{"id":11316,"date":"2009-08-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-08-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T00:00:00","slug":"Walking about Jerusalem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=11316","title":{"rendered":"Walking about Jerusalem"},"content":{"rendered":"
[Review of Simon Goldhill\u2019s book Jerusalem. City of Longing<\/i>, published in a E. Michael Jones\u2019 Catholic monthly Culture Wars<\/a>]<\/div>\n

Jerusalem is a wonderful city to walk about, enjoying its perennial blue and high sky, its warm and pure mountain air, cool and refreshing shades, delicious water, listening to the church bells and muezzin\u2019s calls. I walk it almost every day, and the Old City shopkeepers and artisans call me out, \u201cAhalan, Shamir!\u201d They all know me because I am a guide, guiding discerning travellers about town. My lot is enviable: instead of shepherding an unruly busload of accidental tourists, I accompany families or single people who want to discover Jerusalem and to find its hidden spiritual treasure. I am the first witness of their tears of joy as they leave the empty tomb of Christ, I comfort them in the Gethsemane, and I share with them my excitement in the Noble Sanctuary. I walk the young through the narrow place of Siloam Tunnel, I sit with the mature in the Pasha Garden of the American Colony, and I drive all of them to the Mount of Olives.<\/p>\n

We guides are quite a friendly lot, friendly to tourists and friendly to each other. It was my pleasure to review a guidebook Jerusalem. City of Longing<\/i> written by Simon Goldhill, who for sure loves Jerusalem. This is his second book on the city; the first one was dealing with Jerusalem temple. I also wrote a book about the Holy Land, as many guides do, so I am aware of pitfalls and I do not know him personally, though his face looks rather familiar with its nimbus of curly hair. He is a professor of Greek literature in Cambridge. And this is another feather in his cap in my eyes for I happen to belong to the Greek Orthodox Church of Jerusalem and moreover, I had translated Homer\u2019s Odyssey. The book is a beautifully printed and impeccably designed reading book, aiming to explain Jerusalem to a not-very-religious visitor, and it provides quite pleasant reading material. There is wealth of interesting quotes and nice stories; the author is a man of learning who tries to be fair. <\/p>\n

Regretfully, the book is under-edited, often biased, and has too little religious feeling or even understanding of Christian sentiment towards Jerusalem. It is disappointing to find a physically perfect book so full of misleading misprints that even a superficial editing would eliminate. Author writes: \u201cHerod Agrippa extended the city walls in 414\u201d \u2013 should be in AD 41-44. Impossibly for a Professor of Greek, he misspells Pantakrator (should be Pantokrator). He is loose with references. He attributes to Golda Meir the battle-cry of early Zionists \u201cLand without a people for a people without a land\u201d, which was actually coined some fifty years earlier by Israel Zangwill, if not by an earlier and obscure personality. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Holy Sepulchre<\/b><\/div>\n

Goldhill\u2019s description of the Holy Sepulchre is marred by his lack of religious feeling towards it. He brutally calls it \u201csmall, brown, and undistinguished as a duck.\u201d (He finds the Wailing Wall, however, \u201can impressive edifice\u201d). He quotes at length various 19th century English Protestant visitors who disliked the church, a useful device for writers who do not dare to expose their own bigoted opinion. He finds it necessary to refer to the blessed saint and myrrh-bearer as \u201cMary Magdalene, the former prostitute\u201d, a language meant to offend. Silly, too \u2013 there were no prostitutes before advent of capitalism, as a Cambridge professor should know.<\/p>\n

He is unfair to the beautiful and touching ceremony of the Holy Fire, celebrated on Easter Saturday according to Julian calendar: \u201creaction of the community is startling, even frightening\u201d. I participated in the ceremony many times, and always found it uplifting and exciting, though frequently marred by heavy-handedness of the Jewish police. <\/p>\n

In the Holy Sepulchre, he notes that \u201cone of the chants regularly heard in the 19 c was: Oh the Jews, your feast is the feast of devils [rather, \u2018demons\u2019 according to St John Chrysostom \u2013 ISH] and our feast is the feast of Christ\u201d. Goldhill misses the point: in 19th century, the Christians and the Jews were two competing and quarrelling ancient minorities in the Muslim sea. Jews were as powerful, and often more powerful than the Christian communities, and the Jewish prayers (in 19th century as well as today) are at least equally offensive to Christians. For instance, the Jewish Paschal narrative includes a call for Divine vengeance being poured on Christians and describes Crucifix as idol. <\/p>\n

In the Parvis of the Holy Sepulchre he asks the reader to remember \u201cthe fact that until 1967 no Jew was allowed even into the parvis.\u201d A man of his \u2013 and our time and space, Goldhill does not even understand that people may be serious about their religious feelings. A traditional believing Jew \u2013 and there were no other Jews until fairly recently \u2013 would never enter a church, including its parvis, or inner court. For a believing Jew, the prohibition Goldhill mentions is as painful as a prohibition to patronise a pork butcher. If a religious Jew would find himself in the parvis, his faith would demand him to keep his hat on, to curse the place and spit in its direction. (Nowadays, Jewish fanatics often try to come near a Christian religious procession in order to spit at the Cross.) Goldhill does not remind his reader that nowadays Jewish security guards would not let an Arab enter the Wailing Wall plaza, and they would demand from a Christian to remove or hide his cross \u201cin the interests of keeping peace\u201d, like they demanded from the Pope.<\/p>\n

The beautiful Crusader lintels of the Church were taken in 1929 to Palestine Museum for repairs, and never returned. \u201cThe museum has constructed excellent replicas\u2026 but the Greek Orthodox patriarchate blocked the return (? – ISH) of the lintels\u201d \u2013 writes Goldhill. I wonder whether he would accept \u201cexcellent replicas\u201d instead of the real thing if he were an owner. Introduction of fake replicas can not be described as \u201creturn of the lintels\u201d. This is not unusual turn of events \u2013 museums all over the world are reluctant to return art to its owners, if the owners are Christian churches. They do return everything to Jews, in a jiffy, but with the churches they always find a reason to keep it. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Wailing Wall<\/b><\/div>\n

Dr Goldhill declares his intention to be fair; and he wants his reader to notice this effort. He stresses frequently that he does not want to embrace one of the competing narratives, nor does he wish to \u201cslip into the aggressive and na\u00efve stereotypes of identity politics: he is a Jew\/Arab\/Muslim\/\u201d; he would like the book \u201cto stand out against such reductive and coercive postures\u201d.<\/p>\n

One applauds his intentions, were they supported by actions. However, declarations aside, he slips into \u201cthe aggressive and na\u00efve stereotypes of identity politics\u201d pretty soon. On p. 71 he improbably claims that \u201csome recent Muslim writers deny that there ever was a Temple [of Solomon]\u2026 their claims are so obviously motivated by a desperate contemporary ideological need to disprove any connection between the Jews and the land of Israel and the Temple Mount in particular that it would be unnecessary to take them seriously, if such myth writing did not add to the entrenchment of violent extremism in the region\u201d.<\/p>\n

This is worse than stereotyping, this is ignorance. Who is \u201cmyth-writing\u201d \u2013 scholars who interpret real finds on the ground or writers who just follow the Good Book? Practically all<\/b> modern archaeologists \u2013 including mainstream Israeli Jewish ones – doubt that there ever was a Temple or a kingdom of Solomon; but leading doubters, nay, deniers, are not \u201cMuslim writers\u201d who tend to affirm this part of Biblical narrative for reasons of faith (Solomon is mentioned favourably in Koran), but lay scientists, British and American, beginning with Copenhagen University Professor Thomas L. Thompson<\/a>, \u201cone of the world\u2019s leading Biblical archaeologists\u201d, who wrote<\/a>: \u201cThere is no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem; nor do we have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early period.\u201d Other leading scholars of similar views are Niels Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Philip Davies, hardly Muslim names. <\/p>\n

One does not have to agree with them; one may narrate history of Jerusalem according to the Bible, disregarding archaeology, as Goldhill does. Many guides do so, and this makes sense: a guide in Camelot should not debunk King Arthur stories. But his attribution of the archaeologists\u2019 views to some \u201cMuslim writers\u201d smacks of prejudice, while claim that \u201cit would be unnecessary to take them seriously\u201d implies deep ignorance, for the world does take them seriously indeed. While there is a law banning Holocaust denial, there is still no law forbidding denial of Solomon\u2019s Temple. Though Goldhill\u2019s mentor, Dr Dever (\u201cPlague\u201d), an important Jewish American archaeologist of elder generation, already has claimed that these deniers are antisemites, our Dr Goldhill made it one better by implying that they are terrorist supporters.<\/p>\n

Goldhill\u2019s understanding of modern, as well as ancient history is somewhat deficient. He thinks that the conflict between quarrelsome Catholics and Orthodox in the Holy Sepulchre has been so severe, that in 1852 Sultan was forced to establish the Status Quo agreement. Reader may wonder why it hadn\u2019t happened in preceding hundreds of years. Goldhill does not tell that the Status Quo was established because of the foreign powers\u2019 meddling (with Russia supporting the Orthodox, France supporting the Catholics and England playing its imperial game) brought forth the Crimean War and endangered Turkey. Local quarrels were not all that bad and they would never force the Sultan\u2019s hand.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, Goldhill\u2019s elegant writing seem to be inspired by the IDF spokesmen\u2019 terse prose. The Herod\u2019s Massacre of the Innocents \u201cis blamed\u201d on Herod, (by some antisemites, presumably, eager to blame a Jewish ruler). A la present Israeli foreign minister Lieberman, he stresses that \u201cthe Mufti, the Arab religious leader of Jerusalem, became a close ally and supporter of Hitler\u201d, but he avoids mentioning Mufti\u2019s Jewish contemporaries, Arlozorov, the Zionist Labour leader, who went to Berlin to embrace Hitler and to sign the first trade agreement with Nazi Germany on behalf of the Yeshuv (the Zionist Jewry of Palestine), or Yitzhak Shamir, a future Prime Minister of Israel, who wrote sycophantic letters to the Fuehrer. Many people supported Hitler in these days, or hoped to be supported by him \u2013 especially if they were dissatisfied with the British Empire\u2019s way to run things. <\/p>\n

During 1929 riots, \u201c135 Jews were murdered<\/b>, 116 Arabs were killed<\/b>\u201d. This is so typical: Jews are always \u201cmurdered\u201d, goyim are just \u201ckilled\u201d. In accordance with the Jewish interpretation of the Decalogue, only a Jew can be \u2018murdered\u2019. Goldhill accepts the Zionist narrative: he refers to \u201cJewish worshippers [who] wanted to take some chairs for the elderly\u201d as the reason for the riots. It is well established that the 1929 riots were instigated by the Zionist wannabe-Maccabees, and a good contemporary description of it is given by an American journalist based in Jerusalem Vincent Sheehan. It is quoted at length by the best single book on the subject, the Guardian correspondent David Hirst\u2019s The Gun and the Olive Branch<\/i>, Faber and Faber, 2003. This was also the conclusion of official enquiry.<\/p>\n

With callous disregard, Goldhill writes about destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter of the Old City in 1967: \u201csome two hundred very poor [Palestinian] dwellings\u2026 were cleared away in order to open the plaza in front of the Wall for the thousands of new [Jewish] visitors\u201d. No empathy to these poor \u2013 and not so poor people whose only crime was to possess something the Jews coveted. He does not tell us that so many dwellers were buried alive under the ruins of their houses by raging bulldozers. With equal disregard he tells of destruction of a girls\u2019 school for orphans that stood nearby. Goldhill does not notice that it undermines his own story: what began as \u201csome chairs for the elderly\u201d continued as \u201cslum clearance\u201d of hundreds of houses, and it still waits for the grand finale of the temple building on top of the mosque\u2019s ruins. <\/p>\n

With Bernard Lewis<\/a>-style cheap sophistry, Goldhill evokes \u201c14th century Persian Islamic art which had no problem with representing the Prophet \u2013 despite the vitriolic (sic! \u2013 ISH) response to modern drawings of Muhammad by contemporary Muslim protesters\u201d. By \u201cmodern drawings of Muhammad\u201d he means the insulting cartoons<\/a> published by the Danish Jewish Neocon editor, forsooth a fitful comparison with 14th century sacral art! Interestingly, the Jews had no problem with representation of the Holocaust in sculptures and paintings of the Holocaust Museum \u2013 and they gave quite a vitriolic response to modern drawings of Holocaust in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition<\/a>. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Noble Sanctuary<\/b><\/div>\n

Goldhill is an expert on the Jewish temple and he is expectedly partial to it: he tells of Jewish dreams to have it rebuilt, of Pompey who walked into the Holy of Holies, \u201cexpecting to see a glorious statue\u201d. Actually, Pompey and his contemporaries expected to find there a donkey\u2019s head. The temple built by the bloody tyrant was outdated even as it was constructed: a Hindenburg<\/a> Zeppelin, the last great dinosaur – for the long era of animal sacrifices, of slaughtered sheep and goats was over. The Jerusalem temple never was rebuilt because there were no Jews keen on going back into sacrifices \u2013 but Goldhill does not even understand that.<\/p>\n

Speaking of the Herodian temple, Goldhill tells of \u201cperhaps the most evocative new inscription to be found in Jerusalem, saying \u2018to the trumpet-call building\u2019\u201d. In my view, the most evocative new inscription found there reads “No Gentile may enter beyond the dividing wall into the court around the Holy Place; whoever is caught will be to blame for his subsequent death.” One would think that Goldhill, who noticed that Jews were not let into the Church of Holy Sepulchre, should notice this inscription in Greek he knows. <\/p>\n

If he fails with the Christian holy sites through lack of feeling, he fails the Muslim sites due to lack of historical perspective. He writes: \u201cthe Dome of the Rock was built to express Muslim supremacy over the Jews by building on this site\u201d. Wrong. In the glorious days of Umayyads, Muslims had no need to waste time and effort to express supremacy over the Jews, for the Jews were of very little importance. They were yesterday\u2019s threat and yesterday\u2019s people, small and nasty, rather inconsequential if anything. For a modern professor from Jewish-dominated academe such a thought just could not occur, but Jews practically disappeared at that time. Some embraced Christianity, others embraced Islam, negligible numbers faded away in the steppes to the north of Caucasus or in the fringes of Sahara. Seventh-century Caliphs would sooner express their superiority over mice.<\/p>\n

The Muslims, and the Christians, and the Jews did compete over legacy of the Children of Israel, semi-mythic people described in the Bible. All of them claimed they are the rightful heirs of Abraham, Moses, Solomon. By building on the Temple Mount, the Muslims proclaimed their theology of continuity and supercession. Islam did not position itself as a new faith, but as a return to true faith of Abraham, Moses, Solomon, supposedly distorted by Jews and Christians. <\/p>\n

By building the Noble Sanctuary on the place of Solomon\u2019s Temple, the Muslims had \u201crebuilt the Temple\u201d, fulfilling dreams of the Jews \u2013 and that is why the vast majority of Jews had accepted Islam. Haram a-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary is the Temple Rebuilt<\/b>. Until 19th century, this was the predominant thought. That is why the Crusaders called it Templum Solomonis, and so did the Jews. On the Eastern wall of an 18th c synagogue in Safed, the Temple is depicted: and it is the Dome of the Rock. A Columbus contemporary, a Renaissance Jewish historian Abraham Zacuto<\/a> (whose book I translated) also considered the Dome as the Temple rebuilt. Only in 19th century there was a paradigm shift, and Jews began to consider a new rebuilding.<\/p>\n

\u201cMuslims are instructed to make pilgrimage to the three holy cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem\u201d, writes Goldhill. It would be nice! We\u2019d have more tourists and pilgrims. Though one may find a Hadith transmitted by Abu Hurairah and included by Bukhari calling upon Muslims to visit Jerusalem in the name of the Prophet, it never became a commandment on a par with hajj to Mecca. In different times, Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem was more or less popular; rising to the top in Umayyad Caliphate, but since then, Jerusalem did not compete with Mecca, the only Hajj place. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Outside of Old City<\/b><\/div>\n

Goldhill expresses progressive views; he is quite a reasonable liberal man of Obama and Blair\u2019s days. Not a fanatic, not a Jewish Nationalist-Likudnik. The book was endorsed by a Palestinian professor, Sari Nusseibeh. Goldhill sticks to the left-Zionist narrative, even if it means adhering to a factual error.<\/p>\n

* \u201cPalestinians complain bitterly of what they term the ongoing \u2018Judaisation\u2019\u201d, he says. However, the term is not theirs \u2013 \u2018Judaisation\u2019 (or \u2018Yehud\u2019 in Hebrew) is the official Zionist policy, freely used and espoused by Israeli Jews.<\/p>\n

* Hamas would bar any Jew from owning any property in Palestine, he writes. He does not tell us that religious Jews would bar any non-Jew from owning any property in Palestine, as well. <\/p>\n

* He calls the Deir Yassin murderers \u2013 \u201cIsraelis\u201d. The correct term is \u201cJews\u201d, as the massacre took place in April 1948, before the state of Israel was created.<\/p>\n

* In the same sentence, he refers to Jewish \u201cviolent underground groups\u201d and Arab \u201cterrorist groups\u201d, though the Jews did not mind the name of \u2018terrorist\u2019 being attached to them.<\/p>\n

* In late 19th century, population of Jerusalem was predominantly Jewish, he writes. This is true, but the Jews were not citizens but foreigners. Likewise, during important holidays population of Santiago de Compostella or Canterbury consists of foreigners. <\/p>\n

* The last German settlers were deported by the British, he says. No, the last ones were murdered by Jews in the wave of ethnic cleansing.<\/p>\n

Such small but annoyingly tendentious statements are plentiful. There are many places in Jerusalem which are \u201cmust\u201d and he misses them. The Mount of Olives, Talbiye, Monastery of the Cross are very relevant and important for a non-Jewish visitor, while a visiting American Jew usually is satisfied with seeing the Wailing Wall and the Holocaust Museum.<\/p>\n

Let us conclude: it is a reasonably good book for a liberal British or American Jewish visitor to Jerusalem. The best for a Catholic reader or a pilgrim is the exhaustive, many times republished, guide book by Fr. Eugene Hoade OFM. <\/p>\n

—————<\/p>\n

Israel Shamir is an author of the Pine and the Olive<\/i>, a comprehensive guide book for Jerusalem and the Holy Land, available in Russian and French. Besides being a writer, he is a practicing guide for tourists and pilgrims in Israel\/Palestine. His email is Israel.shamir@gmail.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I walk it almost every day, and the Old City shopkeepers and artisans call me out, \u201cAhalan, Shamir!\u201d They all know me because I am a guide, guiding discerning travellers about town<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Miscellaneous"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}