Travel: Jerusalem’s American Landmark
Few people associate Jerusalem with American history. The city, shaped by Israelites, Romans, Arabs, and Crusaders, is so ancient that it makes the events of 1776, or even 1492, seem almost contemporary. Yet hidden within its narrow stone streets lies a gem of U.S. history, the American Colony Hotel.
Frequently voted the best hotel in the Mideast, the American Colony has changed much in its 120 years. It was founded as a temporary home where American evangelicals could “sit still” while awaiting the Messiah, and it is now a luxurious Oriental-style hotel, a hangout for diplomats and journalists. Its sun-drenched patios and cloistered bars bear witness to quiet meetings between the elites of Israeli and Palestinian politics. Despite the shift from humble Christian settlement to power-broker haunt, the American Colony has maintained a welcoming neutrality, a much-needed rarity in the tumultuous region.
The hotel’s story begins in Reconstruction-era Chicago. Like much of America at the time, Chicago was home to hundreds of small evangelical prayer groups. Horatio and Anna Spafford led one, and they often preached on Chicago’s sidewalks at lunchtime. Their small group of “Spaffordites” experimented with various radical beliefs, often supporting “universal salvation,” the conviction that all souls would be saved regardless of their religion or deeds. At times they even claimed that Horatio’s sister, Margaret Lee, received Messianic prophecies directly from God. The one tenet they held consistently was that the Second Coming was just around the corner. Not surprisingly, their fringe faith won the censure of many mainstream evangelical groups.
A series of unfortunate events only deepened the Spaffords’ faith. The Presbyterian Church expelled them for heresy, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed everything they owned, and their four daughters all drowned in a shipwreck. The Spaffordites interpreted these tragedies as a sign of the nearness of the Second Coming and chose to move to the Holy Land to await Jesus’ return. In 1881 the tiny group of Americans relocated from booming Chicago to ancient, impoverished Jerusalem.
There they established their “American Colony,” living communally and celebrating the city’s first Fourth of July. They soon opened several businesses and relocated to a beautiful villa, formerly a pasha’s palace, outside the city’s walls. In 1882 the sudden arrival of hundreds of Yemeni Jews excited the Spaffordites, who saw the growing Jewish majority as another sign of the Messiah’s imminent return. To aid this immigration, the Americans provided the arriving Jews with food and shelter.
The Americans’ belief in fast-approaching universal salvation kept them from bothering with missionary work or the beliefs of Jerusalem’s residents. At the time, Jews and Arabs were viewing each other with increasing suspicion, Ottoman rule was disintegrating, and European empires were eager to snatch up the region. The Americans’ neutrality won the favor of many locals.
During World War I the American Colony struggled to aid the people of Jerusalem against Ottoman conscription, plagues of locusts, and outbreaks of typhus, running four hospitals and numerous soup kitchens. The colony rushed to Jerusalem’s aid again during the 1948 war that established Israel. In the midst of fighting between Israeli and Jordanian forces, its members managed to treat 17,000 casualties with the aid of the Red Cross.
After half a century in Jerusalem, the colony’s religious community collapsed. The Spaffordites had been so sure of the End Time’s proximity that they hadn’t educated their children in their faith. The next generation, lacking Messianic zeal, saw no reason to maintain the simple, communal way of life. Most of them returned to America, but some stayed on to convert the colony’s home into a popular hotel. Originally a series of suites for Pasha Husseini’s wives and guests, then a lodging place for Christian pilgrims, the American Colony’s home became an elegant hotel, the final legacy of a vanished religious sect.
Forty years ago next week, during the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli and Jordanian forces faced off across Jerusalem with the American Colony just inside Jordan’s territory. Jordanian mortar fire arched over the hotel’s high balconies, hitting the structure twice, until June 6, 1967, the second day of fighting, when the Israeli military fought its way into East Jerusalem. Paratroopers poured through the hotel, their jump boots scuffing the lobby’s cool stone floors as they pushed east. It remains one of the most controversial moments in Mideast history, alternately viewed as the triumphant reunification of the Jewish capital after two millennia of exile or the tragic beginning of the occupation of the Palestinian heartland.
The war that united the city established the hotel as a key rendezvous for meetings of visitors from mostly Arab eastern Jerusalem with ones from mainly Jewish western Jerusalem. The American Colony Hotel became a sort of neutral podium for political events. Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, extended his hand to the Palestinian people in 1988 from the American Colony’s sunny courtyard, and the first secret talks of the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords took place in a hotel room that had once been the chambers of the pasha’s wife.
The hotel, while historic, is also beautiful. Its decor can be described as Oriental light, with Moorish arches and stone floors but also broad windows, airy corridors, and touches of turquoise and yellow all over. Its wide halls are lined with century-old photographs from the Spaffordites’ photography studio—Jerusalem’s first—as well as tapestries and flintlock pistols. The place has something of an Imperial-era gin-and-tonic air. Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill both lodged at it, and it shows.
The hotel’s rooms are unparalleled in Jerusalem. They often occupy two stories and are well-appointed with Victorian furniture, canopy beds, and baskets of fresh apricots, persimmons, and other local fruits. Its exceptional brasserie overlooks a pool surrounded by hedges of palm and cypress trees, which perfectly frame the minaret of a nearby mosque.
At the heart of the American Colony lies the Cellar Bar, a former cistern with low vaulted ceilings, stone floors, and a selection of more than 20 single-malt scotches. A small cabinet next to the bar holds the personal bottles of Jerusalem VIPs. Eavesdropping in the Cellar Bar can turn up juicy tidbits about the world’s most complex diplomatic and political scene.
The hotel’s location at the crossroads of east and west Jerusalem, just north of the walled Old City, makes it an ideal starting point for sightseeing. As you sip your drink by the pool, try to grasp that you sit within a mile of the site of King Solomon’s Temple, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the rock on which Muhammad’s horse alighted. Yet the American Colony feels removed from the controversies those sites produce. Somehow it lacks the heavy tension that so often hangs around the city’s neck like a block of its timeless stone.
The American Colony is no longer a “lonely outpost of American civilization,” as a Minneapolis newspaper called it in 1920. It is the posh base of Jerusalem’s crisis industry. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an international affair, with every person on the planet expected to take a side, and the directors of this unending show spend much of their time at the hotel. It is quite common to happen upon of convoy of white United Nations Land Rovers idling in the parking lot; they seem absurd in a city where everyone, Arab or Jew, rides the bus. The hotel is usually packed with Europeans and Americans enjoying its neutrality and calm in a beautiful city with a divided soul. It is worth visiting even if only to witness that phenomenon.
To plan a visit to the American Colony Hotel, start at its website, www.americancolony.com. If the room prices seem too expensive, consider a much more reasonable night of dinner and drinks there while sleeping elsewhere.