Early modern hopes were not often for betterment by some abstract standard. Usually they were linked to particular people, as most hopes still are, or to places—home, in some sense. These feelings might be especially intense for people who found themselves without homelands to which they could return or where if they did return, they would be subject to foreign rulers: the Armenians, African slaves in the New World, Ming Loyalists among the Chinese in Southeast Asia. For those whom Islam calls the People of the Book—Muslims, Christians, and Jews—Jerusalem was one of the cities of hope and pilgrimage. For the Jews, the longing for Jerusalem and the awareness that they could be there but only under a foreign ruler were near the core of their sense of themselves as a Chosen People in Exile. For seventeenth-century Christians, except for the few, Catholics who still dreamed Crusader dreams, Jerusalem had become less a concrete place than a symbol of special destiny and hope. Jews in exile, Englishmen facing daunting uncertainties turned to the family, sang the same psalms in their celebrations of it, passed sleepless nights, and heard voices of loss and longing.