City of War & Worship

Ten measures of beauty came into the world: Jerusalem took nine and the rest of the world one. There are ten measures of suffering in the world--nine in Jerusalem and one in the rest of the world. There are ten measures of wisdom in the world--nine in Jerusalem and one in the rest of the world.

--The Babylonian Talmud

For Christians, Jews and Moslems alike, Jerusalem is infinitely more than just an embattled city in the Palestine desert. To Jews, it is, according to Deuteronomy, "the place where Yahweh chose to dwell." For Christian churches, Jerusalem marks the mysterious intersection of eternity and time, the spot where God's crucified son died and then was resurrected. In Moslem legend, it was in Jerusalem that Mohammed, borne from Mecca by a winged mare, ascended to heaven from the site of Judaism's Temple to receive his supreme illumination from God. Although Palestine contains numerous landmarks renowned in religious history (see color pages)--such as Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Dead Sea and the Jordan River--Jerusalem is unquestionably the holiest of holy places. With reverence, medieval cartographers called Jerusalem "the navel of the world" and placed it at the center of their maps.

Since the Arab-Israeli war in June, Jerusalem has once again been a matter for cartographic concern--not to mention diplomatic debates and tourist-promotion schemes. Joyful that the shrines of the Old City are in Jewish hands for the first time in nearly 2,000 years, Jews from all over the world are signing up for pilgrimages. Plane and boat reservations for trips from France to Israel are sold out for two months in advance. "Israel," says TWA sales manager in Chicago, John J. Sweeney, "is a hot destination." Wary about the possibility of renewed hostilities, gentiles have been more hesitant, although travel agents report increasing interest in future tours. One Israeli tourist agent in the U.S. tries to calm gun-shy travelers with the thought that "I would rather send people to Jerusalem than Detroit."

Sanctity & Savagery. Historically, Detroit has been more peaceful. Though Jerusalem is a symbol of an all-powerful God whose promise is universal brotherhood and eternal peace, the city has inspired as much savagery as sanctity. No city in history has been fought over so often--it has suffered more than 20 sieges--or destroyed so often. No spot on earth has been won and lost by so many nations.

Jerusalem--the name means "foundation of Salem" (an ancient Semitic deity)--has a superb setting. Situated in the Judean Hills nearly 2,500 feet above sea level and protected on three sides by steep valleys, it was a natural site for a fortress adjacent to trade routes between the Mediterranean and cities to the east. There was a plentiful water supply from a spring that still flows out of the Kidron valley, just below the southeast edge of the present city. Archaeological evidence suggests that Jerusalem was settled around 3000 B.C. by Bronze Age Canaanite tribesmen. According to Genesis 14, when Abraham entered Palestine after his victories in Syria, he was greeted near the city by Melchizedek, king and high priest of Salem. It was on a rock atop Jerusalem's Mount Moriah that Abraham, according to tradition, prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac to the Lord.

Home for the Ark. Jerusalem's religious importance actually begins with David. When the twelve tribes of Israel sought to consolidate their conquest of the Promised Land around 1000 B.C., David decided to capture the citadel from the Jebusites, a tribal ally of the Philistines. He did so after a prolonged siege, and made it his capital. There he brought the ark of the covenant, a gold-lined chest that Moses had built to contain the tablets of the law. David's son Solomon, who reigned from circa 970 to 930 B.C., built a magnificent Temple to contain the ark and serve as God's earthly home.

Sacred as it was to Judaism, Jerusalem also attracted pagan conquerors. In 586 B.C., the city and its Temple were destroyed by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who marched most of its inhabitants off to captivity --a tragedy that inspired the Psalmist to some of his most wistful lamentations. Thanks to the generosity of King Cyrus of Persia, who conquered the Babylonians, the Jews returned 48 years later to rebuild the Temple. In the next centuries, though, Jerusalem was conquered time and again by Greeks, Egyptians and finally the Romans, who adopted Herod as their vassal King. Although hated by Orthodox Jews as a Hellenistic idolater, Herod expanded the Temple and adorned it with marble and gold. It was still standing, one of the wonders of the ancient world, when the Roman procurator Pilate condemned Jesus to death as an insurrectionist and ordered him crucified on Calvary Hill.

Roman Camp. Before he entered Jerusalem for the Last Supper, according to Luke, Jesus predicted the city's destruction, declaring that its enemies would "not leave one stone upon another in you." In A.D. 70, after a four-year Jewish revolt, Roman legions smashed through the walls, burned the city, and killed or exiled most of its inhabitants. Enough of them remained, however, to organize another insurrection in A.D. 132 under the messianic fanatic Bar Kochba; the legions once again leveled the city, rebuilt it in the form of a Roman camp called Aelia Capitolina. It was not until after A.D. 313, in fact, that Jerusalem won back its old name, when the Emperor Constantine and his Christian mother, Helena, began to build new churches at the shrines marking the major events in Christ's Passion and death.

Christian domination over the Holy City ended three centuries later; in A.D. 638, the troops of the Byzantine Emperor surrendered after an onslaught to the Moslem cavalry of the Caliph Omar. In memory of Mohammed's heavenly visit, the victorious Moslems built the Dome of the Rock over the site of the Old Temple. More often than not, they tolerantly allowed Christians and Jews free access to the shrines of the city. In 1095, however, inspired by rumors of Islamic persecution of pilgrims, Pope Urban II proclaimed a holy crusade to reconquer Jerusalem for Christ. Four years later, mail-clad knights led by Godfrey of Bouillon took the city by storm and slaughtered every Moslem they could find--afterward repairing for prayer at the shrine of the Holy Sepulcher.

The Latin kingdom founded by the Crusaders lasted scarcely a century. Recaptured by the Saracen King Saladin in 1187, Jerusalem remained in Moslem hands, except for a brief 15-year Christian reconquest, until World War I. The long sleep under Islam brought little peace, however, as Moslems battled for Jerusalem among themselves. The Saracens were soon overthrown by their Egyptian slave guards, the Mamelukes. The Mamelukes were in turn driven out by the Ottoman Turks, who captured the Holy City in 1517 and ruled it for 400 years. Though Christians were allowed to return to the city, a dispute between Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic clergy over control of the Christian shrines caused the Crimean War (1853-56), pitting Russia, which supported the Greeks, against Britain, France and Turkey.

The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Crimean War, reaffirmed that control of the major shrines should be divided among Christian sects--an arrangement that was adopted by the British when they captured Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917, and was maintained throughout Britain's 31-year occupation. The trouble-ridden British mandate lasted until the creation of Israel in 1948. One year later, ending the Arab-Israeli war, the U.N. ordered Jerusalem's division. Jordan won the less populous but more venerable Old City, containing most of the shrines.

Pious Legend. For all the veneration that Jerusalem's holy places command, the sacredness of many of them is based more on pious legend than historical proof. The stations of the Cross along the Via Dolorosa--marking Christ's path to His crucifixion--begin near the site of the Temple in accordance with medieval tradition. Most Biblical scholars, nonetheless, now believe that Jesus' death march began on the other side of the Old City, near the Jaffa Gate. Many of the churches marking the shrines, moreover, have been rebuilt so often that they have tenuous claims to antiquity. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher has been destroyed twice and renovated no fewer than seven times, most recently in 1949.

Hardly contributing to the spirit of sanctity is the constant churchly bickering over many of the shrines. Six denominations--Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Syrian, Coptic and Abyssinian--have rights to the Holy Sepulcher; for years the basilica has been near collapse because the churches cannot agree on how to make the necessary repairs. The interior of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, co-owned by Orthodox, Catholics and Armenians, is a tasteless clutter of rival altars, lamps, candelabra, icons and statues. In addition, many of the shrines are ringed by bazaars and barkers, hawking everything from plastic crosses to soft drinks.

God in a Cause. Some contemporary theologians are inclined to question whether the term holy can be applied to the sites. Properly speaking, they say, "holy" is a word that applies to God alone, and only by analogy can it be extended to man-made objects. "Any suggestion that God is in a shrine or in some carving is idolatry," says Dean F. Thomas Trotter of California's School of Theology at Claremont. "What is holy is the presence of God, which is everywhere brought into focus by an act of love." In this way of thinking, God's presence is to be discovered not only in a formal act of worship in a "sacred" place such as a church, but may also become apparent in purely secular events and experiences--an encounter with another person, a selfless surrender to a cause.

On the other hand, both Christianity and Judaism have deep roots in history: the story of the Jewish people is the record of God's covenant with a chosen race; Christianity bases its claims on the proclamations of a specific human figure. For that reason, churchmen argue that the shrines have value as reminders that holy events occurred in time and space. Because of their association with "the manifestation of God's divine being," says Roman Catholic Theologian Joerg Splett of Germany, ancient shrines can properly be revered as symbols of "where God's holiness touches man's soul." Adds Anglican Theologian Henry Chadwick of Oxford: "A place is not in itself holy, but by its association through history."

Revelatory Moments. Some religious thinkers believe that they discern a trend toward renewed veneration of objects as symbols of sacred value. Chicago's Lutheran Theologian Martin Marty suggests that the trend is exemplified, to some extent, by the hippies' reverence for flowers. Marty suggests that the Holy Land shrines may come to seem even more precious than ever--as symbols of spiritual meaning and of the decisive "revelatory moments" that changed the course of man's history.

Since capturing and annexing the Old City, Israel has gone out of its way to preserve the sanctity of the Christian, Jewish and Moslem shrines alike. The Knesset has passed laws reaffirming the existing custodial agreements on the shrines and decreeing stiff prison terms for anyone caught desecrating sacred sites. The government has even posted guards at them.

This month, Israeli authorities started bulldozing abandoned Arab shacks clustered around the walls of the Old City; they plan to replace the hovels with a park. In addition, the Arab portion of Jerusalem is rapidly being incorporated into the Israeli New City, under the direction of Mayor Teddy Kollek, 56. Unified water, telephone and bus services have been restored in Jerusalem, and the majority of Arab civil servants from the Old City have been given jobs in Kollek's municipal government. Thanks partly to the incorporation of suburban areas to the north and south, the city's population now stands at 280,000--against an estimated 70,000 at the time of Christ.

Not Negotiable. Although Arabs and Jews have mingled freely in Jerusalem since unification, most of the city's Arab leaders have refused to join Kollek's administration. Last week five Jordanians were arrested for handing out leaflets warning Arabs about the consequences of cooperating with the conqueror. The Arab nations officially insist that Jerusalem be returned to its pre-blitz, partitioned state. Despite the sacredness of the Dome of the Rock to

Islam, their reasons may be as much emotional and fiscal as religious: last year Jordan's tourist income amounted to more than $35 million--most of it coming from Christians visiting the Old City. Israel's position is equally tough. "Jerusalem is not negotiable," says an aide to Premier Levi Eshkol. At most, the Israelis might agree to internationalization of non-Jewish shrines in the Old City--a solution favored by many Christian leaders.

Whatever Jerusalem's future, residents of both the Old City and the New seem to feel that it is a healthier place without the barbed wire and no-man's-lands that divided it. Even some Arabs grudgingly agree with Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban's contention that "the city can breathe with two lungs again." But until a permanent diplomatic solution is reached--and that will not be soon--it seems unlikely that the world has yet heard an answer to Isaiah's anguished prayer: "Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare is ended."

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