Jerusalem, the City of Herod and Saladin

by Walter Besant; Edward Henry Palmer

Of the Occidental Christian communities need only be mentioned the Latins. Amongst a number of monks of the conventional low Romish type, there are a few intellectual men, who devote themselves to educating the poor peasantry of the neighbourhood. Their convents are more orderly, have more of life in them, than those of the Oriental Christians, and one is bound to say that the Latin clergy in Jerusalem do make the best of that parent of all social evils, the celibacy of the priesthood.

The Jews of Jerusalem are almost entirely supported by their co-religionists in Europe, upon whose charity they impose, and whose name they disgrace. They are divided into two classes: the Ashkenazim, who consist chiefly of emigrants from Germany and Poland, and the Sephardim, who claim connexion with the old Hebrew families of Spain. The Sephardim are far superior to the others, both in culture and in manners, and have occasionally a certain air of Oriental dignity about them. The Ashkenazim, on the contrary, are, for the most part, mean and disreputable in appearance, and apparently belong to the lowest orders of society. With his dull, exaggerated German-Jewish features, his ridiculous garb,—a long eastern caftan, or vest, and a broad-brimmed slouch hat, from which depend on either side of the face the Pharisaic love-locks—the Ashkenaz Jew of Palestine resembles nothing so much as his representative in modern theatrical burlesque. The services in their synagogue are conducted in a shamefully careless and indifferent manner; and the weekly ceremony of “wailing over the stones of the Temple,” when not regarded through that distorting medium of religious enthusiasm which too many travellers bring with them to the Holy Land, is simply a farce.

This picture is a melancholy one; much as one may wish that it could have been painted in brighter colours, it is best to present truthfully the impression which the modern city makes upon most travellers whose eyes are not blinded by the associations clinging to its soil. Filled with abuses, its sacred shrines defiled, and their worshippers exposed to constant danger and insult, Jerusalem is indeed “trodden down of the Gentiles until the time of the Gentiles be fulfilled.”

APPENDIX.
THE POSITION OF THE SACRED SITES.

There are very many difficulties in the way of a reconstruction of the City of Herod. The course of the second and third walls, the position of Antonia, and even that of the Temple itself, have been made the subject of very keen and bitter controversy; and, coming to later times, the site of Constantine’s buildings on and round the Holy Sepulchre has been assigned to two positions. Without attempting to go thoroughly into the question, which would not only take too much space, but would give this volume a character quite foreign to our purpose, let us only state the ground taken up as to the two chief sites only, that of the Temple and that of the Holy Sepulchre.

Everyone has seen plans of the modern city. The eastern side is mainly occupied by what is called the Haram Area, a four-sided space surrounded by vast walls, which are, in some places, buried a hundred feet deep in débris. One only of its angles is a perfect right angle, that at the south-west corner. In the middle is a platform constructed round a rough rock, projecting above the surface; in the rock is a cave. Above it is the Kubbet-es-Sakhrah—the Dome of the Rock—an octagonal building of very great beauty. Along the southern wall are various mosques and praying places, the most conspicuous being the Jámi‘-el-Aksa. Tradition has always assigned to the platform in the centre the site of Solomon’s and Herod’s Temples, but Mr. Fergusson, followed by Messrs. Lewin, Thrupp, and others, places the Temple in the south-west corner, measuring off six hundred feet from each angle to get its limits. We have thus, without considering minor points of difference, two sites for the Temple.

The so-called Church of the Holy Sepulchre is situated in the western part of the city, north of what is now called Mount Zion. There, according to the voice of tradition, were erected the buildings of Constantine, and there has existed, ever since, the cave which Christians have reverenced as the Sepulchre in which our Lord lay.

Mr. Fergusson maintains, on the other hand, that the Dome of the Rock is a building erected by Constantine to cover the Sepulchre of our Lord, and that the cave in the rock is the Sepulchre itself. To support this he endeavours to prove that the rock was not enclosed by the city walls at the time of the crucifixion; that the cave may very well have been a tomb: and that, independent of all argument from architecture, the description of historians and pilgrims accord with his position of the church, up to the end of the tenth century, over the rock in the Haram Area. And at some period, most probably after the demolition by Hakem in 969, the Christians abandoned the old site, and collected money to build a new church on the present site, which they pretended was the real site.

There are three ways of considering the question: by excavation, by history, and by arguments derived from a study of the architecture. For the first, Captain Warren is the only person who has excavated, on a scale of sufficient magnitude to produce results which bear upon the question at all. We subjoin a few of his results and opinions, with one or two brief explanatory remarks:

(1.) He has made a contour map of the whole hill on which the Haram Area stands. From this, a most important contribution to the topographical question, it appears that the hill was, much as Josephus describes it, steep and almost precipitous. From the top of the rock to the lowest point in the south wall, a distance of seven hundred feet, there is a dip of one hundred and fifty feet, i.e., one in five.		This makes the altar of Solomon’s Temple, provided that was in the south-west angle, some forty feet below the present surface. But was not the altar on the threshing-floor of Araunah? Further, the threshing-floors of Syria are now about the tops of high places, open to the four winds, and not on slopes, particularly steep slopes.
(2.) He thinks that the east wall is the most ancient, and the south-west angle a later addition, probably of Herod. His opinion is principally founded on the masonry of the stones laid bare at the foundations.		By Mr. Fergusson’s theory, the east wall is more modern than the west; but see, below, the evidence of Josephus, p. 5.
(3.) He has found what he thinks was the old Ophel wall, running from the south-east angle round the ridge of the hill.		This wall, in Mr. Fergusson’s plan, springs from the Triple Gate.
(4.) He has examined the Triple Gate for remains of the eastern wall and finds none.
(5.) He has found what have been pronounced by an eminent authority to be Phœnician characters at the south-east and north-east angles.		Would Phœnician characters have been used by Herod’s workmen?
(6.) He has found on the north-side of the platform of the Dome of the Rock certain foundations, the remains of some older building. But as yet no further examination of the arches then discovered has been possible.		If Mr. Fergusson is correct, these may be remains of the Church of Justinian. But they may just as well prove to be part of the foundations of the Temple.
(7.) He discovered the actual remains of the great bridge which crossed the valley at the south-west corner.		The foundations of the wall were found to cross a carefully constructed older aqueduct. Now if the west wall was Solomon’s, who built the aqueduct? It must have been either David or the Jebusites, and one always imagines that before Solomon’s time there were few buildings or constructions, if any, in Jerusalem; certainly not aqueducts.
(8.) Jar handles were found at the south-east corner with inscriptions in Phœnician character of the same period as the Moabite stone.		Of course no direct inference can be drawn from the finding of anything small below the surface. Tobacco pipes were found thirty or forty feet below the surface, but no one has concluded therefrom that the kings of Israel smoked tobacco.
(9.) He thinks that “Solomon’s Stables” are “a reconstruction from the floor upwards, and it is probable from the remains of an arch described by Captain Wilson at the south-east angle, that the original vaulting was of a much more solid and massive character.”		If this is so, no argument can rest upon the manifest inability of the vaults as they now are to support the Royal Cloister.