The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories (49 page)

J
EWS HAVE BEEN
fascinated by the archaeology of their temple for centuries—for longer, in fact, than the modern notion of archaeology has existed at all. The idea that the stones of the Western Wall somehow tell the story of a whole people is an ancient one.

In 1524, David Reuveni, a tiny man wrapped in expensive oriental silks, arrived in Venice. His brother Joseph ruled over the ten lost tribes of Israel by the river Sambation, which is a torrent of stone and fire that stands still only on the Sabbath day. At least, that’s what he told the merchants of Venice. That was the story he gave to the pope in Rome, and to King John of Portugal, and to Keiser Karel at Regensburg. “The king of the Jews,” as they indulgently permitted him to style himself, was a man with a mission. Merchant, pope, emperor, and king were all quite happy to help him, since Reuveni proposed to lead an army against the sultan Suleyman of Constantinople, the ruler of Jerusalem and their avowed enemy. They received Reuveni at court and offered him horse and cannon and men.

But Reuveni overplayed his hand, for he was less interested in the overthrow of the sultan than in the coming of the Messiah. There was a stone in the Western Wall, he said, that had been placed there by Jeroboam in the time of King Solomon. The stone was cursed, he said, for it had been taken from a pagan temple, and the Redeemer would not arrive until it had been removed. The military campaign against the sultan was merely the prelude to this great event. The Jews he met urged Reuveni to keep quiet about the true nature of his plan, for his Christian sponsors would not want to hear about the appearance of a Messiah. The Jews feared that the usual reprisals would be visited on them all, but they were lucky: only Reuveni was put on trial. Dispatched to Spain for disposal at the hands of the Inquisition, he was burned at the stake in 1535.

The sultan whose downfall Reuveni had plotted was in fact more sympathetic to the Jews than his Christian peers were. He observed the devotion of the Jews to the ancient temple wall, the way they would stroke and kiss it, and he ordered his architect Sinan to make a space so that they could worship there. Sinan cleared a lane at the foot of the wall, excavating the ground to make the wall taller, and he built a low enclosure around it so that the Jews could say their prayers undisturbed. They later told one another that the sultan had purified
the site by washing it in rose water with his own royal hands, just as if he were his namesake, King Solomon himself.

T
HE MESSIAH ANTICIPATED
by David Reuveni did not arrive, and today the Western Wall forms but a tiny and unprepossessing part of the Haram e-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, which is the second most sacred place in the Islamic world. A beautiful grove of olives and cypresses surrounded by stone arcades, the Haram is studded with shrines, which are strange and wonderful retellings in architecture of the stories the Jews and Christians tell about the place. There is the Dome of the Chain, where, it is said, King Daoud used to sit in judgment on the people of Israel. There is the chair of Suleyman, in which the king rested after building the temple, and the Cradle of Isa, from which the son of Maryam preached while still a baby. The upper part of the sanctuary is approached through arcaded gates where, it is said, the souls of all mankind will be weighed on Judgment Day.

At the southern end of the sanctuary stands the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which, like a medieval cathedral, has been rebuilt again and again since it was first constructed in the seventh century. The ivory pulpit was installed by Saladin, the Gothic rose window in the eastern transept was built by the Crusaders, and the white marble columns under the dome were the gift of Mussolini.

In the center of the sanctuary stands the Dome of the Rock, built in the late seventh century by the caliph Abd Al-Malik. Covered in brilliant blue tiles, the gilded dome rests on two rows of antique columns of rich serpentine and porphyry. Beneath it, the holy rock itself, scarred with centuries of devotion and abuse, protrudes through a hole in the marble pavement.

Al-Aqsa means “the farthest,” and all the splendors of the mosque of that name and of the dome beside it commemorate a single enigmatic sura of the Koran.

Glory be to He

Who carried His servant by night,

From the Holy Mosque

to the Farthest Mosque,

the precincts of which

We have blessed

so that We might show him

some of Our signs.

Surely He is the All-Hearing,

The All-Seeing.

Like the tomb at Gloucester or the tale of the Holy House, it started out as a simple story; but it has been told again and again, each retelling an elaboration of the last.

One night Muhammad had awoken and made his way through the streets of Mecca to the Kaaba, where he started to pray. The angel Gabriel appeared to him and led him over to a white winged steed tethered nearby. This marvelous creature was named Al-Buraq. The angel grabbed him by his ear, and Muhammad mounted. They flew through the air at great speed, stopping to pray in Medina, in Sinai, and in Bethlehem. Soon they were hovering over a walled city, gazing down at domed churches and colonnaded streets and the courtyards of palaces becalmed in the silvery light of a crescent moon. The jumble of houses lapped at the walls of a rectangular platform that overlooked the town, empty of all habitation, like a plinth awaiting a statue. Al-Buraq swooped down, and Muhammad tethered the creature to an iron ring he found hanging from the western wall of the platform. He picked his way through ruinous rubble toward a low outcrop of rock.

Standing around the rock was a group of old men silhouetted against the night sky. Muhammad recognized them all. There was Adam, who said to Muhammad, “This is where I first stepped on the earth when God cast me out of Paradise.” And Ibrahim added, “It is where I offered up my son Ishaq in sacrifice.” And Jakoub said, “It is where I saw a ladder between heaven and earth.” And Mousa spoke, “It is where they laid the Ark of the Covenant to rest.” And Suleyman said, “This is where I built the temple.” And Isa added, “This is the place of the temple whose destruction I prophesied.” Then all the prophets moved aside to let Muhammad pass, and he led them in prayer.

And then Muhammad ascended from the rock through the seven
circles of heaven and was shown the heavenly throne. When he was finished, he returned to the Western Wall, and mounted Al-Buraq, and flew back to Mecca. The ring to which Muhammad tethered his miraculous beast is still there. It was uncovered in the 1930s, and Muslims named the wall in honor of the winged horse who had borne the prophet.

Some seventeen years after Muhammad’s night journey, his successor Omar captured Jerusalem from the Byzantine Empire. The citizens sent a proud message out of the gates to their conquerors: “Bring us your caliph, and we shall give him the keys to our city.” And so Omar, who was a humble, pious man, donned his goat’s-hair shirt, mounted his camel, and waited for the Byzantine patriarch Sophronius to emerge from the city in clouds of incense and stiff golden robes. “Show me your city,” said the caliph; and not without trepidation the patriarch led him through the streets to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, where he invited him to pray. “I will not pray here,” said Omar, “lest I encourage my brethren to do so as well. You can keep your church. We shall not build our mosque here. Take me to Al-Aqsa.”

The patriarch was perplexed, for he did not know what Al-Aqsa was. “I want to see the mosque of Daoud,” said Omar. The patriarch thought he understood. He led the caliph up to Mount Zion, where King David is buried, but the caliph was not satisfied. “I will not pray here,” said Omar. “Take me to Al-Aqsa, as I said. Take me to the mosque of Suleyman.”

“The temple of Solomon?” asked the patriarch. “But it is cursed and cast down. We leave our rubbish there in order to win merit in heaven.” Omar nodded, and they went down to a place where the houses and the lanes were built against a mighty wall. The gateway in the wall had been blocked with all sorts of refuse; but Omar had his men remove it, and he made Sophronius go before him, scrambling up over the fallen stones onto the empty plateau above. Omar picked up a handful of dust and threw it over the wall to purify the desolate spot. Then he saw a low outcrop of rock that protruded from the filth littering the site, and he walked toward it. “This is where it happened,” he said. “We can pray here.”

Omar retreated to speak to his advisers. Among them was a certain Kaab ibn Ahbar, who had had once been a Jew. Ibn Ahbar told
Omar the stories he could remember about the ruined mountaintop, and he reminded him that before Muhammad had chosen Mecca he had instructed Muslims to turn to Jerusalem in prayer. “Build your mosque to the north of the mountain,” ibn Ahbar suggested, “so that when we pray we can face the new
qibla
and the old at the same time.” But Omar turned on him. “Are you not a true Muslim?” he said. “Let us place the mosque to the south of the mountain, so that when we pray we face only Mecca. Mecca alone is the true qibla of the faithful.”

Omar’s workmen began to build their Noble Sanctuary on top of the ruins of the Temple of the Jews. They almost succeeded in covering it completely, but in two places its remains are still visible. The living rock enshrined in mosaic splendor under the gilded dome and the crumbling stones of the Al-Buraq Wall remind both Muslim and Jew that, like it or not, the glory of the Lord belongs to and eludes them both.

I
N THE YEAR
70, more than five centuries before Omar picked his way through its antique ruins, Titus, son of the emperor of Rome, met with his generals to decide what to do with the Temple of the Jews. They were reaching the end of a long and bloody campaign. They had captured most of Palestine and, indeed, most of the city of Jerusalem; but the rebels were holed up inside the temple and showing no signs of surrender. Some of the aides, a general present at the meeting related, “insisted that they should enforce the law of war” and destroy the building that the rebels were using as a fortress. “Titus replied that even if the Jews did climb upon it for military purposes, he would not make war on inanimate objects instead of men, or, whatever happened, burn down such a work of art: it was the Romans who would lose thereby, just as their Empire would gain an ornament if it was preserved.”

But things didn’t happen quite as Titus had planned; he hadn’t reckoned with the tenacious attachment of the Jews to their temple. His troops forced their way through the outermost walls that surrounded the sacred enclosure; but the Jewish rebels, instead of surrendering, retreated from the outer Court of the Gentiles into the Court of the Women. When the Romans fought their way into the Court of the
Women, the rebels retreated into the Court of the Israelites. And when the Romans overran the Court of the Israelites, the Levites among the rebels retreated into the Court of the Priests, and the Jews who were not Levites fought to the death where they stood—refusing to retreat lest they defile the holy sanctuary of their temple.

When the Romans forced their way into the Court of the Priests, they found that “around the altar the heap of corpses grew higher and higher, while down the sanctuary steps poured a river of blood.” And they saw that the few rebels who were still alive had climbed up onto the roof of the temple, whence they bombarded the Romans with missiles torn from the building itself. The Romans were so enraged that, despite Titus’s prohibition, some of them set fire to the shrine.