For a five-year period during the second half of the 19th century, the exclusive Mediterranean Hotel in the Old City of Jerusalem was a Bohemian cultural center where renowned visitors chose to stay when they spent a few nights in the Holy Land.

Mark Twain, for example, arrived in September 1867, and at least one of the 50 letters that later became the basis for his legendary book “The Innocents Abroad” - the most widely read travelogue in American literature to this day - was written there. Archaeologist Charles Warren, who headed the group from the British Palestinian Exploration Fund that excavated the well-known vertical shafts at the foot of the Temple Mount, stayed there with his team of excavators, and the group stored its excavating tools and measuring instruments in the hotel’s basement.

Over the years, researchers attempted, on the basis of old sketches and photos, to locate the site where the Mediterranean once stood. Now, the mystery has been solved: The Mediterranean is none other than Wittenberg House on the Old City’s Haguy St., which is currently managed by a convert from Judaism, Moshe Hornstein.
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Wittenberg House became famous some 20 years ago, when then MK (and later prime minister) Ariel Sharon purchased an apartment in it and even lived there several days a week with his wife, Lily. The house is named after Moshe Wittenberg, the person who bought it from a Christian owner over 120 years ago - and who was assisted in the transaction by the reviver of the Hebrew language, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, whose knowledge of French made him a valuable middleman.

The solution to the mystery, which will shed light on one of the landmarks of the 19th-century Jerusalem scene, came about thanks to the work of researcher Yoni Shapira, archaeologist Prof. Shimon Gibson and Rupert Chapman, secretary of Britain’s Palestine Exploration Fund.

The fund and its extensive archive, which contains some 10,000 photos of Jerusalem and the land of Israel in the 19th century, is a real treasure for researchers of the area’s history. Nearly 20 years ago, Gibson used the archive to remap the cisterns and shafts on the Temple Mount based on Warren’s work. At the same time, he also searched for the place in Jerusalem where Warren and the members of his team stayed in the 1860s and 1870s.

Eventually, Chapman found a map sketched by Conrad Schick, a renowned architect, archaeologist, cartographer and member of the organization who was a leading researcher of the Holy Land and Jerusalem. Chapman sent the map to Gibson, but Gibson did not then have time to study it. Only recently did it reach Yoni Shapira, who specializes in architectural-historical research and is also the man behind Mini Israel, a park near Latrun featuring miniatures of many Israeli landmarks. Shapira was working at the time on researching and building models for hundreds of structures, and he succeeded in pinpointing the hotel’s location.

Chapman, Shapira and Gibson found the hotel’s first site, where it remained until 1860, relatively easily: It was located near Hezekiah’s Pool (the Patriarch’s Pool). An elderly Armenian woman now lives in one of the apartments that was then part of the hotel, and when Gibson looked out from the balcony of her home, he saw exactly the same view that Herman Melville, the author of “Moby Dick” and a guest at the hotel in those days, described in his journal. At that point, he knew the riddle’s first part had been solved.

But the big challenge was to find the hotel’s location from 1866 onward - its second and more famous venue, the one described in the writings of Warren and Twain. The researchers had two major hints at their disposal: Warren wrote that the hotel where he stayed was next to Bezetha, which is just southeast of Damascus Gate; he also said the structure resembled a khan, or traditional Middle Eastern inn. In other words, it had an unroofed interior courtyard and a large room with a view of the main road.

Shapira began checking aerial photos and GIS (Geographic Information System) maps prepared by the Jerusalem municipality and marked houses that should be checked. Two photos taken from the courtyard of the hotel by Henry Philips, who was Warren’s photographer, assisted him. After poring through hundreds of documents, photos and aerial photos, Shapira climbed onto the roof of the Austrian hostel, one of the highest buildings in the area, and marked three houses for careful inspection. Then he approached the residents and asked for permission to visit and photograph their homes. When he got to Wittenberg House, which also has an open courtyard, the identification was confirmed almost immediately: The courtyard in the photo, the steps and even the crack in the tiles remained in place. Everything matched.

Gibson said the discovery of the place where Mark Twain stayed, even if just for a few nights, is very meaningful for American tourists: “It’s basically like the room where Theodor Herzl stayed in Jerusalem’s Mamilla neighborhood is for us.” It is true that Twain only spent two nights there, but he is the most famous tourist from the U.S. to visit the Holy Land in the 19th century.

Bezetha, said Shapira and Gibson, was at one time a wonderful place for a hotel. It was located in the vicinity of the British consulate, the Austrian consulate and the Turkish pasha’s residence. The area experienced its peak development in the 1860s and 1870s, attracting the bulk of Western consulates and institutions, such as the military hospital, the Austrian hostel and various schools. Well-to-do families living nearby also added to the area’s prominence.

The hotel had 23 rooms altogether. The main building had two stories: a courtyard level, which housed guest rooms as well as a kitchen and lounge, plus a second floor where the bulk of the guest rooms were located.

An analysis of the structure and the number of rooms there corresponded to an additional photo taken by Henry Philips that showed several people in the typical Jewish dress of that time. This photo, which has been on display for years at the Israel Museum and is known as “Jews in Jerusalem,” clearly shows the device on which the hotel hung its room keys.

The large lounge, which now belongs to Ariel Sharon, was, according to Twain’s descriptions, used in the past as a public lounge where guests rested up from day trips around Jerusalem. Today, the room serves as a classroom for the Ateret Cohanim Yeshiva and several yeshiva students and their families live there.

In a description of the courtyard, Warren wrote in his book that many of the household chores were done there, such as grinding corn (as shown in a photo by Philips from 1867) and cleaning boots. This was also where merchants from Bethlehem displayed their wares (olive wood beads, inlaid jewelry and more), dried flower sellers displayed their flowers, and missionaries displayed bibles with olive wood bindings made by Jews who had converted to Christianity.

Twain was impressed by the bibles and decided to order one as a gift for his mother. From his hotel room, he wrote a detailed letter to Mr. Isias, owner of a bookshop next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to place his order. That bible is now in the Mark Twain Archive at the University of California at Berkeley