Theodor Herzl went to Jerusalem in 1898 and worried that he might be arrested by the Turkish authorities. Just like Shabbatai Zvi. He got sick while he was there and he was frustrated by his efforts to get meetings with the Sultan. His trip to Jerusalem also took him through Istanbul. He met with Kaiser Wilhelm II at Mikveh Israel and he was a prick to Herzl and made anti-Semitic comments. Herzl ruminated about that meeting throughout his experience in Jerusalem. It wasn’t a pleasant time at all and so he recorded in his diary: “When I remember thee in days to come, O Jerusalem, it will not be with delight. The musty deposits of two thousand years of inhumanity, intolerance and uncleanliness lie in the foul-smelling alleys.” This was Herzl’s late 19th century version of the poetic declaration of love in Psalms 137 about the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. / Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.”
Think of it as the opposite of Jerusalem syndrome: a mundane world of lowered expectations. This is also part of travel.
So how fantastic is it that the Lumière brothers recorded some of the first films scenes ever, specifically some of the first travelogue film scenes ever, in Jerusalem in 1896? We can see what Herzl saw only two years later. The first clip fascinates with the first instance of an orthodox Jew covering his face from the camera (was this the first time an Orthodox Jew has ever covered his face from a film camera?). It’s not clear to me why there was an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem dressed this way. Because the other interesting figure in this clip is a Jerusalem Jew, a real one wearing a Turkish tarboosh hat and praying at the Kotel in Hebrew though his daily language, we are told, is Arabic.
The next clip is the scene leaving Jerusalem from the train. Exactly how Herzl came to Jerusalem and left it (and promised to remember it without delight). Herzl noted how he wanted an upgrade to the railway in Palestine to be a central aspect of the new society he hoped to found in Israel.
http://youtu.be/OhYLtLouWSA