Mark Twain's Jerusalem
A renowned man of letters, a novelist, satirist and essayist whose emancipationist sympathies, finely honed wit and admirable mustache ensured him the title of "Father of American literature," Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens enjoyed a memorable visit to Jerusalem in 1867.This event has ended
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His tour of Palestine, then a region within the Ottoman Eyalet of Syria, is today considered an historical footnote of curiosity, especially considering recent research which suggests that Twain's Jerusalem hotel, which also hosted luminaries including Herman Melville and Ariel Sharon over the years, was housed in the same building, known as the Wittenberg House, which today is home to the controversial ultra-Nationalist Ateret Cohanim organization's seminary. According to historical records, though, Twain spent several days poking about the religious sites of Jerusalem.
His travels in the Holy Land and Europe inspired the popular travel memoir The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress, published in 1869, and partly informed the (for its time) remarkably philo-Semitic Concerning the Jews, published years later in 1898 - although as his surviving letters indicate, Twain's chief concern while he was actually in Jerusalem was one that should be familiar to any modern Jerusalem tourist, finding the perfect souvenir-trinket. From a letter to a Christian Quarter bookseller: Mr. Esais — Fix up the little Bible I selected (I don’t want any other) — the one that has backs made of Balsam-wood from the Jordan, oak from Abraham’s tree at Hebron, olive-wood from the Mount of Olives, & whatever the other stuff was — ebony, I think. Put on it this inscription: “Mrs. Jane Clemens — from her son — Mount Calvary, Sept 24, 1867. Put "Jerusalem" around on it loose, somewhere, in Hebrew, just for a flyer. Send it to our camp, near head of the valley of Hinnom — the third tents you come to if you leave the city by the Jaffa Gate — the first if you go out by the Damascus Gate. The Bible described in this letter is now stored at the University of California, Berkeley's Mark Twain archive.
Twain, when not pitching a tent in the valley that now houses the Sultan's Pool performance venue, was staying in the Mediterranean Hotel, then the preferred Jerusalem haunt of international intelligentsia, including Melville and archaeologist Charles Warren. In the years that followed Twain's visit, though, the Mediterranean, on the Muslim Quarter's Hagay St. (also home to the beloved Abu Shukri hummus restaurant), was sold off and repurposed. It's named "the Wittenberg House," because one Moshe Wittenberg purchased the building from its Christian owners in the late 1880s, in a landmark real estate deal that was brokered by famed linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, thanks, somewhat ironically, to his command of French. About a century years later, then-Member of Knesset Ariel Sharon bought one section of the building for his own residence, eventually selling the property to the like-minded ideologues of Ateret Cohanim.
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