The American Cemeteries in Jerusalem
[Note: I wrote this early this year, 9 months before the Israeli assault on Gaza. It got quietly spiked by my shop. And that’s probably fair. After all, the story of two groups of American Protestants trading accusations of “graverobbing” and “free love” is altogether less serious than the ongoing offenses against the dead reported in Gaza, and nothing compared to the so far 20,000 Palestinians killed by Israel in the past two months.]
The January 2023 settler violence against the Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem brings to mind the long history of intersectarian negotiations for space for their dead, in the city holy to Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike.
Starting in 1838, American Protestants were buried in two sites on Mount Zion owned by the Presbyterian Church. The first “old” cemetery, tucked between the Greek and Armenian cemeteries; the second “new” cemetery, at the western end of the German cemetery, southwest of Bishop Gopat School.
Under Ottoman rule, people were buried according to their confessional status. Members of the Christian churches of the East each had their firman allocated by the Sublime Porte, and by the 1830s, even English and German Protestants had their own spaces. By the 1830s, American Protestants of necessity searched for homes for their own dead.
Records of the Jerusalem cemeteries are in our own RG 115. First among them is a quitclaim deed from Hohannes Aroutian, transferring to George Whiting and John Lanneau of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a “garden, situated in the suburbs of Jerusalem, near the place called the Prophet David (on whom be peace)” dated the middle of Rabia, 1251 AH — August 1835. Aroutian for his part bought the garden from Said Wahabi al Dajani, of the Dajani Daoudi family, in 1175 AH — (1761/1762).
A specification document for the property identifies it as being “32 pikes in length from north to south, 15–1/3 pikes in breadth from west to east, situated on Mount Zion, adjacent to the cemetery of the Greeks on the west, and to that of the Armenians on the North,” about 120 by 60 feet.
The land in hand, George Whiting sought permission of local Muslim authorities to identify the cemetery as waqf property — relieving it of taxation. Local authorities would only act by order of the Sultan. Whiting appealed to Commodore David Porter of the U.S. legation to the Sublime Porte, asking the diplomat to seek a firman granting permission for the cemetery. The diplomat declined, writing in November 1837, curtly “Our treaty with the Porte relates to commerce and the protection of our citizens and has no bearing on any particular class, whatever may be its religious tenets.”
Permission appears to have been granted by the Ottoman governor of Jerusalem, in what’s described as a vizierial letter, in January 1839. An English translation of the firman explains that Armenian, Greek, and Catholic authorities had refused burial of American Protestants. It notes that while there’s no precedent for land in Palestine to be owned by foreigners, an exception here “is required by the rights of reciprocal consideration, propriety, and necessity, that citizens of the United States be permitted to inter their Dead as they have done up to the present time.”
For half a century, American Protestants, including members of the American Colony in Jerusalem, buried their dead in the American Cemetery. Ownership of the land would be transferred from the ABCFM to the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. Board of Foreign Missions in 1875. By 1897, it appears the site was not adequate for new burials. William K. Eddy of the PCUSA Syria mission enters the scene in the late 1890s, and prepares to make the cemetery saleable. Some 40 people were recorded as being interred in the small lot, but most were unmarked, and the number of burials was evidently much higher. An 1898 report by the U.S. consulate notes that “so many interments had been made therein and so many graves left unmarked that it was practically impossible to make an opening for a new grave without striking and uncovering human bones […] when the opening was made for the burial of Herbert Drake, a nearly complete skeleton was uncovered at the bottom of the grave.”
In Septmeber 1897 Eddy buys a new, larger plot of land near the German cemetery on Mount Zion for 350 lira in gold, and begins disinterring any identifiably human remains. Records at the time indicated that about a dozen members of the American Colony in Jerusalem were buried in the cemetery, inclduing Horatio G. Spafford. Eddy notified the Colony of the disinterment and relocation to the new American cemetery; no one objected at the time.
Spafford, a member of Fullerton Avenue Presbyterian Church (Chicago, Ill.) emigrated to Jerusalem in 1881, partly to evade creditors, according to the U.S. Consul Selah Merrill, and partly to fulfill Biblical prophecy. Spafford and his cohorts believed “the day after they arrived in Jerusalem, the Star of Bethlehem was to … settle on the head of one of them, and this fact would go out to the world, and immediately all the people who were expecting the Lord’s coming, and looking for it, would hasten as fast as possible to Jerusalem and gather round the Star”
Partly owing to the group’s religous beliefs, partly to their certainty of bringing about the end times, Merrill and others spread rumors of devilry and free love reigning inside the Spaffordite compound: “In order to test their fortitude, married men should maintain close contact with young women, and vice versa, to the extent of sharing a bed. It was said that if the Colonists were not able to restrain their urges, and faltered, they were required to confess to the rest of the group.”
The transfer of bodies was delayed, partly by objections from Greek church authorities about the proposed sale of the old cemetery, partly by the Ottoman government’s slow permitting process. Bodies were then temporarily stored at the English cemetery in “a temporary grave or receiving vault.” Some stone markers were stored in a basement in the German Colony
With the old cemetery cleared, in November 1897 Eddy sells it for $6000 to the Franciscan Order of San Salvador — identified in Presbyterian correspondence as “the monks of Serra Santa,” a misprision of their status as custodians of the Holy Land, Custodia Terra Sancta. According to one Spaffordite source, the Spanish Franciscans’ offer is so lavish because they believe Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is buried in the old American Cemetery.
In late November 1905 an unsigned chain letter goes out upbraiding William Eddy for clearing the old cemetery “in order to sell it to the Roman Catholics!” Tensions between representatives of the Board of Foreign Missions and the American Colony, which counted Presbyterians in their number, had evidently been building over that eight-year period. A later second-hand account by property managers of the UPCUSA holds that the “Spoffordites [sic] (trouble makers)” accused Eddy of grave desecration in retaliation for other Presbyterians’ condemnation of “the loose way they were living […] and there seem to have been very queer things going on, religiously, in this group.”
By the end of 1907, W. K. Eddy had passed “but the plans which he had formulated have been carried out and quite a transformation has taken place in what was at one time a wilderness overrun with weeds and thistles. The land had been graded, paths put in, and a central garden planted with cypress and eucalyptus. Gravestones removed from the old American cemetery were reset in a wall of the new one as a monument. The new cemetery welcomed its first burials that year: Elizabeth J. Marshall of Chicago, and Phineas Gleason, infant son of Ralph E. Gleason, of Jerusalem.
Within 20 years the PCUSA again re-examines its role and responsibilities toward the American Protestants of Jerusalem. On 12 July 1925 W. S. Nelson of Tripoli reports to Robert Elliott Speer at the Board of Foreign Missions headquarters in New York, “We as a Mission have only a nominal interest but a full legal right to the property,” and recommends transferring the new cemetery to the Christian and Missionary Alliance, as the largest American evangelical organization operating in Jerusalem. BFM authorities begin drawing up transfer documents in 1927. Events intervene.
The Thawrat al-Buraq in 1929, the Thawrat Filastin al-Kubra beginning in 1936, and the Second World War delay any action on the cemetery by the PCUSA Syria-Lebanon Mission or the Board of Foreign Missions. The BFM formally transfers the new cemetery to the Christian and Missionary Alliance in October 1954.
The image of Presbyterian authorities desecrating the graves of members of a heterodox evangelical movement persists in places. The story contained in the bureaucratic records of the Syria Mission is far dryer. It is a series of property transactions dedicated to finding space for Protestant bones, and later to relieving the denomination of responsibiity over that space. The space itself, as of 1954, was still hard by the 1949 armistice line and no man’s land.
Offenses against religious sites, as in last January, are ongoing. In recent years the Abbey of the Dormition has been spray painted with phrases like “Death to the heathen Christians, the enemies of Israel.” And seizure, sale, and demolition of waqf property in Palestine is, 75 years into the existence of the State of Israel, practically institutionalized.
