On the Shores of the Mediterranean (32 page)

Sixty years later, Hadrian began to rebuild Jerusalem as the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina, a Roman garrison town with a temple to Venus and a statue of Jupiter rising sacrilegiously on what had been the site of the most sacred Jewish Temples of Solomon and Herod.

This gross affront to their religious sensibilities led in 132 to the second Jewish revolt, headed by Simon Bar-Cochbar who succeeded in regaining Judaea and Jerusalem and there recommenced the practice of the sacred Jewish ritual on the site of the Temple, which had been forbidden. But his success was only temporary and the revolt was eventually crushed, although Hadrian had to recall Septimius Severus from Britain and twelve legions from the Danube in order to do it.

After leaving the railway station we walked down past the fort-like buildings of the Miskenot Sha’ananim, the ‘Home of the Unworried’, the first Jewish settlement outside the walls of the Old City, built here in 1857 at the top end of the Vale of Hinnom by the English Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore, while Palestine was still under Turkish rule, to encourage Jews to leave the confines of the Old City and create a new life outside the walls. Then we went on down to the Pool of the Sultan, rebuilt in the sixteenth century by Suleiman the Magnificent as a reservoir for rainwater on the site of an earlier pool at which the Crusaders used to water their horses; after which we went up along the foot of the west wall of the Old City, past David’s Tower, through what had been between 1948 and 1967, when Jerusalem was partitioned and the Arabs held the Old City, a very dangerous no-man’s-land, to the Jaffa Gate.

The Jaffa Gate is one of the seven gates of the city, all of which were shut at night well into the twentieth century, leaving anyone outside who was not within four walls at the mercy of marauding Beduin. It was this gate which was used by the victorious General Allenby when, on 11 December 1917, having received the Turkish surrender, he entered the city on foot.

Next to the Jaffa Gate there is a large hole in the wall, made in 1898 by order of Sultan Abd ul-Hamid II to enlarge it so that Kaiser Wilhelm II could ride into the city on a white horse and dressed in shining armour in order to attend the consecration of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer. Here we climbed up on to the Wall.

The first wall was built by David and enlarged by Solomon; the second was built, or rebuilt, in fifty-two days, by Nehemiah, a Jewish cup-bearer to Artaxerxes I, King of Persia, who became Governor of Judah after the return of the Jews to Jerusalem from their captivity. Later walls were built by Herod and the Romans. The present one, which enclosed a far larger area than any before it, was built by Sultan Suleiman. The work took five years and the Sultan had the builder in charge put to death for omitting to include within it what was for long presumed to be, but some boring experts now say isn’t, the burial place of David.

Whether it is or not, and it would be difficult to persuade any practising Jew that it isn’t, the tomb is very impressive, hidden away in a labyrinth of courts and separated by railings from the remainder of the small room in which it stands. During the years when they were denied access to the Wailing Wall, the Jews used to come here to pray in large numbers, and many still do, grasping the railings and leaning yearningly towards the tomb and the great silver crowns of the Torah, the Law, which rest on it. It would be a pity if some wiseacre succeeded in proving that it is not the Tomb of David. There is already enough to be unsure about in
Jerusalem, a strange, beautiful, yet to me somehow not altogether lovable place, not the sort of place to which I would come to seek the peace that the world cannot give, perhaps because it is one in which almost everything has a variety of meanings and interpretations, many of them wildly at variance one with another, and one in which no one is absolutely sure where anything is, even Calvary.

Up on the Wall we were afforded previously undreamt-of views, undreamt-of because the last time we had been in Jerusalem we were not allowed on it. Now you can walk round it on every side except the east where the Golden Gate was and where the Muslim burial grounds are at the foot of it, above the Valley of the Kidron, opposite the Mount of Olives. A few years ago, if you had been an Arab and had exposed your noddle above this western section of the Wall where we were now standing, an Israeli sniper on the other side of the Hebron Road would have drilled a hole in it. Now you can safely look out over the amazing panoramas that make up the modern city: the endless builders’ developments that follow the contours of the hills, all faced with limestone that is a golden honey colour in the sunlight; the appalling tower blocks, hotels many of them, that have been allowed to ruin what was once a beautiful landscape, buildings that have also ruined the incomparable view of the Old City from the Mount of Olives, all of which appear to be sprouting up behind it like a lot of rotten teeth.

The best vistas are all on the inside of the Wall, nearly forty feet below in the 210 acres of the Old City; vistas of whitewashed mosques, synagogues, churches, convents, monasteries, noble old houses and unspeakable hovels – all overgrown with a dense forest of TV aerials – forgotten alleys that have somehow got sealed off from the rest of the city and are now knee-deep in grass, secret gardens stocked with carob, pine, fig and peach trees, acacias, oleanders; vegetable gardens behind impenetrable hedges of prickly pears, in which are cultivated onions, artichokes and
gooseberries; scrapyards, one of them full of old iron bedsteads, worth a fortune; butchers’ shops catering for various religious sects; cook shops from which rise the smells of outlandish dishes that we will perhaps never eat. And from down there in the Old City there rises what is the murmuring of a vast, polyglot company of Ashkenazim Jews from Russia, Rumania, Galicia, Poland, Moravia, Germany, Austria and other parts of western Europe, the Americas and the Commonwealth who speak Yiddish; Sephardim, Ladino-speaking Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled here and to other places on the shores of the Mediterranean after the introduction of the Inquisition and their expulsion from Spain in the reign of Isabella I; Arabic-speaking Jews; Maghrebim from Morocco (some of them Berber speakers from the Atlas Mountains), Algeria, Tunisia and Libya, Iraqi Jews who before coming here had lived in Iraq ever since the Babylonian exile, the oldest community outside Israel; Urfali Jews from southern Turkey and Musta’rabim, descendants of Jewish families who never went into exile and adopted the life but not the creed of their Muslim Arab neighbours; Yemenite Jews and Baghdadi Jews; Iranian Jews who speak Persian; the Benei Israeli who speak Marathi and the strictly observant Jews of Cochin who speak Malayam and are divided into three castes who do not marry or even dine with one another – White Jews at the head of the hierarchy, Brown Jews and Black Jews the most numerous; Syrian and Lebanese Jews; Georgian Jews; Bokharan Jews; Kurdish Jews; Karaite Jews, fundamentalists from Iran and Iraq who believe in a literal reading of the Scriptures and reject all rabbinical interpretations; Dagestani Jews, who once spoke an Iranian dialect known as Tat; Crimchake Jews from the Crimea who speak Judaeo-Tatar. And this is just the Jewish portion of all the different people down there in the Old City whose murmurings can be heard up here on the Wall.

There are Sunnite Muslims and Christian Arabs and Christian
Armenians, and Jacobites and Copts, and Greek and Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholics and an infinite variety of Protestants, and Melchites and Marionites and Abyssinians. All of these are currently giving tongue, buying and selling, praying, reading sacred and not-so-sacred works, listening to taped music, teaching the living, tending the dying, calling the faithful to prayer, quarrelling, picking pockets, smoking water pipes, playing
sheshbesh
, a form of backgammon, begging, cooking and eating, digging their plots, feeding their hens, their flocks of sheep, their donkeys and their camels – all of which are also from time to time giving tongue – or simply waiting for the Second Coming.

Dominating everything from up here, rising into the air from its platform opposite the Mount of Olives like some exotic space vehicle waiting to take off, is the Qubbat es-Sakhra, the Dome of the Rock, the masterpiece of the Umayyad Caliph Abd el-Malik, one of a dynasty which ruled from its capital, Damascus, from AD 661–750. He built it in about 691, at a cost of what was said to be the equivalent of seven years’ revenue from Egypt, in order to attract Umayyad pilgrims who could not make the pilgrimage to Mecca because at that time they were being refused admission to the Kaaba (the most sacred Muslim pilgrim shrine into which is built the black stone believed to have been given by the Archangel Gabriel to Abraham, in the direction of which Muslims turn when they are praying). He also built it in order to outdo the dome of the Emperor Constantine’s original church, which had been raised over the Holy Sepulchre in the fourth century. The walled platform on which it stands is known to Muslims as the Harām es-Sherif, the Place of the Temple. It conceals within it the Holy Rock on which David erected his altar, having bought the threshing floor on which it was to stand and the oxen to make his first sacrifice for fifty shekels of silver. And it is the site of Solomon’s Temple, and the Second Temple built when the Jews returned from Babylon
to find Solomon’s Temple destroyed, and of the Third and last Temple, built by Herod.

According to the Talmud,
²
the main authoritative compilation of ancient Jewish law and tradition, the Rock covers the entrance to the Abyss in which the waters of Noah’s flood can be heard roaring. It is also the Centre of the World, a title it shares with a point in the nave of the Greek Cathedral in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place where Abraham was about to slay Isaac, the Rock anointed by Jacob, and the Stone of the Foundation, the
eben shatyâ
, on which the Ark of the Covenant stood and beneath which Jeremiah concealed it at the destruction of Jerusalem, where it still lies buried. It was also the Rock on which was written the great and unspeakable name of God (
shem
) which, once Jesus was able to read it, allowed him to perform his miracles.

According to Muslims the Rock is without support except for a palm watered by a river of Paradise, which hangs in the air above the Bir el-Arwah, the Well of Souls, where the dead assemble to pray weekly. Others say it is the Mouth of Hell.

It was Mohammed, who prayed here before being carried away to heaven on his mare, al-Burak, who said that one prayer here was worth a thousand anywhere else; and in the underside (the ceiling) of the Rock there is the impression made by his head and the handprint of the Archangel Gabriel, who managed to hold on to it and prevent it from following the Prophet to Paradise. Here, on the Last Day, the Kaaba will be transported from Mecca, to await the sounding of the trumpet which will announce the Judgement, when God’s throne will be set up on the Rock, the scales will be suspended for the weighing of the souls, and a
horsehair tightrope will be set up between the Rock and the Mount of Olives, spanning the Valley of the Kidron, otherwise the Valley of Jehoshaphat, which Muslims believe will be the Mouth of Hell, across which the Faithful will walk without falling into it. The same valley devout Jews believe to be the place to which the Messiah will come first, and on the eastern slopes of which, below the Mount of Olives, they exert all their efforts to be buried.

Also within the Dome of the Rock is the marble cover of Solomon’s Tomb, into which the Prophet drove eighteen gold nails, one of which falls out at the end of every epoch – when the last one goes it will be the End of the World; the footprint of the Prophet – displayed by the Crusaders during their tenure of the city as the footprint of Christ – some hairs from the Prophet’s beard, and one of his banners.

Below the Harām es-Sherif, on its west side, is a section of the Western Wall of the Second Temple, nearly sixty feet and twenty-four courses high, with sixteen more courses invisible beneath the ground, its nine lower courses composed of enormous blocks of stone fifteen feet long and between three and four feet high, one monster being sixteen and a half feet long and thirteen feet wide.

This section of the Wall, which is just over fifty yards long, is the Wailing Place of the Jews, in Hebrew the Kothel ma’arvi, to which they come to bemoan the downfall of their Temple, the destruction of their City and the Diaspora, the Dispersal of their Race. It is also sacred to the Muslims, being part of the wall of the Harām where Mohammed tethered his mare, al-Burak, after his miraculous overnight journey from Mecca. In 1929 this conflict of interests led to rioting and bloodshed all over Palestine because the Muslims suspected that the Jews were trying to turn the area in front of it into an open-air synagogue.

There are always Jews to be found at the Wall, both men and
women, who use separate sections of it, some with books of prayers, kissing it, weeping, inserting small pieces of paper with prayers written on them into the interstices of the stones and rocking backwards and forwards on their feet, but around 4 p.m. on a Friday evening, the evening of
Shabbat
, the Sabbath, and on the Sabbath itself and other feast days, it becomes crowded.

On the evening of the Sabbath, with the sun sinking and only the upper part of the Wall still illuminated by it, we heard the chanting of one of the cycle of Hebrew dirges on Zion:

For the Palace that lies desolate
,

the Leader lamented, to which those taking part responded:

We sit in solitude and mourn
.

For the Temple that is destroyed; for the Walls that are overthrown:

For our Majesty that is departed; for our Great Men who lie dead:

For the Precious Stones that are burned; for the Priests who have stumbled: