rebuilding of the walls of Jerusalem by Suleiman the Magnificent (1537): but on the whole Palestine ceases for nearly three hundred years from this point to have a history, save the dreary record of the sanguinary quarrels of local sheiks and of oppression of the peasants by the various government officials. Few names or events stand out in the history of this period: perhaps the most interesting personality is that of the Druse prince Fakhr ud-Din (1595–1634), whose expulsion of the Arabs from the coast as far south as Acre and establishment of his own kingdom, in defiance of Ottoman authority—to say nothing of his dilettante cultivation of art, the result of a temporary sojourn in Italy—make him worth a passing notice. The German botanist, Leonhard Rauwolf (d. 1596 or 1606), who visited Palestine in 1575, has left a vivid description of the difficulties that then beset even so simple a journey as that from Jaffa to Jerusalem. The former town he found in ruins. A safe conduct had to be obtained from the governor of Ramleh before the party could proceed. At Yazur they were stopped by an official who extorted heavy blackmail on the ground that the sultan had given him charge of the “holy places” and had forbidden him to admit anyone to them without payment (!). Further on they had a scuffle with certain “Arabians”; and at last, after successfully accomplishing the passage of the “rough and stony” road that led to Jerusalem, they were obliged to dismount before the gate of the city till they should receive license from the governor to enter.
Towards the close of the 18th century a chief of the family of Zaidan, named Dhaher el-Amir, rose to power in Acre. To El-Jazzar. him fled from Egypt an Albanian slave named Ahmed, who (from the expertness with which he had been wont to carry out his master’s orders to get rid of inconvenient rivals) bore the surname el-Jazzar, “the butcher.” He had, however, incurred punishment for refusing to obey a command of his master, Mahommed Bey, and so took refuge with the Palestinian sheik. After five years Mahommed Bey died and el-Jazzar returned to Egypt. Dhaher revolted against the Turkish government and el-Jazzar was commissioned to quell the rising; his long residence with Dhaher having given him knowledge which marked him out as the most suitable for the purpose. He was successful in his enterprise, and was installed as governor in Dhaher’s place. He was a man of barbaric aesthetic tastes, and Acre owes some of its public buildings to him: but he was also capricious and tyrannical, and well lived up to his surname. Till 1791 the French had had factories and business establishments at Acre;[1] el-Jazzar ordered them in that year summarily to leave the town. In 1798 Napoleon, returning from his unsuccessful attempt at founding an empire on the Nile, came to stir up a Syrian rising against the Turkish authorities. He attacked el-Jazzar in Acre, after capturing Jaffa, Ramleh and Lydd. A detachment of troops was sent under General Jean Baptiste Kléber across the plain of Esdraelon to take Nazareth and Tiberias, and defeated the Arabs between Fuleh and Afuleh. Napoleon was however compelled by the English to raise the siege. El-Jazzar died in 1806 and was succeeded by his milder adopted son, Suleiman, who on his death in 1814 was followed by the fanatic Abdullah. This bigoted Moslem caused the Jewish secretary of his office to be murdered. The Jew had anticipated just such an event, and had secretly arranged that after his death an inventory of Abdullah’s property should fall into the hands of the government—knowing that the latter had claims on the estates of el-Jazzar and Suleiman. The government accordingly pressed their claims: Abdullah refused to pay and was besieged in Acre. He called for the intervention of Mehemet Ali, governor of Egypt; the latter settled the dispute, but Abdullah then refused to discharge the claims of Mehemet Ali. The latter accordingly sent 20,000 men under the command of his son Ibrahim Pasha, who besieged Acre in 1831 and entered and plundered it. So began the short-lived Egyptian domination of Palestine. Mehemet Ali proved no less a tyrannical master than the Turks and the sheiks; the country revolted in 1834, but the insurrection was quelled. In 1840 Lebanon revolted; and in the same year the Turks, with the aid of France, England and Austria, regained Palestine and expelled the Egyptian governor.
From 1840 onwards the Ottoman government gradually strengthened its hold on Palestine. The power of the local Recent history. sheiks was step by step reduced, till it at last became evanescent—to the unmixed advantage of the whole country; and the increase of European interests has led to the establishment of consulates and vice-consulates of the great powers in Jerusalem and in the ports.
The battle of religions still continued. In 1847 the dispute in the Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem about the right to mark with a star the birthplace of Christ became one of the prime causes of the Crimean war. In 1860 occurred a sudden anti-Christian outbreak in Damascus and the Lebanon, in which 14,000 Christians were massacred. On the other hand it may be mentioned that on the 30th of June 1855 the cross was for the first time since the crusades borne aloft through the streets of Jerusalem on the occasion of the visit of a European prince; and that in 1858 the sacred area of the Haramesh-Sherif—the mosque on the site of the Temple of Jerusalem—was for the first time thrown open to Christian visitors. The latter half of the 19th century is mainly occupied with the record of a very remarkable process of colonization and settlement—French and Russian monastic and other establishments, some of them semi-religious and semi-political; German colonies; fanatical American communities; Jewish agricultural settlements—all, so to speak, “nibbling” at the country, and each so intent upon gaining a step on its rivals as to be forgetful of the gathering storm. For in the background of all is the vast peninsula of Arabia, which at long intervals fills with its wild, untamable humanity to a point beyond which it cannot support them. This has been the origin of the long succession of Semitic waves—Babylonian, Assyrian, Canaanite, Hebrew, Nabataean, Moslem—that have flowed over Mesopotamia and Palestine; there is every reason to suppose that they will be followed by others, and that the Arab will remain master at the end, as he was in the beginning.
In 1896 Herzl (q.v.) issued his proposal for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine and in 1898 he came to the country to investigate its possibilities. The same year was signalized by the picturesque visit of the German emperor, William II., which gave a great stimulus to German interests in the Holy Land.
In 1902 Palestine was devastated by a severe epidemic of cholera. In 1906 arose a dispute between the British and Turkish governments about the boundary between Turkish and Egyptian territory, as the Turks had interfered with some of the landmarks. A joint commission was appointed, which marked out the boundary from Rafah, about midway between Gaza and El-Arish, in an almost straight line S.S.W. to Tabah in 29° 30′ on the west side of the gulf of Akaba. A map of the boundary will be found in the Geographical Journal (1907), xxix. 88.
2. The Holy Places.—To the vast majority of civilized humanity, Jewish, Christian and Moslem, the religious interest of the associations of Palestine predominates over every other, and at all ages has attracted pilgrims to its shrines. We need not here do more than allude to the centralization of Jewish ideas and aspirations in Jerusalem, especially in the holy rock on which tradition (and probably textual corruption) have placed the scene of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and over which the Most Holy Place of the Temple stood. The same associations are those of the Moslem, whose religion has so strangely absorbed the prophets and traditions of the older faiths. Other shrines, such as the alleged tomb of Moses, and the mosque of Hebron over the cave of Machpelah, are the centres of Moslem pilgrimage. Christianity is however responsible for the greatest development of the cult of holy places, and it is to the sacred shrines of Christendom that we propose to confine our attention.
- ↑ When this French colony was established is uncertain; Maundrell found them there at the end of the 17th century.
