Jerusalem: City of Longing, by Simon Goldhill

A tour guide, not a road map

Reviewed by Donald Macintyre
Friday, 30 May 2008
Independent.co.uk Web

Bookmark Simon Goldhill’s book on Jerusalem sets out to explore how
this "small, rather dirty and unimposing city, now sprawling far beyond
its historical boundaries" can "fire the imagination like no other".
Believing "we can understand the history through the buildings and…
the buildings through the history", he calls the outcome an exercise in
"historical urban geography" or a "tour guide for the thinking
visitor".

Because he mainly avoids, other than in passing, the most contemporary
manifestations of the anciently rooted but still all too dynamic
interplay of build- ings, religion and ideology in Jerusalem the
determined encroachment by Jewish settler groups on Arab quarters
inside and outside the Old City, to cite only one example the book is a
less complete fulfilment of his first description than his second.

Amiable as it is, it conveys a sense of what Arthur Koestler called the
"continuous waves of killing, rape and unholy misery over the centuries
in the Holy City". There is much less of the consciously present tense
in Koestler’s next sentence: "For those… who are inside it, matters
appear much simpler; constantly exposed to its radiations, they live in
holy blindness".

But the "thinking visitor" who wants to be steeped in the colourful
history of what he is seeing, while keeping it at a safe distance,
could do much worse than use this as a gently irreverent guide.
Goldhill has a sharp eye for the historical anecdote: like Pompey
marching straight into the Holy of Holies inside the Temple in 63BC ,
eager to find a cult statue to take back to Rome, and being baffled by
the emptiness of that sacred place. He shrewdly warns that "it is very
hard to be an archaeologist in Jerusalem without becoming embroiled in
what… feels like a fight between playground bullies."

Interested in both the 19th-century growth of Jerusalem and in the
British mandate’s contribution to its architectural heritage, he is
stimulating on the more modern buildings: St Andrew’s, the Scottish
church completed in 1930, Austen St Barbe Harrison’s Rockefeller
Museum, finished eight years later, and Moshe Safdie’s tubular
21st-century masterpiece, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum which he
surprisingly worries may speak "too strident a political language".

But he is at his best explaining the three great centres of
monotheistic faith: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which compared
with the cathedrals of Notre Dame or Chartres first seems as "small,
brown, and undistinguished as a duck"; the Western Wall and the
now-vanished first, second and Herodian Jewish Temples; and Al-Aqsa and
the Dome of the Rock, at once "the most beautiful building in
Jerusalem" and an aggressive double architectural message. First, to
Jews, that Islam, in the words of Father Jerome Murphy O’Connor’s
excellent archaeological guide to The Holy Land, had now "appropriated"
the rock on which their temple had stood; but also to the Christians
who had worshipped in the Byzantine churches whose style the Dome
resembled, that their faith, too, had been superseded.

The Western Wall plaza and the "spacious and wonderful garden" on the
Temple Mount/ Haram al Sharif, where Al Aqsa and the Dome stand and the
Temple stood, are part of the core of Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Goldhill reflects that together they pose key questions, such as: "Amid
all this political clamour, how can the beauty and awe of the religious
combine with an understanding that comes through generous critical
history?" He provides few answers beyond displaying a desire for a just
and peaceful solution, explaining that he has made no attempt "to solve
the Middle East crisis".

On more recent politics, he seems least comfortable, and at times
inaccurate. The Arab massacre of Jews in Hebron took place in 1929, not
1936. Golda Meir did not "famously and scandalously" call Palestine a
"land without a people for a people without a land", but said in 1969:
"There were no such thing as Palestinians." I know of no modern
historian of Israel who puts the number of Arabs massacred at Deir
Yassin in April 1948 lower than 245, rather than the "more than a
hundred" cited. And the expert who guided Goldhill around the Armenian
quarter is George Hintlian, not Hinklian. This can be all corrected if
the book comes out in paperback, which would make it an even more
convenient and worthwhile guide for visitors.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress