There is a green hill far away outside a city wall. And on it there stands the windmill. This is not at all what we expect. It is one thing to find a windmill in the Netherlands or Kent, quite another to find one outside the walls of Old Jerusalem.
This windmill was both a success and a failure.
It was a success in that it was built as part of a project to get Jews to move out of their enclave in the old city onto the more spacious land outside. This seems a simple enough idea now, but in the insecurities of of the nineteenth century with about 20,000 Jews in this enclave of the great Ottoman Empire, moving outside the walls was a daunting idea. With the help of the windmill a colony was successfully formed outside the cramped squalor of the Old City.
Moses Montefiore, a British Jewish banker provided the funds, but its familiarity to an English eye is down to the fact it was designed in Kent. And that is why it has survived (more later).
It wasn't a success as a windmill once it encouraged the Jews out of the enclave. The photo contains a clue for there is a Jerusalem summer sky. Of course it might be blowing a gale with a blue Middle Eastern sky - that's not unheard of, but rare. The Kentish windmill lacked the Kentish wind.
But as history turns out (and nothing in Jerusalem is ever simple) its Kentishness saved it. After the Second World War the Jews were organising themselves to form a homeland State and their enemy was the British. The British determined to destroy the windmill which was functioning as a gun turret. But the men sent to destroy it found that it had been designed in Kent - their home county. So they simply blew the top off it to make it unusable but preserved.
And on another hill near the city the Maker of All showed greater mercy to those he had made.
Moses Montefiore, a British Jewish banker provided the funds, but its familiarity to an English eye is down to the fact it was designed in Kent. And that is why it has survived (more later).
It wasn't a success as a windmill once it encouraged the Jews out of the enclave. The photo contains a clue for there is a Jerusalem summer sky. Of course it might be blowing a gale with a blue Middle Eastern sky - that's not unheard of, but rare. The Kentish windmill lacked the Kentish wind.
But as history turns out (and nothing in Jerusalem is ever simple) its Kentishness saved it. After the Second World War the Jews were organising themselves to form a homeland State and their enemy was the British. The British determined to destroy the windmill which was functioning as a gun turret. But the men sent to destroy it found that it had been designed in Kent - their home county. So they simply blew the top off it to make it unusable but preserved.
And on another hill near the city the Maker of All showed greater mercy to those he had made.
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