Irrespective of that, the Excursionists started on the Via Dolorosa opposite Antonio’s Fortress, famous for its lookout tower, built by Herod the Great and named in honor of Mark Antony when he was emperor seventy years before the crucifixion. The prefect of Judea was Pontius Pilate, and like all Roman prefects he lived in the capital Caesarea Maritima rather than provincial Jerusalem, which was peaceful enough except at times of Jewish religious holidays. This was one of those times: Passover, and one of the times it was prudent for the prefect to move with his soldiers to Jerusalem. The Romans despised the Jews with their litigious religion but were always wary of a roused mob; and at Passover the litigious religion and the occupation had previously proved a catalyst for the mob to rampage against Rome. Not totally dissimilar, you may construe, from the Ramadan mob railing against their occupation now.
The New Pilgrims back then - and we today - start opposite Antonio’s Fortress because the building itself was destroyed in the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD - destroyed by Titus to give his Roman forces easier access to sack the Temple. The Franciscan Monastery of the Flagellation lies to one side of the courtyard and The Monastery of the Condemnation to the other. Both churches were rebuilt in the twentieth century and both sympathetically designed with the spirit in mind. The former has wonderful acoustics and the monks encourage pilgrim groups to sing in there. Every Friday the monks lead a procession from there along the Via Dolorosa and we are lucky enough to be in the right time and place. We are also lucky enough for Saed to have arranged for us a private visit to the Franciscan archaeology collection in the convent behind - and there doubly lucky to meet the Custos, the local head of the order whose title gives us the word “custodian”.
We have become fond of the Franciscans in the Holy Land. They seem to be the only recognizably practicing Christian sect here. It is partly their love of their churches - any rebuilding is only allowed after extensive archaeology - partly the simplicity and elegance of the new commissions - the lapse at Nazareth aside - and partly their patience in dealing with busloads of irreligious visitors.
Our feeble fondness for them is more than offset by the hatred felt for them by all the Orthodox sects: the Greeks, the Armenians and the Syrians. The Franciscans are unfairly held as being descendants of, and therefore responsible for, the crusades; only in the sense that St. Francis of Assisi was a Latin monk could one stretch and see their point. The mistrust and loathing goes back a long way: up to the point of the Muslim invasion of 638 AD the Greek Orthodox had held the lucrative Christian franchise in Jerusalem. At first the Muslims tolerated them but the toleration turned to persecu- tion when in 1009 AD an unbalanced caliph began sacking the churches and beheading their hierarchies. The surviving Christians finally turned to Rome for help when the Seljuk Turks - the forerunners of the Ottomans - arrived fifty years later. Pope Urban II called for a crusade to free the holy places for the Christian pilgrims. The call was obeyed and the armies of the First Crusade arrived in Jerusalem in 1099. Latin Christians massacred the Muslims and expelled the Orthodox Christians. The latter have never forgiven and forgot- ten but all the evidence we have seen now suggests their Christianity43 is driven by greed and bloody mindedness, and there’s no reason to suspect it was any different a thousand years ago.
Twain then reels off the “stations” along the Via Dolorosa. “We passed under the ‘Ecce Homo Arch,’ and saw the very window from which Pilate’s wife warned her husband to have nothing to do with the persecution of the Just Man. This window is in an excellent state of preservation, considering its great age. They showed us where Jesus rested the second time, and where the mob refused to give him up, and said, ‘Let his blood be upon our heads, and upon our children’s children forever.’”
All the stations on the Via Dolorosa are as he described them but, as one would expect, his comments tend to be pithier than any guide would dare: “We crossed a street, and came presently to the former residence of St. Veronica. When the Saviour passed there, she came out, full of womanly compassion, and spoke pitying words to him, undaunted by the hootings and the threatenings of the mob, and wiped the perspiration from his face with her handkerchief. The strangest thing about the incident that has made her name so famous, is, that when she wiped the perspiration away, the print of the Saviour’s face remained upon the handkerchief, a perfect portrait, and so remains unto this day. We knew this, because we saw this handkerchief in a cathedral in Paris, in another in Spain, and in two others in Italy. In the Milan cathedral it costs five francs to see it, and at St. Peter’s, at Rome, it is almost impossible to see it at any price. No tradition is so amply verified as this of St. Veronica and her handkerchief.”
He carried on station by station in this vein but then at some length described the House of the Wandering Jew. He also retold the legend dating from the thirteenth century: “when the weary Saviour would have sat down and rested him a moment, [the Jew] pushed him rudely away and said, ‘Move on!’ The Lord said, ‘Move on, thou, likewise,’ and the command has never been revoked from that day to this.” Somehow in the last one hundred and sixty years the House of the Wandering Jews has disappeared from the guides” itinerary, nor on examination can any records be found of it every having been here.
The Via Dolorosa leads to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Twain’s account finishes where it had started. The guide then takes them to three more sites - of far greater significance now than then - where worship the Armenians, the Muslims and the Jews.
The Armenian Cathedral of St. James had just been extensively renovated when Twain visited it. We feel it is the most beautiful of all the cathedrals in the Old City, with its altars in each apse and numerous chapels and minimal pews. For services there are no pews at all and rich carpets are laid across the floor. The lighting is wonderful - hanging candelabras just above head height lighting the areas which the directed sunlight from the dome miss lighting.
***
The Armenians were at one point recently felt to be an endangered species in Jerusalem but have since recovered in a way to make Twain’s journalistic whiskers twitch with mirth. After the Israeli victory in 1967 space was needed in Jerusalem for the influx of religious Jews and it was felt that the Armenians were the most vulnerable - and compared to Latin and Greek communities, the least visible politically - sect. Pressure was applied on them to leave: rents raised, permissions denied, ID papers hard to renew. But good old TLUC rode to their rescue! When the Israelis admitted a million Russians they also unwittingly admitted a considerable number of Christians masquerading as Jews. At the time the arrangement suited both sides: the Israelis desperately wanted white immigrants and there were millions of Russians not about to say no to free housing and much more besides in the land of milk and honey. These new Israeli Christians jumped at the chance of practicing their Russian Orthodoxy again, and found the Armenian version of Orthodoxy more in keeping with their own and generally less avaricious than the Greek. Thus the Armenian congregation has recently prospered.
The plot thickens further: it has now emerged that not only are there an estimated three hundred thousand Russians without Jewish mothers, or even grandmothers, but many of these have Muslim - although long lapsed Muslim - forefathers on the male side. The right-wing press is up in arms and the more militant rabbis are on the warpath.
For modern Israelis the crowning glory of today’s Jerusalem is the Wailing, now called Western, Wall Plaza. In spite of the claims by Dayan and Sharon and any number of Zionists of whichever religious-right persuasion that history has now reunited with itself, the Jewish hold on Jerusalem over the last three thousand years has been tenuous to see the least.
Historically the Israelites (they weren’t called Jews until the arrival of the Romans) emerged as an organized tribal society around 1200 BC. They established a kingdom around 1000 BC, with a capital in Jerusalem, after driving out the Canaanites, another bronze-age civilization which had establ
ished itself in the region in the third millennium BC. Some Palestinians now claim to be the descendants of these Canaanites, and therefore outbid the Israelites in terms of Jerusalem descent and so rightful land ownership - but the claim is muddy at best. (Some also claim to be descendants of the Philistines from Philistia and that by quirks of etymology and nomenclature now just happen to be called Palestinians from Palestine and therefore they outbid the Israelites in terms of Holy Land descent - a further claim in unclear water - but around here a claim has to be disproved as much as proved to be taken as true. Proving a negative and disproving a positive are popular parlor games for those hereabouts with selective Levantine memory syndrome.)
The First Temple was built in Jerusalem in the reign of Solomon in around 950 BC. The Israelites believed then the Temple was not just the center of their religion but also the center of the earth, as indeed the literal brigade still do believe today.
Four hundred years of religious and political independence followed until the Israelites were invaded and conquered by a succession of civilizations from the east; first by the Assyrians in 722 BC, then more disastrously by the Babylonians, who in 586 BC destroyed the First Temple and sent the Israelites into exile to Babylon. In 538 BC the Babylonians were defeated by the Persians, who allowed the Israelites to return from exile and the Second Temple was built in Jerusalem.
The next invaders came from the west. The Persians were defeated by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, and for three hundred years Jerusalem was ruled by the Greeks. The Israelites adapted to Greek rule then successfully rebelled in 164 BC when the Temple was converted into a pagan temple to Zeus. They re-consecrated the Temple and for one hundred years governed themselves until the usual rivalries between opposing sects made them vulnerable to the next great power in the region, the Romans, who conquered Jerusalem in 63 BC.
The Romans installed a client king, Herod the Great. Herod undertook many great building projects during his forty-year reign, including re-building the Second Temple. After his death, his three sons did not rule as capably as their father and the real - rather than the proxy - Romans took control. The real Romans were heavy-handed and unpopular. When an uprising broke out between 66 and 70 AD, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and carried its treasures back to Rome. A further revolt in 135 AD against the Emperor
Hadrian led to even more violent reprisals from the Romans, who this time aimed to crush the troublesome, quarrelsome Jews for once and for all. The Jews were forced out of Jerusalem and thousands were murdered, exiled or sold into slavery.
I mention all this because one often hears in Jerusalem today that the Israelites in one form of another have an unbroken claim to Jerusalem; they don’t. By my reckoning they have “only” been in government here for seven hundred years out of the last three thousand and until 1967 not at all in the preceding eighteen hundred years. Perspective, whether historical or human, is not a strong point in Middle East today.
The period prior to the 1967 Six Day War victory was perhaps the most galling of all for the Jewish people. Israel held West Jerusalem but the historically symbolic Old City was part of East Jerusalem and had been held by the Jordanians since 1948. The Jordanians behaved without magnanimity or good grace, sacking the synagogues and driving the Jews out; again, one might feel, plus ça change now the sandal is on the other foot.
When victory came in 1967 the first priority was to re-establish Jerusalem as a Jewish holy site, and the Israelis - citing as everyone else had cited before them “To the Victor, the Spoils” - bulldozed the old Moroccan Sharaf quarter (there are still thirty thousand Moroccans in the Shu’fat refugee camp five miles away behind the Wall/Fence) to make way for the new Western, ex-Wailing, Wall Plaza. It is now a vast and functional series of terraces leading down to the Wall itself. Non-Jews are welcome having donned a kippah or scarf. Men must use the main part to the left and are in the shade, women are backed into a corner on the right side in the sunlight. Women are not allowed to pray aloud as the Jewish god declared that “a women’s voice is indecent”.
Supplicants insert written pleas or prayer into the cracks. In a wonderful example of space-age technology meeting stone-age theology supplicants can now fax or email their pleas or prayers to the rabbis, along with their credit card numbers, and the rabbis undertake to insert their messages in the cracks of Herod’s old wall.
Taking their cues from the Church of the Holy Sepulcher there are frequent rows between the sub-sects. The ultraorthodox have the franchise to worship next to the wall and are keen to maintain their sacred space there at the expense of lesser worshippers. Scuffles frequently break out as unseen dividing lines are crossed. Sometimes the women in the cattle pen next door get uppity and pray aloud or wear men’s kippahs - and then have chairs hurled at them over the dividing wall. Any couple trying to worship together are strong-armed apart. (Most non-resident worshippers arrive at Dung Gate by coach. In the ultraorthodox coaches the men sit at the front, the woman at the back. All ultras assume they have right of frontery on secular buses, too, and scuffles to maintain the privileges they have granted themselves are not infrequent.)
I know it’s not going to worry them one jot, but Judaism - at least as shown to the world here in the epicenter - is fast shaping up to be my least favorite religion. In Western countries we don’t really notice the practice of Judaism very much; as a minority religion it just gets on with it in the background. But here, where it is a highly visible majority religion, one sees at first hand, as in the Talmud: Kethuboth 11b, what a nasty piece of work it can be: it is sectarian (Blessed art thou o Lord for not having made me a heathen... ), racist (... or a slave... ), sexist (... or a woman), elitist, wrathful (Pour out thy wrath, o Lord, on... ), overbearing, intolerant and vindictive. The Jewish quarter today is newly rebuilt and has a totally different feeling to it than the souks and alleys of the Christian, Muslim and Armenian quarters. It is largely residential; the architecture is in scale with the other quarters but obviously modern; Middle Eastern motifs are subtle to the point of absence; the stone at least is local, or locally colored; shops are few and in malls; cafés fewer and off-street; streets are paved for cars and sidewalks; there are few non-Jewish tourists and that’s the way they like it; Arabs are excluded by law and that’s the way they like it too. It has the air of an out-of-term university: empty cloisters, museum and library doors swipe card-closed. It’s not a bag of laughs and isn’t meant to be. Earnest is a word that springs to mind.
***
Mark Twain then visited the Muslim holy sites. We assume his Ferguson for the day was a Christian and unfamiliar with the mosques mentioned: “Up to within a year or two past, no Christian could gain admission to the mosque or its court for love or money. But the prohibition has been removed, and we entered freely for bucksheesh.”
As a result The Innocents Abroad has the Muslim holy sites confused: what Twain calls the Mosque of Omar is in fact the Al-Aqsa Mosque and what he calls Al-Aqsa is in fact Temple Mount. Irrespective of that they come in for the full Twain treatment: “The great feature is the prodigious rock in the center of its rotunda. On this rock the angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded him to spare the city. Mohammed was well acquainted with this stone. From it he ascended to heaven. The stone tried to follow him, and if the angel Gabriel had not happened by the merest good luck to be there to seize it, it would have done it. Very few people have a grip like Gabriel - the prints of his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be seen in that rock to-day. In the place on it where Mahomet stood, he left his footprints in the solid stone. I should judge that he wore about eighteens.
“The inside of the great mosque is very showy with variegated marble walls and with windows and inscriptions of elaborate mosaic. The Turks have their sacred relics, like the Catholics. The guide showed us the veritable armor worn by the great son-in-law and successor of Mahomet, and also the buckler of Mahomet’s uncl
e.”
Twain then touched on the nub of the trouble for religious folk today: the Muslims built the Temple Mount right bang on top of the Jewish Temple. “Everywhere about the Mosque of Omar are portions of pillars, curiously wrought altars, and fragments of elegantly carved marble - precious remains of Solomon’s Temple.
“At that portion of the ancient wall of Solomon’s Temple which is called the Jew’s Place of Wailing, and where the Hebrews assemble every Friday to kiss the venerated stones and weep over the fallen greatness of Zion, anyone can see a part of the unquestioned and undisputed Temple of Solomon, the same consisting of three or four stones lying one upon the other, each of which is about twice as long as a seven-octave piano, and about as thick as such a piano is high. But, as I have remarked before, it is only a year or two ago that the ancient edict prohibiting Christian rubbish like ourselves to enter the Mosque of Omar and see the costly marbles that once adorned the inner Temple was annulled.
“These pieces of stone, stained and dusty with age, dimly hint at a grandeur we have all been taught to regard as the princeliest ever seen on earth. These elegant fragments bear a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing can ever have for the heedless sinner.
“Down in the hollow ground, underneath the olives and the orange trees that flourish in the court of the great Mosque, is a wilderness of pillars - remains of the ancient Temple; they supported it. There are ponderous archways down there, also, over which the destroying “plough” of prophecy passed harmless. It is pleasant to know we are disappointed, in that we never dreamed we might see portions of the actual Temple of Solomon, and yet experience no shadow of suspicion that they were a monkish humbug and a fraud.”
Innocence and War Page 24