Israel

General

Israel Condensing Jerusalem’s four-thousand-year history into a few pages is difficult indeed, particularly since Jerusalem’s past is so immensely varied and dramatic. Situated in the Judean mountains, Jerusalem is a city sacred to humanity. For Muslims, it is El-Kuds, the Holy; for Jews, Yerushalim, their capital city since the time of King David; for Christians, the site of Christ’s Passion and Crucifixion. The name means “City of Peace”, but how few have been the periods of peace in its history! Jerusalem has been invaded and laid waste by the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Persians, Muslims, Christians, Mamluks and the Turks. Jerusalem’s first inhabitants lived on the hill south of the Temple Mount area which Josephus called the Ophel. They were a Canaanite tribe called the Jebusites. Their city had been mentioned in an Egyptian Execration Text of the second millennium B.C. as, one of a long list of cities conquered by Pharaoh. In 1000 B.C., David conquered Jerusalem and bought the top of Mount Moriah from the Jebusite king Arauna on which to build an altar to the Lord. He transferred the Ark of the Covenant, symbolizing the union between God and his people, there from Hebron. It had accompanied the People of Israel throughout the long years of wandering in the desert before arriving in the Promised Land and had gone with them into many battles. Solomon, son of David and Bathsheba, also chose Mount Moriah as the site for the grand and sumptuous First Temple built around 950 B.C. The Temple itself was later destroyed but the wisdom of its builder would be remembered for centuries to come. After Solomon’s death, discord among the tribes split his kingdom into two parts: Israel in the north and Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, in the south. The kingdom of Israel succumbed to Assyrian advances shortly thereafter and became an Assyrian province. Judah resisted a bit longer. While King Sennacherib failed to conquer Jerusalem in 701 B.C., the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar succeeded to do so in 587 B.C. He sacked the city, destroyed the Temple and took thousands of Jews back with him to Babylonia. This Babylonian exile lasted nearly fifty years, until the Persian King Cyrus conquered Babylonia and allowed the exiles to begin their return to Judah. Approximately one hundred years later, Nehemiah the Prophet and Ezra the Scribe supervised the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem as well as the walls around the city, which were completed in record time. With the arrival of Alexander the Great in 333 B.C., the country saw the beginning of its era, when Greek pagan ideas infiltrated the Jewish culture and led to serious clashes. When Emperor Antiochus Epiphanes IV declared himself divine and commanded the Jews to sacrifice pigs on their altars to him, the Maccabbean Revolt ignited, culminating in the ousting of the Greeks (Seleucids) from Jerusalem in 164 B.C. For the next century, the Hasmonean dynasty of Jewish kings ruled the country. In 63 B.C. as Pompey led his legions into Jerusalem, the Land (now composed of Judah, Samaria, the Galilee, the Golan and the Negev) became part of the Roman Empire. In 37 B.C., the Roman Senate gave the title of king to Herod, who would later be known as Herod the Great. Despite the resentment the population felt toward him, Herod brought Jerusalem to unprecedented magnificence by expanding and rebuilding the Temple and by his many other monumental building projects in the city. After his death in the year 4 B.C., his kingdom was divided among his three sons. During the reign of one of them, Herod Antipas, Jesus was crucified on orders of the Procurator, Pontius Pilate, in Jerusalem. The ever more frequent and bloody Jewish rebellions against the heavy-handed Romans led to the destruction of Herod’s Temple by Titus in the year 70 A.D. Sixty years later, another major revolt led by a Jew named Bar Kochba, precipitated the complete leveling of the city of Jerusalem by the Roman general Hadrian. On its ruins he erected the pagan city of Aelia Capitolina and forbade Jews to set foot there. At the same time, he changed the name of the country to “Palestine”. Most of the Jews were forced to leave by famine, persecution and intolerably heavy taxes. Thus began the great Dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world. When the Roman Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity in the early fourth century, the Byzantine Era began. Jerusalem became a Christian city, with the Holy Sepulchre its centerpiece. The Persians, under Cosroe II, invaded the city, destroyed the Holy Sepulchre and deported much of the population in 614 A.D. Twenty-three years later, Omar led the Moslem invasion of Jerusalem. For the next four hundred years, Jerusalem took on the complexion of Islam, and was called by the Muslims “El-Kuds”, “the Holy”. According to the Koran, Abraham, David and Solomon were also great prophets before Mohammed. The tradition that Mohammed made his “Night Journey” to heaven was associated with the Temple Mount, where the Dome of the Rock and the El-Aqsa Mosque were built in 691 and 703 A.D., respectively. In 1099, the Crusaders arrived from Europe to liberate Christian holy sites from the “infidels”. They conquered Jerusalem and immediately set about rebuilding their holiest shrine, the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem became a city of churches and monasteries until 1187, when the Muslim leader Saladin recaptured it. The city was to come into Christian hands once again before the Crusaders were summarily ousted from the country by the Mamluks at the end of the thirteenth century. Jerusalem sank into a dusty, poverty-stricken stupor, its population dwindling to a mere 11,000 by mid-nineteenth century. Following the Crimean War, interest in the Holy Land was rekindled. The first Jewish neighbourhoods began to crop up around the walled city in the 1860’s, and by 1915, the Jewish population of the city had swelled to 100,000. On December 9, 1917, the British General Allenby accepted the surrender of the city of Jerusalem from the Turks and three years later, the British Mandate of Palestine began. Finding the Jewish-Arab rivalry in Palestine too great a burden, England relinquished its Mandate in 1947. On November 29 of that year, the United Nations voted to partition the Mandate between the Jews and the Arabs of Palestine. Within hours the newborn Jewish state was attacked by its Arab neighbours on all sides, a conflict which was to become known as the War of Independence of 1948. A year and a half later, ceasefire lines were drawn, placing Jerusalem’s Old City with all its holy sites in Jordan and the newer, western side of the city in Israel. A wall was built through the heart of Jerusalem, cutting off the population of each side from the other for nineteen years. On June 5, 1967, Jordanian artillery opened fire on the Jewish side of the city. It was a thoughtless act that within 48 hours brought about the reunification of the city under Jewish control. On June 27, the State of Israel annexed the Old City and tore down the wall which had divided east from west. It was as though a dam had burst; people flooded from each side of the city to the other, some seeing the opposite end for the first time ever. Amid tremendous excitement, intermingling and reunions took place. However, once inside the Old City, the Jews made the painful discovery that the Jordanians had blown up the twenty-seven synagogues and many of the religious schools there. Those which hadn’t been destroyed had been used as latrines, stables and garbage heaps. But the Wall, the Wailing Wall, had survived the vandalism. Its environs were cleared and thousands of Jews poured into the Old City to touch and kiss its ancient stones for the first time in two thousand years. It now became known as the Western Wall because it would attract all people not just in sorrow, as in the past, but in joy as well. The long exile was over. Returned to their city, Jews rebuilt her synagogues and houses, lanes and public squares with loving tenderness. Throughout two thousand years of separation from Jerusalem, Jews have repeated each day “Next Year in Jerusalem!”. Today, their hopes of returning to Zion have been realized.