Jerusalem: The Biography (3 page)

When the Bible was translated into Greek then Latin and English, it became the universal book and it made Jerusalem the universal city. Every great king became a David, every special people were the new Israelites and every noble civilization a new Jerusalem, the city that belongs to no one and exists for everyone in their imagination. And this is the city’s tragedy as well as her magic: every dreamer of Jerusalem, every visitor in all ages from Jesus’ Apostles to Saladin’s soldiers, from Victorian pilgrims to today’s tourists and journalists, arrives with a vision of the authentic Jerusalem and then is bitterly disappointed by what they find, an ever-changing city that has thrived and shrunk, been rebuilt and destroyed many times. But since this is Jerusalem, property of all, only their image is the right one; the tainted, synthetic reality must be changed; everyone has the right to impose their ‘Jerusalem’ on Jerusalem – and, with sword and fire, they often have.

Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian who is both participant and source for some of the events related in this book, noted that history is so ‘eagerly sought after. The men in the street aspire to know it. Kings and leaders vie for it.’ This is especially true for Jerusalem. It is impossible to write a history of this city without acknowledging that Jerusalem is also a theme, a fulcrum, a spine even, of world history. At a time when the power of internet mythology means that the hi-tech mouse and the curved sword can both be weapons in the same fundamentalist arsenal, the quest for historical facts is even more important now than it was for Ibn Khaldun.

A history of Jerusalem must be a study of the nature of holiness. The phrase ‘Holy City’ is constantly used to describe the reverence for her shrines, but what it really means is that Jerusalem has become the essential place on earth for communication between God and man.

We must also answer the question: of all the places in the world, why Jerusalem? The site was remote from the trade routes of the Mediterranean coast; it was short of water, baked in the summer sun, chilled by winter winds, its jagged rocks blistered and inhospitable. But the selection of Jerusalem as the Temple city was partly decisive and personal, partly organic and evolutionary: the sanctity became ever more intense because she had been holy for so long. Holiness requires not just spirituality and faith but also legitimacy and tradition. A radical prophet presenting a new vision must explain the centuries that have gone before and justify his own revelation in the accepted language and geography of holiness – the prophecies of earlier revelations and the sites already long revered. Nothing makes a place holier than the competition of another religion.

Many atheistic visitors are repelled by this holiness, seeing it as infectious superstition in a city suffering a pandemic of righteous bigotry. But that is to deny the profound human need for religion without which it is impossible to understand Jerusalem. Religions must explain the fragile joys and perpetual anxieties that mystify and frighten humanity: we need to sense a greater force than ourselves. We respect death and long to find meaning in it. As the meeting-place of God and man, Jerusalem is where these questions are settled at the Apocalypse – the End of Days, when there will be war, a battle between Christ and anti-Christ, when the Kaaba will come from Mecca to Jerusalem, when there will be judgement, resurrection of the dead and the reign of the Messiah and the Kingdom of Heaven, the New Jerusalem. All three Abrahamic religions believe in the Apocalypse, but the details vary by faith and sect. Secularists may regard all this as antique gobbledegook, but, on the contrary, such ideas are all too current. In this age of Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism, the Apocalypse is a dynamic force in the world’s febrile politics.

Death is our constant companion: pilgrims have long come to Jerusalem to die and be buried around the Temple Mount to be ready to rise again in the Apocalypse, and they continue to come. The city is surrounded by and founded upon cemeteries; the wizened body-parts of ancient saints are revered – the desiccated blackened right hand of Mary Magdalene is still displayed in the Greek Orthodox Superior’s Room in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Many shrines, even many private houses, are built around tombs. The darkness of this city of the dead stems not just from a sort of necrophilia, but also from necromancy: the dead here are almost alive, even as they await resurrection. The unending struggle for Jerusalem – massacres, mayhem, wars, terrorism, sieges and catastrophes – have made this place into a battlefield, in Aldous Huxley’s words the ‘slaughterhouse of the religions’, in Flaubert’s a ‘charnel-house’. Melville called the city a ‘skull’ besieged by ‘armies of the dead’; while Edward Said remembered that his father had hated Jerusalem because it ‘reminded him of death’.

This sanctuary of heaven and earth did not always evolve providentially. Religions begin with a spark revealed to one charismatic prophet – Moses, Jesus, Muhammad. Empires are founded, cities conquered, by the energy and luck of one warlord. The decisions of individuals, starting with King David, made Jerusalem into Jerusalem.

There was surely scant prospect that David’s little citadel, capital of a small kingdom, would become the world’s cynosure. Ironically it was Nebuchadnezzar’s destruction of Jerusalem that created the template for holiness because that catastrophe led the Jews to record and acclaim the glories of Zion. Such cataclysms usually led to the vanishing of peoples. Yet the Jews’ exuberant survival, their obstinate devotion to their God and, above all, their recording of their version of history in the Bible laid the foundation for Jerusalem’s fame and sanctity. The Bible took the place of the Jewish state and the Temple and became, as Heinrich Heine put in, the ‘portable fatherland of the Jews, the portable Jerusalem’. No other city has its own book and no other book has so guided the destiny of a city.

The sanctity of the city grew out of the exceptionalism of the Jews as the Chosen People. Jerusalem became the Chosen City, Palestine the Chosen Land, and this exceptionalism was inherited and embraced by the Christians and the Muslims. The paramount sanctity of Jerusalem and of the land of Israel was reflected in the growing religious obsession with the restoration of the Jews to Israel and the Western enthusiasm for Zionism, its secular equivalent, between the sixteenth-century Reformation in Europe and the 1970s. Since then, the tragic narrative of the Palestinians, with Jerusalem as their lost Holy City, has altered the perception of Israel. Thus Western fixation, this sense of universal ownership, can work both ways – it is a mixed blessing or a double-edged sword. Today it is reflected in the scrutiny of Jerusalem and the Israel–Palestine conflict, more intense, more emotional than any other on earth.

Yet nothing is quite as simple it seems. The history is often presented as a series of brutal changes and violent reversals but I want to show that Jerusalem was a city of continuity and co-existence, a hybrid metropolis of hybrid buildings and hybrid people who defy the narrow categorizations that belong in the separate religious legends and nationalist narratives of later times. That is why, wherever possible, I follow the history through families – the Davidians, Maccabees and Herodians, the Umayyads and the houses of Baldwin and Saladin, up to the Husseinis, Khalidis, Spaffords, Rothschilds and Montefiores – which reveal the organic patterns of life that defy the abrupt incidents and sectarian narratives of conventional history. There are not just two sides in Jerusalem but many interlinked, overlapping cultures and layered loyalties – a multi-faceted, mutating kaleidoscope of Arab Orthodox, Arab Muslims, Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, Haredi Jews of legion courts, secular Jews, Armenian Orthodox, Georgians, Serbs, Russians, Copts, Protestants, Ethiopians, Latins and so on. A single individual often had several loyalties to different identities, the human equivalent of Jerusalem’s layers of stone and dust.

In fact, the city’s relevance has ebbed and flowed, never still, always in a state of transformation, like a plant that changes shape, size, even colour, yet always remains rooted in the same place. The latest, glib manifestation – Jerusalem as media ‘Holy City sacred to three religions’ and twenty-four-hour-news show – is relatively recent. There have been centuries when Jerusalem seemed to lose religious and political importance. In many cases, it was political necessity, not divine revelation, that again stimulated and inspired religious devotion.

Whenever Jerusalem has seemed most forgotten and irrelevant, it was often the bibliolatry, the devoted study of biblical truth by people in faraway lands – whether in Mecca, Moscow, Massachusetts – who projected their faith back on to Jerusalem. All cities are windows into foreign mindsets but this one is also a two-way mirror revealing her inner life while reflecting the world outside. Whether it was the epoch of total faith, righteous empire-building, evangelical revelation or secular nationalism, Jerusalem became its symbol, and its prize. But like the mirrors in a circus, the reflections are always distorted, often freakish.

Jerusalem has a way of disappointing and tormenting both conquerors and visitors. The contrast between the real and heavenly cities is so excruciating that a hundred patients a year are committed to the city’s asylum, suffering from the Jerusalem Syndrome, a madness of anticipation, disappointment and delusion. But Jerusalem Syndrome is political too: Jerusalem defies sense, practical politics and strategy, existing in the realm of ravenous passions and invincible emotions, impermeable to reason.

Even victory in this struggle for dominance and truth merely intensifies the city’s holiness for others. The greedier the possessor, the fiercer the competition, the more visceral the reaction. The law of unintended consequences reigns here.

No other place evokes such a desire for exclusive possession. Yet this jealous zeal is ironic since most of Jerusalem’s shrines, and the stories that go with them, have been borrowed or stolen, belonging formerly to another religion. The city’s past is often imaginary. Virtually every stone once stood in the long-forgotten temple of another faith, the victory arch of another empire. Most, but not all, conquests have been accompanied by the instinct to expunge the taint of other faiths while commandeering their traditions, stories, sites. There has been much destruction, but more often the conquerors have not destroyed what came before but reused and added to it. The important sites such as the Temple Mount, the Citadel, the City of David, Mount Zion and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre do not present distinct layers of history but are more like palimpsests, works of embroidery in which the silk threads are so interwoven it is now impossible to separate them.

The competition to possess the infectious holiness of others has led some shrines to become holy to all three of the religions successively then simultaneously; kings have decreed and men died for them – and yet they are now almost forgotten: Mount Zion has been the site of frenzied Jewish, Muslim and Christian reverence but now there are few Muslim or Jewish pilgrims, and it is mainly Christian again.

In Jerusalem, the truth is often much less important than the myth. ‘In Jerusalem, don’t ask me the history of
facts
,’ says the eminent Palestinian historian Dr Nazmi al-Jubeh. ‘Take away the fiction and there’s nothing left.’ History is so pungently powerful here that it is repeatedly distorted: archaeology is itself a historical force and archaeologists have at times wielded as much power as soldiers, recruited to appropriate the past for the present. A discipline that aims to be objective and scientific can be used to rationalize religious-ethnic prejudice and justify imperial ambitions. Israelis, Palestinians and the evangelical imperialists of the nineteenth century have all been guilty of commandeering the same events and assigning them contradictory meanings and facts. So a history of Jerusalem has to be a history of both truth and legend. But there are facts and this book aims to tell them, however unpalatable to one side or the other.

My aim here is to write the history of Jerusalem in its broadest sense for general readers, whether they are atheists or believers, Christians, Muslims or Jews, without a political agenda, even in today’s strife.

I tell the story chronologically, through the lives of the men and women – soldiers and prophets, poets and kings, peasants and musicians – and the families who made Jerusalem. I think this is the best way to bring the city to life and to show how its complex and unexpected truths are the result of this history. It is only by chronological narrative that one avoids the temptation to see the past through the obsessions of the present. I have tried to avoid teleology – writing history as if every event were inevitable. Since each mutation is a reaction to the one that preceded it, chronology is the best way to make sense of this evolution, answer the question – why Jerusalem? – and show why people acted the way they did. I hope this is also the most entertaining way to tell it. Who am I to ruin a story that – to use a Hollywood cliché that is, in this case, merited – is the greatest ever told? Among thousands of books on Jerusalem, there are very few narrative histories. Four epochs – David, Jesus, the Crusades and the Arab–Israeli conflict – are familiar, thanks to the Bible, movies, novels and the news, but they are still frequently misunderstood. As for the rest, I dearly wish to bring much forgotten history to new readers.

This is a history of Jerusalem as the centre of world history, but it is not intended to be an encyclopaedia of every aspect of Jerusalem, nor a guidebook of every niche, capital and archway in every building. This is not a minute history of the Orthodox, Latins or Armenians, the Islamic Hanafi or Shafii schools of law, the Hasidic or the Karaite Jews, nor is it told from any specific point of view. The life of the Muslim city from Mamluks to the Mandate has been neglected. The Jerusalem Families have been studied by academics of the Palestinian experience, but scarcely covered by popular historians. Their histories have been and remain extremely important: some key sources are not yet available in English, but I have had them translated and I have interviewed the family members of all these clans in order to learn their stories. But they are only part of the mosaic. This is not a history of Judaism, Christianity or Islam, nor a study of the nature of God in Jerusalem: all these have been expertly done by others – most recently in Karen Armstrong’s excellent
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
. Nor is this a detailed history of the Israel–Palestine conflict: no subject today is so obsessively studied. But my daunting challenge is to cover all these things, I hope in proportion.