was as yet no official Jewish Quarter. Jews tended to live in three residential districts in the south of the city: the Risha, Sharaf, and Maslakh neighborhoods, where they lived side by side with Muslims. Jewish visitors from Europe were struck by the freedom enjoyed by the Jews of Palestine. In 1535, David dei Rossi, an Italian Jew, noted that Jews even held government positions, something that would be inconceivable in Europe: “Here we are not in exile, as in our own country. Here … those appointed over the customs and tolls are Jews. There are no special Jewish taxes.”¹ The Ottomans did not apply the strict letter of the sharīah law regarding the fiscal arrangements for Jews. Not all Jews in Jerusalem had to pay the jizyah tax, and those that did generally paid at the lowest official rates. The law courts protected Jews and accepted their testimony; the autonomy of the Jewish community was both encouraged and protected by the Ottoman officials.²

Their improved status made the Jews extremely wary of a strange young Jew who arrived in Jerusalem in 1523 claiming to be the Messiah: they feared that his activities would be construed as rebellion by the Ottoman authorities and that this would endanger their position. David Reuveni said that he was a prince of a remote Jewish kingdom, the home of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Soon the tribes would return to Jerusalem, but first he had to perform an important task. During the reign of King Solomon, the rebel Jeroboam had put a stone from a pagan temple into the western wall of the Temple Mount. As long as it remained in place, redemption could not come. The Jerusalem Jews would have nothing to do with this highly dangerous and obviously unsound project: the wall in question had not been in existence in Solomon’s day. After Reuveni left for Italy, a rabbi of Jerusalem warned the Italian Jews to have nothing whatever to do with him. But there were disturbing rumors of an imminent Jewish exodus from Gaza, Egypt, and Salonica. Jews there were said to be selling all their possessions and preparing to come to Jerusalem for Passover to greet the Messiah. “May God take pity on us!” the rabbi wrote in distress.’ Not only would this huge influx disturb the authorities, but it would be impossible to house or feed these vast hordes.

In the event, the Jews failed to show up in Jerusalem when Passover came around. But David Reuveni attracted a considerable following in Italy, where he posed as the new King David. He told a fantastic story of his stay in Jerusalem: he had been greeted with honor by the Muslim establishment, he told his disciples, and been escorted onto the Ḥaram. There he had lived in the cave under the Rock for five weeks. This period of prayer and fasting on the site of the Devir had led to a remarkable event. On the first day of Shavuoth, the crescent on top of the Dome of the Rock had turned eastward and could not be righted. David had seen this as a sign that it was time for him to leave for Rome.

David’s messianic movement petered out, but it was a symptom of the acute distress in the Jewish world after the expulsion from Spain. Under Islam, the Jews had enjoyed a golden age in al-Andalus. The loss of Spanish Jewry was mourned throughout the world as the greatest catastrophe to have befallen Israel since the destruction of the Temple. The fifteenth century had also seen an escalation of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe, where Jews had been deported from one city after another. Exile had become the Jewish condition more acutely than ever, and many dreamed of a dramatic end to this painful separation from home and the past. The conquest of Jerusalem by the Ottomans, who had befriended the Jewish exiles, sent a tremor of excitement through the communities of the diaspora that would continue to ferment for over a century.

The mission of David Reuveni in Jerusalem had focused on the western supporting wall of the Ḥaram, which had been built originally by King Herod and was practically the last vestige of the lost Temple. During the Mamluk period, madāris had been built all along this wall, except for a stretch of about twenty-two meters between the Street of the Chain (Tariq al-Silsila) and the Maghribi Gate. Jews had never previously shown any particular interest in this portion of the wall. In Herod’s day, the place had been part of a shopping center and had no religious significance. Hitherto, Jewish pilgrims had gathered in prayer on the Mount of Olives and at the gates of the Ḥaram. When they were excluded from the city during the Crusader period, they had sometimes prayed at the eastern wall of the Temple Mount.⁴ But during the last years of the Mamluk regime, there had been a change. It may be that the increased Bedouin incursions at this time made it unsafe for Jews to congregate on the Mount of Olives outside the city. Instead, they seem to have turned to the vacant stretch of the western wall of the Ḥaram, clinging to it as their last link with the past.

During the construction of the city wall, possibly while Sinan was in residence and working on the Damascus Gate, Suleiman issued an official edict (firman) permitting the Jews to have a place of prayer at the Western Wall. Sinan is said to have designed the site, excavating downward to give the wall added height and building a wall parallel to it to separate the Jewish oratory from the Maghribi Quarter.³ The enclave was very narrow, only about nine feet wide. But this had the advantage of making the wall beetle impressively over the worshippers. The enclave at the Western Wall soon became the center of Jewish religious life in Jerusalem. There were as yet no formal devotions, but Jews liked to spend the afternoon there, reading the psalms and kissing the stones. Suleiman, who had probably merely hoped to attract more Jews to Jerusalem, was hailed as the friend and patron of Israel. In Jewish legend, he was said to have helped to clear the site himself and to have washed the wall with rose water to purify it, as Umar and Saladin had done when they reconsecrated the Temple Mount.⁶

The small prayer-enclave at the Western Wall for which Suleiman gave permission; it is said to have been designed by Sinan, the chief architect at the Ottoman Court in Istanbul.

The Western Wall soon attracted many of the usual myths connected with a sacred place. It was naturally associated with the traditions in the Talmud about the western wall of the Devir, which, the rabbis had said, the Shekhinah had never abandoned and which God had promised to preserve forever.⁷ Now these Talmudic sayings were applied to the western supporting wall of the Ḥaram. As the Presence was thought to linger there, Jews began to remove their shoes when they entered the enclosure. They liked to write petitions on slips of paper and insert them between the stones, so that they might remain continually before God. Because it was so close to the site of the Temple, it was said that the Gate of Heaven was situated directly above the Western Wall and that prayersascended directly from the enclave to the divine Throne. As the Karaite Moses Yerushalmi wrote in 1658, “a great sanctity rests on the Western Wall, the original sanctity which attached to it then and forever.”⁸ When they stepped into the narrow enclosure and gazed up at the wall that towered powerfully and protectively over them, Jews felt that they had stepped into the presence of the sacred. The wall had become a symbol of the divine, but also a symbol of the Jewish people. For all its majesty, the wall was a ruin—an emblem of destruction and defeat. As Moses Yerushalmi continued, “one wall and one wall only is left from the Temple.”⁹ It evoked absence as well as presence. When they clung to the Western Wall and kissed its stones, Jews could feel that they were making contact with past generations and a departed glory. Like the Jews themselves, the wall was a survivor. But it also reminded them of the desecration of their Temple, which itself symbolized the accumulated tragedies of Israel. Weeping over the wall, Jews could cathartically mourn for everything they had lost, in the past and in the present. Like the Temple itself, the Western Wall would come to represent both God and the Jewish self.

Life was not idyllic for Jews in Ottoman Jerusalem. There was still tension with the officials of the al-Umari mosque adjoining the Ramban Synagogue. Twice during the 1530s and 1540s the Muslims tried to get the synagogue closed, but the qādī decided in favor of the Jews. In 1556 there were so many Jewish worshippers in the synagogue that their Muslim neighbors made yet another attempt to have them evicted. They complained that Jews were disobeying the law by aping Muslim dress, covering their heads with their prayer shawls as with a keffiyeh. They also accused them of praying so loudly that they disturbed the Muslim worship next door. Eventually in 1587 the synagogue was closed permanently, though it was shut down in an orderly fashion.¹⁰ The Jews were permitted to keep their scrolls and pray in their own houses. There were similar problems at the Tomb of the Prophet Samuel (Nebī Samwīl), nine miles north of Jerusalem, which was revered by both Jews and Muslims. The Jews kept a synagogue there and came frequently on pilgrimage. The local Muslims complained that the Jews took the place over and behaved offensively to Muslim pilgrims to the shrine. This time, however, the qādī ruled permanently in the Jews’ favor and they kept their synagogue.

The tension revealed a deep-seated insecurity. The proximity of a rival cult at the same holy place can be extremely disturbing. Muslims felt threatened by the large numbers of Jews, whose worship penetrated their personal space. The convergence of two communities at the same site, each insisting that it had the monopoly of truth, raised difficult questions. Which one of them was right? The complaint about the Jewish prayer shawls showed a desire to establish a clear and distinct Muslim identity and to separate Islam from this confusion. Many similar clashes have developed in the increasingly pluralistic world of the twentieth century, especially when there is also a political quarrel between the religious groups. The most famous case is the current Muslim-Hindu conflict at Ayodhya in the eastern Gangetic plain, which both communities claim as a holy place. Jews were beginning to feel vulnerable in Ottoman Jerusalem. By the end of Suleiman’s reign, they were starting to leave the city. They were also abandoning the districts of Risha and Maslakh, where they lived alongside Muslims, and moving into the Sharaf district, which was closer to the Western Wall. A new Jewish enclave was being created. By the end of the sixteenth century, Sharaf was regarded as a distinct Jewish Quarter, quite separate from the surrounding Muslim neighborhoods.

There was also renewed tension between the Muslims and the Western Christians of Jerusalem. The Ottoman conquests had made a great difference to the relative status of the different Christian denominations. The Greek Orthodox, Syrian, and Armenian Christians were all Ottoman subjects, members of a recognized religious taifa. But the Franciscans were mere resident aliens. They were still living in their cramped quarters on Mount Sion, and the Cenacle Church, though not the Tomb of David, was in their hands. During the last years of the Mamluk empire, the Franciscans had also managed to move into the Holy Sepulcher Church, and now eight priests and three lay brothers lived in a dark, stuffy underground apartment, constantly suffering from headaches and fever. They had somehow succeeded in gaining control of the chief sites in the Holy Sepulcher Church before the arrival of the Ottomans. We have no record of this transaction, but the Fransciscans had learned the value of documents as a proof of title and had efficiently begun to collect official deeds and firmans.

Yet in 1523 their position deteriorated. Suleiman, who was still fighting his wars in Europe, purported to be horrified to hear that some “religious Franks” occupied a church directly above the Tomb of the Prophet David and were tramping over it in the course of their false worship.¹¹ He issued a firman closing the Cenacle Church and transforming it into a mosque. On the eastern wall of the Cenacle an inscription can still be seen stating that: “Suleiman the emperor, offspring of Uthman, ordered this place to be purified and purged of infidels and constructed it as a mosque in which the name of God is venerated.” The Franciscans moved into a bakery on Mount Sion. In vain did Francis I, King of France, try to intervene with Suleiman on their behalf, but the sultan did assure him that all the other Christian holy places in Jerusalem were safe and secure.

The support of the great powers of Europe proved to be an important counterweight to the Franciscans’ vulnerability in Jerusalem. In 1535, Suleiman made a treaty with Francis I against the European emperor Charles V. As a gesture of goodwill toward France, Suleiman, who represented the stronger power, concluded the Capitulations, which gave French merchants a privileged position in the empire by exempting them from Ottoman jurisdiction. Francis could appoint a French “bailiff” or “consul” to judge civil and criminal cases between merchants and other French subjects in Ottoman territory, without interference from the Muslim legal system. The Capitulations also confirmed the Franciscans as the chief custodians of the holy places in Jerusalem.¹² Very little came of these discussions. It was three hundred years before a Western consul was able to reside permanently in Jerusalem. Suleiman had offered the Capitulations in a spirit of condescension; the Ottoman empire was then at the peak of its power. Later his successors would make similar agreements with France and other Western countries. But Suleiman had miscalculated. When the Ottoman empire was in decline, this type of arrangement gave the West a chance to intervene with impunity in its internal affairs in a way that violated Turkish sovereignty.

Naturally the Franciscans’ control of the holy places led to tension with the Greek Orthodox, who since the Crusades had never been able to look kindly upon the Latin church. Not only had the Crusaders usurped their tenure of the Holy Sepulcher, but in 1204 the armies of the Fourth Crusade had sacked Constantinople in one of the most disgraceful incidents in the whole Crusader enterprise; some historians believe that Byzantium never fully recovered from the Crusaders’ attack. It is not surprising, then, that the Greeks saw the Latins as their enemies. Yet the Greeks had not yet learned how to manipulate the Ottoman authorities or to exploit the fact that their ecumenical patriarch lived in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul (as Constantinople was now called). In 1541, Patriarch Germanus of Jerusalem instituted the Hellenic Confederacy of the Holy Sepulcher as the official guardians of the holy places on behalf of Orthodox Christendom; at the same time, the Franciscans formed themselves into a national community to guard the holy places on behalf of Latin Christendom. Battle lines had been drawn and preliminary skirmishing began in the long, disedifying fight between Greek and Western Christians for the control of Christ’s sepulcher. In 1551 the Franciscans won another victory. The Venetians persuaded Suleiman to let them have a small convent to the west of the Holy Sepulcher, which at the time housed only a few Georgian nuns. The Georgian Christians protested, but money changed hands and the nuns had to leave. In July 1559 the Franciscans moved in and renamed the convent St. Saviour’s. This became their chief headquarters in Jerusalem; they began to acquire some of the neighboring houses, and by 1600 St. Saviour’s had become a thriving compound, with a carpenter’s shop and a smithy. By 1665 there was also a boys’ school, a hospice, a library, and an infirmary that offered the best medical care in the city.

After the death of Suleiman in 1566, his empire began to show signs of weakness. The feudal system gradually deteriorated. Once the wars of conquest came to an end, the sipāhīs, the feudal landlords, tried to compensate for the loss of spoils by exploiting the peasantry on their lands. This led to a sharp drop in agricultural production, which precipitated the empire into crisis. Other factors in the Ottoman decline were the loss of trade once the sea routes to India had opened, the depreciation of silver currency after the discovery of the New World, and the growing dissatisfaction of the Janissaries and the peasants in both Turkey and the provinces. Starting with the defeat of the Ottomans at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the empire also lost its military supremacy. The growing crisis was reflected in the lesser caliber of Ottoman officials in Jerusalem. Pashas began to oppress Muslims and dhimmis alike: between 1572 and 1584, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all began to leave the city. There was a marked deterioration in public security, particularly on the roads leading to the city, which once more became the prey of the Bedouin. From the end of the sixteenth century, the Bedouin regularly attacked pilgrims traveling to Hebron and Nebī Mūsā and prevented preachers from delivering their sermons in the mosques. The government tried to find a solution: they took Bedouin hostages, appointed sheikhs as fief-holders, and tried to enlist their support by putting them in charge of pilgrim caravans. They even attempted to create rural settlements for the Bedouin in the countryside. Fortresses were built and garrisoned against them, and in 1630 Sultan Murad IV built large fortresses near Bethlehem and at the Sultan’s Pool. But they were fighting a losing battle. Istanbul was now involved with wars in both Europe and Russia and lacked the manpower to enforce law and order in the provinces.

But the sultans did not neglect the Ḥaram. The Dome of the Rock was restored by Sultan Mehmet III in 1597, by Ahmad I in 1603, and by Mustafa I in 1617. They issued frequent firmans regarding the holy places. Pashas were to consider it one of their chief duties to keep order on the Ḥaram and to ensure that the shrines were always clean and in good repair. The waqf revenues were used for this maintenance, but the government was always ready to share the expense, when necessary.

Even though conditions had begun to deteriorate in Jerusalem during the seventeenth century, the city was still impressive. When the Turkish traveler Evliye Chelebi visited al-Quds in 1648, he was fascinated by the citadel and the Ḥaram and even admired the economy. He found eight hundred salaried imams and preachers employed on the Ḥaram and the surrounding madāris, fifty muezzins, and a host of Qurān reciters. Muslim pilgrims still processed around the Ḥaram, praying at its various “stations.” Chelebi was particularly impressed by the small Dome of the Prophet and was told that its black stone had originally been ruby-red but had been affected by the waters of the Flood. He prayed at the Dome of the Chain, noting its exquisite Kashem tiles, which were the color of lapis lazuli. The Ḥaram was the center of an intense spirituality. The porticoes were crowded with dervishes from India, Persia, Kurdistan, and Asia Minor. All night long they recited the Qurān and held dhikrs, chanting the names of God as a mantra, in the flickering light of the oil lamps that were placed along the entire length of the colonnades. After the morning prayer another dhikr was held in the Mosque of the Maghribis on the southwestern corner of the Ḥaram: Chelebi found it a noisy, bewildering affair.

He reported that the pasha of Jerusalem had five hundred soldiers at his command; one of their chief tasks was to escort the ḥajj caravan of the Damascus province to Mecca each year. The qā˙ī and the pasha still both earned the same salary and got an extra fifty thousand piastres apiece from the pilgrim trade. At Easter alone there could be between five thousand and ten thousand Christian pilgrims in the city, who could not enter the Holy Sepulcher until they had each paid between ten and fifteen piastres as an entrance fee. Muslim pilgrims also had to pay for protection on the roads when they visited Nebī Mūsā or Hebron. Jerusalem, with its fine stone houses and imposing walls, seemed like a fortress town to Chelebi, yet, he said, it had 43,000 vineyards which all Jerusalemites enjoyed for about three months a year, and many flower gardens and vegetable plots. The surrounding mountains were covered in olive groves, the air of the city was fresh, and its waters sweet. Checking the official records of the muḥhtasib (the supervisor of thesūq), he noted that Jerusalem had 2,045 shops; it also had six inns, six bathhouses, and several fine markets. But above all it was a religious town. The Armenians had two churches, the Greeks three, and the Jews had two synagogues:

Although the city appears to be small, it has 240 miḥhrābs, seven schools for the teaching of ḥhadīth, ten for the teaching of Qurān, forty madāris and convents for seventy Sufi orders.¹³

For security reasons, the gates were locked every night, and there were no houses outside the walls except on Mount Sion, which Chelebi called “the suburb of David.”¹⁴

Chelebi was obviously impressed, but after the vibrant developments under Suleiman, the city was beginning to slow down. Most of the building work was restorative rather than innovative, and because of the imperial crisis, there was little direct contact with Istanbul. Local Arab dignitaries were sometimes appointed governor of Jerusalem, a practice which increased during the eighteenth century. The qāḍī usually came from Istanbul, but the lesser religious posts were usually filled by members of the leading Jerusalem families. Four muftīs (sharīah consultants) were appointed from the Abu ’l Lutf family and one from the Dajani. The families also provided personnel for the main teaching posts, which became in effect hereditary. This inevitably led to a drop in standards. In 1670 the traveler al-Khiyari explained that he could not find a reputable scholar in the whole of al-Quds. Yet the madāris were still open: Chelebi noted that forty out of the fifty-six Mamluk madāris were active. But the strain was evident. The state still paid the salaries of the teachers and officials, but by the seventeenth century these sometimes outnumbered the students. The Aqsā Mosque was in bad repair and had to support the dervishes in residence in the porches. The waqf system was beginning to deteriorate: there were cases of neglect, dishonesty, and embezzlement.

The decline of the Ottoman empire was balanced by the rise of the European powers, which were now able to dictate terms to the sultans. This meant that the position of the Franciscans in Jerusalem continued to improve. Nearly every military or trade agreement between the Ottomans and Europe included a clause about the Holy Sepulcher. The kings of Europe could not yet influence the affairs of Jerusalem as much as they would have liked, however. In 1621, following a trade agreement with France and Sultan Mustafa I, M. Jean Lempereur was sent to Jerusalem as the first French consul, his brief to protect the rights of the Franciscans and the Western pilgrims. He did manage to lessen the excessive extortions from the pilgrims in fees, fines, and bribes, and by 1631 the pashas were seriously annoyed. They saw the consul as the thin end of the wedge: the port of Jaffa was only eight hours away. How many more of the Western “consuls” would follow Lempereur and interfere with their customs? The royal decree was canceled and the consul returned home. No other consul was permitted in Jerusalem, but in 1661 the French were able to insist that their consul in Sidon or Acre assume responsibility for the Latins in Jerusalem. They stipulated that he must be permitted to come to Jerusalem every Easter to protect the pilgrims and ensure that the ceremonies were carried out without hindrance.

The Greek Orthodox were beginning to organize their affairs more efficiently. The ecumenical patriarch in Istanbul was well placed to pull strings in the court and to offer bribes to the sultans and the wazīrs. In 1634, in an audience with Sultan Murad IV, Patriarch Theophanes of Jerusalem produced the letter which Caliph Umar had given Patriarch Sophronius in 638, granting the Greeks control of the holy places. At once the French ambassador in Istanbul declared that the letter was a forgery, whereupon Theophanes produced more recent Ottoman documents, purporting to be from Selim I and Suleiman, supporting the Greek cause. Sultan Murad issued a. firman in favor of the Greeks, giving them the Nativity Church in Bethlehem and most of the key sites in the Holy Sepulcher Church. Under pressure from the pope, France, and Venice, however, the sultan annulled this firman following a payment of 26,000 piastres, and the Franciscans were back in power. Not for long, however. The Ottomans had now discovered a valuable source of income: the holy places would henceforth go to the highest bidder, and in 1637 the Greeks were back in control with a new firman putting them in the superior position in the Holy Sepulcher.

It was an unseemly struggle for supremacy at a place where, according to Christian belief, the God-man had voluntarily divested himself of power and accepted death. The Franciscans were particularly devoted to Christ’s Passion but seemed unable to apply its lessons to their own lives. They continued a vicious campaign against Islam: during the sixteenth century, two more Franciscans had been executed after rushing onto the Ḥaram waving the cross and cursing the Prophet Muhammad. This aggressive quest for martyrdom was their way of following in Christ’s footsteps unto death, even though it was inspired by hatred rather than love. Their other method of identifying with Christ’s death was by the new devotion of the Stations of the Cross, which was now part of the Jerusalem scene. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Franciscans would lead the pilgrims in a procession down the Via Dolorosa every Friday evening, barefoot; they would pause to say an Ave and a Paternoster at eight “stations” along the route, beginning at the “House of Pilate” at the “Ecce Homo Arch.” They would then proceed down the street, stopping at the places where Christ fell under the weight of the cross, met his mother, was helped by Simon of Cyrene, and prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem to the women of the city. Then they visited the “Prison of Christ” in the Holy Sepulcher Church before going to Golgotha itself. Other pilgrims had their own variations of the stations, and some of them reproduced Christ’s last journey in their churches back home. Eventually fourteen stations were customarily commemorated in Europe in pictures illustrating the various incidents around the church walls. In the nineteenth century, the six extra stations were added at appropriate points to the stations in the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. This was a peculiarly Western devotion. The Greek Orthodox had always emphasized the Resurrection more than the Passion of Christ, but the stations were an attempt to help people get beyond their personal sufferings by identifying themselves with the divine pathos.

Jews were creating similar rituals, based symbolically on Jerusalem. After their expulsion from Spain, many of the Jewish refugees had eventually settled in Safed, and there, under the influence of the Kabbalist Isaac Luria, they developed a new type of mysticism that focused on the experience of exile. The myths of Lurianic Kabbalah suggested that at the very beginning God had, as it were, gone into exile from a part of himself to make room for the created world. There had also been a primal catastrophe, during which the Shekhinah, the bride of God, had been separated from the Godhead; divine sparks were now scattered abroad and imprisoned in base matter. There was thus a displacement at the heart of Being itself. Nothing could be in its right place, and the exile of the Jews symbolized the cosmic homelessness suffered alike by God and humanity. But Jews could end the exile of the Shekhinah by the careful observance of Torah and mystical prayer. These poetic myths—a re-creation of ancient pagan mythology—spoke directly to many of the Jewish people, who had experienced their state of exile anew in these dark years. Cut loose from their roots, Jews experienced the world as a demonic realm and their life as a struggle with evil powers. Luria’s imagery helped them to transcend their own misery by imagining a final return to the primal unity that had characterized existence before the beginning of time.

From the middle of the sixteenth century, the Kabbalists of Safed and Jerusalem celebrated the redemption of the Shekhinah in a ritual that—in the time-honored way—was thought to have repercussions in the divine sphere. Every Friday afternoon, they would dress in white and process to the fields outside the city to greet the Shekhinah, the divine bride of God. They would then escort the Presence back to their own homes. In each house, the dining room was decked with myrtle, like a wedding canopy, and loaves, wine, and a candlestick were set out in a way that recalled the Temple. Thus the Shekhinah symbolically reentered the Devir and was also reunited with the Godhead in the Heavenly Sanctuary. Isaac Luria composed a hymn that was always sung after the Sabbath meal:

To southward I set
the mystical candelabrum,
I make room in the north
for the table with the loaves.…

Let the Shekhinah be surrounded
by six Sabbath loaves
connected on every side
with the Heavenly Sanctuary.

Weakened and cast out
the impure powers,
the menacing demons
are now in fetters.¹⁵

Each home had become a replica of the Temple; each was therefore symbolically linked to the heavenly Jerusalem, the celestial home of God. The ritualized return of the Shekhinah meant that for one night each week, everything was back in its proper place and the demonic powers were under control. The Sabbath therefore became a temporal sanctuary, an image of life as it was meant to be. The Friday-night ritual also looked forward to that final Return to the Source of being—a union suggested by the sexual imagery of Lurianic Kabbalah.

At Safed the old mourning rituals for the Temple acquired a fresh urgency. Abraham Halevi Berukhim, one of Luria’s disciples, had once had a vision of the Shekhinah, weeping and dressed in black, imprinted on the Western Wall. Every night he used to rise at midnight and run, sobbing, through the streets of Safed, crying: “Arise in God’s name, for the Shekhinah is in exile, the house of our sanctuary is burned, and Israel is in great distress.”¹⁶ Others performed a more elaborate midnight ritual. The mystic would rise and dress to perform the “Rite of Rachel,” in which he would imaginatively enter into the exile of the Shekhinah. Weeping, like the Shekhinah herself, he would remove his shoes and rub his face in the dust. It was an act of imitatio Dei which brought about his participation in this cosmic dislocation. But Luria never left his disciples in misery; he constantly emphasized the importance of joy and celebration. At sunrise, the mystic would perform the “Rite of Leah”: he would recite a description of the Shekhinah’s final redemption, meditating the while upon her final union with the Godhead until he felt that each organ of his body had formed part of the Chariot-Throne. Each night, therefore, the Kabbalist passed from despair to a joyful reunion with the Source of being. He became himself the human shrine of the divine Presence, an incarnate Jerusalem and a bodily Temple.¹⁷

Lurianic Kabbalah was a spiritualized version of the old mythology. There was no need to make the physical aliyah to Jerusalem. Jews could encounter the reality that gave the city its value in their own homes and in the depths of their own being. Luria was not a Zionist, as Nachmanides had been. His ideas spread like wildfire in Europe, where its vision of divine exile spoke to the suffering and displaced Jews. Like the sacred geography of the ancient world, this type of mysticism was an essentially imaginative exercise. It depended upon the ability to see that the symbols introduced you to the reality that existed ineffably beyond them. They were suffused with the unseen mystery that they imperfectly represented in terms that human beings could apprehend, so that the two became one in the experience of the worshippers. If the myths of Kabbalah, for example, were understood literally, they either were patently absurd or could even lead to catastrophe. This became evident in the affair of Shabbetai Zevi, a disturbed Jew who demonstrated symptoms that we would classify today as manic-depressive.¹⁸ In his “manic” phases, he would break the food laws, utter the forbidden Name of God, and declare that the Torah had been abrogated. These would be succeeded by periods of black despair. In his wanderings, Shabbetai met the young Kabbalist rabbi Nathan of Gaza, who was entranced by him and declared him to be the Messiah. When Shabbetai sank into depression, he had entered the demonic realm to fight the powers of evil; he would raise the Shekhinah from the dust and end the divine exile. His “manic” phases presaged the messianic period after the Redemption, when there would be no need for Torah and nothing would be forbidden.

On 31 May 1665, Shabbetai proclaimed himself the Messiah and announced that he was about to go up to Jerusalem. He chose twelve young rabbis as his disciples, one for each of the tribes of Israel. His plan was to go to the Temple Mount and resume the sacrificial rites: Nathan was appointed high priest. When the news reached the Jews of Jerusalem, there was panic and consternation. Their position was already vulnerable, and if Shabbetai violated the sanctity of the Ḥaram, Muslim vengeance might be terrible indeed. They begged Shabbetai to give up his plan. He was desolate: Redemption had been so near, and now it had been delayed yet again! He did go to Jerusalem, however, where he announced that the Torah had been revoked and declared that he was the King of Israel. The rabbis handed him over to the qā˙ī, who acquitted him of treason, doubtless seeing that the man was not in his right mind. But Shabbetai saw this as proof of his mission and rode around the city streets on horseback, clad in a green cloak: it was another act of defiance, since dhimmis were forbidden to ride horses and green was the color of the Prophet.

Shabbetai left Jerusalem, but frantic enthusiasm for this strange mystical Messiah spread through the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire, as well as Italy, Holland, Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. But all ended in tears. In January 1666, Shabbetai arrived in Istanbul to ask the sultan to crown him King of the Jews and restore to him the city of Jerusalem. Instead, the sultan, faced with the frightening prospect of a Jewish revolt, gave him the choice of conversion to Islam or death. Shabbetai opted for conversion and lived as an apparently devout Muslim until his death, ten years later. He retained a surprising number of followers, but most Jews, horrified by the scandal of an apostate Messiah, were disillusioned not only with Shabbetai but with the Lurianic mysticism that had been the driving force of his appeal. Yet Lurianic mythology was chiefly concerned with the interior landscape of the soul. It was not meant to be lived out literally in the political world. Luria had not urged Jews to work for a physical return to Zion. Instead he had charted a spiritual path for them, leading from disintegration and displacement to the Source of being. The mythology made no sense if translated into the realm of mundane reality.

Increasingly the people of Europe were discovering for themselves that the old myths of sacred geography no longer appealed to them. They had started a scientific revolution that would eventually transform the world. Seeds of a new rationalism had been planted, which would encourage Catholics and Protestants alike to examine the physical properties of phenomena in and for themselves, instead of seeing them as symbols of the unseen. They must ruthlessly exclude such unproven and unprovable associations and concentrate on the objects themselves and find out what they were literally made of. It was a whole new way of seeing. Their discoveries were leading people to map the world scientifically, and from this perspective it was clearly nonsense to say that Jerusalem was the center of the world. As their outlook changed, Europeans would begin to look for a more rational religion that eschewed myths, fictions, and mystery and concentrated on the so-called facts of the faith that could be demonstrated logically. They had no time for a religion of the imagination. Gradually the traditional symbols and images of the faith ceased to be impregnated with numinous significance, as people examined them critically in the cold light of reason. They became only symbols, essentially separate from the unseen reality they represented. Ritual became mere ceremony; liturgical gestures were no longer inseparable from the spiritual dynamic they bodied forth. The Protestant reformers had already divorced the symbol from the divine reality. Zwingli saw the bread of the Eucharist as a mere symbol, quite distinct from the body of Christ. The elaborate ceremonies of Catholic liturgy were a meaningless distraction from the truth, not an imitatio dei that brought the timeless mystery into the present. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus were events that had happened in the past, not an eternal dimension of reality.

Naturally this made the old sacred geography meaningless. “Holy places” could not provide a link with the heavenly world. God could not be contained in a mere place, because he was infinite, so a particular location was only “sacred” if it had been set aside for religious purposes. The Puritan John Milton expressed his scorn for pilgrims

 … that strayed so fair to seek
In Golgotha him dead, who lives in Heav’n.¹⁹

But Catholics were equally involved in the scientific revolution of Europe, and they would increasingly find that a shrine had a different meaning for them.

Felix Fabri had already revealed the incipient skepticism of the new Europe. By the seventeenth century, Europeans had started to arrive in Jerusalem who were tourists rather than pilgrims. In 1601 the British traveler John Sanderson had not wept or gone into a trance when he saw the Holy Sepulcher. He merely strolled around the church, regarding the fervor of Catholics and Orthodox with detached amusement.²⁰ When Henry Maundrell, the chaplain of the English Levant Company in Aleppo, visited Palestine in 1697, he was even more scornful of the “rubbish” of “vain apparitions” that had made his ancestors quake. He was as interested in the Greek and Roman antiquities as in the biblical sites. When he attended the ceremony of the Holy Fire, he was horrified by the crowds’ ecstasy, which seemed to him pure “madness,” “Bedlam itself.”²¹

He was especially disgusted by the antagonism of Greeks and Latins at the Tomb of Christ; they demonstrated all the murderous rage and fanaticism that the advocates of cool reason were seeking to transcend. There had recently been yet another change of arrangements in the Holy Sepulcher, following the victory of Austria, Poland, and Venice over the Ottomans at the battle of Belgrade in 1688. The Franciscans were now back in charge. Maundrell explained that they and their Greek Orthodox rivals

have sometimes proceeded to blows and words, even at the very door of the Sepulchre, mingling their own blood with their sacrifices. As evidence of which fury, the [Franciscan] Father Guardian showed us a great scar upon his arm, which he told us was the mark given him by a sturdy Greek priest in one of these unholy wars.²²

It was pointless to dream of a new Crusade to liberate these “holy places,” since “if they should be recovered, what deplorable contests might be expected to follow about them, seeing even in their present state of captivity they are made the occasion of such unchristian rage and animosity.”²³

By the eighteenth century, the Ottoman empire seemed to have broken down irretrievably. The sultans were weak and devoted themselves to private pleasures, which they financed by the sale of public offices. Governors of the provinces and sanjaks were no longer chosen for their ability but because they had bribed their way into power. When the sultans discovered that they had lost control of the pashas, they began to replace them on an almost annual basis. This had serious consequences for the provinces. It was simply not worth repairing buildings or reforming the local administration if you were likely to be replaced the following year. Since a pasha’s property was sometimes confiscated at the end of his period of office, governors often tried to make as much money from their district as they could, bleeding it dry with unfair taxation, exploitation, illegal confiscation of land, and other desperate measures. Istanbul had in effect abandoned its empire to unscrupulous officials. Peasants began to leave their villages to escape from rapacious pashas, which added to the dereliction of a land already damaged by the Bedouin raids. In 1660 the French traveler L. d’Arrieux noted that the countryside around Bethlehem was almost completely deserted, the peasants having fled the pashas of Jerusalem.

In 1703 the people of Jerusalem revolted against the cruel taxation of Jurji Muḥammad Pasha, governor of the city. Muḥammad ibn Mustafa al-Husaini led them in an attack upon the citadel. They released all the prisoners and put the pasha to flight. Al-Husaini became governor in his stead, and it was two years before the Turks were able to regain control of the city. Eventually, in November 1705, Jurji Muhammad, now provincial governor (wālī) of Damascus, attacked Jerusalem with two thousand Janissaries. The city was not occupied by the Turks easily: there were hours of fierce and desperate fighting.

The Turkish governors were increasingly powerless. They could not even collect taxes from the recalcitrant population. Each year the wālī of Damascus had to come with soldiers to force the people to pay up. Even then they were not always successful. There is virtually no mention of the city’s revenues in the Ottoman documents of the eighteenth century, possibly because the returns were so negligible they were not worth recording.²⁴ The pasha could not move freely about his own sanjak without bribing the Bedouin. As a result, Istanbul resorted to the expedient of appointing local Arabs as governors. The Turqan and Nimr families of Nablus both produced governors of Jerusalem. Umar al-Nimr (1717–31) was particularly effective and was appointed for a second term in 1733: he cooperated with the notables of Jerusalem, kept the pilgrim roads free of the Bedouin, and even kept the feuds of the Christians within reasonable bounds. But most governors remained impotent. They found it extremely difficult to keep order even within the walls, and Jerusalemites would sometimes refuse to admit a governor to the city who was not to their taste.

As a result of the governors’ weaknesses, the main families of Jerusalem rose to fill the power vacuum. The Husainis, the Khālidīs, and the Abu ’l Lu˙tfs took an increasingly large share of the administration of the city. They were often the sole link between the local population and the ruling power, having made a point of keeping on good terms with influential people in Damascus and Istanbul since the 1703 revolution. They were rewarded with large landholdings and important offices. During the eighteenth century, the Abu ’l Lu˙tf family continued to provide muftīs, while the Husainis held the presidency of the Sharīah Court. For several generations, Khālidīs became deputy judges and chief clerks of the Shari’ah Court. Mūsā al-Khālidī (1767–1832), an eminent authority on Islamic jurisprudence, was highly respected in Istanbul and became the chief qā˙ī of Anatolia, one of the three highest judicial posts in the empire.

Jerusalem still attracted Sufis and scholars from Syria and Egypt. There were actually more ulamā in the city than there had been in the seventeenth century. Some of the ulamā developed important private libraries in the city. But the madāris were declining fast. By the mid-eighteenth century, there were only thirty-five of them left, and later they would almost all have ceased to exist. The deepening economic plight and impoverishment of the city and its citizens meant that many of the awqāf became extinct, and others were dissolved and the assets alienated. Muslims would try to recoup their losses by leasing the waqf properties and, later, even selling them to non-Muslims.

The dhimmis were as badly off as the Muslims. In the early eighteenth century, the community of Ashkenazic Jews from Europe had grown so rapidly that they bribed the pasha and thus gained permission to build a new synagogue, a yeshiva, and forty dwellings for the poor in the south of Jerusalem. But almost immediately they fell into debt and were charged an exorbitant rate of interest. The Ashkenazim had enough difficulties getting along in Jerusalem anyway, because they did not speak Arabic and had not yet learned their way around the system. Now they scarcely dared to leave their homes lest their creditors seize them and throw them into prison. In 1720 they fell so badly behind in their payments that the Turks confiscated their property and the Ashkenazim were forced to leave the city: two hundred families left for Hebron, Safed, and Damascus, even though conditions were little better in these cities.²⁵ It would be another century before the Ashkenazim felt able to establish themselves in Jerusalem again. The Jewishtaifa in Jerusalem was now entirely Sephardic. They lived in the Sharaf neighborhood, which deteriorated considerably as the century wore on and as the Ottoman crisis deepened. The Sephardim worshipped at four interconnected synagogues that were supposedly built on the site of the yeshiva of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai: adjoining the Ben Zakkai Synagogue were the three smaller synagogues of the Prophet Elijah, the Kehal Zion, and the Istanbuli. By the end of the eighteenth century these were in a deplorable state. The whole Jewish Quarter was full of neglected houses, and its streets were filled with decaying rubbish. Disease was rife and mortality high. The synagogues were scarcely standing. The buildings were tumbling down, rain poured in through the roof, and services had to be rushed before the synagogues flooded. It was not uncommon for the congregation to leave in tears.

The Latin Christians were in a better position, because they were supported by rich communities abroad. In 1720, the year the Ashkenazim lost their property, the Franciscans were able to refurbish the mosaics in the Holy Sepulcher Church and enlarge their underground convent there. But, like the Greeks, Copts, and Armenians, who also had apartments in the church, they had become virtual prisoners. The Turkish authorities kept the keys, and the Christians dared not leave the building lest they lose their right of possession. Food was passed in to them through a large hole in the front door. Each sect controlled different parts of the church, and in 1720 the Franciscans still had the choicest sites. In 1732 the French were able to put pressure on the sultan and new Capitulations were granted them in perpetuity. The French were now recognized as the official “protectors” of the Roman Catholics in the Ottoman Empire and the Franciscans’ custodianship of the Holy Sepulcher was reconfirmed. In 1757 the Franciscans were also given the Tomb of the Virgin in the Kidron Valley.

The Greek Orthodox had watched all this with ever-increasing fury. Finally they could bear it no more. On the day before Palm Sunday 1757, they stormed into the Rotunda, smashing the Latin vessels and lamps. Blood was shed and several people were seriously injured. The Franciscans took refuge in St. Saviour’s, which was besieged by the Greek and Arab members of the Orthodox Church, and the patriarch hurried to the imperial court in Istanbul. Since the French were too busy fighting the Seven Years War in Europe to help the Turks in their war against Russia, the sultan felt free to issue a firman in favor of the Greeks. This extremely important document remains in force to the present day, and the Greeks are still the chief custodians of the Holy Sepulcher. In 1774 their hand was further strengthened when Russia was named the official “protector” of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Jerusalem had become an impoverished city. The French traveler Constantin Volney could scarcely believe his eyes when he visited Palestine in 1784 and, two days after leaving Nablus, arrived

at a town, which … presents a striking example of the vicissitudes of human affairs: when we behold its walls levelled, its ditches filled up, and all its buildings embarrassed with ruins, we scarcely can believe we view that celebrated metropolis, which, formerly, withstood the efforts of the most powerful empires … in a word, we with difficulty recognize Jerusalem.²⁶

Volney was one of the new men of Europe. He came not as a pilgrim but to conduct the first scientific survey of Jerusalem, with a prepared questionnaire. His object was to study the geography, climate, social life, and economy of the city. Its holiness was of interest only insofar as it affected the economy. Volney noted that the Turks had made a huge profit from the stupidity of the Christians. Greeks, Copts, Abyssinians, Armenians, and Franks continually played into the governor’s hands by paying large sums in bribes “to obtain some privilege for themselves or to take it from their rivals”:

Each sect is perpetually informing against the other for irregularities. Has a church been clandestinely repaired; or a procession extended beyond the usual limits; has a Pilgrim entered by a different gate from that customary? All these are the subject of accusations to the Government, which never fails to profit from them in fines and extortions.²⁷

The barren struggle for possession that now engaged the Christians of Jerusalem was actually eroding their position and standing in the Holy City.

Volney noted that very few pilgrims came to Jerusalem from Europe—a fact that scandalized the other communities in the city. Many travelers would have been deterred by his gloomy account of Jerusalem, which had indeed fallen upon hard times. But the picture was not as bleak as he implied. The walls, for example, had not been leveled as he claimed, though he was right about the blocked valleys surrounding them. There was an inordinate amount of rubbish lying in and around the city. Stones, earth, ashes, shards of pottery, and decayed wood clogged the deep valleys beneath the city, sometimes to a depth of forty feet. Indeed, much of the city had actually been built on the debris that had accumulated over the centuries. To the north of the walled city were several artificial mounds composed of waste from the soap factories.²⁸ Jerusalem was known to be unhealthy: there was no sanitation, a poor water supply, and a great deal of poverty. But that was not the whole story. There were still about nine soap factories that were fully functioning; ceramics was also becoming an important industry, and the sūqs were usually well stocked. Evliye Chelebi had been struck by the number of vineyards and gardens in and around the city, and these were still a feature of Jerusalem, particularly in the Bezetha district in the northeast of the city, which was sparsely settled. The waqfiyya of Sheikh Muḥammad al-Khalīlī shows that there were many vineyards and orchards of figs, olives, apples, pomegranates, mulberries, apricots, and almonds inside and outside the walls. Some parts of the town were undoubtedly run-down, but there were also beautiful villas and mansions belonging to the chief families of Jerusalem. The sheikh himself built two large houses outside the city walls and stressed the importance of keeping buildings in good repair and not allowing them to fall into the hands of non-Muslims, who were still eyeing Jerusalem covetously.²⁹ The more prescient inhabitants were uneasy about these new French and Russian “protectorates”; when the French again attempted to install a consul in Jerusalem, the local Muslims had made sure that he was ejected. But Constantin Volney and his scientific survey had simply been the precursor of a much more formidable Western presence.

In 1798, Napoleon sailed to Egypt with scores of Orientalist scholars, who were charged with the task of making a scientific study of the region as a prelude to colonization. Napoleon’s aim was to establish a French presence in the east to challenge the British acquisition of India, and he was prepared to use the new science of “orientalism” to further his political ambitions. In January 1799, Napoleon also dispatched 13,000 French troops to Palestine; they defeated the Ottoman army at al-Arish and Gaza and then began to advance up the coast to Acre, the leading city of Palestine. He had brought map-makers and explorers with his army and they branched out into the hill country on a factfinding mission, while the soldiers proceeded up the coastal road. In Ramleh, Napoleon called upon Jews, Christians, and Muslims to shake off the Ottoman yoke and accept the liberié of revolutionary France. Yet the local inhabitants were not impressed by this promise of freedom, recognizing that it would simply mean subjugation to this western power. There was panic and fury in Jerusalem. The Muslims attacked St. Saviour’s and took some of the Franciscans—the clients of the French—as hostages; but the sultan insisted that their churches and property were to be protected as long as they paid the jizyah. Sheikh Mūsā al-Khālidī, the Jerusalem-born qā˙ī of Anatolia, called upon the people of Palestine to defend their country against the French, and all the able-bodied Arabs of Jerusalem were drafted into the Ottoman army by the wālī of Damascus.

Napoleon’s army was hit by plague, but he pressed on to Acre, where he was repelled not only by the British fleet but also by the army of Ahmad Jezzar Pasha, the wālī of Sidon, which displayed exemplary courage and effectiveness. Napoleon’s bid for an eastern empire had failed and he was forced to return to Europe. But his expedition had introduced Western modernity and science to Palestine, which from the start were linked to European dreams of conquest and imperialism. Other colonialists would shortly follow and drag Jerusalem into the modern age.