THE JERUSALEM REPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 201140

BOOKS

Tales of aTortured Town

In Jerusalem’s history holiness routinely went hand in hand with homicide

AT THE END OF HIS PIL-grimage to Jerusalem in1267, the Biblical scholar andcommentator Nachmanides,also known as the Ramban,

found, to his horror, a ramshackle town oftumbledown dwellings with just two Jewishresidents. “Oh Jerusalem,” he lamented,rending his clothes, “I wept bitterly.”

Two centuries later a similar sight await-ed another pilgrim, Rabbi Obadiah diBertinoro. “The poorest Jews,” he noted,“live in heaps of rubbish, for the law is thata Jew may not rebuild his ruined home.”

Another few centuries, and the state ofaffairs was much the same. If a Muslim setupon a Jew, a European visitor reported in1766, “the Jew goes away cowering.” Jewsstill lived in squalor and were still bannedfrom repairing their houses.

Come the early 20th century, the storiedcity of David and Solomon was still notmuch to write home about. During a two-week tour of the Holy Land in 1918, theZionist leader Chaim Weizmann found theJewish part of the Old City to be “a miser-able ghetto, derelict and without dignity.” Herefused even to spend the night in the town.

For most of its long history, Jerusalem,that venerated object of millennial Jewishlonging, was not a happy place for Jews.Often it wasn’t much fun to be Christian orMuslim there, either.

Over the past 3,000 years, Jerusalemhas been conquered almost 40 times,destroyed 18 times, and repopulated end-lessly. For most of the past two millenniaJews were a powerless, disenfranchisedand disdained minority struggling to retain

a toehold in their ancestral capital. If theywere lucky, they were allowed to remain onsufferance so that their downtrodden statuswould serve as a reminder of their ostensi-ble fall from grace. If they were less lucky,they faced periodic expulsions, lynchingand massacres.

Each new ruler – Romans, Byzantines,Persians, Arabs, Catholics, Ottomans – setabout stamping their marks on the city’sspiritual landscape while trying to erasethose of their predecessors. As a result, per-haps the best way to think of Jerusalem isnot as a single city but as a series of citiesthat grew up over time, one succeeding theother, around a single focus that anchoreddivine purpose to tangible mundane geogra-phy: the Temple Mount.

In vying for supremacy over the HolyCity, rival religious traditions often wanton-ly appropriated the holy sites of the others.A Crusader church on Mount Zion becameDavid’s Tomb. A Templar baptistery was co-opted into service by Muslims as the Domeof Ascension, where Muhammad was saidto have ascended to heaven on his NightJourney on his steed Buraq. Nearby on theRock, a natural groove on the boulder thatwas formerly attributed to a footprint ofJesus was reinvented as Buraq’s hoofprint.

And so the back-and-forth went. Aftertheir capture of the city from war-wearyByzantine Christians in 638, the Muslimconquerors walled up the Golden Gate tothwart Jewish prophecy, which foresaw themessiah entering there. In a bid to outdo theChristians’ Church of the Holy Sepulcher,they erected the Dome of the Rock, whichstill dominates the city’s skyline. They did

that at the very site where they believed thetwo Jewish temples to have once stood andwhich Christians before them had used as agarbage dump to mock Jews. Not to be out-done in religious triumphalism, after theirown conquest of the city in the 12th century,the Crusaders turned the Muslim shrine intotheir Templum Domini (Temple of OurLord) with a crucifix mounted on top untilSaladin recaptured Jerusalem in 1187 andcleansed the Temple Mount with bucketfulsof rosewater from Damascus.

“JERUSALEM’S GIFT FOR DY-namic reinvention and culturaltheft is endless,” notes Simon

Sebag Montefiore in his engaging and high-ly informative history, “Jerusalem: TheBiography.” “Sacred geography,” addsJames Carroll in his own new book on thecity, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” “create[d]battlefields.”

Montefiore, who is best known for hisbooks on Stalin, is a grand-nephew of thefamous 19th century British Jewish philan-thropist, Sir Moses, who has a suburbnamed after him, Yemin Moshe (formerlythe Montefiore Quarter, where he pioneeredthe resettlement of Jews outside the OldCity’s walls) and whose signet ring with theword “Jerusalem” on it the author nowwears. The book comes alive especially inthe latter parts where the historian draws onsuch primary sources as the meticulouslykept diary of the bon vivant oud-playingArab Jerusalemite Wasif Jawhariyyeh, whochronicled life in the city from the turn ofthe 20th century right up to the Six Day War.

Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in

Tibor Krausz

1967 is also the last landmark event inMontefiore’s no-nonsense chronologicalretelling of Jerusalem’s torturous history,with each chapter devoted to a new phasein the city’s topsy-turvy affairs. His well-researched and even-handed treatment ofthe subject needs to be read by anyone whowishes to voice an informed opinion aboutthe historical backdrop for Jerusalem’sseemingly intractable religious and politi-cal conundrums.

Carroll, a former American Catholicpriest and author of “Constantine’s Sword,”a seminal study on historical Christian anti-Semitism, explores Jerusalem’s spiritualdimensions through its pivotal role inJewish, Christian and Islamic thought. Heportrays Jerusalem as humanity’s groundzero of sacred violence – “violence carriedout in this world in the name of anotherworld” – from prehistoric human sacrificesat Mount Moriah (later associated with theTemple Mount) to today’s Palestinian sui-cide bombers who seek to reach paradise bymurdering Jewish bystanders.

Despite the potentials of that premise,Carroll’s book is a letdown. In his meander-ing and often abstruse meditation on thecity, the author rewards us with suchGnostic-like nuggets of wisdom as“Jerusalem is the womb of self-surpassing... the school that teaches knowledge toknow itself.”

IN BIBLICAL TIMES, JERUSALEM’Sholiness as the earthly seat of Yahwehdid not just evolve organically. It was

scrupulously cultivated by the ruling eliteand the local priesthood, a fact both histori-ans pass over in silence. Biblical scholarsspeculate that it was the priestly author orauthors of sections of the Torah, who turnedJerusalem into a centerpiece of Jewish wor-ship in order to grant God-given legitimacyto the city’s hereditary priesthood centuriesafter the time of David. They did so byretroactively glorifying the capital of Judahas the only legitimate locus of an increas-ingly centralized cult of Yahweh.

Geographically, King David’s decisionto make Jerusalem his capital may seempuzzling. The city was relatively far fromthe coast, isolated from trade routes, and setin agriculturally infertile terrain. Yet thetown was also supplied with water by theGihon spring, and its hilltop location pro-vided it with a formidable natural defense.Then there was the Jebusite citadel’s pre-sumed holiness, which by David’s time waswell established.

Yet despite its exalted place in religioushistory, the actual City of David was nometropolis. According to archaeologicalfinds, it probably covered a mere 15 acres ata site which had been occupied already2,000 years before that. Four-millennia-oldEgyptian potsherds mention Ur Salim, a

town named after the god of the EveningStar. In 1350 BCE, one Abdi-Hepa, thechieftain of a settlement at the site thencalled Beit Shulmani, or House ofWellbeing, wrote letters beseechingPharaoh Akhenaten for help againstmarauding outlaws.

The Bible first mentions the city inGenesis 7:1, when Abraham enjoys the hos-pitality of Melchizedek, the king of Salemand a priest of the High God, in the land ofMoriah. Abraham soon returns, ready tooffer his son Isaac as a sacrifice on MountMoriah, in a test of faith, to God at the veryspot where, tradition has it, the Holy ofHolies of Solomon’s Temple would stand.

Ceaseless religious strife and unrelentingfolly between Jews, Christians and Muslimswould come to center around the site’s mis-shapen Foundation Stone, where, the faith-ful believe, Adam was created, the Ark ofthe Covenant stood, Muhammad ascendedto heaven, and the world would come to anend on Judgment Day. Throughout the agesworshipers would flock to Jerusalem to dieand be buried in a growing necropolis nearthe ancient rock with an eye to the resurrec-tion of the dead at the End of Times.

Above ground, meanwhile, life wasrarely a picnic – not even during times ofalleged bliss. For hundreds of years after-wards, Jewish commentators, starting withthe 2nd century BCE author ben Sirach,would wax lyrical about the reign of the 3rdcentury BCE high priest Simon the Just.Montefiore sets the record straight on that.Simon may have been just, but he ruled withpuritanical zeal. His observances wouldhave gladdened the hearts of Taliban mul-

THE JERUSALEM REPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 2011 41

CONQUEST: The assault onJerusalem during the First

Crusade (1096–1099)

THE JERUSALEM REPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 201142

BOOKS

lahs. All manner of minor religious trans-gressions carried the death penalty: way-ward Jerusalemites were burned, beheaded,stoned, or strangled to death, depending onthe nature of their crimes. Four times a day,seven silver trumpets called the faithful toprostrate themselves in the Temple, fore-shadowing later Muslim practice.

In another of the many ironies inJerusalem’s history, the city reached itszenith (before the modern era) under the late1st century BCE rule of King Herod, a tal-ented, tormented yet much-maligned manwhom his Jewish subjects despised andChristians would later come to loathe.Herod, a half-Arab convert to Judaism (whowe learn dyed his hair), could be homicidal-ly paranoid one day and high-minded thenext. Yet he was a relatively benevolentruler by the standards of the era, Montefiorestresses. During a famine Herod boughtgrain from Egypt with his own gold to feedstarving Judeans. Rich and well-connected,he proved himself a latter-day Solomon byturning Jerusalem into a glorious city with apopulation of between 70,000 and 100,000.Herod’s Temple, which replacedZerubbabel’s modest 6th century BCE struc-ture, was a marvel of the ancient world.

It would stand for only as long as it hadtaken to complete: a mere half century.

THROUGHOUT THE AGES THEfortunes of Jerusalem rose and fellwith the vagaries of power politics.

The city lay in a region that was a perennialhub of regional and cross-continental con-quests – “the cockpit of empire,” as Jesusscholar John Dominic Crossan put it. Inaddition, its very sacredness brought unwel-come attention to it.

Unlike more sanitized accounts,Montefiore spares us no details of the ram-

pant slaughter that routinely went on in theHoly City in times of war. Apropos theSecond Temple’s destruction in July 70 CE,the historian writes: “The cruelties inflictedby the Romans and the rebels within thewalls compare with some of the worst atroc-ities of the twentieth century.”

Citing the Romanized Jewish historianJosephus’s work, Montefiore relates howthousands of men, women and children werebutchered and crucified by the Romanlegions and their Syrian auxiliaries, who dis-emboweled many of them in a search forswallowed treasures. While the SecondTemple burned, priests, officiating to thelast, were cut down at the altar. Yet some ofthe city’s factious Jewish defenders were nobetter: they terrorized, tortured and murderedfellow Jerusalemites with wanton abandon.

In 130 CE, following another failedJewish rebellion against Rome, a Romanconsul reported that “985 villages wererazed to the ground [and] 585,000 werekilled.” “So many Jews were enslaved,”Montefiore adds, “that at the Hebron slavemarket they fetched less than a horse.” Theemperor Hadrian decided to erase the verymemory of Jerusalem by renaming the cityAelia Capitolina and rebuilding it as aGreco-Roman polis with the Temple ofJupiter and his own equestrian statue atopthe Temple Mount. He also wiped Judea offthe map, renaming it Palaestina.

At times mayhem was interspersed withcomedy. During their siege of the city in1099, sanctimonious Crusaders saw it pru-dent to please God by reenacting Joshua’scapture of Jericho by marching barefootaround the fortified walls of Jerusalem bear-ing holy relics and blowing trumpets asMuslim and Jewish defenders taunted themfrom the ramparts.

Then, just as Joshua did with the defend-

ers of Jericho, the Crusaders set aboutslaughtering Jerusalem’s inhabitants. “Pilesof heads, hands and feet [lay everywhere],”a contemporary European account recalledapprovingly. “In the Temple of Solomonthey rode in blood up to their knees and bri-dle reins.” Jews were burned alive in theirsynagogues and 10,000 people werebutchered on the Temple Mount. Yet againthe sacred site turned into a zealot’s abattoir.Their work done, the warriors of Christdropped to their knees and offered theirthanks to heaven.

THE FIRST MAN WHO ENVI-sioned a heavenly Jerusalem as anideal for the mundane, blood-soaked

variety was the Prophet Isaiah. His mysti-cal ideas would inspire rich apocalyptictraditions in Judaism, Christianity andIslam alike. Yet Biblical Jerusalem’s trans-formation into full-blown Holy City tookfinal shape far afield from it: in Babylon.There by its rivers the Jewish exiles “weptwhen we remembered Zion” as recorded inPsalm 137.

That set a precedent for Jews ahead of afar more enduring exile. The SecondTemple’s destruction thrust Jerusalem againinto the forefront of liturgy and ritual.Shabbat observance in the Diaspora wouldturn into a ritualistic reenactment of ideal-ized Temple worship. Cups of wine replacedburnt offerings and steadfast observance ofthe mitzvot replaced animal sacrifice as away to God. Jerusalem went into exile withthe Jews. In medieval Polish shtetls, Carrollnotes, rabbis prayed for clement weather forthe city. A heavenly Jerusalem, which byGod’s grace would one day be restored toearth, became “a designated center of hope,”he says.

Not incidentally, the staunchly secularZionist movement, whose ideas were moreinfluenced by socialism than theology,would take its own name from the city,Carroll points out. The very notion of home-coming became equated with a return(ascent or aliya) to Jerusalem, “the City onthe Hill.”

Jerusalem also exerted a great mysticalinfluence over another set of believers whowere physically barred from it: Christians.After the debacles of the Crusades, EuropeanChristians came to see Jerusalem as God’s

While it may be true that [Jerusalem’s] Muslims were often more lenient than Christians,

that isn’t saying much considering the latter’s murderous loathing of Jews

THE JERUSALEM REPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 2011 43

Kingdom manifested on earth, the dead cen-ter of Christian cosmogony, the very gate-way to Heaven. On medieval maps the citywas portrayed as “the navel of the world”and the further away a place lay from it, themore it shriveled into insignificance – hencethe skewed perspective that aligned Europeright into Jerusalem’s orbit. “[C]artographyin the west,” Carroll writes, “came into beingin part to valorize Jerusalem.”

The city’s own sacred geography would,too, inspire centuries of millennial fantasies.In Jerusalem even the quotidian rhythms ofdaily life were believed to assume a holysheen: apotheosis came from the believer’smere presence in the city. Being inJerusalem was to have a foot in heaven, yettime and again holier-than-thou posturingled to sectarian strife and sparkedinternecine violence.

At one point, as many as eight Christiansects competed for control over the Church ofthe Holy Sepulcher with priests coming toblows over such weighty matters as whocould sweep the floor where. In 1834, duringa riotous stampede in the church, 400 pil-grims were trampled to death. A decade latera fight between Catholic and Greek Orthodoxpriests left 40 of them dead. Frequently, “thecrimes of the past returned to haunt the heirsof the future,” Montefiore observes.

Meanwhile, pilgrimage to the citybecame a cottage industry with venalJerusalemites milking pious and gulliblevisitors through tolls, fees and a flourishingtrade in phony relics. The pioneering Britishtravel agent Thomas Cook also set up shop,peddling extravagantly conceived packagedeals. Some more erotically inclined pil-grims made a habit of sealing their unions inthe Church of the Holy Sepulcher in thebelief that children conceived there wouldbe blessed.

By the early 19th century much ofEurope and America was in the grip of evan-gelical fervor for the Second Coming, whichwould be precipitated by the ingathering of“exiled” Jews to Jerusalem. Almostovernight, Montefiore writes, Jerusalemwent from “a benighted ruin ruled by ashabby pasha in a tawdry seraglio to a citywith a surfeit of gold-braided and bejeweleddignitaries.” Rich foreign missionariesbought up large swaths of land, the better toconvert newly arrived Russian and

Yemenite Jews on behalf of the LondonJewish Society, a Christian Zionist organiza-tion. Herman Melville called it a “preposter-ous Jew mania.”

In the 19th century alone, Montefiorenotes, well over 5,000 books were publishedin English about Jerusalem. They were eitherfeverish evangelical treatises or scornfultravelogues by the likes of Melville, WilliamMakepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain and KarlMarx, who all mocked the squalor of the cityand the pious vulgarity of its inhabitants.Jerusalem’s Jews, Thackeray wrote, lived inthe “stinking ruins of the Jewish Quarter,venerable in filth,” where they lamented “thelost glory of their city.”

BY THE 1890S, JEWS WEREalready a clear majority in the city,numbering 25,000 souls in nine sub-

urbs of their own, including the Orthodoxneighborhood of Me’a She’arim. Yet theycontinued to suffer repeated harassment andat times murder at the hands of Muslims andChristians as the Ottoman authorities lookedthe other way, Montefiore says.

His book is a welcome corrective to aprevalent view, popularized by KarenArmstrong’s “Jerusalem: One City, ThreeFaiths” (1997) and in part by Carroll himself

now, which portrays the city’s Muslim rulersas invariably benign. According to thatview, it was modern Zionism that hardenedArab hearts against Jews in the Holy Land.

While it may be true that Muslims wereoften more lenient than Christians, that isn’tsaying much considering the latter’s mur-derous loathing of Jews. After his capture ofJerusalem from Byzantine Christians in the7th century, Caliph Omar allowed Jews backonto the Temple Mount to pray and he evenappointed a Jew as governor. Yet Muslimtolerance wouldn’t last. In 720 the caliph’snamesake Omar II banned Jews from thesite again. During the long centuries ofIslamic rule Jews now enjoyed tolerance,now faced vicious persecution. Mamluk sul-tans, who ruled the city from the mid-13th tothe early 16th century, required Jews to wearyellow turbans (and Christians blue), evenas they let the city go to rot.

Suleiman the Magnificent, whose remod-eling of the Old City in 1542 is still evidentin the current city walls, gladly employedJewish advisers, yet the sultan alsoreworked Jerusalem’s religious landscape infavor of Islam, Montefiore notes. It wasunder his rule that the Western Wall becamecemented as a hub of Jewish worship, yetover time the kotel, too, would become a

WESTERN WALL, 1912: ‘In the early 20th century Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini triedrepeatedly to chase Jews away from [the Western Wall], at times by instigating murderous riots’

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battleground. In the early 20th century,Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husseini, a bigot-ed, unscrupulous rabble-rouser and Nazisympathizer, tried repeatedly to chase Jewsaway from it, at times by instigating murderous riots.

The mufti rejected any offer of compro-mise from the Zionists over the fate of thecity. During Israel’s War of Independence in1948 the mufti’s Arab militiamen, aided byBritish officers, encircled Jerusalem’s90,000 Jews. A terror attack on Ben YehudaStreet killed 58 Jews on February 22. Inrevenge Menachem Begin’s paramilitarieswent on a rampage in the nearby Arab vil-lage of Deir Yassin, killing scores ofwomen and children by tossing grenadesinto houses. On April 13, Arab attackersretaliated by massacring 77 doctors andnurses of Hadassah Hospital. “The gunmenmutilated the dead and photographed eachother with the corpses splayed in macabre

poses,” Montefiore writes. “The pho-tographs were mass-produced and sold aspostcards in Jerusalem.”

The eastern part of Jerusalem, along withthe historic Old City, fell into Jordanianhands. Arabs looted and destroyed scores ofancient synagogues, including the oneNachmanides himself founded in the 13thcentury. Jordanian soldiers used Jewishgravestones for building latrines.

Come the Six Day War in 1967,Jerusalem passed fully into Jewish handsafter two millennia. In coming decades arelentless string of terror attacks would takeits toll on Jerusalemites, claiming yet moreinnocent lives as sacrificial victims for themurderous religious crazes the city hasalways inspired. Yet now at long last Jewsdo not need to “go away cowering” inJerusalem. •

THE JERUSALEM REPORT SEPTEMBER 26, 201144

BOOKS

Jerusalem,Jerusalem: How the ancientcity ignited ourmodern worldBy James CarrollHoughton Mifflin Harcourt432 pages; $20

Jerusalem: The biographyBy Simon Sebag MontefioreKnopf688 pages; $35