Jerusalem Day in the Old City

A. and I celebrated Jerusalem Day, appropriately enough, with a visit to Jerusalem’s Old City. (The Old City is only a small portion of modern-day Jerusalem, which I can only describe as one great traffic-congested mass of urban sprawl.) The Old City has been continuously inhabited for nearly five millennia, which sometimes leads people to believe that the walls that currently enclose it are ancient, but in fact they were only built some 470 years ago by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Each of the Old City’s four sides is about 3,000 feet (900 meters) long; Mark Twain noted that “a fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour.” There are seven gates in the walls through which one can enter: the New Gate, Damascus Gate (where Mark Twain entered), and Herod’s Gate on the north; Lion’s Gate on the east; the Dung and Zion gates on the south; and Jaffa Gate on the west. (A. and I entered first through the Jaffa Gate, but we made it a point to enter or exit through each of the seven gates at least once during the course of the day.) An eighth gate on the eastern side, the Golden Gate, is sealed, but according to Jewish legend it is through this gate that the Moshiach (Messiah) will enter the city. Mark Twain described it this way: “the Golden Gate, in the temple wall … was an elegant piece of sculpture in the time of the temple and is even so yet. From it, in ancient times, the Jewish high priest turned loose the scapegoat and let him flee into the wilderness and bear away his twelve-month load of the sins of the people. [Twain is referring to the Biblical rite described in Leviticus 16 –W.Y.] … The Muslims watch the Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall, and with it the Ottoman Empire.” The Ottoman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate (which Al-Qaeda wants to resurrect) fell after the First World War, but the Golden Gate remains standing. Here is a picture of it today:

When Mark Twain entered the Old City in 1867, he was struck by the narrowness of the streets. They were so narrow, he said, that he saw cats jump across them from one porch roof to another, and “the cats could have jumped double the distance without extraordinary exertion.” He adds that such streets were obviously “too narrow for carriages.” In this respect, the Old City hasn’t changed much. A few of the streets are just wide enough to accommodate automobiles in single file, which force pedestrians to dodge out of the way and press themselves up against the buildings on the left and right, but many of the streets (like the one below) are not more than eight or ten feet across.

Mark Twain writes that the population of Jerusalem was 14,000 in his time. Today Jerusalem – and here I mean the entire city, not just the Old City – has 724,000 residents. That is roughly ten percent of Israel’s entire population, making Jerusalem the largest city in the country. In 1867, according to Twain, the city’s population was “composed of Muslims, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants.” These same groups are present today, though the proportions may be different (and the Abyssinians one sees now are usually Jewish Israelis who immigrated from Ethiopia). Jews were already the largest single religious group in Jerusalem by the third quarter of the 19th century, they became an absolute majority by the late 19th century, and they formed an overwhelming majority of the city’s population by 1946. Ironically, however, the Jewish proportion of the city’s population has declined since 1967, from three-fourths to about two-thirds today. The rest of the city’s population, for those who may be wondering, is mostly Muslim (32%) with a tiny smattering of Christians (2%).

A. and I began our day with a three-hour walking tour of the Old City. Mark Twain and his traveling companions called all of their tour guides Ferguson because they couldn’t pronounce or remember foreign names. Our tour guide was an elderly gentleman named Asher – easy to say and remember, so we had no need to give him a new name – who had come to Israel from Cologne, Germany, before Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Asher took us through the Old City counterclockwise from Jaffa Gate through the Armenian Quarter, whose main attraction is the St. James Cathedral; on to the Jewish Quarter, where we viewed the Cardo (once the main thoroughfare of Jerusalem when, under Roman rule, it was renamed Aelia Capotolina and Jews were forbidden to live here), the Hurva Synagogue (now being rebuilt), and the Kotel (known in English as the Western or Wailing Wall); through the shouk (market) in the Muslim Quarter; and then west along the Via Dolorosa (“Sorrowful Way”) to the Christian Quarter, whose most prominent site is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Here is a section of the Cardo, four meters below present-day street level. Mark Twain did not see and does not mention the Cardo because it was not until a century after his visit that Israeli archaeologists found, excavated, and partly restored it.

Here is the Hurva Synagogue in the Jewish Quarter. It served as Jerusalem’s main Ashkenazi synagogue until Jordanian soldiers destroyed it during Israel’s War of Independence in 1948. Although the original synagogue was standing when Mark Twain visited Jerusalem (his contemporary Moses Montefiore had visited it the year before and donated a silver breastplate for one of the Torah scrolls), Twain doesn’t mention it. The Hurva Synagogue is now being rebuilt and is scheduled to be completed by next year, but knowing how things operate in Israel, there will probably be delays.

Here is the pièce de résistance of the Jewish Quarter: the Western Wall (Kotel in Hebrew), a part of the supporting wall of the Temple Mount that remained intact after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 C.E.

For Jews, it is sacred not only because it is a remnant of the Temple, but also because it is close to where the Holy of Holies once stood (the innermost and most sacred part of Solomon’s Temple, which held the Ark of the Covenant), a place from which it said the Shekhinah (Divine Presence) never departed. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel, it became a site of mourning, which is how it acquired the moniker “Wailing Wall.” Under Muslim rule, Arabs humiliated Jews and provided them with additional reasons for wailing by sometimes dumping garbage at the Wall. Mark Twain described it this way: “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.” You may have noticed that the Western Wall is now higher than he describes. That is because the ground in front of the Kotel was excavated in 1968 to expose two buried courses of stone. Today eight courses of massive Herodian stones from the Second Temple period are visible below four layers of smaller stones added in the eighth century. Twain adds that when he entered the Al-Aksa Mosque, he saw there built into the walls “costly marbles that once adorned the inner temple [of Solomon].” These marbles, he wrote, bore “a richer interest than the solemn vastness of the stones the Jews kiss in the Place of Wailing.” I cannot say, since today only Muslims are allowed inside the mosque. One last thing I will add about the Kotel: Mark Twain complained about the ubiquitous throngs of beggars constantly demanding baksheesh in Jerusalem. They are nearly all gone now – except for a few shnorrers at the Kotel who noodge you for tzedakah so incessantly that it’s hard to find a quiet moment to pray.

Mark Twain provides a very funny account of retracing the Via Dolorosa – he was clearly skeptical of some of the stories and embellishments he heard from his guide – which included a stop at what was purported to be the house of the Wandering Jew. I cannot speak of this mysterious and sorrowful house here – because I did not see it. Perhaps the house was destroyed in 1948 or 1967, or perhaps it’s just too hard to find after so many wandering Jews returned to Israel in the twentieth century.

We ended our walking tour of the Old City at the place Mark Twain visited first: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built over the site of the crucifixion of Jesus. (A sepulcher, for any reader who may be wondering, is a vault in which somebody is buried.) Mark Twain devoted an entire chapter of The Innocents Abroad to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which could not have been hard because it’s a huge structure filled with seemingly endless altars, chapels, niches, and relics. Even here, describing one of the most sacred and solemn sites in Christendom, he is unfailingly funny. His general description of the church – “chanting priests in coarse long robes and sandals,” “pilgrims of all colors and many nationalities,” “a somber cathedral gloom freighted with smoke and incense” – remains more or less accurate 141 years later. As in Mark Twain’s time, “monks … perform everywhere – all over the vast building and at all hours. Their candles are always flitting about in the gloom and making the dim old church more dismal than there is any necessity that it should be, even though it is a tomb.” In this setting, he remarked, it was hard to remember that the crucifixion took place outdoors, “in the open air, and not in a gloomy, candlelighted cell in a little corner of a vast church.”

Here is the church from the outside:

At the entrance to the church, Twain saw Turkish guards whose presence, he explains, was necessary to maintain order, “for Christians of different sects will not only quarrel, but fight, also, in this sacred place if allowed to do it…. All sects of Christians (except Protestants) have chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and each must keep to itself and not venture upon the other’s ground.” “It has been proven conclusively,” he adds wryly, “that they cannot worship together around the grave of the Saviour of the world in peace.” Today the Turkish guards are gone, but Israeli policemen have taken their place and perform the same function.

When Mark Twain entered the church, the first thing he saw was “a marble slab, which covers the Stone of Unction, whereon the Savior’s body was laid to prepare it for burial.”

“Entering the Rotunda,” Mark Twain continues, “we stand before the most sacred locality in Christendom – the grave of Jesus. It is in the center of the church, and immediately under the great dome. It is enclosed in a sort of little temple…. Within the little temple is a portion of the very stone which was rolled away from the door of the Sepulchre” and the sepulcher itself, with “the stone couch on which the dead Saviour lay.” Twain was somewhat disappointed upon entering the sepulcher; he described it as “scandalized by trumpery, gewgaws, and tawdry ornamentation.” I cannot comment on the sepulcher myself, because A. and I did not have the patience to stand in the long line of pilgrims waiting to view it.

“When one enters the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” Mark Twain wrote, “the Sepulchre itself is the first thing he desires to see, and really is almost the first thing he does see. The next thing he has a strong yearning to see is the spot where the Saviour was crucified…. It is the crowning glory of the place.” Unfortunately, I can’t show it here because the monks don’t allow photographs. It occurred to me that taking photographs has now replaced the practice of chipping off pieces of monuments and relics as the preferred method of obtaining souvenirs. (Mark Twain has some very funny and disapproving things to say about all the chipping that his traveling companions did.) Graffiti, however, seems to have lost none of its appeal; A. and I spotted plenty of graffiti in the church, some of it dating back to the nineteenth century (no, I didn’t see Mark Twain’s name), and some of it more recent.

One other thing about the church is worth noting. “It is a singular circumstance,” Mark Twain wrote, “that right under the roof of this same great church … Adam himself, the father of the human race, lies buried.” “How touching it was,” he adds, “here in a land of strangers, far away from home and friends and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation.” A. and I thought we had found Adam’s tomb in the church, but a Russian tour guide told us that we were mistaken, so were unable to pay our respects to dear old Grandpa Adam.

After leaving the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and taking a break for lunch in the Jewish Quarter, A. and I exited the Old City and stumbled on to Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as King Solomon’s Quarry, and paid a few shekels to enter. The cave runs under what is now the Muslim Quarter of the Old City. This is another place that Mark Twain didn’t see and didn’t describe, perhaps because the Ottoman authorities forbade people to enter the cave after an American missionary rediscovered it in 1854. Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, is said to have fled into the cave when the Babylonians besieged Jerusalem. Before that, the cave is said to have been the quarry for King Solomon’s Temple, which is how it acquired its other name. I have to admit that A. and I, behaving a little like Mark Twain’s souvenir-hunting traveling companions, pocketed a few rocks from the quarry. Here is A., fearlessly leading the way down:

After exiting King Solomon’s Quarry with our precious load of stones, A. and I spotted some interesting-looking tombs in the Kidron Valley. (The Kidron Valley runs along the eastern wall of the Old City and separates the Temple Mount from the Mount of Olives.) When we asked a couple of young Israeli soldiers what these structures were, they shrugged and said (indisputably) “some dead people.” Perhaps inspired by the new Indiana Jones movie, I convinced A. to climb down into the valley to explore the tombs with me. Only later did we discover that they were the tomb of Absalom and the tomb of Zechariah. You will remember Absalom and Zechariah, no doubt. Absalom was King David’s third and favorite son, who revolted (unsuccessfully) against his father, and Zechariah was the son of the Jewish high priest who denounced his king and his people for their rebellion against G-d and then, for his troubles, was stoned to death (2 Chronicles 24:20). After discovering whose tombs these were, I felt a little badly about sitting so cavalierly on poor old Zechariah’s tomb. He deserves better. Mark Twain, by the way, mentions riding through the Valley of Jehoshaphat (the Kidron Valley) on horseback and seeing the tombs of Absalom and Zechariah, but only in passing.

Here is the Tomb of Absalom:

And here is the Tomb of Zechariah:

Toward dusk, we returned to Jaffa Gate to watch what seemed like an endless crowd of young people streaming into the Old City to celebrate Jerusalem Day. They came to walk through the liberated Old City, where for nearly twenty years (1948 to 1967) Jews were denied access, and to gather at the Kotel – once called the Wailing Wall – to sing and dance.

I have to admit that I found this spectacle more moving than any ancient relic or Biblical monument. Never have I seen so many joyous and happy Jews assembling together in one place, and the city seemed positively charged with what Emile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” Without a doubt, this is the single biggest difference between the Jerusalem of Mark Twain’s time and today. “Jerusalem,” he wrote, “is mournful and dreary and lifeless.” No description could be further from the truth on Jerusalem Day.