Introduction

      In Jerusalem, more than in any other place I have visited, history is a dimension of the present. Perhaps this is so in any disputed territory, but it struck me forcibly the first time I went to work in Jerusalem in 1983. First, I was surprised by the strength of my own reaction to the city. It was strange to be walking around a place that had been an imaginative reality in my life ever since I was a small child and had been told tales of King David or Jesus. As a young nun, I was taught to begin my morning meditation by picturing the biblical scene I was about to contemplate, and so conjured up my own image of the Garden of Gethsemane, the Mount of Olives, or the Via Dolorosa. Now that I was going about my daily business among these very sites, I discovered that the real city was a far more tumultuous and confusing place. I had, for example, to take in the fact that Jerusalem was clearly very important to Jews and Muslims too. When I saw caftaned Jews or tough Israeli soldiers kissing the stones of the Western Wall or watched the crowds of Muslim families surging through the streets in their best clothes for Friday prayers at the Haram al-Sharif, I became aware for the first time of the challenge of religious pluralism. People could see the same symbol in entirely different ways. There was no doubting the attachment of any of these people to their holy city, yet they had been quite absent from my Jerusalem. Still, the city remained mine as well: my old images of biblical scenes were a constant counterpoint to my firsthand experience of twentieth-century Jerusalem. Associated with some of the most momentous events of my life, Jerusalem was somehow built into my own identity.

      Yet as a British citizen, I had no political claim to the city, unlike my new colleagues and friends in Jerusalem. Here again, as Israelis and Palestinians presented their arguments to me, I was struck by the vivid immediacy of past events. All could cite, in sometimes minute detail, the events leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 or the Six-Day War in 1967. Frequently I noted how these depictions of the past centered on the question of who had done what first. Who had been the first to resort to violence, the Zionists or the Arabs? Who had first noticed the potential of Palestine and developed the country? Who had lived in Jerusalem first, the Jews or the Palestinians? When they discussed the troubled present, both Israelis and Palestinians turned instinctively to the past, their polemic coursing easily from the Bronze Age through the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Again, when Israelis and Palestinians proudly showed me around their city, the very monuments were drawn into the conflict.

      On my first morning in Jerusalem, I was instructed by my Israeli colleagues how to spot the stones used by King Herod, with their distinctively beveled edges. They seemed ubiquitous and a perpetual reminder of a Jewish commitment to Jerusalem that could be dated back (in this case) to the first century BCE—long before Islam appeared on the scene. Constantly, as we passed construction crews in the Old City, I was told how Jerusalem had been utterly neglected by the Ottomans when they had ruled the city. It had come to life again only in the nineteenth century, thanks, largely, to Jewish investment—look at the windmill built by Sir Moses Montefiore and the hospitals funded by the Rothschild family. It was due to Israel that the city was thriving as never before.

      My Palestinian friends showed me a very different Jerusalem. They pointed out the splendors of the haram al-Sharif and the exquisite madāris, Muslim schools, built around its borders by the Mamluks as evidence of the Muslim commitment to Jerusalem. They took me to the shrine of Nebī Musa near Jericho, built to defend Jerusalem against the Christians, and the extraordinary Umayyad palaces nearby. When we drove through Bethlehem once, my Palestinian host stopped the car beside Rachel’s roadside tomb to point out passionately that the Palestinians had cared for this Jewish shrine for centuries—a pious devotion for which they had been ill rewarded.

      One word kept recurring throughout. Even the most secular Israelis and Palestinians pointed out that Jerusalem was “holy” to their people. The Palestinians even called the city al-Quds, “the Holy,” though the Israelis scornfully waved this aside, pointing out that Jerusalem had been a holy city for Jews first, and that it had never been as important to the Muslims as Mecca and Medina. But what did the word “holy” mean in this context? How could a mere city, full of fallible human beings and teeming with the most unholy activities, be sacred? Why did those Jews who professed a militant atheism care about the holy city and feel so possessive about the Western Wall? Why should an unbelieving Arab be moved to tears the first time he stood in the Mosque of al-Aqsā? I could see why the city was holy to Christians, since Jerusalem had been the scene of Jesus’s death and resurrection: it had witnessed the birth of the faith. But the formative events of both Judaism and Islam had happened far away from Jerusalem, in the Sinai Peninsula or the Arabian Hijaz. Why, for example, was Mount Zion in Jerusalem a holy place for Jews instead of Mount Sinai, where God had given the Law to Moses and made his covenant with Israel? Clearly, I had been wrong to assume that the holiness of a city depended upon its associations with the events of salvation history, the mythical account of God’s intervention in the affairs of humanity. It was to find out what a holy city was that I decided to write this book.

      What I have discovered is that even though the word “holy” is bandied around freely in connection with Jerusalem, as though its meaning were self-evident, it is in fact quite complex. Each one of the three monotheistic religions has developed traditions about the city that are remarkably similar. Furthermore, the devotion to a holy place or a holy city is a near-universal phenomenon. Historians of religion believe that it is one of the earliest manifestations of faith in all cultures. People have developed what has been called a sacred geography that has nothing to do with a scientific map of the world but which charts their interior life. Earthly cities, groves, and mountains have become symbols of this spirituality, which is so omnipresent that it seems to answer a profound human need, whatever our beliefs about “God” or the supernatural. Jerusalem has—for different reasons—become central to the sacred geography of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. This makes it very difficult for them to see the city objectively, because it has become bound up with their conception of themselves and the ultimate reality—sometimes called “God” or the sacred—that gives our mundane life meaning and value.

      There are three interconnected concepts that will recur in the following pages. First is the whole notion of God or the sacred. In the Western world, we have tended to view God in a rather anthropomorphic and personalized manner, and as a result, the whole notion of the divine frequently appears incoherent and incredible. Since the word “God” has become discredited to many people because of the naïve and often unacceptable things that have been asserted and done in “his” name, it may be easier to use the term “sacred” instead. When they have contemplated the world, human beings have always experienced a transcendence and mystery at the heart of existence. They have felt that it is deeply connected with themselves and with the natural world, but that it also goes beyond. However we choose