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In October 1898, the manic kaiser arrived in Constantinople bursting with ideas to discuss with Abdulhamid: the building of his railways, the training of his army – and Zionism. Back home, Wilhelm had been approached by a Viennese journalist, Theodor Herzl, who had observed the rise of antisemitism – a word for anti-Jewish racism coined only in 1880 – not just in Russia but in Paris and Vienna, and concluded that the Jews would never be safe in Europe. ‘The idea I’ve developed’ – he called it Zionism – ‘is a very old one: the restoration of the Jewish State.’ Judaea had been ruled by Jews for the millennium before Christ’s birth; Jews everywhere had revered Jerusalem and Judaea since the fall of Simon Bar Kochba in 135 and had dreamed of return. A small, impoverished Jewish community, often persecuted and limited in rights, had long lived in Jerusalem and Ottoman Palestine. Between the 1560s and 1860s, Jerusalem was neglected and pillaged, a monumental but half-empty walled village, prey for local Turkish despots, home to a few thousand Arabs and a few hundred Jews until the conquest of Mehmed Ali and Ottoman reforms had reignited the reverence of British and European powers, who rebuilt the city with churches and hostels. The Romanovs sent thousands of Russian pilgrims annually – yet it was their antisemitic measures within their empire that also attracted Russian Jews to Jerusalem. Arabs and Jews moved into the city. In 1860, Moses Montefiore built the first Jewish borough outside the walls, just as the Husseinis, Arab grandees, built the first Arab settlement. In 1883, Edmond de Rothschild, youngest son of James, helped Russian immigrants found a Jewish town, Rishon LeZion, and by the 1890s there was a slight Jewish majority in Jerusalem. Herzl, imagining an aristocratic Jewish republic led by the Rothschilds, turned to Europe’s most civilized, modern state, Germany, and through an introduction to Phili Eulenburg reached Willy.

Willy and Phili were rabid Jew-haters. ‘I’m very much in favour of the Mauschels [a pejorative for Jews] going to Palestine,’ responded Wilhelm. ‘The sooner they clear off there the better.’ But when he mentioned this to Abdulhamid, busy promoting his caliphal credentials in the Arab world, he brusquely dismissed it. Next Willy proceeded to Jerusalem, where he opened a hulking German church, mocked impoverished Jews as ‘greasy and squalid, cringing and abject … Shylocks by the score’ – and received Herzl, telling him his idea was ‘a healthy one’. But as for funding, he sneered, ‘Well, you have plenty of money!’^* In Damascus, Willy declared himself ‘protector of all Muslims’, backing the Ottomans and stealing a march on the British, who had overextended themselves in Africa.

At first the British had seemed unstoppable, thanks to an invincible new piece of killing technology. On 25 October 1893, British paramilitaries, controlled by the diamond mogul Cecil Rhodes, deployed a new weapon – Maxim’s machine gun – against charging Matabele warriors for the first time.

RHODES, THE MAXIM GUN AND LOBENGULA

Rhodes did not expect to live long. Like Clive and Lugard, he was a clergyman’s son, this time from suburban Hertfordshire, who had a weak heart and chronic asthma. He craved adventure; his family believed South African heat would save his life, and as a teenager he set himself up in the rough Kimberley mining camp. There, he outplayed competitors and amalgamated claims, then won Rothschild backing to turn his De Beers company into the dominant diamond producer. Unmarried and awkward with women, manipulated by a female grifter who almost broke him, he was probably gay and was devoted to his secretary, Neville Pickering. But his passion was the British empire and its extension along a planned railway line from the Cape to Cairo, African peoples dominated by the white race. ‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world,’ as he wrote in his will, ‘and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’