Prophets And Profits

The sect behind a five-star Jerusalem hotel.

Jane Fletcher Geniesse tells the story Anna Spafford, inset, who with her husband ruled an Evangelical commune in Jerusalem “the American colony.”

by Martha Mendelsohn
Jewish Week Correspondent

“American Priestess:
The Extraordinary Story
of Anna Spafford,”
by Jane Fletcher Geniesse. (Doubleday, 378 pages, $26.)

‘They believed that God had postponed the final judgment until the Jews were returned to Zion to repent for their sins,” Jane Fletcher Geniesse writes about a group of Protestant evangelists.

She is not referring to the current crop of Bible thumpers. Before John Hagee and Pat Robertson, there was Anna Spafford, a blue-eyed, zafdig Norwegian immigrant who settled in Chicago. With her husband Horatio, a wealthy lawyer who grew up during the Evangelical boom in post-Civil War upstate New York, she founded a sect called the Overcomers that moved to Jerusalem in 1881 and encouraged Jewish settlement in Ottoman Palestine to hasten Jesus’

Second Coming.

Christian Zionists in the 19th century — who knew? Geniesse’s carefully researched book “American Priestess: The Extraordinary Story of Anna Spafford” (Doubleday) tells the strange, fascinating, little-known story of the Evangelical commune Anna and Horatio ruled, pointing up the profits to be found in piety, extremes of abnegation and indulgence, and other hypocrisies that often accompany feverish religiosity.

Devastated by the loss of loved ones to illness and fire, and further traumatized by the death of four daughters in a shipwreck, Anna abandoned a previous disdain for religion and espoused her husband’s eschatological views. How else to deal with her suffering than to believe that she would be swooped up into heaven and reunited with her dead children?

In a large house near the Damascus Gate, the “American colony” of 18 added to its ranks diverse disciples, including a Hebrew scholar from Lithuania, a Turkish Jew converted to Christianity by British missionaries who may have become Anna’s lover, and a Jew from India who adoringly recorded the divine “messages” and prophetic “signs” that Anna attested to at daily prayer meetings.

While a succession of anti-Zionist American consuls, concerned about destabilization, frowned on the colony’s agenda, the Overcomers, plying good works among the poor and sick, gained the friendship of the city’s Muslim Turks and Arabs. Jerusalem, as they soon discovered, “belonged equally to Jews, Christians, and Muslims and was sacred to all alike,” but, “propelled by messianic urgency,” their priority was “to connect with Jerusalem’s Jews,” Geniesse writes.

Horatio — as complex and interesting a character as his wife — enjoyed droll encounters on daily jaunts through the city to track the influx of Jews. Ecstatic over the arrival of a “tattered band” of Yemeni Jews searching for a stolen Torah scroll, he was convinced they were the descendants of Gad, one of Israel’s lost tribes, and their presence was “irrefutable proof” that the “End Times loomed thrillingly near.”

More Jews were coming, in flight from Russian pogroms, but, at the Wailing Wall, Horatio met “ragged rabbis” supported by the haluka, a stipend from international Jewry. His Arab dragoman (interpreter) explained that Jews didn’t like to work. (Many worked as money-lenders, shoemakers or tailors.) It was Horatio who gave up gainful employment, forsaking earthly pursuits to devote himself to the spiritual as atonement for fraudulent financial dealings and $100,000 worth of debt incurred through risky investments.

“God will provide,” he assured Anna, while friends of the colony donated funds and vendors extended credit for months on end.

Taking over on the homefront as supreme matriarch, Anna brooked no dissent. She ordered beatings for fractious children, appropriated money earned by colonists, gave preferential treatment to her own two daughters born after the shipwreck, barred medical treatment for the sick (which led to many deaths during Jerusalem’s sweeping epidemics), and put in place unorthodox domestic arrangements.

For a time, she outlawed marriage in the colony, decreeing that members remain celibate, and reshuffled husbands and wives into “affinity” couples. To wrestle with the evils of temptation, she picked a handsome young cleric from the colony as her “tempter,” closeting herself with him for days, and possibly causing Horatio to fall prey to the fever that killed him.

The Overcomers had been invigorated in the early 1900s by a group of industrious Swedish evangelicals, who launched a number of lucrative enterprises and expanded the colony’s burgeoning guest business in a pasha’s former palace off the Nablus Road at the edge of East Jerusalem. The colony had lived through Ottoman rule, World War I, and the British Mandate, and Geniesse describes each of these periods with abundant color and detail.

Anna was reassured by the prophetic implications of Field Marshal Edmund Allenby’s triumph in the Battle of Megiddo on the plains of Armageddon, but, after her death, talk of the Second Coming subsided.

Meanwhile, the Overcomers’ commune had evolved into the American Colony Hotel, which survived and thrived after Israeli statehood was established. Today, Spafford relatives still own shares in the hotel, but Valentine Vester, Anna’s grandson’s wife, who continued to play a managerial role after the hotel was bought by a Swiss chain, died last week at age 96.

The site of secret negotiations between Israeli and Palestinian officials, the luxury hotel is considered an oasis of neutrality. After Israel’s War of Independence, however, Anna’s daughter, Bertha Spafford Vester, was hardly neutral.

“The problem of miserable refugee camps crowded with 860,000 homeless Palestinians stoked [Bertha’s] indignation,” Geniesse writes in her last chapter, where, in making provocative comments about charged political issues, she remains far from neutral.
She writes that, except for Bertha, those who had once been part of the colony left because of “their dislike of Israel’s discriminatory ordinances.”

So much for the Overcomers’ support of a Jewish return to Zion. It was one thing for Jews to wail at the Wall, another for them to be in charge. Sixty years later, as we embrace today’s aliyah-touting Christian Zionists, we might take “American Priestess” as a warning. Or even a prophecy.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization