Jerusalem: The Biography (150 page)

Theodore Herzl, assimilated Viennese journalist and brilliant publicist, was the organizer of political Zionism. In 1898, he approached Kaiser Wilhelm II who ordered Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem. Regarding himself as a German Crusader, the Kaiser wore a specially designed white uniform with a full-length veil attached to his pickelhauber.

The Kaiser visits the Tomb of Kings. In the archaeological race between the Great Powers, the Frenchman de Saulcy had claimed this was King David’s tomb. It is actually the tomb of the first-century Queen of Adiabene.

The American Colonists arrived as a millenarian Christian sect but they soon became beloved philanthropists: here, Bertha Spafford, a daughter of the founders, poses with Bedouin friends.

Jerusalem’s mayor Selim al-Husseini: the very model of an aristocratic Jerusalemite.

Ne’er-do-well aristocratic rogue and huckster, Montagu Parker, later Earl of Morley, whose three-year project to uncover the Ark of the Covenant ended in the sole riot in Jerusalem’s history to unite Jews and Muslims. He only just escaped with his life.

For almost half a century the fixer, aesthete, socialite and
oud
-player Wasif Jawhariyyeh knew everyone, saw everything, and recorded it all in his peerlessly vivid diary.

Jemal Pasha, the dictator of Jerusalem during the First World War, was a Turkish nationalist with a taste for cigars, champagne, beautiful Jewish courtesans and brutal executions.

Born in a Russian shtetl, Chaim Weizmann was at home with kings and lords. His passionate charm helped convert Britain’s imperial panjandrums, Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, to Zionism, while Lawrence of Arabia promoted the Arab cause.

Surrender, 1917: Hussein al-Husseini, mayor of Jerusalem (centre, with walking stick), tried six times to surrender to the British with a sheet tied to a broom.