ABSTRACT
As a holy muslim city only nominally ruled by the Turks, early nineteenth-century Jerusalem was off-limits to European settlers. The Catholic Church routinely punished recalcitrant priests by exiling them to far-off Jerusalem for three years or so, and the handful of Ashkenazis in the city adopted Sephardi dress and prayed inconspicuously in the foyer of the Sephardis' Yohanan ben Zakkai Synagogue. Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, Ashkenazi Jews were under a double ban. As Europeans they were prohibited from residing in Jerusalem, and as Ashkenazis they were liable for debts owed Muslim creditors since the immigration of Yehuda He-Hasid and his followers in the early eighteenth century, an episode bizarre even by Jerusalem standards. Just as the Prushis were getting settled in their new Galilean home of Safed, a split occurred in their ranks that would influence Ashkenazi life for several generations to come.
