REVIVAL

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY began badly in Jerusalem. There was poverty and tension in the city. The Ottoman system was still in disarray, and the people suffered from bad government. Nominally part of the province of Damascus, the city was actually ruled by thewālī of Sidon during the early years of the new century. There were more Arab governors; one of these, Muḥhammad Abu Muraq, was notorious for his tyranny to Muslims and dhimmis alike. There was also friction between the different communities. In 1800, Jerusalem had about 8,750 inhabitants: 4,000 Muslims, 2,750 Christians, and 2,000 Jews. They all shared a common sūq and lived clustered around their principal shrines. Some intercommunal relationships were friendly. The Muslims in the Maghribi Quarter, for example, had a healthy rapport with the Jews, who had to walk through their district to get to the Western Wall. But Jews were forbidden to enter the Holy Sepulcher, and relations were so bad with the Christians that they kept away from their neighborhoods. The different Christian denominations coexisted in a state of poisonous animosity that could flare into physical violence at the smallest provocation. In the Jewish Quarter, relations between the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim, who had returned to Jerusalem between 1810 and 1820, were strained. The city of peace was seething with frustration and resentment, and the old ideal of integration seemed a vanished dream. This anger frequently erupted in riots and uprisings.

In 1808 a fire broke out in the Holy Sepulcher Church. It began in the Crypt of St. Helena, which was under Armenian aegis, and spread rapidly. The whole church was gutted, and the pillars supporting the dome collapsed. Recriminations began immediately as the different communities blamed one another for the catastrophe. The Armenians were accused of starting the fire deliberately to change the status quo in the church; others said that the Greek Orthodox priests had accidentally set fire to some wood while drunk and had then tried to douse the flames with brandy. Since rebuilding was a mark of legal ownership, there was intense competition to take charge of the restoration, each denomination trying to outbid the others and appealing to their foreign “protectors” for support. Eventually the Greeks succeeded in buying the privilege, and the repairs began in 1819. But building had never been a neutral activity in Jerusalem, and the Muslims had long been uneasy about the Holy Sepulcher Church, particularly in times of economic hardship. Muslims now laid siege to the governor’s residence demanding that the work stop; they were joined by the local Janissaries, who were angry that other troops were garrisoned in the citadel. Soon full-scale rebellion had broken out all over the city. The rebels attacked the Greek Orthodox patriarchate and occupied the Citadel, expelling the governor from the city. The uprising was not quelled until the wālī of Damascus sent a detachment of troops to besiege the Citadel. Forty-six of the ringleaders were decapitated, and their heads sent to Damascus.

The rebuilding of the Holy Sepulcher continued, but the reconstruction itself turned out to be an act of war. The Greeks seized the opportunity of erasing all traces of Latin occupation from the building. They replaced the edicule built by the Franciscans over the tomb during the eighteenth century and threw out the graves of Godfrey of Bouillon and King Baldwin I. Henceforth a Greek monk stood on permanent guard over the sepulcher. They now controlled the tomb and Golgotha; the Franciscans were confined to the north of the building, the Armenians to the Crypt of St. Helena, the Copts to a small chapel west of the tomb, and the Syrians to a chapel on the Rotunda. The Ethiopians would be forced to build their monastery and church on the roof. Christians found it impossible to live together amicably at their holiest shrine: a Muslim family was given possession of the key to the church, and to this day has the privilege of locking and unlocking the church at the direction of the various authorities. This cumbersome arrangement was necessary because no one sect could be trusted to let the others in. The different denominations would take the key in turns to hold services at the tomb, but this frequently led to brawling and incivility. One shocked British visitor described the scene:

The Copts, say, are standing before the shrine: long before they have finished their service of sixty minutes, the Armenians have gathered in numbers around the choir, not to join in the prayers and genuflections but to hum profane airs, to hiss the Coptic priests, to jabber and jest and snarl at the morning prayer.

Often the worshippers came to blows, and then the Turkish guards, posted permanently outside the church to meet this contingency, thundered in to stop the fighting—“an affair of candles, crooks, and crucifixes.”¹ If no blood had been shed, the service would continue, but the soldiers stood on guard, guns at the ready. If charity and loving-kindness were indeed the hallmarks of the faith, Christianity had clearly failed in Jerusalem.

There were further Muslim demonstrations against the Christians in 1821, when the Greeks of the Peloponnese rebelled against the Ottomans. Again the Greek Orthodox patriarchate was attacked, though the qā˙ī and the leading Jerusalem families, under strict orders from Istanbul, did their best to stop the violence. In 1824 there was a more serious disturbance. Mustafa Pasha, the new wālī of Damascus, raised the taxes to ten times their former rate. The peasants in the villages around Jerusalem immediately revolted, and the pasha set out from Damascus to quell the uprising with five thousand soldiers. This time the Jerusalem notables did not support the Ottoman establishment but banded together with the peasants and townsfolk. As soon as the pasha had returned to Damascus, having, as he thought, quashed the revolt, the people of Jerusalem invaded the citadel, drove out the Ottoman garrison, helped themselves to weapons, and threw all the non-Arab citizens out of the city. It was, perhaps, an early expression of Arab solidarity in Jerusalem. The Arabs refused to surrender, even when Abdallah Pasha, governor of Sidon, arrived with two thousand men and seven cannons. The fighting continued for a week, and the city was under continuous bombardment from the Mount of Olives. Eventually the Turks agreed to the rebels’ demands: the taxes were reduced, the army undertook not to interfere with the life of the city, and in future all officials in Jerusalem would be Arabs.

But in 1831, Jerusalem came under stronger Turkish rule. Muḥammad Ali, an Albanian Turk and Ottoman commander, had fought Napoleon in Egypt. After the departure of the French, he was able to make himself virtually independent of Istanbul; his ambition was to make Egypt a modern state, run on Western lines. There would be a strong central government, and all citizens would be equal before the law, whatever their race or religion. The army was modernized, and by November 1831 it was strong enough to invade Palestine and Syria and wrest these provinces from the Ottomans. It was a turning point in the history of Jerusalem. Muḥammad Ali controlled Syria and Palestine until 1840. During those nine years, he applied his modernizing ideas and permanently changed the Jerusalem way of life. His son Ibrāhīm Pasha was able to curb the Bedouin and threatened to draft them into the Egyptian army. He also established a secularized judicial system which effectively undercut the power of the Sharīah Court. Henceforth the dhimmiswould enjoy full equality and personal security of life and property; Jews and Christians were also represented on the Jerusalem majlis, a consultative body appointed to advise the governor of the city. Secularism had arrived in Jerusalem, the state and judiciary operating independently of religion.

Naturally there was opposition to these reforms. The main Jerusalem families and the local dignitaries feared the loss of the independence and privilege they had acquired over the years. In 1834 the whole of Palestine and part of the Transjordan rose up in rebellion. Insurgents took control of Jerusalem for five days, the rebels rushing through the streets and smashing and looting the shops of the dhimmis. Ibrāhīm Pasha needed the force of his entire army to crush this uprising. When peace was finally restored, the Egyptian government continued to implement the reforms. Ibrāhīm Pasha built the first two windmills in Jerusalem in the hope of introducing modern industrial methods into the city. The dhimmis began to enjoy their new freedom: they were now allowed to build and restore their places of worship without needing to resort to bribery and graft.

They immediately took advantage of this privilege. In 1834, many of the Christian monasteries had been damaged in an earth tremor, and the monks were now able to repair them at once. The Franciscans also restored St. Saviour’s, which had taken a lot of battering during the recent uprisings. Over the years it had become a large complex. The Franciscans now gave bread to about eight hundred Christians and Muslims each week, and they were the first to offer an education to Arab Christians. Fifty-two boys whose families had converted to Catholicism were taught to read and write in Arabic, Italian, and Latin, though there were as yet no lessons in arithmetic or natural science. There was also a sewing school for Arab girls. In 1839 the Franciscans were able to extend themselves in the city, building a new convent in the Muslim quarter of Bezetha, which was still largely uninhabited. Their Church of the Flagellation was one of the first Christian buildings to be built beside the Via Dolorosa, which gradually became a new Christian street during the nineteenth century.

Jews also took the chance to build. In 1834, Muḥammad Ali issued a firman giving the Sephardim permission to rebuild the dilapidated Ben Zakkai Synagogue. The Ashkenazic community had increased dramatically in recent years with the influx of new immigrants from Poland, and it also needed a new place of worship. In 1836 the Ashkenazim got permission to build a new synagogue, yeshiva, and mikveh on the site which they had been forced to vacate in 1720. The whole community turned out to work on the new building; rabbis, students, and even old people helped to dig the foundations and clear away the piles of refuse. The first wing of the new Hurva Synagogue was consecrated in 1837. But this building proved to be a source of contention. Rabbi Bardaki of Minsk was opposed to the new synagogue, believing that the site should have been used instead for housing: about five hundred new Jewish immigrants were practically destitute. In protest, he and his followers built the Sukkoth Shalom Synagogue, creating a permanent rift in the Ashkenazic community. It was the first of many. During the nineteenth century the Jewish community continued to fragment: Sephardim opposed Ashkenazim, Hasidim fought Mitnaggedim, and sects grew up within these larger groupings. The Jewish Quarter was split into antagonistic kahals, each one clustered around its own rabbi and frequently worshipping in a different synagogue.

Almost every new development in Jerusalem seemed doomed to increase the sectarianism and rivalry that now seemed endemic to the city. Muḥammad Ali was anxious to gain the support of the West, and he therefore encouraged Europeans to settle in the city. Thus for the first time a Western power was able to establish a consulate in Jerusalem—a step which the local people had fought for so long. In 1839 the English diplomat William Turner Young arrived in Jerusalem as British vice-consul, and within the next fifteen years, France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria all opened consulates in the Holy City. The consuls would become an extremely important presence in Jerusalem. They helped to bring modern medicine, education, and technology to the city. But each one had his own political agenda, and this often led to new conflict in the already divided city. The local people found themselves drawn into the quarrels of the European powers. Thus William Young was told to take a special interest in the Ashkenazic Jews. Britain would have liked to establish a “protectorate” in Jerusalem, as France and Russia had done, but there were no Protestants for the consul to take under his wing. The European Jews, however, had no foreign sponsor, and Young set himself up as their unofficial patron. He was inspired by an old millennial dream. St. Paul had prophesied that all the Jews would be converted to Christ before the Second Coming, and an increasing number of British Christians felt that they had a duty to fulfill this prophecy and clear away this obstacle to the final Redemption. By September 1839, through Young’s good offices, the London Society for Promoting Christianity Among the Jews (also known as the “London Jews Society”) had been given permission to work in Jerusalem, and the first Protestant missionaries began arriving in the Holy City. But they would clash with both the older denominations and the Jews, who resented this Christian initiative.

Modern ideas had now begun to penetrate Jerusalem, and there was no stopping the process. When the Egyptians were forced out of Palestine in 1840 by the European powers and the Ottomans resumed control, there could be no question of returning to the old system. Istanbul was also bent on modernization, and Sultan Mahmud II was attempting to run a more centralized state with a reformed army. His tanzīmāt (“regulations”) confirmed the new privileges of the dhimmis. They still had to pay the jizyah for military protection, but they had greater religious freedom and could continue to build and restore their places of worship without hindrance from the local Muslims. The Ottomans now showed more interest in Jerusalem, in part alerted by the Western preoccupation with the holy city. Before the Egyptian invasion, Acre had been considered the chief city of Palestine. Now Jerusalem was taking its place. It was still a mutaṣarriflik, coming between a province (eyālet) and a district (sanjak) on the administrative scale, but thesanjaks of Gaza, Jaffa, and (until 1858) Nablus were added to Jerusalem. For a short time in 1872, Jerusalem became independent: no longer subject to the wālī of Sidon or Damascus, the governor reported directly to Istanbul. The population was also growing. In 1840 there were 10,750 people in the city, with 3,000 Jews and 3,350 Christians. The population continued to increase dramatically. By 1850 the Jews formed a majority in the city, their numbers having almost doubled in ten years. This trend continued, as the following table makes clear:

From being a deserted, desperate city, Jerusalem was being transformed by modernity into a thriving metropolis, and for the first time since the destruction of the Temple, Jews were once again gaining an ascendency.

In the meantime, the Western powers were doing their best to extend their influence in the Holy City through the consuls and the churches. Prussia and Britain jointly appointed the first Protestant bishop to Jerusalem, and on 21 January 1842, Bishop Michael Solomon, a Jewish convert, arrived in Jerusalem and announced that his first duty was to bring the Jews of the city to Christ. Naturally this alarmed the Jews. The new Protestant cathedral was called Hebrew Christ Church and was built near the Jaffa Gate, next door to the British consulate. On 21 May 1843, three Jews were baptized in a Hebrew ceremony in the cathedral in the presence of Consul Young. The Jews, not unnaturally, were outraged that these Protestants were blatantly trying to lure their impoverished people into their churches with the promise of welfare and security. Converts, who were cast out of the Jewish community, were usually supported by the Christians whose ranks they had joined. In 1844 there were yet more Jewish baptisms and the Jews realized that they would have to counter this Christian offensive.

Philanthropy had always been crucial to the sanctity of Jerusalem. Now it too was becoming aggressive and divisive. In 1843 the London Jews Society established a hospital offering free medicine on the borders of the Jewish Quarter. When Consul James Finn replaced Young he threw himself into the conversion campaign, offering protection to the Jewish immigrants from Russia at the behest of the consulate in Beirut. In 1850, when the Ottomans gave foreigners permission to buy land in the empire, Finn bought an estate outside the walls a mile to the west of Mount Sion. This became the Talbieh colony, where Jews could be trained in agricultural work. Finn’s chief donor was a Miss Cook of Cheltenham, and her money also funded two other farms, one near Bethlehem and the other at Abraham’s Vineyard, north of the Jaffa Gate, which employed six hundred Jews. Finn was convinced that if Jews could leave the squalor of the Jewish Quarter and earn their own living, their lot would improve. Most of the Jerusalem Jews lived on thehalakka, alms collected in the Diaspora to maintain a community in the Holy City where Jews could study Torah and Talmud. Like the enlightened Jewish philanthropists, Finn believed that it was essential that Jews shake off this unhealthy dependence, which made them particularly vulnerable if, for any reason, the halakka failed to arrive. Education was also important. The new Protestant Bishop Gobat opened two schools, one for each sex, on the northern slope of Mount Sion for Jewish converts and Arab Christians. German deaconesses founded a school for Jews near Christ Church, and the London Jews Society built a House of Industry, also near Christ Church, to teach young Jews a trade. These institutions inevitably attracted poverty-stricken Jews. Clearly the best way to withstand this threat was to open Jewish welfare establishments. In 1843 the British Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore set up a Jewish clinic in the city, and in 1854 the Rothschilds established the Misgav Ladach Hospital on the southern slope of Mount Sion together with a fund for schools and a low-interest lending scheme.

The older Christian communities were also spurred on to new philanthropic efforts by this Protestant challenge. The Greek Orthodox opened a school for Arab boys with a broader curriculum than St. Saviour’s. The arrival of the Protestant bishop inspired the Roman Catholic Church to revive the Latin patriarchate, which had lapsed with the demise of the Crusader kingdom. The new patriarch moved into a new building near the Jaffa Gate, which was becoming a modern enclave in Jerusalem. His presence caused new dissension in the city. He not only offered an obvious challenge to the Greeks but also antagonized the Franciscans of St. Saviour’s, who felt slighted by his appointment. The new patriarchate meant the introduction of more Catholic orders in the city. Soon the Sisters of Zion—a Roman Catholic version of the London Jews Society—founded a convent near the Ecce Homo Arch in the Via Dolorosa, where they opened a school for girls.

Jerusalem was waking up to the modern world. The American archaeologist Edward Robinson had noticed the change as soon as he set foot in the city in April 1852. He had previously visited Jerusalem in 1838, during the Egyptian occupation. But this time he was immediately struck by the modern Anglican church, the consulate, and the coffeehouses at the Jaffa Gate. “There was a process going on in Jerusalem, of tearing down old dwellings and replacing them with new ones which reminded me somewhat of New York,” he wrote. “There was more activity in the streets; there were more people in motion, more bustle and more business.”³ Robinson had come to research ancient Jerusalem, however, but from a very modern perspective. He wanted to prove the literal truth of the Bible by scientific, empirical methodology. He was convinced that it was possible to trace the journeys of Abraham, Moses, and Joshua. During his 1838 visit, he had crawled through the water conduit built by Hezekiah. There had been immense excitement when he published his Biblical Researches in Palestine (1841). It seemed that it really might be possible to demonstrate the truths of religion and answer some of the worrying criticisms of scientists, geologists, and exegetes who were beginning to call the historical reliability of the Bible into question. This new “biblical archaeology” was an expression of the rationalized religion of the modern West based on facts and reason rather than on imaginative mythology. Yet Jerusalem still exerted a less cerebral pull that operated independently of theological conviction. During Robinson’s first visit to the city, he found himself overwhelmed by emotion. The place had been imaginatively present to him since infancy, so that even though he had never been there before, he felt that his visit was a “return” and an encounter with his younger self. The sites “all seemed familiar to me, as if the realization of a former dream. I seemed to be again among the cherished scenes of childhood.”⁴

When Robinson came back to Jerusalem in 1852 he made an interesting discovery. The year before, the American engineer James Barclay had visited the city as the guest of the Ottomans to advise them about the preservation of the Mamluk madāris. At the Western Wall, he had noticed a huge lintel stone which had topped one of the gates to Herod’s Temple. Now Robinson caught sight of some large stones protruding at ground level from the southwest face of the Western Wall. When he unearthed them, he realized that this must have been one of the monumental arches spanning the Tyropoeon Valley described by Josephus. “Barclay’s Gate” and “Robinson’s Arch” were valuable finds, though it is doubtful whether they had any real religious significance. Yet archaeology could fuel its own holy wars, and Catholics felt impelled to challenge these and other Protestant discoveries. In 1850, Felicien de Saulcy, a soldier who had no training in antiquities, claimed that the Herodian walls of the Ḥaram had been built by Solomon and that the “Tomb of the Kings,” built in the first century by the Queen of Adiabene, was the Tomb of David and the Kings of Judah. Without offering any proof for these assertions, de Saulcy hoped to discredit the Protestant enterprise (Robinson had believed that David’s tomb was on Mount Sion) and thus cast doubt upon Protestant belief in general.

While these more scholarly disputes were in process, the bitter feuding of the Jerusalem Christians led to a full-scale war between the great powers. In 1847 a particularly disreputable brawl had broken out in the Nativity Church between the Greek and Latin clergy. Blood was shed and furious accusations were made about a missing silver star. This led to a clash between France and Russia, the “protectors” of the two communities. France in particular welcomed the chance to reopen the question of the holy places, while Russia replied that the status quo, with the Greeks in pride of place, must be maintained. This quarrel gave Britain and France the pretext they needed to declare war on Russia in order to stop any further Russian advance into Ottoman territory. In 1854 the Crimean War broke out. Despite the new secularism, the issue of Jerusalem could still spur a major confrontation between the Christian powers.

When the war ended with the defeat of Russia in September 1855, Britain and France had greater leverage in Istanbul. The Ḥaram was opened to Christians for the first time for centuries. The duke and duchess of Brabant had been the first Western visitors to the sacred precinct in March 1855, and a few months later, in recognition of Britain’s part in the war, Sir Moses Montefiore ascended to the Ḥaram platform reciting Psalm 121, carried in a sedan chair lest his feet inadvertently touch one of the forbidden areas. Other favors were also forth-coming. The sultan returned the Crusader Church of St. Anna, which Saladin had converted into a madrasah, to Napoleon III as a gift to the French people, and the British were able to insist that the Jews be allowed to extend the Hurva Synagogue.

Modernization proceeded apace after the war. The Christian churches had all bought printing presses, and by 1862 there were two Jewish presses, which a year later had begun to produce two Hebrew newspapers. The Laemel School was founded to give Jewish boys a modern education: they learned Arabic and arithmetic as well as Torah. This led to more antagonism in the Jewish Quarter, since the more conservative Jews, particularly the Ashkenazim, would have no truck with this goyische establishment.⁵ More modern buildings had started to appear in the city. The Austrian government had built a hospice for Catholic pilgrims at the intersection of one of the main streets of the sūq in 1863. Nearby the Austrian consulate was established in a beautiful house in Bezetha, near the Damascus Gate, which was also beginning to be a center of modernity. The British and French consulates also moved to this district, which was becoming one of the most salubrious areas in town.

Far more momentous, however, was the exodus from the walled city. It began in 1857 when Montefiore got permission to buy a plot of land opposite Mount Sion, several hundred yards nearer to the city than Finn’s Talbiyeh estate. He had intended first to found a hospital but changed his mind, building instead a row of almshouses for impoverished Jewish families. He wanted Jews to move out of the overcrowded and unhealthy Jewish Quarter; on top of the hill overlooking the cottages, he built the most advanced windmill in Jerusalem. Like Finn, Montefiore wanted Jews to become self-reliant. Other Jews were attracted by the idea. In 1860, David Yellin, a Russian Jew, bought land near the village of Kalonia, five miles west of the city. By 1880 there were nine of these new Jewish suburbs. One of them was the Ashkenazi colony called Mea Shearim (“Hundred Gates”), half a mile from the Jaffa Gate. It was built strictly according to the rules of the Torah, with its own synagogue, market, and yeshivas. Moving out to these settlements was dangerous. The first families in Montefiore’s cottages were so frightened of robbers that they used to creep back into the city at night to sleep in their old hovels. The Ashkenazim were often attacked on their way out to Mea Shearim. Nevertheless, the settlements grew and prospered. Once they started to leave the Jewish Quarter, the health of Jerusalem’s Jews began to improve dramatically, and this was one reason for the great increase of the Jewish community during the nineteenth century. Another was the new opportunities to earn a decent living. Life had always been economically difficult for the Jews of Jerusalem, and for this reason many new immigrants had preferred to settle in Safed or Tiberias. Now that obstacle was being removed, Jews naturally wanted to come to their Holy City, and when there was an earthquake or some other disaster in Safed, they instinctively came to settle in Jerusalem.

Arabs had also begun to settle outside the walls, forming Muslim, Christian, and mixed communities. By 1874 there were five Arab residential suburbs at Karim al-Sheikh and Bab al-Zahreb, north of the city; Muresa, four hundred yards northwest of the Damascus Gate; Katamon, a mile from the Jaffa Gate; and Abu Tor, overlooking the Hinnom and Kidron valleys. The Christian communities were also starting to move beyond the walls. In 1860 the Swiss German Brotherhood built an orphanage in the fields outside the Jaffa Gate for Arab children. The German deaconesses built the Talitha Cumi School for girls in the fields south of the Jaffa Road. In 1871, Protestants from Württemberg built the German Colony south of the city, starting with a church, hospice, school, and hospital. In 1880 the Spaffords, an American family, founded a new Protestant mission center north of the Damascus Gate, and this would become the American Colony. Not long afterward the Russians built a huge hospice, capable of housing a thousand pilgrims, west of the city; its distinctive green domes were the first buildings to be seen on arrival from Jaffa. Catholics also opened institutions outside the walls during the 1880s: the Schmidt College, opposite the Damascus Gate, and, at the northwest corner of the walls, the St. Vincent de Paul Monastery, Notre Dame de France, and the Hospital of St. Louis.

The Damascus Gate became one of the centers of modem Jerusalem, though for some time old and new methods of transport, style of dress, and architecture continued to exist side by side.

Arab Jerusalem was also developing. In 1863 the first municipal council (baladiyya al-quds) was established in the city, occupying at first two small rooms off the Via Dolorosa. Jerusalem was probably the first Ottoman town after Istanbul to have such a body. The council had ten members: six Muslims, two Christians, and one Jew; the Jewish quota was raised to two in 1908. Despite the tensions in the city, the members of the three faiths were able to work creatively together. The council was elected every four years by male Ottoman citizens who were over twenty-five years old and paid a property tax of at least fifty Turkish pounds per annum. The mayor was chosen by the governor from the elected members. Until 1914 most of the mayors came from the Khālidī, Alami, Husaini, and Dajani families, and the appointment usually reflected the balance of power between the notable families, especially between the Khālidīs and the Husainis. The municipality took an active role in the development of Jerusalem. From the very beginning it tried to improve the infrastructure of Jerusalem, paving and clearing the streets, installing a sewage system, and taking steps to light and clean the city. In the 1890s the council arranged for the streets to be regularly sprinkled with water, arranged for rubbish collection, planted trees along some of the streets, and opened a city park on the Jaffa Road. The council was responsible for introducing a police force, a municipal hospital providing free medical help, and, at the turn of the century, the Museum of Antiquities and a theater near the Jaffa Gate, where plays were performed in Turkish, Arabic, and French. Few other cities of the late Ottoman empire had such an active and committed municipality.

One of its leading lights was Yusuf al-Khālidī, who held the position of mayor for nine years.⁶ He was representative of the new Palestinian citizen, being one of the first Arabs of Jerusalem to receive a modern, Western education. Khālidī had no nationalistic aspirations, however. He was a loyal Ottoman citizen and was the Jerusalem delegate to the short-lived Ottoman parliament in 1877-78. Here he spoke out fearlessly against the corruption of the administration and the unconstitutional behavior of Sultan Abdulhamid. He believed that the reformed Ottoman state should establish modern education, an uncorrupt administration, religious toleration, constitutional rights, and an improved infrastructure. He became a local hero in Jerusalem until he was removed from office in 1879 by the governor Rauf Pasha, who wanted to break the power of the local families. This ended the political ascendancy of the Khālidīs in Jerusalem, and henceforth the more conservative and intolerant Husainis tended to take the lead—a development that would not always be helpful as tension increased in Jerusalem.

When Rauf Pasha tried to replace the Khālidīs and other Arab notables with Turkish officials, there was uproar in Jerusalem. The action was seen as an anti-Arab move. This was a new development. Hitherto religion had been far more important as a determinant of identity than race. The new Arab consciousness that had first surfaced during the 1825 uprising showed the first stirrings of Arab nationalism in Palestine. The consuls noted that increasingly the Turks were resented as usurpers by the Arabs of Jerusalem, who would later take a leading role in the struggle to come. Another sign of this assertion of a distinctly Arab identity came in 1872 when the Arab members of the Greek Orthodox Church started to campaign vehemently for greater participation in their church. They felt despised and marginalized by the elite Greek minority. The quarrel started in Jerusalem but spread to the rest of Palestine, encouraged by the Russian consul, who had his own reasons for challenging the Greek hegemony of Orthodoxy in the Holy Land. At one point, Arab behavior became so violent that the British consul saw it as an incipient revolt. Peace was eventually restored, but Arab discontent smoldered beneath the surface. In 1882 the Arab Christians founded the Orthodox Palestine Society to fight against the foreign control of their church.

The Arabs were trying to form their own plans for their country, but the Europeans were also eyeing Palestine possessively. They tended to see their bringing of modernity to Jerusalem as a “peaceful Crusade,” a term which laid bare the desire to conquer and dominate.⁷ The French looked forward to Jerusalem and the whole Orient coming under the rule of the cross in a successful Crusade. Their task was to liberate Jerusalem from the sultan, and their new weapon would be colonialism. The Protestants who built the German Colony called themselves the Templars and urged their government to complete the work of the Crusaders. The British had a rather different line. They developed a form of gentile Zionism. Their reading of the Bible convinced them that Palestine belonged to the Jews, and already in the 1870s sober British observers looked forward to the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine under the protection of Great Britain. It was a point of view clearly allied to the policies of the British consuls. It had become a received idea to many people in Protestant England, where the Bible was read rather literally, that the Jews would one day return to Zion and that the Arabs were temporary usurpers.⁸

The Europeans were using the modernization of Jerusalem as a way of taking possession of the country. In 1865, Captain Charles Wilson of the British Royal Engineers arrived in Palestine to study the hydrology of Jerusalem. He would also prepare the first ordnance survey of the Holy City, which, in Western minds, would tend to supersede the old sacred geography. While exploring the underground cisterns of the Ḥaram, Wilson noticed a monumental arch parallel to “Robinson’s Arch.” “Wilson’s Arch” caught the attention of the British public far more than the proposed new water system, and as a result of Wilson’s dispatches the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) was founded in 1865 to research the archaeology and history of the Holy Land. The inherent possessiveness of this “peaceful Crusade” was voiced by the archbishop of York, president of the new society, at the inaugural ceremony. “The country of Palestine belongs to you and me; it is essentially ours,” he announced. “It is the land from which news came of our Redemption. It is the land we turn to as the foundation of all our hopes. It is the land to which we look with as true a patriotism as we do this dear old England.”⁹ Because Palestine was such an important province of the Christian imagination, it was difficult to see it as objectively as the new scientific disciplines required. It was somehow part of the Christian self and identity, which made it hard to see it as belonging in a wholly different sense to the people who actually lived there and made it their home.

The people of Palestine soon got wind of this new crusading archaeology. When de Saulcy returned to Jerusalem in 1863 to continue his excavations at the Tomb of the Kings, he was confronted by the angry local residents, who demanded financial compensation for their land and possessions, which he had violated. The Jews also accused de Saulcy of desecrating the graves of their ancestors. The Europeans seemed to assume that the land that they were exploring was theirs to do with as they liked. When Charles Warren of the Royal Engineers arrived in Jerusalem in February 1867, he found the authorities unhelpful and suspicious. He was not permitted to dig under the Ḥaram itself: the holy place could not be penetrated by the crowbars, jacks, and blocks of these new Crusaders. To solve the problem, Warren rented private plots of land around the southern end of the Ḥaram, then sank deep shafts and underground passages leading to the base of the walls. What he discovered was that Herod’s Temple had been built on top of mounds of loose rubble that had gradually accumulated during the biblical period and filled the Tyropoeon Valley. While digging on the Ophel, he also came across the ancient Jebusite water conduit, which was henceforth known as “Warren’s Shaft.”

Increasingly, Western travelers arrived in Palestine in search of facts. Unlike the pilgrims of old, they were not there to explore the sacred geography of the spirit but to find historical evidence that their faith was true. The PEF set up a shop and lecture room at the Jaffa Gate, and guides had to pass an examination on the history of Jerusalem, based on the findings of PEF explorers. “Biblical archaeology” had begun as a quest for intellectual certainty, but it was beginning to uncover a more complex reality that made such certainty difficult. It was not really possible to make simple statements about Jerusalem’s past. The excavations of the American archaeologist Frederick J. Bliss had unearthed a cuneiform tablet at Tel el-Hesy, some thirty miles south of Jerusalem. The tablet was similar to those recently found at Tel el-Amarna in Egypt. Clearly the history of the “Holy Land” did not begin with the Bible. Bliss discovered a similar complexity in Jerusalem. Although he could not yet prove this, he became convinced that the original City of David had not been on Mount Sion, as people had assumed for centuries, but on the Ophel hill. Did this make nonsense of the struggle for the so-called Tomb of David? When he began to excavate the Ophel, however, Bliss found that it was not possible simply to dig down and uncover the Ir David. Many of the ancient structures he found were not at all easy to date, but it was clear that the hill had been inhabited continuously from the Bronze Age to the Byzantine period. The various strata overlapped in a most confusing manner, and it would take years for archaeologists to form an accurate picture of Jerusalem’s past. It was far more difficult than the Bible-reading faithful tended to assume.¹⁰

In 1910 the Dominican archaeologist Hughes Vincent was able to complete Bliss’s excavations on the Ophel and showed that the earliest city of Jerusalem had indeed been sited there and not on Mount Sion. He found Bronze Age tombs, water systems, and fortifications that proved that the town had a history that long predated David.¹¹ It was not possible, therefore, to claim that the city belonged to the Jews because they had been there first. Indeed, the Bible went out of its way to show that the Israelites had taken both Palestine and Jerusalem from the indigenous population. Modern archaeology could therefore threaten some of the simple certainties of faith.

Archaeology was still experienced by the Muslims of Jerusalem as a potentially blasphemous activity that sought to penetrate the mystery of the sacred with crude, aggressive methods. Père Vincent’s excavations took place in the context of the disgraceful expedition of Montagu Brownlow Parker, son of the earl of Morley. He had been led to believe that there was buried treasure in the underground vaults of the Ḥaram. Vincent had agreed to help him simply to ensure that the wholly untrained Parker did not destroy valuable evidence. On the night of 17 April 1910, Parker bribed his way onto the Ḥaram and started to explore the cave under the Rock. A Muslim attendant, who had decided to sleep on the Ḥaram, heard noises and rushed to the Dome of the Rock to discover Parker hacking away at the sacred stone with a pickax. The Muslims of Jerusalem were horrified, and there were riots in the city for days. Parker was an example of the worst aspects of Western secularism. He had violated an ancient sanctum and attempted—literally—to undermine the holiness of the site not as part of a noble quest for knowledge but for pure material gain.

Modernity was gradually changing religion. People in Europe and the United States had lost the art of thinking in symbols and images. Instead, they were developing a more linear, discursive mode of thought. New ideologies, such as socialism and nationalism, were beginning to challenge the old religious convictions. Yet the mythology of sacred geography went deep. We have seen that Byzantine Christians, who thought they had outgrown this type of religion, had to revise their ideas when their circumstances changed. Soon after the discovery of the tomb of Christ they had quickly evolved their own mythology of sacred space. During the second half of the nineteenth century, some Jews were beginning to restate the old ideology of Zion in a new way. European Jews had undergone an immense upheaval. In France, Germany, and England they had been emancipated and encouraged to join modern secular society. But though some flourished when they left the ghetto, others felt curiously lost. They had been cut off from their roots and felt adrift, without orientation. What did it mean to be a Jew in the modern world? Was Judaism simply a private affair of the individual? Some Jews developed a demythologized faith that eschewed messianism and the desire to rebuild the Temple; they wanted to separate religion from politics. But others found this solution unsatisfactory. Moreover, they were becoming painfully aware that the new tolerance of Europe was superficial. Anti-Semitism was an ingrained Christian habit and would not easily disappear. Europeans would indeed reinterpret the old myths about Jews in the lights of their new enthusiasms. Increasingly, some Jews felt alienated and vulnerable in the brave new modern world. Without a true place of their own, they turned instinctively to Zion.

As early as 1840, after the first anti-Semitic pogroms in the Islamic world were instigated by Franciscans in Damascus, Yehuda Hai Alchelai, a Sephardic rabbi of Sarajevo, urged Jews to take their destiny into their own hands. They were not as safe in the Islamic world as they had supposed. It was no good sitting back helplessly waiting for the Messiah: “The Redemption will begin by efforts of the Jews themselves,” he wrote in his Minḥhat Yehuda.¹² They must organize, choose leaders, and establish a fund to buy land in Palestine. In 1860 the Ashkenazic rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer had been disturbed to see the new nationalism of his gentile neighbors in Poland. Where would this leave the Jews, who had no land of their own? They must develop their own nationalism. Again, Kalischer taught, it was no good waiting passively for the Messiah. The Montefiores and Rothschilds should form a company for Jewish settlement in Palestine and organize a mass migration of Jews to a place they could really call their own. Most Orthodox rabbis—who, refusing to make any concessions to modernity, maintained a strict observance of traditional practices—would have no part of this new Zionism, which they saw as an impious attempt to precipitate forcibly the Redemption; but Alchelai and Kalischer showed how natural it was for Jews to look to Zion when they felt alienated in a hostile world. Zionism would be a secular movement, inspired for the most part by Jews who had lost faith in religion, but these two rabbis showed that the movement had a religious potential.

The man who has been called the father of Zionism, however, was Moses Hess, a disciple of Marx and Engels, who reinterpreted the old biblical mythology according to the revolutionary ideals of socialism and nationalism. He was one of the first people to see that a new form of anti-Semitism was rising in nationalistic Germany, based on race rather than religion. As Germans became more devoted to the Fatherland, Jews would be hated and persecuted because they did not belong to the Aryan nation and had no land of their own. Few people believed Hess at the time—Germany seemed eager to allow Jews to assimilate—but Hess had sensed the deeper currents that were at work in society. In his Zionist classic Rome and Jerusalem (1860) he argued that Jews must establish a socialist society in Palestine. Just as Mazzini would liberate the eternal city on the Tiber, Jews must liberate the eternal city on Mount Moriah. Socialism and Judaism were entirely compatible. The prophets had taught the paramount importance of justice and concern for the poor. Once Jews had established a socialist commonwealth in Jerusalem, the light would go forth once more from Zion. They would thus bring about what Hess called “the Sabbath of history,” the Utopia prophesied by Karl Marx, which Hess equated with the messianic kingdom.

Those Jews who felt marginalized in Europe were heartened by the German historian Heinrich Graetz, who taught them that Judaism was relevant to the highly politicized world of their day. In his monumental History of the Jews from the Earliest Times to the Present (1853–76), Graetz argued that it was no use trying to copy Christianity and separate religion from politics, as Reform Jews advocated. Judaism was an essentially political faith. From the time of King David, Jews had linked politics and religion in a creative synthesis. Even after the Temple was lost, Jews had developed the Talmud as a substitute for the Holy Land. The Torah could “turn every Jewish household anywhere in the world into a precisely defined Palestine.”¹³ The Holy Land was, therefore, in their blood. “The Torah, the Nation, and the Holy Land stand, one might say, in a mystical relationship with one another, they are inseparably united by an invisible bond.”¹⁴ They were sacred values, inextricably bound up with the Jewish identity. Unlike Hess, whose work he admired, Graetz did not advocate migration to Palestine. He had been horrified by the backward-looking Jews of Jerusalem and the squalid Jewish Quarter when he had visited the Holy City. His contribution to the Zionist cause was his History, which educated a whole generation of Jews and taught them to rethink their traditions in the light of modern philosophy.

The years 1881-82 were a watershed in the history of Palestine and Jerusalem. First, the British established themselves politically in the region by conquering Egypt. They would play a fateful role in the coming struggle. One of the heroes of the Egyptian campaign was General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, who was killed in the Sudan after the fall of Khartoum. His main contribution to Jerusalem was the discovery of the “Garden Tomb.” Many Europeans had become repelled by the Holy Sepulcher Church, finding this musty building filled with angry, rebarbative monks impossible to associate with the limpid mysteries of their faith. When Gordon studied Wilson’s ordnance survey of Jerusalem, he noticed that one of the contour lines resembled a woman’s body, whose “head” was a little hill north of the Damascus Gate. This must be the “Place of the Skull.” With touching faith in his so-called scientific method, when Gordon found an apparently ancient rock tomb there, he immediately identified the hill as Golgotha and the tomb as Christ’s. After his death, the Garden Tomb became a Protestant holy place. It was a monument to the British imperialism that would permanently change the history of Jerusalem.

In 1882, following the outbreak of vicious pogroms in Russia, the first Zionist colonies were established in Palestine—not in Jerusalem but in the countryside. These colonies, run according to socialist ideals, were not a success, but the new Jewish enthusiasm that would transform Palestine had been given a local habitation and appeared on the map. Zionism was taking on flesh and substance in the land of the Patriarchs. In 1899, Zionists acquired an international platform when they held their first conference at Basel, Switzerland. Even though many of these early Zionists were secularists who no longer shared the theological beliefs of traditional Judaism, they had called their movement after one of the oldest names of the Holy City, which had for so long been an image of salvation. They also expressed their ideals in conventional Jewish imagery. Thus they were moved to see Theodor Herzl, who had become the spokesman of Zionism, ascend the podium. He looked like “a man of the House of David, risen all of a sudden from his grave in all his legendary glory,” recalled Mordechai Ben-Ami, the delegate from Odessa. “It seemed as if the dream cherished by our people for two thousand years had come true at last and Messiah the Son of David was standing before us.”¹⁵

Herzl was not an original thinker, though his book The Jewish State (1896) would become a Zionist classic. Nor was he a religious man; he had been committed to the ideal of assimilation and had even toyed with the possibility of converting to Christianity. But then came the shock of France’s Dreyfus affair, which showed him the vulnerability of the Jewish people. He foresaw—correctly—an impending anti-Semitic catastrophe and literally worked himself to death in an attempt to find a haven for the Jews. Realizing the importance of public relations, he approached the sultan, the pope, the Kaiser, and the British colonial secretary and thus brought Zionism to the attention of the world’s political leaders. Herzl did not believe that the new Jewish state needed to be in Palestine, and he was shocked at the Second Zionist Conference by the depth of opposition to his proposal to establish a state in Uganda. To retain the leadership, Herzl was forced to abandon the idea. He stood before the delegates, raised his right hand, and quoted the words of the psalmist: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither!”

When, however, Herzl actually visited Jerusalem in 1898, he was not favorably impressed. To the contrary, he was appalled by “the musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance, and foulness” in its “reeking alleys,” and resolved that the first thing the Zionists would do if they ever got control of Jerusalem was to clean it up.

I would clear out everything that is not sacred, set up workers’ houses beyond the city, empty and tear down the filthy rat-holes, burn all non-sacred ruins, and put the bazaars elsewhere. Then, retaining as much of the old architectural style as possible, I would build an airy, comfortable, properly sewered, brand new city around the holy places.¹⁶

A few days later, he changed his mind: he would build the new secular city outside the walls and leave the holy shrines in an enclave of their own. It was a perfect image of the new secularist ideal: religion must be relegated to a separate sphere. The sanctity of Jerusalem played little part in the early Zionist movement. Most of its luminaries preferred to leave the city and its religious communities alone. For Herzl, salvation would not descend from on high: it lay in the brave new city that he would like to build outside the city walls. The “wide, green ring of hillside all around” would be “the location of a glorious New Jerusalem.”¹⁷ The old religious traditions of Judaism had been superseded and left behind. Consequently Herzl’s chief emotion when he visited the Western Wall was disgust: the squalor, the moaning, and the craven attitudes of the Jews who clung to its stones symbolized everything that Zionism must transcend.

Not all Zionists had that reaction, however. Mordechai Ben Hillel wept like a child when he first caught sight of the Western Wall. It was a survivor, like the Jewish people, its power deriving not from facts and reason but from “legend” that had the power to unleash immense psychic force.¹⁸ The writer A. S. Hirschberg had a similar experience when he visited Jerusalem in 1901. Walking through the Maghribi Quarter, he felt ill at ease and out of place. But as soon as he stood before the Western Wall and took the prayer book offered him by the Sephardic beadle, he started to weep uncontrollably. He was in shock, he recalled later, touched to the depths of his being: “All my private troubles mingled with our nation’s misfortunes to form a torrent.”¹⁹ The wall had become a symbol that had the power to heal the sense of rootlessness and alienation that afflicted the most secular of Jews. Its power took them by surprise, bringing them up against themselves and reaching hitherto unsuspected areas of their hearts and minds.

In 1902 a new wave of Zionist settlers began to arrive in Israel from Russia and Eastern Europe; they were secular revolutionaries, dedicated to the socialist ideal. One of them was the young David Ben-Gurion. This “Second Aliyah,” as the migration was called, would be decisive in the history of the movement. Ben-Gurion was not religious. His New Jerusalem was the socialist vision. To his wife, Paula, he wrote: “Dolorous and in tears you will arise to the high mountain from which one sees vistas of a new world, shining in the glow of an eternally young ideal of supreme happiness and glorious existence.”²⁰ Their secular faith filled these settlers with the kind of exaltation that is usually associated with religion. They called their migration to Palestine an aliyah, chiefly because this was the traditional term for return to the Land of Israel, but also because it represented an ascent to a higher plane of being. For them, however, holiness resided in the land, not in heaven. Some of these Zionists did settle in Jerusalem, but many of them shared Herzl’s distaste. In 1909, beside the Arab port of Jaffa, they began to build Tel Aviv, which became the showcase city of their new Judaism.

Most of the settlers were such urban types. In the Zionist pantheon, however, they were never as important as the settlers in the kibbutzim. The first of these collective farms was established in Degania in the Galilee in 1911. The Zionist theorist Nahum Sokolov remarked: “The point of gravity has shifted from the Jerusalem of the religious schools to the farms and agricultural schools, the fields and the meadows.”²¹ Just as ancient Israel had come into being outside Jerusalem, the new Israel would be formed not in the holy city but in the kibbutzim of Galilee.

Yet Jerusalem was still a symbol that had power to inspire these secular Zionists as they struggled to create a new world, even if they had little time for the city as an earthly reality. Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, who would become the second President of the State of Israel, was converted to Zionism while speaking at a revolutionary rally in Russia. Suddenly he felt dissociated from his surroundings and in the wrong place. “Why am I here and not there?” he asked himself. Then he had a vision. There arose “in my mind’s eye the living image of Jerusalem, the holy city, with its ruins, desolate of its sons.” From that moment he thought no more of revolution in Russia but only of “our Jerusalem.” “That very hour I reached the absolute decision that our place is the Land of Israel, and that I must go there, dedicate my life to its upbuilding, and as soon as possible.”²² He had discovered his true orientation and his real place in the world.

The seeds of the modern confrontation between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem had already been sown by the early twentieth century.

The trouble was that Jerusalem was not “desolate of its sons.” It already had sons, a people who had lived there for centuries and who had their own plans for the city. Nor was the city a ruin, as Ben-Zvi imagined. Fourteen new suburbs had been established since the 1870s. Jerusalem had a modern shopping arcade and hotel at the Jaffa Gate, a brand-new park where the municipal band played in the afternoons, a museum, a theater, a modern post office, and a telegraph system. There was now a carriage road linking the Holy City to Jaffa, and a railway brought visitors from the coast through the Baq’a Valley. Jerusalem had become a city to be proud of. Its Arab residents had come to resent the Turkish occupation and were alarmed by the Zionist settlers. In 1891 a number of Jerusalem notables sent a petition to Istanbul, asking the government to prevent further immigration of Jews and the sale of land to Zionists. The last known political act of Yusuf al-Khālidī had been to write a letter to Rabbi Zadok Kahn, the friend of Herzl, begging him to leave Palestine alone: for centuries, Jews, Christians, and Muslims had managed to live together in Jerusalem, and this Zionist project would end such coexistence. After the Young Turk revolt in 1908, Arab nationalists of Palestine began to dream of a state of their own, free of Turkish control. When the first Arab Congress met in Paris in 1913, a telegram of support was signed by 387 Arabs from the Near East, 130 of them Palestinians. In 1915, Ben-Gurion became aware of these Arab aspirations for Palestine and found them profoundly disturbing. “It hit me like a bomb,” he said later. “I was utterly confounded.”²³ Yet, the Israeli writer Amos Elon tells us, despite this bombshell, Ben-Gurion continued to ignore the existence of the Palestinian Arabs. Only two years later, he made the astonishing suggestion that in a “historical and moral sense,” Palestine was a country “without inhabitants.”²⁴ Because the Jews felt at home there, all other inhabitants of the country were merely the ethnic descendants of various conquerors. Ben-Gurion wished the Arabs well as individuals but was convinced that they had no rights at all as a nation. Like Jerusalem, the Land of Israel had long been a state of mind for Jews. Even a committed atheist like Ben-Gurion found its sacred position on his own emotional map more compelling than the demographic and historical facts that were staring him in the face. Yet this deep denial was destined shortly to run up against some hard realities—perhaps partly because of that denial, a tragic clash of interests between Jews and Arabs was developing.

In 1914 the Great War broke out, Turkey siding with the Germans against the French and the British. Jerusalem became the headquarters of the Turkish VIII Corps. Between 1915 and 1918 a tragedy occurred that presaged a future catastrophe that would have a profound impact on the history of Jerusalem. Official Turkish policy demanded the massacre of the Armenian people. In Jerusalem, where the Armenians had long kept a low profile, the kaghakatsi were unmolested, however. Those who had government positions were deprived of their posts, but otherwise family life continued as usual in the Armenian Quarter, except that the young men were drafted into the Turkish army. In other parts of the Ottoman empire, however, Armenians were mercilessly exterminated. The code word for this mass execution would be “deportation,” just as it was later in Nazi Germany. Crowds were herded to riverbanks and pushed into the water, the soldiers shooting those who tried to save themselves by swimming. Tens of thousands were driven into the desert without food and water. A million Armenians died in this way; another million went into exile. Some of them arrived in Jerusalem and crowded into the Armenian Quarter. The refugees were allowed to reside in the Convent of St. James with the brotherhood, a privilege usually denied seculars. The first genocide of the twentieth century had led some to seek refuge in the ancient sanctity of Jerusalem.

In 1916 the British decided that a spectacular victory in the Near East would break the stalemate of trench warfare in France. The British Egyptian Expeditionary Force was moved into the Sinai Peninsula, but met determined Turkish resistance in Gaza. General Murray was replaced by General Edward Allenby, who was told by Prime Minister Lloyd George to conquer Jerusalem as a Christmas present for the people of Britain. Allenby carefully studied the PEF publications: as in Napoleon’s conquest over a century earlier, scientific study was a prelude to military occupation. In October 1917, Allenby took Gaza and began his advance to Jerusalem. There the governor Djemal Pasha gave orders for the Turks to evacuate the city, and on 9 December, Mayor Hussein Selim al-Husaini was the only authority left in the city. He borrowed a white sheet from an American missionary and left the Old City through the Jaffa Gate with a procession of small boys. He surrendered Jerusalem to two startled British scouts. When Allenby arrived at the Jaffa Gate on 11 December, the bells of the city pealed to welcome him. Out of respect for the holiness of Jerusalem, Allenby dismounted and entered the city on foot, taking his stand on the steps of the Citadel. He assured the inhabitants of “Jerusalem the Blessed” that he would protect the holy places and preserve the religious freedom of all three faiths of Abraham in the name of His Majesty’s Government. He had completed the work of the Crusaders.