Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Ottoman Decline and European Infiltration (Kallie Eisenberger)






Ottoman Decline and European Infiltration
8 July 2008, tour leader Barak Zemer
Report submitted by Kallie Eisenberger

Today we continued through time to the four-century period of Turkish rule in Jerusalem, which began in the 16th century and lasted up until the end of the First World War. We began the tour by noting that the majority of the visible Old City walls are relatively new for Jerusalem, about 450 years old, and were built by the Turks. We learned that throughout this entire time period Jerusalem was relatively unimportant and was not even the capital. We were left wondering why then did Suleiman the Magnificent, the great Ottoman builder, order the construction of the wall?

One tale describes how every night Suleiman went to sleep while his wife sang to him. One night, however, she had a sore throat and couldn’t sing for him and on this night he had a nightmare. The king dreamt he was in a field with four starved lions and when he appeared, the lions realized they finally had food. He had this dream four times a night for four nights in a row. Finally, he couldn’t take it anymore and decided to consult medical professionals—Muslim clergy, but no one could cure his nightmares. At last, he went to a Jewish rabbi and asked for help. The rabbi explained that the lion is Judah (the symbol of that tribe and later the kingdom of Judah) and, essentially, the people of Jerusalem, who are also starving. The king says that he will give them food, but the rabbi answers that this is not enough and that he must do something else for them. In order to protect the Jews, Suleiman rebuilds the Old City walls, and decorates one of the gates with four lions (the Lion Gate, which we viewed and entered through on our tour the previous day). Here again the theme of myth versus reality comes into play. While certainly not everything in this story can be true, there is some historical significance here as well. For instance, we are able to understand that not only was this a hard time for the Jewish people in terms of food, but also in regards to security.

In order to see the types of people living in Jerusalem during these four hundred years, we must take a step back and examine the consequences of a historical event in 1492, the expulsion of all the Jews of Spain by its Christian rulers. These Jews, known as the Sephardic Jews (from the Hebrew word for Spain) were welcomed by the Ottomans into their empire because of their business prowess, their facility with languages, and their international mercantile connections. As the Turks controlled Palestine at the time, the Jews were allowed to once again travel and settle in Jerusalem. A monument of this time is the four Sephardic synagogues in the Old City, from which we learn a lot from merely examining the outside of the buildings. Their true identity was camouflaged so as not to elicit Muslim antagonism. For example, there were no marks to distinguish it as a synagogue and there is a hemispheric protrusion in the exterior wall pointing towards Mecca in imitation of the prayer niche in a mosque (the mihrab). Most significantly, the building stands below grade and is lower than the nearby mosque as one of the regulations at the time was that no Christian or Jewish place of worship could be taller than a mosque.

After making our way around to the other side of the synagogues, the Elijah the Prophet Synagogue, Barak related to us another piece of folklore. One day the community of Sephardic Jews was gathered for Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, but there were only nine males present. According to the Jewish religion, there must be ten adult males present in order for communal prayer to take place. The congregation waits and waits and just before the final hour at which prayers must begin, an old man enters the synagogue and everyone prays. No one asks the man who he is but, because he is a stranger, they want to invite him home after services. The problem is that when they look around to invite him, he is already gone and they realized that his man must be the prophet Elijah, who had ascended to heaven and is also the harbinger of the messiah. Thus, they named the synagogue after Elijah and preserved the chair he sat it, which survived until the Jordanians destroyed much of the Jewish quarter and its synagogues after the fighting in 1948 when they took control of the Old City. From this story, despite its fantastic quality, we do understand some truths about this early period of Muslim rule. We know that, because this was such a small congregation and everyone knew their fellows, that there must have been few Jews in the area during this time.

A relatively large influx of Jewish immigrants came to Jerusalem during the time of Ottoman rule because of religious reasons and because the Turks opened the border, making it easier for Jews to travel. This immigration, sometimes of entire communities, resulted in a significant need for housing. Because the Arabs owned the land and because demand was increasing, the price for housing went up. For example, Jews from Holland and Denmark purchased land in order to create housing for their members. Later on in the nineteenth century, European Jewish philanthropists donated money to create welfare housing known as Batei ha-Mahaseh. This was to be the last housing built in the old Jewish quarter.

Next we visited the Tiferet Yisra’el (“Glory of Israel”) Synagogue, which we learned was built in the middle of the nineteenth century by the Ashkenazi, or European Jews, after the Sephardic community was already here. Again, the synagogue revealed to us through its architecture a significant decrease in Turkish power relative to European empires, as this synagogue would have been much taller than the mosques in Jerusalem.

We also visited another famous 19th-century synagogue, the so-called Hurva Synagogue, which is currently being reconstructed. This place was once a beautiful representation of Jewish existence, and yet its name means “The Ruin.” Why is this? During the 1700s the Ashkenazi Jews come to Jerusalem to get ready for the coming of the messiah and want to build a synagogue. In order to do so, they borrowed money from other European Jews and Muslims. Because of the poor living and sanitary conditions in Jerusalem, however, the Ashkenazim began to die very quickly and the donations stopped coming from Europe, meaning they were stuck with a debt to the Muslims. The Muslims are able to identify who is an Ashkenazi due to their distinctive clothing and would ask every Ashkenazi Jew they came across for the money. Finally, in 1721, the Arabs burnt down the provisional, wooden synagogue—hence the name “The Ruin.” Later, the Ashkenazim want to come back but are afraid that they will again be asked for the money they owe, so they change their style of dress to that of the Sephardic Jews, and this is the style of clothing still worn today. Rothschild eventually gave the donation to build a large stone structure on the same site but the name stuck. This synagogue was blown up by the Jordanians during the 1948 war. In 1967, Israel gained control of the Old City and initially left the destroyed structure with only a commemorative arch, but during the past few years the city has decided to rebuild the synagogue as it appeared in its heyday.

Our next stop was to the Courtyard of the Old Yishuv, an old Sephardic Jewish settlement museum with several different apartments from various time periods. Our first time period was from the 16th century, where the whole room was about the size of a dorm room. The families during this time were very large, possibly ten people or more, and they all slept in the same room at night, storing the mattresses behind a curtain during the day. There were twenty of us in the room, and we barely fit, so it was hard to imagine an actually family living there. The courtyard in the middle of the building seemed to be the only relief people had from their tight living quarters, but even this was congested. We skipped ahead to the period of British rule, which began in 1917. In this room we found a typewriter, a teapot, and china and realized that living conditions had greatly improved. How did this happen?

About 200 years into the rule of the Ottomans, the Turks empire declined in power, and living conditions in Jerusalem were horrible. As a result of this and the Napoleonic Wars, which signaled to some Christians the end of the world, missionaries came to Israel. Schools and hospitals sprang up around Jerusalem, as no European country wanted to be outdone by another. It was also around this time period that Protestants began to travel to Israel, believing that they the Jews should in fact come back to Israel, but that they should also be converted to hasten the Second Coming of Christ. This, of course, made the Jewish leadership and Jews in general very uncomfortable, as they did not want to be influenced by Christianity. Jews were warned by their coreligionists that if they stepped inside a missionary hospital and died there, they would not be allowed to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. This was a great threat considering that most 19th century Jewish immigrants came here to die and be buried. There were, however, positive Christian influences here that the Jews did not mind. For example, there was no mail or post office under the Turks until the Austrians established one, no road or railroad lines from the coast until the French constructed them. We visited the Anglican compound and Christ Church established by Anglican missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century.

Towards the end of the 19th century, another significant event occurred outside of Jerusalem that signaled the coming of a change from several different perspectives. In 1898, the Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany was traveling to Jerusalem and a section of wall adjacent to the Jaffa Gate was knocked down to make way for his carriages. This reveals the prominence of Germany on the world stage. A second important fact about the Kaiser’s visit was Theodore Herzl’s anxiety to meet with him. As one of the founding fathers of Zionism, Herzl hoped a meeting with the Kaiser might advance Zionist aims. Although the two men did meet very briefly, Herzl did not receive any promise of support, and a photo was not taken of the encounter. Instead, we saw a very famous photomontage of the two men together (the Kaiser on horseback with Herzl before him on foot) created for Zionist propaganda purposes from two separate pictures of the men. Herzl’s readiness to meet the Kaiser further highlights the fact that at this time the Zionist leadership was desperate to receive support for their cause from the European empires.

Our tour ended with a visit to the Russian Compound, just outside the Old City walls. Once again, there were a great number of Christian religious pilgrims coming from Russia during the 19th century, and thus the Russian government decided to build a compound in order to house them during their pilgrimage. Another church was constructed in the area, similar in style to those seen in Moscow and elsewhere in Russia, highlighting again the importance of European influence at this time.