Walking about Jerusalem
By Israel Shamir
[Review of Simon Goldhill’s book
Jerusalem. City of Longing, published in a E. Michael
Jones’ Catholic monthly
Culture Wars]
Jerusalem is a wonderful city to walk
about in, enjoying its perennial blue and high sky, its warm
and pure mountain air, its cool and refreshing shade, its
delicious water, - listening to the church bells and
muezzin’s calls. I walk about in it almost every day, and
the Old City shopkeepers and artisans call out to me:
“Ahalan, Shamir!” They all know me because I am a guide,
escorting 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 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
Gethsemane, and I share with them my excitement in the Noble
Sanctuary. I walk the young through the narrow 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.
We guides are quite a friendly lot,
friendly to tourists and friendly to each other. It was my
pleasure to review the guidebook Jerusalem: City of
Longing written by Simon Goldhill, who for sure loves
Jerusalem. This is his second book on the city; the first
one dealt with the Jerusalem temple. I also wrote a book
about the Holy Land, as many guides have done, so I am aware
of the pitfalls. 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 at 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’s Odyssey. His
beautifully printed and impeccably designed book aims to
explain Jerusalem to the not-very-religious visitor, and it
provides quite pleasant reading material. It contains a
wealth of interesting quotes and nice stories; the author is
a man of learning who tries to be fair.
Regretably, 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 have eliminated. The author writes: “Herod Agrippa
extended the city walls in 414” – this 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
the early Zionists “A land without a people for a people
without a land”, which was actually coined some fifty years
earlier by Israel Zangwill, if not by some earlier and more
obscure personality.
The Holy Sepulchre
Goldhill’s description of the Holy
Sepulchre is marred by his lack of religious feeling towards
it. He brutally calls it “small, brown, and undistinguished
as a duck.” (He finds the Wailing Wall, however, “an
impressive edifice”). 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 “Mary Magdalene, the
former prostitute”, language meant to offend. (Silly, too –
there were no prostitutes before advent of capitalism, as a
Cambridge professor should know.)
He is unfair to the beautiful and
touching ceremony of the Holy Fire, celebrated on Easter
Saturday according to the Julian calendar: “the reaction of
the community is startling, even frightening”. I have
participated in the ceremony many times, and have always
found it uplifting and exciting, though frequently marred by
the heavy-handedness of the Jewish police.
In the Holy Sepulchre, he notes that “one
of the chants regularly heard in the 19th century was: Oh
the Jews, your feast is the feast of devils [rather,
‘demons’ according to St John Chrysostom – ISH] and our
feast is the feast of Christ”. Goldhill misses the point: in
that century, the Christians and the Jews were two competing
and quarrelling ancient minorities in a Muslim sea. Jews
were as powerful, and often more powerful than the Christian
communities, and the Jewish prayers (in the 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 to be poured on
Christians and describes the Crucifix as an idol.
In the parvis of the Holy Sepulchre he
asks the reader to remember “the fact that until 1967 no Jew
was allowed even into the parvis.” A man of his – and our –
time and place, Goldhill does not even understand that
people may be serious about their religious feelings. A
traditional believing Jew – and there were no other Jews
until fairly recently – 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
should find himself in the parvis, his faith would require
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 today's
Jewish security guards would not let an Arab enter the
Wailing Wall plaza, and they would demand from a Christian
that he remove or hide his cross “in the interests of
keeping peace”, as they demanded of the Pope.
The beautiful Crusader lintels of the
Church were taken in 1929 to the Palestine Museum for
repairs, and never returned. “The museum has constructed
excellent replicas… but the Greek Orthodox patriarchate
blocked the return (? - ISH) of the lintels” – writes
Goldhill. I wonder whether he would accept “excellent
replicas” instead of the real things if he were their
owner. The introduction of fakes [replicas] cannot be
described as “return of the lintels”. This is not an unusual
turn of events – 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 things.
The Wailing Wall
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 any of
the competing narratives, nor does he wish to “slip into the
aggressive and naïve stereotypes of identity politics: he is
a Jew/Arab/Muslim/”; he would like the book “to stand out
against such reductive and coercive postures”.
One could applaud his intentions, were
they supported by his actions. However, declarations aside,
he slips into “the aggressive and naïve stereotypes of
identity politics” pretty soon. On p. 71 he improbably
claims that “some recent Muslim writers deny that there ever
was a Temple [of Solomon]… 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”.
This is worse than stereotyping, this is
ignorance. Who is “myth-writing” – scholars who interpret
real finds on the ground or writers who just follow the Good
Book? Practically all modern archaeologists – including
mainstream Israeli Jewish ones - doubt that there ever was a
Temple or a kingdom of Solomon; but leading doubters, nay,
deniers, are not “Muslim writers” who tend to affirm this
part of Biblical narrative for reasons of faith (Solomon is
mentioned favourably in the Koran), but lay scientists,
British and American, beginning with Copenhagen University
Professor
Thomas L. Thompson,
“one of the world’s leading Biblical archaeologists”, who
wrote:
“There is no evidence of a capital in Jerusalem; nor do we
have evidence for any temple at Jerusalem in this early
period.” Other leading scholars of similar views are Niels
Peter Lemche, Keith Whitelam, and Philip Davies, hardly
Muslim names.
One does not have to agree with them; one
may narrate the 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 the King Arthur stories. But his attribution of the
archaeologists’ views to some “Muslim writers” smacks of
prejudice, while the claim that “it would be unnecessary to
take them seriously” 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’s Temple. Though Goldhill’s mentor, Dr.
Dever (“Plague”), an important Jewish American archaeologist
of the elder generation, already has claimed that these
deniers are antisemites, our Dr Goldhill goes him one better
by implying that they are terrorist supporters.
Goldhill’s understanding of modern, as
well as ancient history is somewhat insufficient. He thinks
that the conflict between quarrelsome Catholics and the
Orthodox in the Holy Sepulchre has been so severe, that in
1852 the Sultan was forced to establish the Status Quo
agreement. The reader may wonder why it hadn’t happened in
the preceding hundreds of years. The Status Quo was
established because of the foreign powers’ meddling (with
Russia supporting the Orthodox, France supporting the
Catholics and England playing its imperial game) which
brought forth the Crimean War and endangered Turkey. Local
quarrels were not all that bad and they would never have
forced the Sultan’s hand.
Sometimes, Goldhill’s elegant writing
seem to be inspired by the IDF spokesmen’s terse prose.
Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents “is blamed” on Herod, (by
some antisemites, presumably, eager to blame a Jewish
ruler). A là the present Israeli foreign minister
Lieberman, he stresses that “the Mufti, the Arab religious
leader of Jerusalem, became a close ally and supporter of
Hitler”, but he avoids mentioning the Mufti’s Jewish
contemporaries, such as Arlozorov, the Zionist Labour
leader, who went to Berlin to embrace Hitler, to court Magda
Goebbels, 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 those days, or hoped to be
supported by him – especially if they were dissatisfied with
the British Empire’s way of running things.
During the 1929 riots, “135 Jews were
murdered, 116 Arabs were killed”. This is so
typical: Jews are always “murdered”, goyim are just
“killed”. In accordance with the Jewish interpretation of
the Decalogue, only a Jew can be ‘murdered’. Goldhill
accepts the Zionist narrative. He refers to “Jewish
worshippers [who] wanted to take some chairs for the
elderly” as the reason for the riots. It is well
established that the 1929 riots were instigated by 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, Guardian correspondent David
Hirst’s The Gun and the Olive Branch (Faber and
Faber, 2003). This was also the conclusion of the official
enquiry.
With callous disregard, Goldhill writes
about the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter of the Old
City in 1967: “[S]ome two hundred very poor [Palestinian]
dwellings… were cleared away in order to open the plaza in
front of the Wall for the thousands of new [Jewish]
visitors”. No empathy for these poor – 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 the destruction
of a girls’ school for orphans that stood nearby. Goldhill
does not notice that it undermines his own story: what began
as “some chairs for the elderly” continued as the “slum
clearance” of hundreds of houses, and it still awaits for
the grand finale of the temple building on top of the
mosque’s ruins.
With
Bernard Lewis-style
cheap sophistry, Goldhill evokes “14th century
Persian Islamic art which had no problem with representing
the Prophet – despite the vitriolic (sic! – ISH) response to
modern drawings of Muhammad by contemporary Muslim
protesters”. By “modern drawings of Muhammad” he means the
insulting
cartoons
published by the Danish Jewish Neocon editor, forsooth a fit
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 – and they gave quite a vitriolic response
to modern drawings of Holocaust in the
International Holocaust Cartoon
Competition.
The Noble Sanctuary
Goldhill is an expert on the Jewish
temple and he is predictably partial to it: he tells of
Jewish dreams to have it rebuilt, of Pompey who walked into
the Holy of Holies, “expecting to see a glorious statue”.
Actually, Pompey and his contemporaries expected to find
there a donkey’s head. The temple built by the bloody tyrant
was outdated even as it was constructed: a
Hindenburg
Zeppelin, a 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 – but Goldhill does
not even understand that.
Speaking of the Herodian temple, Goldhill
tells of “perhaps the most evocative new inscription to be
found in Jerusalem, reading ‘to the trumpet-call building’”.
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 the
Greek that he knows.
If he fails the Christian holy sites
through lack of feeling, he fails the Muslim sites due to
lack of historical perspective. He writes: “the Dome of the
Rock was built to express Muslim supremacy over the Jews by
building on this site”. 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’s threat and
yesterday’s people, small and nasty, rather inconsequential
if anything. For a modern professor from Jewish-dominated
acadème 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 the Caucasus or in
the fringes of Sahara. Seventh-century Caliphs would sooner
have expressed their superiority over mice.
The Muslims, and the Christians, and the
Jews did compete over the legacy of the Children of Israel,
the semi-mythical people described in the Bible. All of them
claimed they were the rightful heirs of Abraham, Moses and
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 the true faith of Abraham, Moses and Solomon,
supposedly distorted by Jews and Christians.
By building the Noble Sanctuary in the
place of Solomon’s Temple, the Muslims had “rebuilt the
Temple”, fulfilling the dreams of the Jews – and that is why
the vast majority of Jews had accepted Islam. Haram
a-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary is the Temple Rebuilt.
Until the 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, Renaissance
Jewish historian Abraham
Zacuto
(whose book I translated), also considered the Dome as the
Temple rebuilt. Only in the 19th century was
there a paradigm shift, and Jews began to consider a new
rebuilding.
“Muslims are instructed to make
pilgrimage to the three holy cities of Mecca, Medina and
Jerusalem”, writes Goldhill. That would be nice! We’d 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 has not competed with Mecca, the only
Hajj place.
Outside of Old City
Goldhill expresses progressive views; he
is quite the reasonable liberal man of Obama and Blair’s
days. Not a fanatic, not a Jewish Nationalist-Likudnik. The
book was endorsed by a Palestinian professor, Sari
Nusseibeh. The author sticks to the left-Zionist narrative,
even if it means adhering to factual error:
* “Palestinians complain bitterly of what
they term the ongoing ‘Judaisation’”, he says. However, the
term is not theirs – ‘Judaisation’ (or ‘Yehud’ in Hebrew) is
the official Zionist policy, freely used and espoused by
Israeli Jews.
* 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.
* He calls the Deir Yassin murderers –
“Israelis”. The correct term is “Jews”, as the massacre took
place in April 1948, before the state of Israel was created.
* In the same sentence, he refers to
Jewish “violent underground groups” and Arab “terrorist
groups”, though the Jews did not mind having the name of
‘terrorist’ attached to them.
* In late 19th century, the
population of Jerusalem was predominantly Jewish, he writes.
This is true, but the Jews were not citizens but foreigners.
Likewise, during important holidays the population of
Santiago de Compostela or Canterbury consists of foreigners.
* The last German settlers were deported
by the British, he says. No, the last ones were murdered by
Jews in a wave of ethnic cleansing.
Such small but annoyingly tendentious
statements are plentiful. There are many places in Jerusalem
which are “must-see” and he misses them. The Mount of
Olives, Talbiye and the Monastery of the Cross are very
relevant and important for the non-Jewish visitor, while a
visiting American Jew usually is satisfied with seeing the
Wailing Wall and the Holocaust Museum.
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.
---------------
Israel Shamir is an author of the Pine
and the Olive, 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
Simon Goldhill replied:
Dear Culture
Wars,
Shamir's review of my book "Longing for Jerusalem" is so
hysterical, ill-informed and biased that it is barely worth
replying to. "Silly", he sniffs, "there were no prostitutes
before capitalism, as a Cambridge Professor should know".
Hmmm. This Cambridge Professor wonders what all those Greek,
Latin and Biblical descriptions of prostitutes are on about.
But I am afraid that that sort of bizarre, patronizing and
ignorant comment is the level of the review's discussion.
Typically, he triumphantly quotes Thomas Thompson that "nor
do we have evidence for any Temple at Jerusalem at this
early period", and declares that I am thus guilty of
ignorance and stereotyping for suggesting that Muslim claims
that there was never any Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, are
politically motivated. What I wrote was (71): "There is no
material evidence existing today for the First Temple or for
its destruction". Sounds a bit like Thompson, no? I add (71)
"sceptical historians have not found it hard" to argue that
the wonderful golden Temple was " a dream of a glorious past
for a downtrodden people". Which is what "most modern
archaeologists" believe. I then add that the denial of any
Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, a very recent Muslim argument,
is politically motivated. After all, there simply was a very
old Jewish Temple there in the first century BCE which Herod
rebuilt. To deny it is not historically respectable.
The guide, like most guides, seems to see
only what he has been trained to see. So he rants that
everyone knows that the riots of 1929 were "instigated by
Zionist wannabe-Maccabees", and I must be spouting IDF
propaganda to deny it. Oddly, what I wrote (80) was "In
1929, with equal calculation, Jews marched to the wall and
waived Jewish flags and made nationalist speeches; Arabs,
fired up by a bloodthirsty speech from the Mufti,
responded...". My vocabulary is more dignified than his, I
admit, but I am not sure why he thinks I am in denial. I
think he is just very angry, and needs to read what he
thinks I must have wanted to say...
So when I said that the massacre of the Innocents is blamed
on Herod, it had nothing to do with anti-semitism as he
wildly asserts: it is a point about the unreliability of
historical sources about Herod. (Does any modern historian
believe that the Massacre of the Innocents is a historical
event?). When I said that the Mufti was a supporter of
Hitler and Nazi policy, it is part of an argument about why
he was exiled after the war and the failure of Arab
leadership, and has nothing to do with Lieberman, a man I
had not even heard of when the book was written! And so on.
The review is a mess.
And of course some of the motivation for such bad faith
writing comes across. Partly in his upset that I, like many
visitors, do not share his feelings about the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre. But perhaps most bizarrely in his two claims
that the Jewish population of Jerusalem in the 19th century
were just "foreigners" (like Christian pilgrims at
Campostella [sic!]) but also that the Jews in 19th-century
Jerusalem "were as powerful and often more powerful than the
Christian communities.". He just doesn't like the fact that
the Jews were an absolute majority of the population living
there, some of whom were immigrants, others long-resident
families.
You can't write about Jerusalem without getting involved in
politics, even and especially when writing about the past.
In Jerusalem, someone will shout at you for any expressed
opinion. I end the introduction to my book by saying "I will
just say that I have tried to be equally insulting to all
parties". At very least I seem to have succeeded with
Shamir.
Okay?
SDG
Shamir responds:
No, it is not okay, Prof Goldhill. The
problem is not the mental attitude of this reviewer, but
real faults of the book mirrored in your response.
-
One of them is certain shoddiness,
lack of care. This is felt in your response as well as
in the book. Every writer should check spelling, dates
and facts, before sending to print. In the book, there
was an impossible spelling of “Pantakrator” (instead of
Pantokrator). In the response, an equally impossible
misspelling of “Campostella” (should be Compostela). If
this is dyslexia, use speller-checker.
-
Check historical facts. In the
response you express wish to explain “why [the Mufti]
was exiled after the war”. You may learn that the
Mufti had to escape before the war, in 1937, and
never made back to Palestine. The Jews did not even
allow his body to be brought for burial in the city they
seized meanwhile.
-
You can’t believe the Jews “in the 19th
century Jerusalem were as powerful and often more
powerful than the Christian communities”. Apparently you
are taken in by the fairy tale of Jews being poor,
persecuted and wretched. However, fairy tales aside, we
have many witnesses of Jewish influence in 19th
century Palestine. The richest man in the land was
Farkhi, a Jew who “had more money than the Bank of
England”. Jews have occupied important positions in
Istanbul at the Sultan’s Court, and were as ready to
help their coreligionists in Jerusalem, as the US and
British Jews are today. European powers competed who
would show more generosity and patronage towards
Jerusalem Jews. For this reason, Jerusalem Jews indeed
preferred to keep their foreign citizenship and did not
become local citizens. For the same reason they could
not buy land: very few houses and very little land in
Jerusalem area actually belonged to Jews. Not that they
cared: majority of 19th century Jerusalem
Jews were old men who came to die and be buried in the
Holy Land.
-
You want to prove you are not in
denial of the cause for 1929 riots, but in your own
words, Jews have made “nationalist speeches” while Arabs
were “fired up by a bloodthirsty speech”. Jews are
merely “nationalist”, Arabs are “bloodthirsty”…
-
You think there were prostitutes in
ancient “Greek, Latin and Biblical” milieu. I wonder
whom you have in mind, women like Aspasia or Thais? If
they should be called “prostitutes”, one may call King
David and Agamemnon - “mafia dons”, or “top gangsters”.
Certainly, there were loose, sexually voracious women
and men in those days, but before capitalism and advent
of money as universal equivalent, no prostitution in
modern sense was feasible. But this is beside the point.
-
St Mary Magdalene in her youth “gave
herself wholly to the pleasures of the senses”, in words
of de Voragine’s Golden Legend, but nothing – in the
Gospels or in Tradition - hints or implies that she did
it for pecuniary gain. Christ said that all her sins
were forgiven her, because she loved much, and this
reasoning does not agree with the sordid picture drawn
by Prof Goldhill. One must be too Victorian even for
Cambridge to consider every woman who had extramarital
relationship – a prostitute. Moreover, both Christian
and Jewish traditions forbid reminding misdeeds of a
repentant sinner.
-
St Mary Magdalene is an object of
intense love and veneration for the Christians. They
remember that Christ admitted her to His friendship,
dwelt in her house and defended her, that she stood at
the foot of the Cross, anointed His dead body and was
the first witness of the risen Christ. For us Christians
she is not dead because saints are assured of eternal
life.
-
A man who intends to write about
Jerusalem must understand that he deals with the live
wire of live faith. “I have tried to be equally
insulting to all parties (says Goldhill), at very least
I seem to have succeeded with Shamir”. Insults mean
nothing, but he drops his insults so casually, without
even comprehending their severity, that this
insensitivity disqualifies him from writing about
Jerusalem. For this is not a fiery book written by
iconoclast, enemy of the Church, or a Voltaire – neither
by tormented suffering soul seeking God. It is a tepid
book by insensitive liberal, and “because you are tepid
– neither hot nor cold – I shall spit you out of my
mouth” (Rev 3:16).
-
But I do not want to conclude on this
severe note, for surely not everything is lost. I
applaud Goldhill’s honest and rather decent response; he
is certainly a man of good intentions. If he will
consider our remarks and correct his attitude, the next
edition of the book may be more successful.
Israel Shamir, Jaffa