Inside
the Dome of the Rock.
The
Kotel, also known as the Western Wall or the Wailing Wall.
Abraham,
or Ibrahim in the Koran, is usually considered the ancestor of both Jews and Arabs
Aerial view of Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif from the southwest.
Reconstruction of the Second Herodian Temple, by Israeli archaeologist Leen Ritmeyer,
1977.
Inside the Al-Aqsa mosque.
Can the two sides share these strata of historically interwoven masonry steeped in
such passionate
emotion?
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UNESCO
and Jerusalem’s Old City
UNESCO has
regularly been asked since 1967, chiefly by Arab countries, to help “preserve the
cultural heritage of East Jerusalem,” which includes the Old City and the Temple
Mount, the Haram. At UNESCO’s general conference in fall 1999, they reiterated a
request that “no measure and no action likely to modify the religious, cultural,
historical and demographic character of the city or the overall balance of the site
be taken.”
This appeal was mainly based on the fact that the United Nations considers Jerusalem
to be “an occupied city.” Those seeking UNESCO’s help cite the 1954 Hague Convention
for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and the 1972
Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Jerusalem
has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981 and on the List of World Heritage
in Danger since 1982. The 1972 Convention requires the country responsible for a
site to ensure it is not damaged or altered.
The Arab countries are mainly concerned about the measures taken by the Israeli authorities
in the Old City, especially those involving population changes and archaeological
digs. “In the Middle East conflict, each side establishes its legitimacy by digging
into the ground,” wrote Jacques Tarnero, of the Paris-based Interdisciplinary Research
Centre on Jews and Diasporas. “Symbolic and archaeological strata signal the precedence
of one side over the other.”
The Israelis want excavations to help reconstruct the history of their holy places.
In principle, they cannot undertake them because a 1956 New Delhi recommendation
by UNESCO forbids an occupying power from doing this kind of work. The Muslim authorities
fear Israeli excavations will undermine the foundations of the esplanade and cause
the mosques to collapse.
Israel rejects these criticisms, and says they have more to do with politics than
preserving heritage. The current Israeli ambassador to UNESCO says that in current
negotiations on the matter, “any move… by an outside body, especially an international
organization like UNESCO, would create ill feeling and be considered an unwelcome
interference.”
UNESCO decisions on the issue are based on the opinions of experts. The next such
mission to Israel, to be led by Professor Oleg Grabar, is awaiting the green light
from Israeli
authorities.
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In
a small precinct of Jerusalem’s Old City, 4,000 years of history have generated a
religious, symbolic and mythical intensity unmatched anywhere in the world
Israelis and Palestinians
do agree upon at least one point: their most recent negotiations at Camp David stumbled
over the future status of Jerusalem, and especially a tiny 15-hectare area—a precinct
perhaps more holy, sacred and exalted in the eyes of several religions than any other
in the world.
The heart of the problem—a quasi-rectangular area measuring just under 500 metres
by 300, carved out of the rock at its northern end and elevated on the east and west
sides where the land slopes—is about a fifth of Jerusalem’s Old City, forming its
southeast corner.
Temple Mount to the Jews and the Haram al-Sharif (The Noble Sanctuary) to Muslims
forms a platform that seems suspended in the air: its walls, sometimes rising up
40 metres, tower above the entire Old City and far beyond.
The approaching tourist, pilgrim or worshipper is confronted by these colossal walls
of hewn stone blocks up to 10 metres long. They were built under Herod the Great.
Recognized by the Romans as king of the Jews, he rebuilt the top of the Jewish temple
from 19 B.C. and completed most of the reconstruction by around 9 A.D.
Detailed descriptions have survived which talk of the temple’s size and splendour—50
metres long, wide and high, on an esplanade bordered by hundreds of white marble
columns, some of them 30 metres high. Giant doors and stairways led out onto the
square itself. But after a fire started by the legions of the Roman emperor Titus
in 70 A.D., what remains of this building besides religious beliefs, myths and even
ideology, all of them stronger and more powerful than before? No trace of the Temple
has been found. From Herod’s building, only a few large gateways and most of the
walls have survived.
One part of the walls, on the west side, was called the Wailing Wall by Christians
in the Middle Ages. The Jews simply refer to it as the Western Wall (the Kotel),
the place where they came to pray and mourn. For centuries they have considered it
the holiest place of Judaism. Some say it was built on the foundations of the wall
around the first Jewish Temple. Archaeologists, however, think the only remains of
this earlier wall are actually part of the present eastern wall.
“And behold, I propose to build a house for the name of the Lord my God, as the Lord
spoke to my father David, saying ‘Your son, whom I will set on your throne in your
place, he shall build the house for My name.’”
Thus spoke Solomon, son of King David, who united the 12 tribes of Israel into a
kingdom with Jerusalem as the capital. Solomon bought a hill called Mount Moriah
and it was there, more than 3,000 years ago, that he built the first Jewish temple,
between 960 and 953 B.C. Its dimensions might have been modest—only about 30 metres
by 10 wide and 15 metres high—but literary sources praise the splendour of its interior
decorations made of gold, silver, bronze and Lebanese cedarwood.
An
eternal Covenant and rules to respect
Above
all else, it housed at its centre the Ark of the Covenant, placed inside the Holy
of Holies whose sole entrance was a door that from the 6th century B.C. only the
high priest could pass through. It was the home of the Eternal.
The Ark enclosed the two blocks of stone—the Tablets of the Law—which Moses received
from God on Mount Sinai. These sealed the Covenant between a “chosen people” and
the single God of the Israelites, whom they later proclaimed the sole God of all
humanity. Monotheism was born.
The Covenant was a contract. God ordered the faithful: “You shall have no other gods
before me” and “you shall not make graven images,” and laid down the main moral and
liturgical rules. If they respected God’s law, the faithful would not only become
“a great nation” living in happiness and prosperity, but God would also give them
a land of their own.
Because the Covenant was eternal, they would own the land for eternity. If they carried
out their divine obligations, they could live there. If they did not, God who gave
the land could take it back and relinquish his people to the miseries of exile. But
an eventual return was promised: “if you return to Me, and keep My commandments and
do them, though some of you were cast out to the farthest part of the heavens, yet
I will gather them from there, and bring them to the place which I have chosen as
a dwelling for My name.”
Exiles there were. Israelites from the northern kingdom of Samaria were exiled in
Assyria seven centuries before Christ. Jews from Judea were exiled in Babylon after
the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B.C. And after the destruction
of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 A.D., Jews were exiled for nearly 2,000
years. During all this time, religious Jews implored God, three times a day, 365
days a year, to restore the Temple and thus the Covenant between God, them and their
land, at the centre of which was Temple Mount.
“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, Let my right hand forget its skill! If I do not remember
you, Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth” (Psalm 137). These words are recited
at every Jewish marriage.
Where exactly was the First Temple? Historians and archaeologists generally agree
it was on Mount Moriah. The Altar of Holocausts was probably at the very top, in
line with the rules of the time about choosing the site of a shrine and erecting
it. There is a rock on the Mount that the Torah—the first five books of the Bible—says
was the rock where Abraham proved, 1,000 years before it was written, that he worshipped
God to the point of being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac. The first Covenant was
made.
Abraham—or Ibrahim in the Koran—is usually considered the ancestor of both Jews and
Arabs. More than 2,000 years later, it was from this same rock, according to Muslim
tradition, that the Prophet Mohamed, arriving from Mecca after a mystical night journey,
ascended to heaven. The faithful can see the supposed venerated footprint of the
Prophet.
In 638, Caliph Umar conquered Jerusalem. The esplanade the Arabs discovered was by
now a wasteground littered with ruins and had not been used for religious purposes
for centuries, as if to signify that the city had lost its Jewish character. Written
sources say that the esplanade was even used as a rubbish dump after serving as the
site of a Roman temple.
Later writings described how Umar cleaned up the esplanade and the rock. Since then,
because more remains have been found, speculation has given way to certainty. Construction
work and what one would call today restoration were done to make the esplanade a
religious and social centre for the new Muslim community. It was enlarged over several
centuries.
The
Haram takes its present-day shape
The
southern and eastern walls were partly rebuilt. The two present-day platforms on
the esplanade were laid out. It was probably on the southernmost of the two that
the first mosque—in fact just a shelter to keep the sun off worshippers—was built,
the Al-Aqsa mosque (“the furthest mosque” in Arabic). On the other higher platform,
the Dome of the Rock was built soon afterwards, around the turn of the 7th and 8th
centuries. Ever since then, its dome, atop an octagonal building which Suleyman the
Magnificent later adorned with coloured tiles that are still there, has towered over
the Haram and nearly all of the city and its suburbs. The Al-Aqsa mosque was then
rebuilt several times.
The Crusaders (1099-1187) took over the entire esplanade but did not permanently
alter it. When Saladin recaptured Jerusalem from them, he removed all trace of their
presence and restored the buildings to their previous state. It was his dynasty,
the Ayyubids, and then above all the Mamluks, rulers from the 13th century to the
beginning of the 16th, who transformed the Haram into what it is today.
They increased the number of places for prayer and built religious schools (madrasas),
along with libraries, retirement homes and hostels for pilgrims. The Haram now had
both religious and secular buildings, which jutted out over the edge of the walls.
The Koran makes no clear reference to Jerusalem as a holy place. At the outset, Muslims
were to face towards the city when they begin to pray. But right from the start,
the mosque the Koran calls “the furthest sanctuary,” where it says the Prophet went
after his celestial journey from Mecca, was associated with the holy places that
were developing in Jerusalem.
Then, probably from the 8th century, the stories of the mystical journey and of Mohamed’s
ascent merged and a very powerful emotional, intellectual, religious and personal
link grew between al-Quds (“the holy”), which is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, and
the Muslims.
3,000
years of demolition, rebuilding and restoration
It
became the third holiest city of Islam, after Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia, and
a very important place of pilgrimage. Some Muslims believe that the Kaaba, the construction
that stands in the centre of the mosque in Mecca and which contains the Black Stone
attributed to Ibrahim, will be transported at the end of time to stand near the Dome
of the Rock. There, all Muslims will face God on Judgment Day.
The Haram, the Temple Mount, has seen never-ending construction, demolition, rebuilding
and restoration for nearly 3,000 years now. The same stones have perhaps been used
in the same places to build temples both to pagan gods and to the one God of the
world’s three monotheistic religions.
Over the centuries, the various masters of the city, because they were always both
religious and secular, erased all trace of their conquered predecessors and used
new monumental buildings to flaunt their power on the esplanade overlooking the entire
city.
This Jerusalem, around which exiled Jews built their identity, was a celestial one.
“Somewhere between heaven and earth, often closer to heaven than earth, Zion [a hill
near Temple Mount] beckoned and gave meaning to the lives” of these exiles, say Jean-Christophe
Attias and Esther Benbassa, authors of a recent article in the French magazine Notre
Histoire.
From the end of the 19th century, the Zionist movement, although mostly composed
of secular Jews, “made the ancient myths relevant to the present day” and “took possession
of the holiness of the land,” according to Attias and Benbassa. Jerusalem was seen
as both a physical and a celestial place, as a promised land and a national territory.
Compromise
vs coexistence:resolving religious conflict
In
1980, the Israeli parliament decreed that “all of reunified Jerusalem is the capital
of Israel.” At the same time, nationalism was rising among the Palestinians, partly
in response to the Israeli move, and one of their principal goals became the proclamation
of Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. The Umma, the worldwide
Muslim community, insisted that the Haram was inalienable.
Temple Mount or the Haram: today this site is doubly sacred to the faithful and to
many non-religious people, and sometimes exploited by two nationalist currents. Will
there be a conclusion where one side wins all and the other agrees to lose everything?
Can the two sides share these strata of historically interwoven masonry steeped in
such passionate emotion? Shimon Peres, who as Israeli foreign minister was one of
the architects of the Oslo Accords, is fond of pointing out that political conflicts
can be solved by compromise, but religious ones can only be settled through coexistence.
1This article
is based on the work of Oleg Grabar, an Islamic art expert who is professor emeritus
at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University (U.S.), and of Ernest-Marie
Laperrousaz, honorary professor in the religious studies department of the École
Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and author of a 1999 book about the
temples of Jerusalem.
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Landmarks
• circa
2000 B.C.: according to the Bible, Abraham leaves on God’s orders to the Promised
Land chosen for him, which stretches between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean.
This same biblical source states that Abraham was ready to sacrifice his son Isaac
to God from the rock at the summit of what will become known as Temple Mount or Haram
al-Sharif.
• circa 1200 B.C.: Moses receives the Tablets of the Law from God on Mount Sinai.
• circa 953 B.C.: the construction of the First Temple is completed under the
reign of King Solomon.
• circa 587 B.C: destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar.
• 515 B.C.: the construction of the Second Temple is completed.
• from 19 B.C. to A.D. 64: reconstruction of the Second Temple under King Herod
the Great. The size of the working site led some to believe that he had in fact built
a Third Temple.
• 70: destruction of the Second Temple.
• 132-134: theories point to the construction of a new Temple, which would have
been the fourth one.
• 632: death of the Prophet Mohamed. According to Muslim belief, he rose to
the sky from the rock on the esplanade following a mystical night journey from Mecca.
• 638: Caliph Umar seizes Jerusalem and builds a first mosque there.
• 691-92: construction of the Dome of the Rock.
• 1099-1187: the Crusaders occupy Jerusalem.
• 1187-beginning of the 16th century: the Ayyubid dynasty and to a greater extent
the Mamluks (from 1250) give the Esplanade, in particular the Al-Aqsa Mosque, its
current features.
• 1917: beginning of the British mandate over Jerusalem.
• 1948: following the first Arab-Israeli war, West Jerusalem is annexed by Israel
and East Jerusalem, which is home to the Old City, comes under Jordanian administration.
• 1967: Israel seizes East Jerusalem.
• According to the Jewish religion, the Third Temple will be constructed once
the Messiah arrives.
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