From The Holy Mountain (52 page)

In 1922, twenty-six years before the creation of the State of Israel, Christians made up around 10 per cent of the population of British Mandate Palestine. The Christians were wealthier and better educated than their Muslim counterparts, owned almost all the newspapers and filled a disproportionate number of senior jobs in the Mandate Civil Service. While numerically they dominated the Old City of Jerusalem - as indeed they had done almost continuously since the fourth century
a.d
. - their leaders and merchants had already moved out from the narrow streets around the Holy Sepulchre and the Via Dolorosa to build fine villas for themselves in the West Jerusalem suburbs of Talbieh, Kattamon and Bak'a - now home to the better-off Israeli businessmen and Knesset MPs.

The exodus of the Palestinian Christians began in 1948, during the war which followed the withdrawal of British troops from Palestine. In the fighting some fifty-five thousand Palestinian Christians - around 60 per cent of the total community - fled or were driven from their homes, along with around 650,000 Muslim Palestinians. After the Israeli conquest and occupation of the West Bank during the Six Day War, a second exodus took place: between 1967 and 1992 around 40 per cent of the Christians then in the Occupied Territories - a further nineteen thousand men, women and children - left their homes to look for better lives elsewhere.

The great majority of Palestinian Christians now live abroad, in exile: only 170,000 are left inside Israel and the West Bank, compared with the 400,000 living outside the Holy Land, either in squalid refugee camps in Lebanon or elsewhere. The Christians now make up less than a quarter of 1 per cent of the population of Israel and the West Bank. Moreover their emigration rate remains very high, double that of the Muslim Palestinians, not because the Christians suffer any worse indignities than the Muslims, but because being better educated they find it far easier to emigrate and get jobs abroad. So far, the stumbling peace process has done little to stop this flood of emigrants. A recent survey by Bethlehem University showed that around a fifth of those Palestinian Christians still remaining in their ancestral homeland hope to emigrate in the near future.

All this matters very much. Without the local Christian population, the most important shrines in the Christian world will be left as museum pieces, preserved only for the curiosity of tourists. Christianity will no longer exist in the Holy Land as a living faith; a vast vacuum will exist in the very heart of Christendom. As the Archbishop of Canterbury recently warned, the area, 'once centre of a strong Christian presence', risks becoming 'a theme park' devoid of Christians 'within fifteen years'.

The future looks particularly bleak for Christian Jerusalem as

Jewish settler organisations focus their energies on the Holy City. Rings of Israeli settlements are springing up all around East Jerusalem, while within the Old City radical settler groups continue to try to buy up land within the Muslim, Christian and Armenian Quarters of the Old City. Within ten years of the Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem, 37,065 acres of Arab land had been confiscated and settled; today only 13.5 per cent of East Jerusalem remains in Palestinian hands. Less assertive but equally insistent is the Muslim claim to the place they call Al-Quds (the Holy City), as King Hussein and Yasser Arafat compete for the right to protect the Muslim Holy Places. Between these two competing claims, the Christians' stake in Jerusalem seems increasingly irrelevant.

The various Churches in Jerusalem are more than aware of the seriousness of their situation. Traditionally, the forty-seven Christian denominations represented in the Holy City were famous for their pointless and petty squabbling: year after year newspapers across the globe would celebrate Easter with some light Paschal story about the Greek Orthodox feuding with the Roman Catholics over the cleaning of such-and-such a window sill in the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. But since 1989 the Patriarchs and Archbishops of the major Churches have come together - possibly for the first time since the First Crusade in 1095 - to issue an annual joint statement 'to make known to the people of the world the conditions of life of our people here in the Holy Land who experience constant deprivation of their fundamental rights .
..
[and to] express our deep concern and alarm for the growing feeling of insecurity and fear among our people and Churches
...
[which constitutes] a serious threat to the future of Christianity and its rights in the Holy Land'.

Yet despite the apparent hopelessness of the Christian position, the leaders of the Eastern Churches remain surprisingly defiant. Yesterday morning, armed with a letter from Fr. Theophanes, I was granted a brief audience with the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Diodoros I. A hover of black-robed archbishops and metropolitans conducted me into a tall, vaulted reception room. Portraits of centuries of Orthodox Patriarchs stared down impassively from the walls. In the centre of the room, slumped over a large red velvet throne, sat Diodoros, the present holder of the office once occupied by Sophronius. Now very old, he was still a large, powerfully built man with a white beard tumbling down his Patriarchal robes; as he sat on his great gilt throne he resembled an elderly lion with a long grey mane.

'This land,' he boomed, 'this Holy Land, is watered with the blood of the martyrs. It has never been easy for the Christians who live here, and these present times are no different. During the
intifada
we condemned the suppression of our flock. We intervened to get prisoners released. We took food to our people when they were under curfew. We share the aspirations and agonies suffered by our people. The Holy Land has never been a place for quiet contemplation, somewhere peaceful like Mount Athos. Here we have a mission, a mission we have to try and keep going.'

I asked the Patriarch whether he thought the end of the Christian presence in Jerusalem appeared to be imminent, and whether his mission was not now drawing to a close.

'In Byzantine times when we Greeks ruled the Holy Land, this city was entirely Christian,' said Diodoros. 'Of course you cannot compare the present situation with then: our numbers are now very few. But then you do not judge a light by the size of its container.'

The Patriarch rearranged himself on his throne and clutched a miniature icon in a gold setting, suspended on a chain around his neck. 'Even a small oil lamp,' he said, 'can give light to a big room.'

Jerusalem,
10
November

The Patriarch was right: for the three hundred years of Byzantine rule in Palestine, Jerusalem had been a Christian city; indeed in many ways it was the capital of Christianity. For the barbarians of Dark Age Europe as for the Byzantines themselves, Jerusalem was thought of as the navel of the world, and well into the late medieval period world maps like the Hereford Mappa Mundi depicted the city in the very centre of the earth.

Bishops across Christendom looked to Jerusalem for instruction on how to conduct their Holy Week services and how to order their liturgical calendars; European pilgrims, such as the Spanish nun Egeria, sent back almost ludicrously detailed accounts of the city's liturgical practices to their correspondents, 'knowing how pleased Your Charity would be to learn what is the ritual observed day by day in the Holy Places'. When Pope Gregory I wished to cement an alliance with the Lombards, he sent their Queen a flask of oil from the shrine of the Holy Cross at Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the Holy City, and the eyes of the Christian world were firmly fixed upon it.

All this was a dramatic departure from the situation at the end of the Pagan Empire. Not only had the Romans looked on Palestine as an obscure province wedged between the far richer and more civilised lands of Egypt and Syria, since its destruction by Titus in 70
a . d
., Jerusalem had sunk to little more than an anonymous garrison town. As late as 310
a.d
. it was possible for the Roman Governor of Palestine, based in Caesarea Maritima (south of modern Haifa), to express ignorance as to the whereabouts of Jerusalem; interrogating a Christian suspect who said he came from the town, the Governor Formilianus replied by asking, 'Jerusalem? Where is that?'

The accession of the Emperor Constantine and the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire changed all this for ever; overnight the obscure province became the Holy Land, pampered and patronised by a string of emperors, their wives and courtiers. Within a few years of Constantine's Edict of Milan in 313, announcing the official toleration of Christianity, the Emperor's mother Helena had personally travelled to Jerusalem and conducted a series of excavations to locate the Holy Places - even if, as Sir Steven Runciman laconically noted, her discoveries of such relics as the wood of the Holy Cross, were made 'with miraculous aid seldom now vouchsafed to archaeologists'. On the site pinpointed by his mother as that of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, Constantine ordered the building of 'not only the finest basilica in the world, but one where everything shall be of such quality that all the most beautiful buildings of every city may be surpassed by this'. Constantine also commissioned huge basilicas in Bethlehem, at the site of the Nativity, and on the Mount of Olives.

Others soon followed his lead. The Empress Eudoxia, the headstrong wife of the Emperor Theodosius II (builder of the great Land Walls of Constantinople) lived in Jerusalem for sixteen years and spent one and a half million pieces of gold on building projects, at a time when two gold pieces was enough to keep most people in some style for at least a year. Her donations included the Patriarchal Palace, repairs to the city's fortifications, a new loop of wall enclosing Mount Zion within the city limits, and the church and monastery of St Stephen, the place where Sophronius later said the last liturgy before the Holy City fell to the armies of Islam. Eudoxia also built a leper hospital near Herodion on the West Bank, and a tower in the wilderness of Judaea to protect the monks there from the raids of desert nomads. Meanwhile, in nearby Bethlehem, St Jerome had gathered under his wings a gaggle of wealthy Roman matrons. These included an heiress named Paula who 'gave up all her worldly goods' before her pilgrimage to Palestine, yet who still had enough spare change left over to build two monasteries and a hospice, as well as supporting a multitude of monks and paupers, including of course St Jerome himself.

Even the ascetics, living in poverty in the caves and ravines of Judaea, were often from the smartest Imperial families. The monk Photius, for example, was actually the stepson of Justinian's greatest general, Count Belisarius. According to Procopius, Photius escaped from the Empress Theodora's secret torture chambers, into which he had been thrown when he threatened to divulge details of various sexual shenanigans amongst Theodora's ladies in the court at Constantinople. Eluding Theodora's secret police, Photius managed to flee to Palestine, seeking refuge as a monk in the desert somewhere outside Jerusalem.

The wealth and social standing of many of the pious pilgrims who settled in the town is also hinted at by John Moschos. He records a story originally told to him by Amma Damiana the Solitary, mother of his friend the Bishop of Petra. Amma Damiana was related to the Imperial family, and in the story she tells how she persuaded one of her smart Imperial cousins to accept the charity of a poor woman.

'In the days before I was enclosed [as a nun],' said Amma Damiana, 'I used to go to the Church of Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian [in Jerusalem] and spend the whole night there. Every evening there came an old woman, a native of Phrygian Galatia [modern central Turkey], and she gave two
lepta
[small coins] to everybody who was in the church; she often gave me these alms. One day a kinswoman of mine - and of the most faithful Emperor Maurice - came to pray at the Holy City and remained there a year. Soon after her arrival I went to the Church of Cosmas and Damian, taking her with me. While we were in the oratory, I said to my kinswoman: "Look, my lady; when an old woman comes distributing two coins to each person, please swallow your pride and accept them." With obvious distaste, she said: "Do I have to accept them?" "Yes," I said. "Take them, for the woman is great in the eyes of God. She fasts all week long, and whatever she is able to gain by this discipline she distributes to those who are found in the church. Take the coins and give them to somebody else. Do not refuse the sacrifice of this old woman."