The Tribes Triumphant: Return Journey to the Middle East. Charles Glass
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At the Convent of the Olive Tree, there was indeed one olive tree. ‘This is, of course, a very young tree,’ George said, ‘but they say it is Ananias’s tree.’ By very young, George meant a few hundred years. Ananias had been a high priest two thousand years ago, when, legend claimed, Christ had been tied to the tree and whipped. Interestingly, both a non-Armenian church and a mosque stood within the grounds of the Armenian Quarter. St Mark’s, believed to have been the house of St Mark’s mother, Mary, was a Syrian Orthodox church. And the tiny Yaqubieh, or Jacob, Mosque had once been the chapel of the martyr St James of Persia. He was known as St James the Cut-Up, because the martyr’s singular form of execution was to be chopped to pieces.
The entire Armenian Quarter was clad in the smoothest stone I had ever seen, as slick as a seal’s back. The roofs, the courtyards and the plazas all had surfaces you could run your hands over or run barefoot across without taking a scratch. The rooftops and walkways formed an intricate system of water collection. Every massive stone was set to point the water towards a channel, and every channel made its way to a reservoir. ‘Under every church,’ George said, ‘there is a cistern. Before the rainy season, people spend weeks cleaning the roofs.’ Like the Nabataeans of the desert, the people of Jerusalem saved every drop the sky gave them. To waste water was a sin. To run dry was death.
The Armenians, like the Arab Christians of Palestine, were running out of people. We walked by the yard of the Armenian school, where a few boys played basketball. ‘The children have no future,’ lamented George, himself unmarried and childless. ‘Our generation didn’t care about the future. Albert and I, for example, have no possessions. We are a proud generation. We lived under Arab sovereignty and dignity. We were treated as normal citizens.’ He looked at the children, all born long after Israel conquered the old city in 1967. ‘They have known only occupation. They have had only humiliation. They challenge it in the intifadah, but that is superficial.’
The Armenians had survived genocide by Turkey. They would survive the Israelis, I said. Jerusalem, he reminded me, was a long way from the massacres in Anatolia, northern Syria and Mesopotamia. Jerusalem, in the last years of the Ottomans’ chaotic empire, was a refuge. ‘The Turks,’ he said of those who ruled the old city, ‘wanted money. These people want the land.’ The monks hid their money or begged for more. Land cannot be concealed or replaced.
George, a bespectacled and subdued man in a grey cardigan, hated the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem and the indignity meted out to both Arabs and Armenians. He told me that the only way he had found to endure was, like the monks of old, to seek a refuge. His refuge, he said, was the nineteenth century.
The View from the Convent
Jerusalem had always been a real estate scam, Albert Agazarian told me. George had left me at Albert’s house inside the convent. Albert lived there with his wife, son and two daughters. At home in his Syrian stone house, where every room opened on the courtyard as in old Damascus and Seville, Albert was a pasha. Madeleine, whom he had married when they were still in their twenties, brought coffee, tea, tobacco and sweets without his asking whenever anyone dropped by. He often had a guest – a journalist, a diplomat or an instructor from Bir Zeit University where he worked and his children studied. He usually received them in his library, a cluttered, domed room, with overstuffed sofas, shoe-sized ashtrays and books in no discernible order that he pulled down to quote some passage or other. There was no point in making an appointment to see Albert. He and Madeleine rarely bothered to answer their telephone.
God, could Albert talk. ‘You went to the leather tannery?’ he asked me. The ‘leather tannery’ was Dabbagha Square, just below Papa Andrea’s rooftop restaurant. ‘Up until 1860, that place stank like hell. After the Crimean War, the Russian pilgrims started coming. There was a wedding here between Russian piety and generosity on the one hand and Byzantine cunning on the other. It was Eftimos, the Orthodox treasurer, who got rid of the tannery and the smell from those dead cows and rotting hides.’ He said it as if the aroma had just cleared his nostrils. ‘Eftimos built the first well and the first hotel in the old city. It was not a khan.’ A khan, or caravanserai, was common in the Levant of the nineteenth century. Travellers stopped for shelter, but brought their own blankets and food. A hotel that provided beds, linen and meals was an innovation. ‘This hotel was the Hospice of St John, the first modern hotel in Jerusalem. This is where the settlers have been since April 1990.’ Those were the blue-grilled windows with Israeli flags that I had seen at lunch.
Madeleine, supporting a tray of coffee and cakes, pushed through the door and cleared space among the papers on the coffee table. Albert got up, opened a drawer and searched for something. Whatever it was, he did not find it. Madeleine poured the coffee and started for the door. I asked why she did not stay. Friends were waiting for her in the kitchen, and their conversation was more interesting.
‘The hotel was successful,’ Albert continued. ‘Its success instigated the Greek Orthodox to open the Grand Hotel and Grand New Hotel.’ The two hotels, built of Jerusalem stone in the high splendour of late Victorian and Habsburg design, dominated the western portal of the old city at the Jaffa Gate. ‘The Grand changed its name to the Imperial when Kaiser Wilhelm visited in 1898.’
The period from the Egyptian invasion of 1830 to Kaiser Wilhelm’s pilgrimage in 1898 made modern Jerusalem. The Christian powers – Russia, England, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Italy – erected churches and hospices in the Christian Quarter, on sites they bought in the Muslim Quarter and on hills outside the walls. German Christians erected the Augusta Victoria Hospital on a summit where the Kaiser was said to have had his first view of the Holy City. Prior to that, Imperial Russia staked its claim to Jerusalem with the construction of the Ascension Church, all onion domes and multicoloured like St Basil’s in Moscow, in 1870. Most of the modern Christian Quarter was built with foreign Christian donations in the late nineteenth century. England and Prussia opened the first Protestant church in the Holy Land, Christ Church, near the Jaffa Gate in 1849. It was a time when ideas born in Europe invaded the near Orient, Jerusalem in particular: imperialism, la mission civilitrice, the romantic Christian Zionism of Lords Shaftesbury and Palmerston (who suggested in 1840 that Europe’s Jews should be removed to Palestine and originated the phrase ‘land without a people for a people without a land’), nationalism, the forced opening of Ottoman markets to European trade with all its dislocating effects, the political Zionism of Leo Pinsker and Theodor Herzl and the first purchases with Rothschild money of Arab land for Zionist settlement. The Kaiser’s well-publicized procession through the Holy Land attracted Herzl from Vienna. Herzl paid homage to Kaiser Wilhelm and requested German sponsorship for the colonization of Palestine. At the Herzl Museum in West Jerusalem a photomontage in badly focused sepia depicted the elegantly dressed, bearded Father of Zionism on foot and doffing a white pith helmet to the mounted Kaiser. The Kaiser did not sponsor the Zionist project, whose architects wisely turned to Britain.
‘Before 1831,’ Albert said, ‘the population of Jerusalem was never more than 10,000. There were 4000 Muslims, 3000 Christians and 2000 Jews. The gates of the city were locked at night.’ From 1840, with the European Christian building programme and the missionary attempts, mostly failed, to convert Muslims and Jews to Christ, the modern age began. Britain in 1917 accepted the status quo in the old city, freezing the Jewish, Christian, Armenian and Muslim land holdings where they were. Israel, after 1967, was more flexible. This took Albert back to Jerusalem’s first hotel, the St John Hospice, where I had watched settler children staring through wire mesh at the Arab world below them. ‘The settlers got in through the protected tenant,’ he said, ‘who unfortunately was an Armenian.’
He dropped his pipe in an ashtray and jumped up to find a book. Then another. He handed them to me. One was Robert Friedman’s Zealots for Zion and the other Dilip Hiro’s Sharing the Promised Land. ‘Look on page ninety-nine,’ he said, pointing at the Friedman book. There it said that an Armenian named Martyros Matossian had received $3.5 million to assign his family’s protected tenancy in the hospice to a group of Israeli settlers. The Hiro book, on page twenty-two, made the same allegation, but said Matossian, who then fled the country, received $5 million.
Albert explained that most