Give Me Everything You Have

Part IV: Mosaic

I am uneasy when confronted with my own work…

– Freud,

Moses and Monotheism

In the year 1700 a group of Polish Jews emigrated to Jerusalem. The journey was hard and by the time they arrived they were in ill health and penniless. Borrowing money from the Arab community, they built a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter, not far from the Wailing Wall. But their leader died, and before long they defaulted on their debt and the creditors burned down the building. Ever since then, the site it stood on has been known as the “Hurva,” which is the Hebrew word for “ruin.”

For more than a century the ruin lay undisturbed, and then in 1864 a second synagogue was built on the same site, this time by Lithuanians, followers of the influential rabbi known as the Vilna Gaon: the “Genius of Vilnius.” Their version of the building, designed for them by the Turkish sultan’s own architect and modeled on the domed and arched mosques of Constantinople, dominated the skyline of the Jewish Quarter for almost a century and came to be regarded as the official synagogue of Old Jerusalem. Theodor Herzl spoke there. The first British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, paid a ceremonial visit in 1920. But in 1948, during the War of Independence, it too was destroyed, blown up by the Jordanian army as they took the Old City.

The Vilna Gaon, a revered figure in Orthodox Judaism, left behind a prophecy stating that three versions of the Hurva synagogue would be built, and that completion of the third would bring about the rebuilding of the Great Temple in Jerusalem. The rebuilding of the Temple is a dream cherished by all sorts of religious cults and associated, variously, with the arrival of the Jewish Messiah, the Second Coming of Christ, the Rapture, and the End of Days.

In 1967, during the Six-Day War, the Israelis captured the Old City and set about reconstructing the Jewish Quarter, which had been largely flattened. The project was overseen by the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, a cultured, liberal figure, legendary for his expansive spirit and tireless energy. In time Kollek turned his attention to the rubble of the Hurva synagogue and proposed yet another incarnation: the fateful third.

His ambitions for this version were grandly international. It would be both a civic and an architectural statement; a showcase for his vision of a reunited, enlightened, globally minded new Jerusalem. The first architect he appointed was the American pioneer of modernism Louis Kahn, who worked on it until his death in 1974. His plans were admired but not, in the end, adopted, and the project went dormant. But in 1978 Kollek took it up again, appointing a new architect, to whom he spelled out his rather exalted vision of the building:

“I fully believe that we will witness the creation of a religious and spiritual focus for world Jewry.”

The new architect was my father. For several years he shuttled back and forth between London and Jerusalem, working almost exclusively on the project. He wasn’t especially religious (and though he always thought of himself as a Jew, and publicly identified as one, his Jewishness was complicated by the fact that he was also a baptized Christian). But he had a sort of agnostic regard for the possibility of higher mysteries, especially as embodied in the great churches and temples of antiquity. Ceremonial spaces fascinated him; he was responsive to the “numinous” (a favorite word of his) in both nature and architecture, and had always wanted to design a religious building. Like Kahn, he devoted considerable time and energy to resolving the question of what a Jewish cathedral (for it was to be essentially that) could possibly look like at this late date in the ancient city. Like Kahn, he produced an uncompromisingly modernist design. And like Kahn’s, it came to nothing.

Some time before the project fizzled out, he took me aside to show me a letter he had been sent at his office. He had published his design in The Architectural Review, and the letter consisted of a photocopy of the article with violent anti-Semitic abuse scrawled all over the pages. I had never seen anything like it in my life (I was in my early twenties). It was like a splinter from a block of some concentrated substance that I had only ever known by rumor or, at most, in the much diluted form it took in polite English society, where occasionally someone would use the word “Jewish” to mean tight with money. We stared at it together, and then my father put it away, asking me not to mention it to my mother.

I remembered this letter when Nasreen’s attacks began, and I thought of it many times as they continued. Overt anti-Semitism is rare today, and it seemed to me noteworthy that my father and I, neither of us exactly representative Jews, had both been at the receiving end of it.

And yet what did it mean, this coincidence? A part of me sensed that, objectively speaking, it didn’t mean anything at all. Certainly I didn’t want to interpret it as evidence that anti-Semitism exists everywhere, seething under veneers of strained civility. That way of thinking, always tempting to members of minority groups, is a dangerously easy way of blaming all one’s woes on other people, and strikes me as something one should resist, even when it seems justified.

But meanwhile another part of me remained fixated on this curious recurrence, and continued probing it as if it were some enigmatic legacy that might turn out to be valuable if I could only figure out what it was. When you are under acute stress, and when the source of your tribulation seems to lie beyond the reach of rational understanding, you start to attach great importance to any circumstance that resonates with your own. These things become your signs: the clues that, if you follow them correctly, will enable you (so you believe) to penetrate the mystery that stands before you.

In March 2010, an unexpected chain of events occurred that seemed, in conjunction with my father’s letter, to comprise precisely such a sign, linking my father’s very public field of action with my own largely private one, in ways that I found irresistibly fascinating.

It began with an announcement by the Israeli government of plans to build an extensive new settlement in East Jerusalem. Vice President Joseph Biden happened to be in Israel for peace talks at the time, and the announcement set off a major diplomatic row. I wasn’t following the story closely, but after a few days a subplot emerged that involved, of all things, the Hurva synagogue, and I found myself suddenly paying attention.

Teddy Kollek had died in 2007, having retired from politics years earlier, and I’d assumed the Hurva project had long been forgotten. But apparently it hadn’t. After all these years, the synagogue had finally been rebuilt: not as a modern building but as an exact copy, a “stone for stone” replica (so the papers were reporting) of its Ottoman predecessor. It was about to be officially reopened, and the news, which had immediately become entangled with the settlement announcement, was provoking furious reactions from Palestinians. Hamas had called for a “day of rage” to protest the rededication. Fatah accused the Israelis of “playing with fire.” The spokesmen for both organizations referred explicitly to the Vilna Gaon’s prophecy. In light of it, they claimed, the rebuilding of the synagogue amounted to a statement of intent to rebuild the ancient Temple, and was therefore to be regarded as a deliberate act of aggression toward the two sacred Muslim shrines that currently occupy the Temple Mount, or Haram Ash-Sharif (as Muslims call it): namely the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Arab Knesset members warned of a third intifada. Three thousand security personnel were put on alert for the opening ceremony.

The more I read, the more interested I became. In the thick gloom that had settled on me in the wake of Nasreen’s attacks, it appealed to me, perversely, to discover a family connection to so promisingly apocalyptic an affair.

By this time I had already begun to consider writing something about Nasreen. My motive, initially, was purely defensive, and there was one particular incident that triggered it. I had been invited to apply for a teaching job at another college near where I live, and was updating my résumé when an email arrived from Nasreen. In it was a link to a website where she had posted a long article about the traumas she’d endured at the hands of her “puffed-up former writing professor,” who had “won expensive prizes for ‘writing’ stories based on my deteriorating state”; et cetera, et cetera.

Arriving at just this moment, the message had seemed to confirm my worst forebodings: that if I was offered this or any other job, it would only be a matter of time before Nasreen contacted the college and I would have to relive the mortifying scenes I’d been through with my other employers.

I was about to give up on the application when it occurred to me that if I had a website of my own, I could post the story of Nasreen, complete with sample emails, and refer people to it when the need arose. It wouldn’t protect me against the taint that clings to one merely by being accused of certain crimes, but at least it would spare me some of the unpleasantness of having to explain the situation over and over.

I did create a website, jameslasdun.com (it seemed a miracle that Nasreen hadn’t already appropriated the domain name), but somehow I couldn’t get the tone right for the story. Just as I’d found when I’d talked to the FBI, the harder I tried to be neutral and objective, the crazier I sounded. Even the material I did post, some basic author information, comes off as a little obsessional, I realize now. “This is the official website of the writer James Lasdun,” it begins, “and the only reliably accurate source of information about his work…” I have left it up: a memorial to my brush with paranoia.

But in the process of trying to create this posting, I began to sense that if I cared to examine certain aspects of the story in greater depth than I was aiming for in that purely forensic account, then it had the potential to release the kind of large energies that could fuel a book-a book that would interest me, both as writer and as reader: wide-ranging, unpredictable, but unified by a single, elemental conflict.

It would be a risky enterprise: that was clear from the start. On top of the usual problems associated with writing any book, there would be some less routine matters to address. The necessity of using private emails in a story about accusations of plagiarism and violations of privacy was an irony I was going to have to come to terms with. I would also, needless to say, have to have the full consent of my wife and family before proceeding. I wouldn’t have survived this ordeal without K-’s steadfast support, and I certainly wasn’t going to jeopardize this by publishing a book against her wishes (she agreed to it without hesitation). Then too, there would be legal considerations that would have to be very thoroughly looked into (and resolved) with the cooperation of any potential publisher. Even if I settled all these matters for myself, there were bound to be readers-honest ones as well as the professionally offended-who would object to the very notion of such a book, and this was something I knew I would have to accept in advance. And finally, as one of the lawyers I consulted pointed out, there would be the question of how Nasreen herself might retaliate. Might I be making things worse for myself? “She’ll do everything she can to discredit you,” the lawyer warned. But hadn’t she already? Certainly it was hard to imagine anything more damaging than the allegations she had already made. And since those allegations-of plagiarism, of “daytrading” her work with my Jewish cabal, of “setting up” her rape at the magazine where she worked before I taught her at Morgan College, and all the rest of it-were pure fabrication, wouldn’t the daylight of publication be the best way of turning them to dust?

I hadn’t kept copies of all my emails to her during the early phase of our correspondence, but she had (or so she claimed), and these would certainly prove that I’d liked her and had been warmly supportive of her work. But there was nothing in them that embarrassed me to remember (certainly nothing more embarrassing than the ones I did keep and have already quoted). Still, I had to assume, knowing her, that she would try to think of some way of using them against me, and I realized I would have to resign myself to this too.

Despite all these obvious hurdles, the more I thought about the project the more compelling it became. Nasreen’s uncanny ability to get under my skin-all the little neuroses and insecurities of mine that she had so cleverly intuited and exploited-made her, potentially, an extremely illuminating subject as far as my interest in these murky aspects of myself was concerned. There would be the armature of the case itself, but beyond it, if I could get it right, would be a larger story woven from memories, journeys, portraits, observations-all the stray psychic material that had been drawn into orbit around the drama that had monopolized my consciousness for more than three years now. I saw a place in it for my family, my father, our Provence trip, my train ride across the country, my interest in questions of moral culpability, honor and reputation, desire and repression; for various figures out of history, legend, and fiction, for an analysis of what it feels like to be a middle-aged white male writer of impeccable (by his own reckoning) liberal convictions, publicly accused of the tawdriest kinds of misconduct, and for an account of what happens when an unbelieving, not even entirely kosher Jew finds himself subjected to a firestorm of unrelenting anti-Semitism.

All of which, I am willing to concede, may have been merely the false excitement of desperation: the knowledge that I had to do something if I wasn’t going to jump off a bridge, that writing was what I knew how to do best, and that at this point the only subject I was capable of writing about was Nasreen.

Even before the Hurva story appeared in the papers, I had begun to feel I should go to Jerusalem before writing this book. My idea was to situate myself at the geographic and spiritual heart of Judaism so that I could reexamine what I had experienced, from the viewpoint of maximum possible intimacy with the condition (so abstract to me) of being Jewish.

Specifically, I had an image of myself at the Western Wall (formerly the Wailing Wall), the stones of which were held by true believers to contain the Divine Presence, the Shechina; its earthly refuge pending the rebuilding of the Great Temple itself. I would stand at the Wall at sundown on Shabbat, wrapped in the force field of sacred observance distilled there down through the ages, and think about my long and strange ordeal.

But I am not in a position to “situate myself” in some distant city just because I believe it might be useful for a book. Even if I had been, I would still have had to overcome my by-now leaden state of inertia, not to mention my private taboo against projects driven by acts of will rather than forces of necessity. So I mulled it over, vaguely wishing I could be teleported to Jerusalem but doing nothing about it.

Then out of the blue a magazine editor emailed to ask if I had any ideas for an article. This kind of invitation comes my way only rarely (in fact the last journalistic assignment I’d had was the one I’d taken the train to L.A. to write, several years earlier), so it was inevitable that this too should strike me as more than merely fortuitous: vindication, in fact, of my principle of passive acquiescence; the outer world knocking at my door just when I needed it, and for just the right reason. (This feverish, dubiously founded enthusiasm was increasingly my state of mind in those months.) I wrote back proposing an article on the Hurva synagogue. It would be a story of politics, history, and architecture, I told the editor; part memoir, part essay, part travelogue. I would need to go to London first, to look at the Hurva papers in my father’s archive, and then of course I would have to go to Jerusalem… It seemed politic to mention that I had other reasons, besides this article, for wanting to go there, and I told the editor about Nasreen (I was also concerned that she would send the magazine something unpleasant about me after the article came out, and I wanted to preempt that). He was interested; we even discussed bringing her into the piece. In the end I decided not to, but it helped to know that my motives were all, so to speak, out in the open. I have become pedantically scrupulous about such things.

A few weeks later I was on a plane.

In London I spent a day looking at my father’s archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum. (A strange hilarity rises in me as I write those words: “my father’s archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum”-the way that faintly delirious note of grandeur seems to attach itself to every aspect of my father’s life… In himself he was a stormy, passionate, embattled person, often laid low with depression. But around this volatile core radiated a paradoxical air of almost imperious serenity. There was the vulnerable human being, lying flat out in darkness on the living-room sofa, nursing his wounds after some attack in the press, but there was also this figure for whom a kind of imperturbable kingliness was somehow a given, the element in which his essential self existed. I lived in England until my late twenties, and it seemed wherever I went one of his buildings was always nearby. They were part of the geographic, almost the geological, foundation of my own existence. When I worked in Bloomsbury I would pass the School of Oriental and African Studies or another of his University of London buildings on my way to lunch. When I lived in Highgate my journey to my girlfriend in South London would take me past the Royal College of Physicians in Regent’s Park, Hallfield School in Paddington, then the National Theatre and IBM headquarters on the South Bank. When I visited friends in Cambridge, Fitzwilliam College or Christ’s would loom over us on and off all day as we wandered around. The vast scale and austere surfaces of these buildings, not to mention the fact that they were mostly “controversial,” which meant that my filial pride was always in danger of being affronted by someone saying something extremely rude about them, made their presence in my mind all the more charged and gigantic, while their frequently pyramidal form gave them, and by extension their maker, an inescapably Pharaonic aspect. Looking back, I realize how unusual it is for anyone, even a successful architect, to permeate the physical fabric of his world to quite this extent. But my father somehow conveyed, without any arrogance or posturing, that it was entirely in the natural course of things for him to have done this, and for a very long time this was how I saw it too. He and his buildings were natural phenomena to me, like mountains and plains. Even now, knowing how very remarkable and unnatural it all was, how hard he had to fight for everything he accomplished, how much uncertainty and self-doubt he lived with, I can’t quite shake off the traces of that other, regally entitled aura he projected. So it is impossible for me to speak casually of his “archive in the Victoria and Albert Museum” without smiling at my involuntary compliance in the illusion, as if it really is normal and unremarkable and altogether to be expected to have one’s papers taken in by the V &A after one’s death.)

The archivist had set out the Hurva material-five black box-files-in the architectural collection’s study room. The files were full of notes, minutes, scribbles, and correspondence covering everything from payment schedules to the comparative architectural traditions of Judaism and Christianity. There was plenty of dramatic material for my article: clashes and reconciliations by telex between my father and Teddy Kollek; minutes from meetings with Israeli diplomats in London and government officials in Jerusalem; press cuttings charting the progress of the job from the cornerstone-laying ceremony conducted with the president of Israel to its final fading away as it became clear that the prime minister, Menachem Begin, wanted a replica rather than a modern building (eighteen years after his death, the will of this deeply conservative leader appears to have prevailed).

And the letter was there, the hate letter my father had shown me in 1982. It was in a large white envelope. A swastika was drawn on the outside, so my father must have had a pretty good idea of what he was going to find inside. Gingerly, I took out the photocopied article it had been written on. Every single line of the article had been individually blacked out (I had forgotten this detail). “AL QUDS. NOT THIS” was written at the top (“Al Quds” is the Arab name for Jerusalem). Next to it was a name, presumably the sender’s, also in large, emphatic letters: “JAWEED KARIM.” Scrawled over the pictures of my father’s plans and models were phrases such as “DANGER JEWS ABOUT” and weird punning insults: “HOMOSEXUALS USE SINAGOG,” and so on. There were drawings of swastikas equaling Stars of David, such as you see on protest banners today, and there was an outright threat: “IF YOU DESIGN THIS YOU WILL DIE PREMATURE DEATH.” There was also the peculiar conflation of the roles of victim and oppressor that seems to distinguish anti-Semitism from other forms of racism, and that was such a pronounced feature of Nasreen’s emails: “HITLER WAS RIGHT TO GAS JEWS,” on the one hand, and on the other: “THIS IS JEW ECONOMY DIRTY PEOPLE ONLY KNOW HOW TO MASSACRE PEOPLE.”

From London I flew to Israel, arriving in Jerusalem at dusk. Ramadan was in its last week, and the city was quiet. My hotel, a former private villa, was in East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city. It had been recommended as a place to meet interesting people: NGO workers, journalists, political operatives with connections on both sides of the conflict. The idea of subjecting my tribal allegiances to a slight geographic torsion was also a part of the appeal.

I was tempted to stay in for the evening, unwind in the candlelit garden bar, but I made myself go out. The concierge gave me directions to the Old City, a fifteen-minute walk. The streets were dark, almost empty. Two days earlier a settler’s car had been ambushed, all four passengers shot dead, and although it had happened in the West Bank, several miles from Jerusalem, it was different thinking about it here on Nablus Road than it had been reading about it in my mother’s kitchen in London. I walked quickly.

More people appeared as the Old City’s medieval wall came into view. Lights flared on the steps leading down to the Damascus Gate, and there were vendors selling kebabs and candy to the crowds breaking their fast for the day. A man was inflating silver balloons from a rust-streaked helium tank in the center. Another man handed out fluorescent soft drinks in plastic bags. I passed through the gate onto El-Wad Road, one of the narrow thoroughfares running through the old Arab Quarter. A few lamps burned in storefronts, but most of the little businesses had been shuttered for the night. Overhead, blue fairy lights strung between rooftops glinted against the black sky. Robed men, women in headscarves, groups of small children, moved along the narrow street. The air was warm, full of cooking smells and bursts of sound from radios: Arab pop and the distorted wail of prayers being chanted through megaphones. A glow appeared and around a corner a dozen men sat on rickety chairs outside a store with a single naked bulb, smoking narghiles. They stared at me as I passed, and I stared back, noting their tender, creaturely involvement with the pipes: the long, coiling, tail-like tubes held in one hand, the smoke bubbling through the murky stomachs of water.

I ate in a small restaurant and wandered on into a maze of alleys, unsure whether or not to be concerned about the darkness. As I turned onto what must have been the Souk Khan al-Zeit road, heading back toward the Damascus Gate, three Orthodox Jews, a father and two sons in black hats and coats, appeared just ahead of me; the father full-bearded and portly, the sons in knee breeches, sidelocks dangling against their pale cheeks. It surprised me to see them there, in the heart of the Arab Quarter. As I followed behind them it occurred to me that they were possibly from one of the national-religious factions I’d read about who had taken over buildings in East Jerusalem. They moved purposefully along the street, with what seemed a certain deliberately unwatching watchfulness. Out of the gate, they cut sharply up through the crowds on the steps. A loud bang came from the center and for a second I thought it was a gunshot, but it was a helium balloon bursting, and the three moved on without flinching, disappearing across the street above.

In the morning, Misha, a friend of a friend, gave me a tour of the city. Misha had grown up partly in America and moved to Jerusalem a few years earlier. He was a writer and translator, also a doctoral student with a half-finished PhD on Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel The Penitent. I like Singer but I hadn’t read this book. It was the story of a womanizing businessman in America, Misha told me, who gives up everything to join the ultra-Orthodox Haredim after a visit to Jerusalem. I promised to read it, though it sounded a bit austere for my tastes.

We walked through the Old City, taking a meandering route that led past crumbling Mamluk palaces, down the Via Dolorosa with its dense crowds of Christian pilgrims bowed under heavy crosses, and into the Jewish Quarter. The buildings there were modern but faced in the ancient-looking sand-gold Jerusalem stone that was apparently statutory for all new construction. It was easy on the eye but created a slightly unreal, stage-set atmosphere. The human element added to the effect, consisting mostly of Haredim whose eclectic period gear, worn on a motor scooter or while chatting on a cell phone, seemed to collapse several eras into one. In Hurva Square we stopped to look at the new synagogue. It too was faced in Jerusalem stone, but of a whiter shade than its neighbors, which made it look eerily new, while its form-the shallow dome supported on a squat cube of four wide arches, with towers at each corner-was clearly antique, further compounding the sense of temporal confusion. I made some quick first-impression notes for my article, and we moved on.

Passing through the Jaffa Gate, we crossed into the wide, unshaded streets of the New City. At some point Misha described himself as socially liberal “but pretty conservative on security.” Despite, or perhaps because of this, he was careful to draw my attention to various injustices of municipal policy as we walked around. In Silwan, he explained how building safety regulations had been exploited to justify the seizure and demolition of Arab homes. In Mamilla he showed me the intended location of the imprudently named “Museum of Tolerance,” where construction had been halted because of international protests over the siting of the building on top of a Muslim cemetery. We talked about these protests, and the hostility that had been growing toward Israel in general over the past couple of decades: the academic boycotts, the consumer boycotts, the comparisons to South Africa under apartheid, and so on.

I had been thinking about these subjects quite a bit since Nasreen had begun her attacks. Israel and the Palestinians had been constantly in the headlines. There was the invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008, but all year bad news had been spilling out of the region. I felt implicated in the conflict in a way I never quite had before, and compelled to take a position, though at the same time I found it impossible to anchor myself in any stable point of view. The question of where honest criticism of Israel ended and anti-Semitism began had started to interest me greatly, perhaps because I was trying to determine the line where Nasreen’s attacks on me, personally, crossed from legitimate grievance (at least in her mind) to deliberate, malicious smear. The boycott movement seemed bound up in this question, somehow, but I had to admit I had extremely confused feelings about it.

I remembered the story of the left-wing academic at Ben-Gurion University who had allegedly been told by the editors of the British journal Political Geography that an article he had written (cowritten with a Palestinian academic, actually) would be accepted only if he included a statement in it comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa. Whatever one thought of the comparison, the stipulation seemed very obviously stupid and wrong. But not everything was as easy to dismiss, at least not for me. A few years ago, for instance, a petition was circulated by a group of architectural luminaries, calling for a boycott against architects involved in the “settlement industry.” Among the signatories were several British Jews and at least one former colleague of my father’s. I don’t think my father would have signed it himself if he had still been alive (he seldom signed anything), but he would have been troubled by it, and receptive to its arguments, and I think it might have made him wonder if it wasn’t just as well that his involvement with the Hurva project had ended when it did.

Of course, the rebuilding of a synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City could hardly be considered part of the “settlement industry,” so from that point of view he would have been in the clear even if his design had been built. Or so it would have seemed at the time. But according to a book I’d read in preparation for my article, even this was now open to question. The book, Simone Ricca’s Reinventing Jerusalem, makes the very contentious case that the rebuilding of the Jewish Quarter after the Israelis captured the Old City in ’67 was not the historically sensitive reconstruction of an “already existing” neighborhood that it purported to be, but rather a calculated, triumphalist exercise in the manufacture of Jewish “heritage.” Kollek, in Ricca’s hands, turns from enlightened visionary into a more stained and devious figure, hoodwinking the world into accepting the illusion of a much more substantial historic Jewish presence in the Old City than had ever in fact been the case. Using demolition, expropriation, selective archaeology, and architectural trompe l’oeil, he and his colleagues created, according to Ricca, not a reconstruction at all but a settlement, the ur-settlement in fact: the practical model and indeed the spiritual inspiration for most of the settlements that followed in its wake (the unbroken connection to the old Jewish Quarter being an indispensable element in the historic claim to the Land of Israel). The Hurva synagogue, along with the newly cleared esplanade beneath the Western Wall, was intended to form the centerpiece of this “settlement.” I can’t say exactly how my father would have reacted if the project had been presented to him in these terms rather than Kollek’s more nobly appealing “focus for world Jewry,” but I imagine he would have had some serious misgivings.

Whatever the case, the implications of this building seemed more incendiary than ever after I finished the book, and once again the thought of my (albeit tenuous) connection to it offered a certain gloomy satisfaction. This had to do with Nasreen, who was a constant presence in my mind during this trip. It seemed to confer a more dignified solemnity on our conflict, turning me into a larger, grander adversary, somehow, than her “daytrading” conspiracy theory implied. Better to be found complicit in the original sins of Israeli history than in some act of petty plagiarism.

At some point, as Misha and I discussed the world’s apparent fascination with Israeli politics, I repeated a line from Saul Bellow’s book To Jerusalem and Back, which I was also reading for my article (it contains a vivid portrait of Teddy Kollek at the time of my father’s involvement with him). “What Switzerland is to winter holidays,” Bellow writes, “… Israel and the Palestinians are to the West’s need for justice-a sort of moral resort area.”

Misha liked that. He repeated it approvingly: “moral resort area.” He told me there was actually a well-organized “moral tourism” industry in Israel these days, with bus trips to weekly protest venues all around the country. He knew of an Italian art professor who brought his students to the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem on a regular basis, for a class on protest photography. Seeing me write all this down in my notebook, Misha clarified his position. “I’m not opposed to the protests themselves,” he told me, “just to certain oversimplifications they encourage.” He began to lay out the complexities of the situation as he saw it, speaking with a curious inward-directed frown, as if he were arguing with himself while addressing me, and I glimpsed something that became increasingly evident as I spoke to other Jewish Israelis, namely the uncomfortably narrow margin a person of any moral sensitivity must have to operate within here: bounded between conscience on one side and, on the other, a natural reluctance to commit oneself to a line of reasoning that, pursued too far, would begin to place one in opposition to one’s own existence.

Before we parted Misha took me to his favorite used-book store. We rummaged around, and by chance I came upon an old paperback of The Penitent on a dusty shelf near the back. It looked as forbidding as I’d imagined: a faded illustration of a bearded man in gabardine and fringed garment on the cover, along with a not very enticing quote from the Chicago Tribune describing it as the story of “one who has returned to the faith of his fathers.” But I felt compelled to buy it all the same.

I spent the next few days interviewing people for my article. The architect of the newly replicated Hurva gave me a tour of the building. I went to Tel Aviv to talk to scholars and critics. Back in Jerusalem, an architectural historian who knew the complicated story of the building invited me to his house in the suburb of Malcha.

Before I set off, I googled the address and stumbled briefly into a universe of websites denouncing the Zionist takeover of what had once been an Arab village, al-Maliha.

The term “ethnic cleansing” was used. I navigated away, but the phrase wasn’t so easy to shake off. It is another of those contaminating terms, like “apartheid” or “rape,” that trigger a very specific shunning reflex when you hear them: an urgent impulse to dissociate yourself from the person or group they are applied to, even if you question the validity of the application.

The phrase pulsed in my mind as I set off, tinged in the blood-light of the Yugoslav massacres for which it was coined. Again I was aware of something connected with Nasreen-some trace or emblem of her that had by now taken up permanent residence in my own consciousness-clutching onto the two words with a kind of avid, triumphant tenacity. They seemed to shed their taint on everything I saw as my taxi cruised into Malcha: the quiet residential streets curving around their hilltop, the rows of shiny parked cars, the pedestrian-only enclave where the historian lived, with its stepped, bougainvillea-lined walkways, at the safe heart of which a lone boy my son’s age was shooting hoops in the waning daylight.

The historian’s house was compact and modern, with framed abstracts mounted alongside folk-art weavings and carvings. The historian himself gave an impression of wanting to seem more detached from the fray of Jerusalem politics than he really felt, and the result was an uneasy geniality punctuated by bursts of sardonic gloom.

He knew Teddy Kollek well-well enough to have had a public falling-out with him. “He called me a clinical psychopath,” he remembered, smiling drily. He told me that he’d disliked Louis Kahn’s design, and then added bluntly, “I didn’t like your father’s design either.” Both, in his view, were too provocative-to aesthetically conservative Jews as well as politically wary Palestinians-to have stood any real chance of being built. There was also a short-lived third plan, he remembered, designed by an architect close to the ultra-Orthodox and backed by Ariel Sharon. “Terrible,” he snarled, showing me a picture of a model that looked like a space helmet dipped in bronze. “Dome of the Rock, Yiddish style…”

We got onto the subject of the Vilna Gaon’s prophecy and Palestinian anger at the rebuilding of the synagogue. Was it possible, I asked, that the project really did amount to some kind of proxy action for rebuilding the Great Temple?

The question drew down another grimace across the historian’s lined features. He nodded. “For some people, yes.”

There was a thriving “Third Temple” subculture in Jerusalem, he explained. Somewhere in the Old City was a basement full of proposed models for the building, each more lavish than the next. Funds could be raised to build any one of them in six months, he assured me gloomily, if any government was foolish enough to allow new construction on the Temple Mount.

This subculture was on the far fringe of the ultra-Orthodox movement, he was careful to add, but on the other hand there was probably no spot on earth where religious fantasy had more combustible potential than the small area in Old Jerusalem encompassing the mosques and the Western Wall. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, a deliberately provocative assertion of Jewish prerogatives on what is now sacred Muslim ground, had set off the second intifada. An attempt to build on it could very easily ignite a third world war.

Breakfast in the leafy courtyard of my hotel. The guests at the other tables appear to be mostly Scandinavian or African. I stayed up late reading the Singer novel, which was unexpectedly gripping, and a residue of its narrator seems to be lingering over me, making me feel oddly conspicuous, as if his dark hat and ritual garment were glimmering spectrally over my Banana Republic tee shirt and khakis.

It surprises me to find myself hospitable to this character, Joseph Shapiro. I’ve had no serious religious feelings since I was a teenager, and have no interest in developing any. But before Shapiro becomes that pious figure on the book cover he is a regular flawed and fallen human being, which is of course what makes him appealing. Furthermore, in the process of transformation he undergoes his own version of precisely the trials I have felt ghosting my own ever since these events began. He too, it turns out, is a Gawain, a Lawrence, a Guy Haines.

The turning point in his story comes one night after he discovers he is being cheated on by both his wife and his mistress. All his vague disgust for the life of cheap titillation that he has been living in America boils up inside him, precipitating a crisis. Barely aware of what he is doing, he goes to the airport and buys a ticket to Israel, carrying nothing more than an overnight bag and a couple of religious books.

On the plane a young woman, Priscilla, sits down next to him, carrying a volume of Sartre. “She smelled of eau de Cologne, chocolate, and other scents enticing to a male. I was reading about abstinence and sacred matters…”

She glances at his book and asks if the letters are Hebrew. They are, he replies. She had been sent to Hebrew lessons as a child, she tells him, but now the language “is a completely strange element to me.” His reply is innocent enough on the surface: “No matter how strange an element may be, it can become familiar,” but even as he speaks he acknowledges that his words “carried a sly reference, as if to say ‘Now I’m a stranger, but tomorrow I may sleep with you.’” The girl orders a whiskey. He joins her, assuring himself he is doing so purely out of politeness, but the dance has begun, the “dere dalyaunce,” and he is well aware of the real reason. She mentions a fiancé but at the same time lets Shapiro know that she doesn’t believe couples are under any obligation to be faithful to each other. Shapiro, feeling the old sweet responsiveness rising inside him at this flagrant invitation, struggles to resist it. The adjacent seats have become his version of the room, the roomette, that private but violable space in which one’s most intimate conflicts act themselves out: “I sat there baffled by the dramatic turn of events my life had taken and by my own lack of character. I had abandoned everything to flee from the lie, but the lie now sat next to me, promising me who knows what joys…” It is cold on the plane, and at Priscilla’s suggestion Shapiro spreads a blanket across his lap. Soon he feels her hand moving under the blanket. Their fingers touch, entwine, and at once they are entangled in a session of furtive petting and groping. But there are limits to what you can do on a plane, and after a while they pull apart, strangers again, Shapiro filled with rankling physical dissatisfaction while at the same time overcome with shame: “We were left sitting there like two whipped dogs…”

Just then a man in full Orthodox garb walks down the aisle beside them. Priscilla, modern and assimilated, grimaces. “Her eyes reflected embarrassment and scorn.” But to Shapiro the figure is a sign, a revelation that crystallizes his hitherto rather vague spiritual yearnings into their final, inflexible form: “I realized at that moment that without earlocks and a ritual garment one cannot be a real Jew. A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty. Had I worn such an outfit that night I wouldn’t have been exposed to those temptations…”

It is proving difficult to find Palestinians willing to talk about the Hurva synagogue. I leave messages but nobody calls back. When I do finally make contact with someone, a professor of urban studies at Al-Quds University, his response is a volley of polite excuses: “You see I am very busy now because Ramadan is coming to an end and I have many things to do but I wish you the best of luck with your article, goodbye.”

I mention the difficulty to a cousin of mine at her house in the German Colony, where she has lived since the seventies. She nods, unsurprised. She volunteers for an organization that helps Palestinians with legal problems, but even this limited contact between the two communities has become strained in recent years, and increasingly rare. Contact of a purely social or intellectual nature is virtually impossible. She tells me the following story.

She and her husband were friendly with a Palestinian housepainter from Bethlehem who often did work for them. His wife needed dialysis and had a pass to get into Jerusalem for regular treatment at the Hadassah hospital. After the second intifada broke out, the twenty-minute drive from Bethlehem turned into a half-day trip with all the detours and checkpoints. Then, mysteriously, it became further complicated by entirely new bureaucratic obstacles. One day a mutual friend called my cousin with grim tidings: the Israeli authorities had made it impossibly difficult for the man to get his wife to the hospital and she had died. Furthermore, the man’s son had been killed, shot dead while visiting a settlement to collect payment for a carpentry job.

Some time passed, and then the mutual friend called my cousin again. The circumstances of the son’s death were not, after all, as he had first reported. The boy had in fact been shot in a supermarket, where he had been about to detonate a suicide vest. The father had been unable to come to terms with this fact, hence the version of events he had originally told the mutual friend, but it was indeed the case, and it was also the reason why the Israelis had made it so difficult for the mother to get her dialysis.

If I were writing the story I would want to end it there: a bleak equipoise of mutual ill will. But it doesn’t end there. The man remarried and started a new family. A year later the army came with bulldozers and demolished his house.

The scene is convivial at the garden bar; most of the customers are on first-name terms with the barman, Fadi, who laughs obligingly at their banter as he mixes their drinks.

Next to me is a woman with stringy gray hair and weathered features, talking in Italian-accented English to a couple of Arab men in jackets and open shirts.

Listening in, I gather that she is a journalist and they are civic officials of some kind. I try to edge into the conversation, sensing an opportunity to get some impromptu Palestinian reaction to the Hurva. But my polite gestures and smiles go unnoticed, and I can’t quite bring myself to do anything more forceful. I read the newspapers instead, peering at them in the dim candlelight. The Herald-Tribune has a story about the taxi driver in New York, Ahmed Sharif, who had his throat slashed by a passenger for being Muslim. Haaretz has an article on a poll released by the Spanish government showing that “one in three Spaniards is anti-Semitic, maintaining negative opinions about Jews.”

By uncertain processes of association, I find myself thinking of another of Saul Bellow’s remarks from his Jerusalem book, to the effect that “evenhandedness” is not a useful or even commendable attitude to take in this city. Visitors who are always judiciously observing on the one hand this and on the other hand that infuriate him. Support for the Jewish state, he implies, is worth nothing if it doesn’t come out of strong emotional conviction, because the corrosive logic of the situation will eat away at any attitude founded on mere “evenhandedness,” devouring arguments until there is nothing left. Better to be outright hostile.

I recognize that equivocating tendency in myself. So much depends on where you begin the story you are trying to tell, which in turn, as far as I can see, depends on whom you happen to like most, or dislike least. The army bulldozed the Palestinian’s home. But his son tried to blow up a supermarket. But it was a supermarket on land illegally occupied by settlers. But the land was part of ancient Judaea. But the Jews have been absent from Judaea for more than two thousand years. But the Holocaust…

I make my way under dark palms to my room, in an annex away from the main building. The air is warm, scented with night blossoms. As I reach the annex door, a woman appears from another direction. We enter together and stand in the empty vestibule, waiting for the tiny elevator. She looks about thirty-five, black hair cut short, smooth pink cheeks. She seems a little uncomfortable, finding herself in this deserted space with a strange man. I smile, trying to signal my harmlessness, and make a comment about the nice evening. She appears to relax. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she says.

In the slow, creaking elevator, which we are both taking to the same floor, we exchange further remarks to cover up what would otherwise be an awkward silence. By the time we arrive at our floor we are having something more like a real conversation. She seems interested in the article I’m writing, and in fact subscribes to the magazine that commissioned it. She herself is here with an NGO that does psychiatric work in a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. She goes to the door of her room, and I move along the narrow landing to my own door, but she seems to want to continue talking, and for several minutes we linger across the landing from each other, talking in the thin brass glare of the night lights. She lives in Atlanta, she says, but she comes here every year to work in the refugee camps. She likes to bring visitors, to show them what conditions are like for the Palestinians. “I mean, I give them things to do, people to talk to. They don’t stand around just staring.” “It sounds interesting,” I say. “You should come, if you have some free time.” “Well, I’d like to.”

The hotel is moving her into the main building tomorrow, and she gives me the number of what will be her new room. “I’m Nadia,” she says, opening her door. She is wearing a blue dress with white polka dots. I tell her my name. We smile at each other and say goodnight.

In my room I feel the encounter reverberating inside me, a pleasant aftereffect in which the impression of her pink cheeks and blue dress are present, jumbled together with a feeling that I ought not to pass up an opportunity to visit one of these camps.

I write down the room number she gave me, intending to call her in the morning.

At the same time I am aware of something delicately treacherous in the air. The phrase “moral resort area” rises up at me from the Bellow book next to my bed. Beside it Joseph Shapiro grimaces from the cover of the Singer novel. I remember the way he describes his conversation with Priscilla on the plane, his unabashedly archaic terms: “I knew very well that this was the Evil Spirit talking through her…”

I turn out the light, telling myself not to be ridiculous. Being happily married doesn’t mean you have to behave like some misogynistic ascetic, any more than being Jewish means you can’t look at things that reflect badly on Israel.

I had intended to spend the afternoon at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, but I couldn’t face it, and am in the Garden of Gethsemane instead, thinking about Judas Iscariot.

The garden is a small, enclosed olive grove with gravel paths leading among twenty or so olive trees. Some of these are said to be over two thousand years old. They are tremendously wide, like very large and ancient women, their twisting bodies at once bulbous and cavernous. Their silver-and-green leaves-all eyes, as the Greeks observed-wink in the breeze, and it is impossible not to think of the scene they witnessed when they were young. This is where Judas of the Thirty Pieces of Silver becomes Judas of the Kiss, the gesture transforming him from petty money-grubber into the great antagonist of the Passion, the necessary betrayer.

In Provence K- and I and the kids did a walk that led along the Levens valley to the fifteenth-century Chapel of Notre Dame des Fontaines, a small white building in the middle of nowhere that happens to contain one of the great masterpieces of early Renaissance art, Giovanni Canavesio’s fresco cycle of the Life of Christ.

Judas first appears in the panel depicting the Last Supper, where he sits in profile opposite Jesus, in blue-and-brown robes. Alone of all the company he has no halo, but his unruly reddish hair has something windswept and romantic about it, and his bearded profile, in contrast to the bland baby faces of the other disciples, is full of dashing individuality, with a hint of amusement about the lips and an appealingly manic exuberance in his eye. Apparently Jesus hasn’t yet informed this fiery disciple of the ignominious role he has been chosen to play in the coming drama. He is gesturing eloquently, one arm raised high, clearly speaking about some matter of passionate concern to him. Jesus and the rest look at one another with uneasy sidelong glances.

One interpretation of “Iscariot” identifies Judas as a member of the Sicarii, a group of Jewish assassins intent on driving the Romans out of Judaea, and there is a tradition of Judas as an insurrectionist who had hoped to win Jesus over to the cause of armed revolt against the occupying power. Certainly Canavesio would have known that Judas went in for political grandstanding. There is the incident in John where Judas scolds Jesus for allowing Mary of Bethany to annoint him with a whole pint of expensive perfume instead of making the woman sell it to help the poor. John is quick to assure the reader that this outburst isn’t as noble as it might appear. According to him, Judas just wants to pilfer the money from the communal kitty, which he looks after: “This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.” But the comment sounds suspiciously catty and after-the-fact revisionist (I can’t help thinking of how Nasreen only started accusing me of theft after she had turned against me). At any rate, judging from Judas’s upraised arm and the misgivings on the faces of his fellow diners, it would seem that the urging of some kind of extreme rebellious action is being imagined here by the painter.

But whatever cause Judas may be pleading, we can assume it finds no favor. In the next panel he stands with a chastened and troubled look, waiting in line as Jesus kneels down, washing his disciples’ feet. Judas is lifting his leg to take off his sandal, a touchingly prosaic gesture that again contrasts with the attitudes of placid piety assumed by his fellow disciples. He seems torn: at once eager for the cleansing and a bit sullen about it. You sense that he has begun to feel, confusedly, the first inklings of his ordained role as betrayer stirring inside him, and is dimly attempting to ward it off, while at the same time beginning to find all this humility business (Jesus kneeling on the floor with his sleeves rolled up) irritating. At this point in the sequence he comes over as a case of the unstable artist-intellectual type: restless, querulous, contrarian, driven by conflicting urges, attaching himself to causes only to turn against them-an embodiment of nature’s own principle of growth by division.

By the next panel his transformation has begun in earnest. A demon grips his purse (“Then entered Satan into Judas”), and in quick succession as you walk down the nave he is shown visiting the Temple in Jerusalem to negotiate his informer’s fee with the priests, counting out an advance on the thirty pieces of silver, leading the Roman soldiers here into the Garden of Gethsemane, and then lightly kissing Jesus’s half-averted face, one hand on Jesus’s shoulder, the other stretched out backward to receive the balance on his fee. His own face by now has begun to change, its hitherto fierce nobility turning into something altogether more rattish or wolfish.

He disappears for a while before turning up again on the other side of the nave. The panel, The Remorse of Judas, refers to the passage in Matthew where Judas, discovering that Jesus has been sentenced to death, repents and tries to return the thirty pieces of silver. The priests refuse it, and he flings the money onto the Temple floor, storming off: a grimacing, twisting study in impotent anguish and disbelief, as if, like Shylock, he has just had revealed to him the colossal cunning and malice of the trap his own avarice has led him into. It is a staggeringly un-Christian moment in the Gospel story-the repentant sinner whose sincere wish to make amends is flatly refused-and Canavesio highlights the cruelty with a little diabolic touch of his own, placing Jesus himself at the edge of the scene, apparently taking a moment out from his flagellation to make sure his enemy is given no encouragement to avoid the despair that will shortly consign his soul to hell for all eternity.

And next to this panel, juxtaposed with the impassive abruptness of the Gospel narrative itself (“And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself”), is the panel of Judas self-slaughtered: hanging by a rope from an olive tree, his abdomen split open with its contents hanging out.

The image actually combines two different accounts from the Bible: the guilt-stricken suicide from Matthew 27, and the unrepentant sinner of Acts 1 who buys real estate with his ill-gotten gains and dies entirely by accident, in a nasty fall (the land itself rising up against its usurper, so to speak): “he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out.”

It is a terrifying picture, not so much for the dangling organs and guts as for the face, a greenish-hued rictus in which the agony of the victim and the rapacity of the evildoer merge into an image of pure, free-floating horror, and I remember it vividly (it has come to form a private image of a certain familiar soul state, call it the state of ruin, as in “I will ruin him”; swinging from a gibbet with one’s insides spilling out for the world to see): the eyes all rolling whiteness with red-rimmed lower lids, the stiff tongue poking out between crooked fangs, hair and beard matted in greasy rats’ tails, the gray-green ghetto pallor of the skin, the nose long and hooked; the whole physiognomy at last unambiguously and aggressively Semitic, or anti-Semitic (in certain contexts there is no distinction), as if in this climactic gesture of eternal self-exile from the community of man and the grace of God (he is dangling in a strange void, separated even from the tree he hangs from by a high wall guarding the verdant landscape behind him), he has finally become above all else Judas the Judaean, the archetype of the Jew in the medieval imagination, his name an incitement, a fatal convergence of interests.

I call Nadia. Three days have passed since we talked on the landing, but I haven’t called her until now. I’ve picked up the phone a couple of times, and then thought better of it. But this morning I decided I had allowed the matter to become unnecessarily complicated, and that this was yet another symptom of Nasreen’s effect on me.

I recognize the nice Southern voice when she says hello.

“Hey, Nadia, this is James. We met the other night. You offered to show me the refugee camp in Ramallah.”

“You have the wrong number.”

“This isn’t Nadia?”

“No.”

I apologize and hang up, very unsure about what has just occurred. I didn’t misdial the three-digit room number, and from what she told me earlier, she wasn’t leaving Jerusalem anytime soon. I suppose she must have given me the wrong number and I was mistaken in thinking I recognized her voice.

But I am fairly certain it was Nadia, and this makes me wonder if there was some disparity between what I experienced during our original encounter and what actually happened, some delayed effect of my words or manner that has caused her to have second thoughts about her invitation. This in turn awakens an ancient insecurity of mine: Is there something about myself that I simply don’t see?

Succumbing to a sort of piqued, lethargic mood, I lie on my bed looking at YouTube videos of refugee camps instead. Rubble and graffiti; a small child staring at a patrolling tank; an old woman saying that she would like to die. Clips from the weekly settlement protests appear in the portal and I drift on into these. Maale Adumim, Nabi Salih, Beit Jala, Silwan. They rouse violent, contradictory emotions. The spectacle of settlers clutching sacred texts as they assert their God-given right to land they have ousted Palestinians from is viscerally shocking. Even as you register the shock, though, you find yourself cringing at the uncanny way in which the rituals of modern protest recall the ancient gestures and geometries of Jew baiting: camera-wielding protestors getting in the faces of the religiously garbed, increasingly agitated settlers, pushing and goading them until they come out with the terrible thing-the racist comment, the fanatical religious self-justification-that will stand as their portrait, their panel, for as long as the living fresco-cycle of YouTube survives. Some of the videos are obvious anti-Israel propaganda. A few carry bluntly anti-Semitic titles. But even after you have made all possible allowances in that direction, even after you have noted the preening self-regard of some of the backpacking “internationals” protesting alongside the Palestinian villagers and anti-settler Israelis, the sense that something calamitous is preparing itself in these dusty hilltops is overwhelming. You watch in dismay as a group of young male settlers in yarmulkes beat and kick a family of Palestinians who have come, with a judge’s warrant, to harvest their olives. The army arrives and you think, Well, at least there is this. But then you watch the soldiers arrest not the young settlers, but the Palestinians. Dark forebodings rise up inside you. You begin to wonder if these settlers with their rifles and prayer shawls (“Guns ’n’ Moses” is a popular tee-shirt logo in Jerusalem) might not be enabling ancient impulses that once manifested themselves as straightforward bigotry, to regroup under the banner of justice.

And it comes to me that behind the figure of Judas stands that of Jacob, my implacably grasping namesake (the name means “he who supplants”), tricking his brother out of his birthright, wrestling with the angel: “I will not let thee go except thou bless me…” and then duly blessed; the blessing being life, more life, and with nothing dreamy or languidly abstract about it: pots and pans, flocks of sheep, olive groves, gemstones, weapons, women, offspring numberless “as the stars of heaven”; land. Strange profile for a religious patriarch, as if the very hunger were its own theology: I want this more than you want it and that makes it mine.

“A work grows as it will and sometimes confronts its author as an independent, even an alien creation…”

The words are from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which I am reading in the café of the Austrian Hospice, a palatial building on the Via Dolorosa that was once the residence of the Austrian consul in Jerusalem. It is now a hostel for tourists and pilgrims in the Old City, with flights of clean stone steps and a little Viennese café.

Freud’s theory is that Moses, the great architect of the Jewish religion, was not a Jew at all, but an Egyptian, a follower of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who had tried to impose an austere, ethically demanding monotheism on his own people. The Egyptians had turned against Akhenaten, and in due course the Jews likewise turned against Moses, murdering him. But later, driven by collective guilt, they invented the idea of a messiah, essentially Moses himself, who would return to save them. By this time they had merged with a Midianite tribe who worshipped the volcano god Jehova (a version of the thunder god Jove), and under the resurgence of longing for their lost father, they combined this choleric minor deity with the serenely omnipotent spirit that Moses had directed them to worship, thereby creating the hybrid God of the Old Testament: half ranting maniac, half celestial abstraction.

The book has been thoroughly discredited by historians (Freud too has joined the pantheon of tarnished names), but I find it extremely interesting-though possibly more for the curious difficulties involved in its composition than for its actual content.

Freud began writing it in Vienna during the thirties, under the protection of the Catholic Church. Hitler was chancellor in Germany, but in Austria the Church still appeared to be a bulwark of resistance against the Nazis. This put Freud in an awkward position, particularly concerning the second section of his book, where he develops ideas from his earlier work that consider religion in general as a mass psychological disorder.

“We are living here in a Catholic country under the protection of that Church,” he writes in the first of two prefaces to this section, “uncertain how long the protection will last. So long as it does last I naturally hesitate to do anything that is bound to awaken the hostility of that Church.”

Self-censorship appeared to be his only option: the preface ends with a declaration that he has decided not to publish the essay. But then in 1938 the Nazis invaded Austria, and with the Catholic Church proving spineless after all, he fled to London: “In the certainty of persecution-now not only because of my work, but also because of my ‘race,’ I left…”

The calamity was paradoxically liberating; you can feel his joy at the lifting of inhibitions in the second preface, which he wrote in London:

“I found the kindliest welcome in beautiful, free, generous England… I dare now to make public the last part of my essay.”

And yet even with the external obstacles removed, he was still troubled by what he called “inner misgivings” and “inner difficulties” with this book. He himself attributed these to uncertainty over whether he had amassed enough historical evidence to demonstrate how his analysis of religion in general applied to Judaism in particular. But this scholarly scruple doesn’t convincingly account for the brooding self-doubt conveyed in this preface. “The inner difficulties were not to be changed by the different political system and the new domicile. Now as then I am uneasy when confronted with my own work…” (my italics).

A likelier explanation becomes apparent in the text itself, where, in the course of discussing the psychology of anti-Semitism, Freud offers a number of observations on the special characteristics of Judaism and the Jewish people. The tone is respectful, even reverential, and there are moving evocations of the ethical grandeur and civilizing force of the Mosaic vision (albeit undercut by the blasphemous earlier argument that Moses himself wasn’t a Jew). But at the same time, the logic of his analysis forces Freud to say things that must have been uncomfortable for a Jew to say, or even think, at that particular moment in history, with the prospect of total extermination confronting his people.

For example, there is the comment that the Jewish religion was rendered, psychologically speaking, “a fossil” by the advent of Christianity with its healthy recovery of repressed polytheistic impulses. Then there is the matter of the Jews’ long-standing habit of cultural self-separation from their host societies, a subject that compels Freud to adopt, briefly but startlingly, the perspective of those societies at their most aggrieved: “We may start with one character trait of the Jews which governs their relationship to other people. There is no doubt that they have a very good opinion of themselves, think themselves nobler, on a higher level, superior to the others…” And there is the final, triumphantly psychoanalytic unraveling of the ever-escalating asceticism that gives the adherents of this religion, at least the more orthodox ones, their special character. The passage begins admiringly enough: “In a new transport of moral asceticism the Jews imposed on themselves constantly increasing instinctual renunciation, and thereby reached-at least in doctrine and precepts-ethical heights that had remained inaccessible to other peoples of antiquity…” But the conclusion is merciless: “The origin, however, of these ethics in feelings of guilt, due to the repressed hostility to God, cannot be gainsaid. It bears the characteristic of being never concluded and never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-formations of obsessional neurosis.”

One imagines that writing such things about the Jews in 1938, the year of Kristallnacht, must have given Freud-confident as he always was in the clinical impartiality of his own observations-some qualms. At any rate it seems fair to Freudianize the master here, and conjecture that there were strong unconscious reasons, beyond the immediate argument in hand, why considerations of ethics and guilt may have been on his mind, and why he was experiencing “inner misgivings.”

But speaking of psychoanalysis, a comment that the archivist made at the V&A has been nagging at me.

I had put my father’s hate letter in a pile of documents I was setting aside to copy. When the archivist saw it she gave a sort of sigh. “Ah, that letter,” she said. “Whoever wrote it was mentally ill. That’s my opinion.”

At the time I’d thought nothing of it, but now I feel as if I was being gently reproved for digging up something sensationalistic for my article, some shameful relic that should have been left to decompose in peace.

My impulse is to jump to my own defense and assert that the writer of the letter was aware of what he was doing and that it was therefore perfectly appropriate to exhume it. But thinking back to the shouting capitals and thickly scrawled defacements, the hundreds of painstakingly inked-out lines of print, I become less certain. And I return to a question that has arisen periodically in my mind since Nasreen first began emailing me; namely, was Nasreen herself simply “mentally ill,” and if so is there any point, after all, in trying to write about her? Has her behavior all along been just the chaotic by-product of chemical imbalances and misfiring synapses-to be regretted and pitied, surely, but in itself essentially meaningless?

I have mentioned the “borderline” aspects, as they seemed to me, of Nasreen’s personality. But I could probably have made the case that she was communicating from a place well and truly across the border. She herself seemed to want to convey that impression. Her emails contained dozens of references to her “insanity,” “psychosis,” “nervous breakdowns,” “craziness,” and so on, of which I have quoted only a fraction. There were those paranoid comments about mysterious forces tampering with her computer. And there was quite a bit of talk about doing drugs. Arguably, in other words, the whole saga could be explained purely and simply as some kind of “mental illness,” possibly worsened by drug abuse.

But I can’t quite accept this. For one thing, “mental illness” carries an implication that the sufferer isn’t aware of the possible consequences of his or her actions and therefore shouldn’t be held accountable for them. That seems reasonable in cases of real insanity, but however afflicted Nasreen may have been, she was obviously, calculatingly, tauntingly aware of the possible consequences of her actions, and by her own admission dead set on bringing at least some of them about (“I will ruin him”). For another, the very proclamations of her own “insanity” seem precisely evidence that she was not insane, but rather that she was using the idea of insanity as leverage for manipulation.

Even as I write this, though, I am aware of the possibility of mixed motives in what I myself am doing. I have a strong vested interest, after all, in claiming that Nasreen was fundamentally sane. I want to hold her responsible for her behavior. I tell myself that this is simply because I believe it to be the case, which I do. But I also have to admit that if I didn’t, I would probably feel uncomfortable writing about her. Uncomfortable not only from a personal point of view but also from a literary one. As soon as you reduce human behavior to a pathology-label it “psychotic” or “sociopathic,” or attribute it to some kind of personality disorder-it becomes, for literary purposes, less interesting (at least to me). She’s clinically this or that; she has X Syndrome, Y Disorder: well, maybe, but in that case there is no morally engaging antagonist and therefore, for me, no drama. Iago’s “motiveless malignancy,” in Coleridge’s famous phrase, brings the audience up against the mystery of evil with a force that would be seriously weakened if a psychiatrist were to appear in the play and explain his behavior as the result of an excess of monoamine oxidase in his posterior cerebellum.

So I have reasons that may not be entirely objective for resisting a purely medical diagnosis of Nasreen’s actions. But even as I acknowledge this, it occurs to me (and you could say this proves nothing except the urgency of my need to justify myself) that even if these outbursts-Nasreen’s and that of my father’s attacker-are instances of “mental illness,” they are perhaps not quite as special-case and narrowly applicable as I have been thinking. Might they not, on the contrary, be evidence of some naturally occurring feature in the human mind, one that by definition requires the presence of “madness” in order to become observable, since, under present social conditions, nobody in their right mind would allow it to disclose itself?

The spasmlike, explosive nature of anti-Semitism, when you do witness it today, seems relevant to the conjecture. Often the outburst appears to be as startling to its perpetrator as anyone else, as if some constriction or inhibition had been unexpectedly lifted, some area of the psyche had come suddenly uncoupled from the social self with its diligent observance of proprieties and taboos. The look on the White House correspondent’s face in the news footage after she has said that Jews should go back to Germany and Poland, for instance; a grimace of astonished horror, as if toads have just hopped out of her mouth. The extreme drunkenness involved in recent outbursts of anti-Semitism from fashion and movie celebrities. Even in its cooler, steelier form it seems to arise almost involuntarily in its perpetrators, insinuating itself into other impulses before its unmistakable fin surfaces. Moral outrage, for example, is the proper response to a news story of Israeli soldiers killing a Palestinian child, but when a poet writes of a Palestinian boy “gunned down by the Zionist SS” you feel that something other than moral outrage has entered the picture: an opportunistic malice riding in on the wake of the legitimate disgust, itself having no particular interest in the child or the soldiers, but only the desire to seize a rare chance to call Jews Nazis. The tainted word “Zionist” is the poet’s alibi (“It’s not Jews I’m against, only Zionists”), but his use of “SS” as the slur of choice gives him away (imagine calling an African American soldier who killed a child a “slave-trader” or a “Klansman”). The urge to condemn people in their capacity as wrongdoers gives way mid-expression, mid-breath almost, to the apparently stronger urge to bait them in their capacity as Jews. The propensity for Judaism to keep drawing this kind of archaic lightning out of educated people even after the Holocaust seems an intrinsic part of its curious time-dissolving effect. Or put it this way: there is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.

In the early days of Israel, strictly orthodox Jews were opposed to the Zionists. They rejected Zionism because of the Midrashic injunction not to hasten the will of God in creating a home for the Jewish people. The gap was narrowed somewhat by the teachings of the country’s first chief rabbi, Avraham Kook, who held that the Zionists could be regarded as unconscious agents of God’s will; their actions, whether they knew it or not, part of the divine plan to reestablish the House of David in Israel.

After Rabbi Avraham Kook died, his son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, refined his father’s theology, steadily aligning it with the politics of the young state. Some Orthodox groups continued to oppose the notion of a man-made state of Israel (some still do), but for Kook and his followers the earthly and the divine increasingly appeared to be on the same track. The final convergence came with the Six-Day War. What more stunning evidence could there be of God’s will than those lightning victories? To a religious mind, alert for signs in even the most mundane of occurrences, these seemingly miraculous events were proof of God’s favorable disposition toward the Zionist project. “The Almighty has his own political agenda according to which politics down here are conducted,” Kook jubilantly proclaimed. “… No earthly politics can supersede it.” Henceforth settlement of the Land of Israel was to be regarded as a divine commandment, a mitzvah. The Religious Settler movement was born.

Another member of the Kook family, Simcha HaCohen Kook, was appointed rabbi of the new Hurva synagogue a few months before my visit. The appointment was controversial, even within the Jewish Quarter. The head of the civic agency that oversaw the project (the Jewish Quarter Development Company) refused to attend the rabbi’s investiture. I have been trying to arrange an interview with the rabbi for several days. The JQDC, who manage the synagogue, offered to put me in touch with him, but nothing has come of it so far. A few hours ago I walked down here to Hurva Square, where I am sitting now, to try my luck in person. A polite young man with a pistol took my number and told me someone would call soon, but I’m still waiting. It is Friday; soon Shabbat will have begun and Rabbi Kook won’t be able to use a phone.

I am debating whether to pursue a line of thought in my article, concerning the philosophical implications of replicas. If you replicate the appearance of something, do you also replicate its meaning? Is this building in any meaningful way the “same” as the Ottoman structure it replicates? If not, why not? At some point, if I were to go in this direction, I would bring in the Borges story about the writer who re-creates Don Quixote word for word, not by copying it, but by immersing himself in the context of its original creation so thoroughly that he is able, as it were, to give birth to it a second time. Is it the same book, or do the same words magically mean something entirely different? From here my idea would be to move on to politics, specifically the topic of apartheid. If the outward features of South African apartheid evolve in another society, but do so by a different process and for different reasons than they did in South Africa, do they nevertheless mean the same thing and deserve to be called by the same name? Is the same visceral shunning reflex appropriate, or should criticism take account of the different underlying causes? Is it the case that while brutality and humiliation are what they are, regardless of underlying causes, there is nevertheless a difference between saying “T his is wrong” and “T his is apartheid”? That one is a legitimate moral reaction, while the other is a smear?

A gated lodge guards one main entrance of the synagogue and a locked stairway bars the other. Security is of course a serious matter in this city, but I have noticed that you can wander freely into the restored Sephardic synagogues down the road, whereas here visitors seem to be actively discouraged.

Perhaps it’s just a literary prejudice of mine, but I seem to be developing a certain animosity toward this smooth, pale, architectural doppelgänger. Its gates and railings oppress the spirit. The sight of young men in black hats and business suits coming and going through side doors that are opened from the inside only after a knock, and then closed immediately behind them, adds an air of secretiveness to the overall effect. It doesn’t help to learn, as I did this morning online, that one of the two donors who paid for the construction, a Ukrainian businessman, was reported by the FBI to have links with organized crime. (But perhaps that isn’t true; perhaps he has his own Nasreen, smearing him on the Internet.)

The afternoon deepens and the streets begin to fill. Tourists and groups of Yeshiva students head toward the Western Wall. Locals are bustling about on last-minute errands before Shabbat begins. It also happens to be Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so I imagine Rabbi Kook will be busy all weekend. And after that I return to the States.

I realize I left it rather late to start trying to get hold of him, and I’m wondering if this is because I don’t really want to talk to him, and if so, whether this is because I am afraid that his views will resemble those of his illustrious relative Zvi Yehuda Kook, thereby necessitating a yet more uncomfortably treacherous-feeling attitude of hostility toward the synagogue than I already have, or the reverse: that he will be so moderate and sensible that my forebodings about the building, the vague sense I’ve been forming of it as some sort of cyclopic creature gazing broodingly at the Temple Mount with the unblinking eye of its dome, will prove frivolous and sensationalistic.

An hour passes. It doesn’t look like I am going to hear from the rabbi. I get up from my bench and join the slow tide of figures moving toward the Western Wall. I was busy the previous Friday, and so today is also my last opportunity to do what I had planned to do: place myself at the Wall at sundown on Shabbat, and reflect.

There are families on their way to prayers now, the large families of the ultra-Orthodox, with six, eight, ten children-the fastest-growing religious group on the planet. What you notice about them as an outside observer is always their sheer extremity of self-differentiation, their physical unlikeness to any other group on earth.

Most traditional dress has a relationship to natural conditions that one grasps intuitively, even if one can’t account in detail for specific features. But intuition alone will merely register the appearance of the Haredim as strange, and therefore at some level of consciousness estranging. Even to make the most basic sense of it you have to have educated yourself in some rather esoteric matters. The shtreimel, for instance, a wide cylindrical hat made of sable or of gray fox tails, the size and shape of an enormous cake, and very popular among the Jerusalem Ashkenazi, is a magnificent and yet unfathomably singular piece of Shabbat headgear, bearing no obvious kinship to any other hat. The fact that it is always worn over another head covering, the close-fitting yarmulke, further compounds the cryptic effect. If you know nothing of the traditions concerning its origin and symbolism-the decree forcing Jews to wear a tail on their heads, the conversion of an object of humiliation into one of dignity, the gematrial or numerological significance of the number of tails used and the relation of this to the tetragrammaton (the name of God), the special spiritual merit of wearing two head coverings, the allusion to the shaatnez rules from the Torah prohibiting certain uses of wool, the clockwise spiral wrapping of the fur to emulate and invoke the radiance of the Divine Presence, the overall intention to glorify not the wearer but the holiness of Shabbat-if you are ignorant of all this, you are likely to see the hat just as something at once disquietingly weird and unaccountably sumptuous, and find yourself wondering by what quirk of eccentric and extravagant self-regard a man would find it necessary to crown himself in this fashion. What it replaces, the tefillin, or phylacteries, worn on non-Shabbat days, is even more enigmatic. What is the uninformed eye to make of a black leather box strapped to the center of a man’s forehead like a miner’s lamp shedding invisible light, another attached to his arm, facing inward to the heart, the leather straps wound and tied in precise arrangements unmistakably charged with meaning yet indecipherable by any process of natural deduction? Likewise with every other aspect of outward appearance: without a knowledge of the complex interplay of history and scripture, tsarist decree and Talmudic injunction, everything-the wigs and hairnets, the prevalence of silk, the mid-body gartel dividing the heart and mind from the sex organs, the uncut sidelocks, the right-over-left buttoning, the laceless Shabbat shoes, the satin bekeshe, or surcoat, that looks so lavish but is in fact intended to convey modesty, the knee breeches to avoid contact of clothing with the unclean ground, the fringed garments, and on, and on-everything is going to appear almost intentionally alien, uncanny, unheimlich. But even with this knowledge there remains, to the irreligious outsider, something unassimilable to one’s instincts about human attire, a stubborn residue of mystery.

I remember another scene in the Singer novel. Changing planes in Rome, Shapiro notices the man in Orthodox garb he’d seen earlier on the flight from New York, this time with a group of young Yeshiva students in tow, all dressed like him. He stares at them as they wait for their connection to Tel Aviv. “How did they become what they are?” he wonders, noting their indifference to the mocking glances of passersby, the look of passion in their eyes, the air of eagerness to serve God, “to carry out all His commandments and to assume even more rigors and restrictions…” He remembers a line from the Torah, the commandment to be other, different, unlike: “‘After the doings of the land of Egypt shall ye not do.’” As Egypt changes its fads and fashions, he asserts, “so must the true Jew constantly assume new rigors and restraints…” What Freud attributes to neurotically escalating Oedipal guilt at the murder of Moses, Shapiro explains as an arms race between worldliness and piety, one driving the other into ever more elaborate expressions of itself. His image of the soldier comes to me-A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform-and I see these figures precisely as soldiers, though the volatile instability in my own point of view at once causes them to vacillate between that and Freud’s counter-image of the descendants of a people wracked by an unassuageable guilt that “made them render their religious precepts ever and ever more strict, more exacting, but also more petty,” and that pitiless observation of his: “It bears the characteristic of being never concluded and never able to be concluded with which we are familiar in the reaction-formations of obsessional neurosis…”

Near the top of the steps leading down to the Western Wall Plaza, a vast, glass-encased golden menorah stands ready to be installed in the Third Temple when its hour comes round. “May it be rebuilt speedily and in our days,” goes the legend on the sign below. It was created by the Temple Institute and paid for by one of the Hurva donors, the Ukrainian businessman with alleged links to organized crime. It used to be farther away from the Wall, in the Cardo, but it was recently moved forward, closer.

You can see the plaza from here; already milling with people, the density of the crowd increasing toward the bastion of the Wall itself. A man stands with his back to the steps, unwinding the tefillin from his left arm. His movements are exact, quietly ceremonious. There are elaborate rules covering every aspect of the manufacture and use of these objects, from the dyeing and stitching of the leather boxes to the tone of voice in which to recite the blessings while wearing them. The boxes contain verses from the Torah. They are worn, or “laid,” as a sign of remembrance-of God’s hand leading the Jews out of Egypt-and they have also acquired the significance of a protective charm or amulet (the Greek “phylakter” means “guard”). They are not worn during the twenty-four hours of Shabbat because the period, being holy, is a sign and guard in itself. To wear them would be a blasphemy, a superfluous measure of self-protection that would imply doubt rather than faith.

Having duly removed them, the pious man proceeds on down the steps to present himself to the Almighty. Someone sounds a blast on a ram’s horn shofar, summoning in the New Year, which is also the Day of Judgment, and a volley of answering blasts goes off all around, echoing off the gray-gold cliff of the Western Wall.

I follow after him, passing through the security booth into the crowded esplanade. Closer to the Wall is a partition dividing the men’s side from the much smaller women’s area, but here at the back men and women, tourists and worshippers, mingle together. There is a carnival atmosphere, with the bleaty trumpeting of the shofars, and people calling out shana tova, the New Year’s greeting. Small groups merge into larger groups who hold hands in a ring and then splinter off haphazardly into singles again. Individuals tent a fringed shawl, a tallith, over their heads and conduct a private prayer service under it, each his own priest. There are teenagers, businessmen, tour groups, IDF soldiers in military fatigues, and Shapiro/Freud’s soldier-neurotics in their own regalia. They pray, chat, read, chant, stare entranced. In one corner of the plaza about eighty young men in white shirts, Yeshiva students, dance in a circle singing loudly, hands on one another’s shoulders. Among them is an older, gray-bearded man with a large, handsome head tilted back in a way that makes the smile fixed on his powerful features seem superbly self-assured. There is something more concerted about this group than any of the others, a consciousness of their impact on the crowd around them.

I press on toward the Wall. Inside the men’s section the nodding and chanting and davening are more concentrated. The crowd is thicker. Some men in fur shtreimels and silk stockings gather in front of me, talking in Brooklyn accents. Up close, the heavy masses of glistening fur have a dense materiality that for a moment blots out all thought of their religious or historical meaning, and I catch myself falling into my old, ignorant misprision of preening self-delight. Across the plaza the linked students uncouple and regroup in several short rows, one behind the other. Arms around one another’s shoulders, they come toward the men’s section in a half-marching, half-dancing shuffle. The gray-bearded man is at the center of the front row, his smiling head thrown back as he leads his acolytes toward the Wall. All of them are smiling, in fact; their joy is palpable, and I am struck by the fact that this too, this dancing phalanx advancing on the Wall, is one of those images that can resonate with contradictory meanings depending on where you begin the story in which they appear. You could call it just a ceremonial crossing of empty space to a holy site. Or you could start earlier, when the plaza wasn’t empty but comprised the old Moroccan Quarter with its houses crowding almost all the way up to the Wall, in which case you would have to describe how the Israelis tore down the houses immediately after the Six-Day War, which would charge this empty space with meanings that might or might not trouble you but would certainly affect how you saw it and how you interpreted the dancing and marching impulses it seems to inspire. Or you could go back further, to the War of Independence, the final retreat of Jewish forces from the Old City following the destruction of the Hurva, which they were using as a stronghold, and the Jordanian commander’s strange boast that “for the first time in a thousand years not a single Jew remains in the Jewish Quarter. Not a single building remains intact. This makes the Jews’ return here impossible,” which would endow both space and dancing with yet another complexion. And so on.

A knock comes at the door. You let in the stranger, accept the challenge, venture forth, and a year later find yourself baring your own neck for the death blow of a freshly sharpened ax. The ax stalls in mid-air once, twice, but the third time it comes all the way down. To your astonished relief it does no more than very lightly nick your neck, spilling a little blood on the snowy ground.

New Year’s Day-not the Jewish but the Christian New Year-is also the day of the climactic scene in Gawain, where the young knight finally reencounters his nemesis. He wakes early and puts on his armor: the surcoat with its pentangle symbol of purity, but also the magic girdle, his not-so-pure charm against death, wrapping it twice around his waist. A man from the castle brings him as far as a tall cliff, where a path leads on to the Green Chapel, and leaves him there, afraid to go any closer. Alone, Gawain follows the path into a ravine under the cliff. There is nothing anywhere that looks like a chapel, only a smooth green mound off to the side. He rides over and sees that it is hollow; a grave mound or barrow, but empty, with entrances on four sides. This, he realizes, is the Green Chapel, this stark hatchway between the worlds of the living and the dead. Suddenly he hears the sound of a blade being sharpened in the air above him: “Quat! Hit clatered in the clyff…” The Green Knight is up there somewhere, hidden in the cliff like the Shechina, the Divine Presence, here in the Western Wall. But after a moment he emerges into plain sight, striding down toward Gawain, head squarely back on his shoulders.

He is Sir Bertilak, of course, and he carries the gigantic ax in his hand, ready to behead Gawain and finish the game he began a year earlier.

The two withheld blows are for the two evenings Gawain played true in the exchange of spoils, passing on the lady’s kisses. As for the third, well, “here yow lakked a lyttel, sir…” But it was just a token blow all the same: a little “tappe,” Sir Bertilak calls it, acknowledging that the girdle had been withheld from him, not for purposes of lecherous intrigue but out of a natural attachment to existence: “Bot for ye lufed your lyfe…”

All this Sir Bertilak explains in great good humor under the cliff, laughing genially as he praises Gawain’s generally commendable performance in the game, pressing him to keep the girdle as a souvenir of his adventure and assuring him that he is now fully absolved of all wrongdoing. He even invites him back to the castle to make up with the lady and meet the witch Morgan le Faye, Arthur’s half sister and Gawain’s aunt. It was she, Sir Bertilak continues, thoroughly amused by it all, who dreamed up this whole beheading business in the first place, sending me to Camelot out of pure idle malice, to drive you out of your senses, “your wyttes to reve.” But that’s all water under the bridge as far as this indomitably jolly man is concerned, and there is no reason to dwell on any of it. Come back and say hello to your aunt, he entreats Gawain, as if after all nothing of any great consequence has occurred. “Make myry in my hous…”

But Gawain isn’t in the mood for making merry. Exposed in his little deceit, he is no longer able to ignore the gap between his impossibly pure image of himself and the flawed reality that has just been thrust in his face. Shame floods him, bitter and unassuageable. Fear taught me to forsake my nature: the largesse and loyalty that belongs to knights. Now am I faulty and false. There is no question of going back to the castle. As for the magic girdle (or not so magic, since he would apparently have been safer if he hadn’t worn it), he will keep it, but only as the sign of his own guilt. Winding it carefully around his neck and shoulder, he laces it under his left arm, the knot against his heart, and sets off for Camelot, a newly minted soldier-neurotic from the dark ages, riding home to his fortress.

Laughter here too; jubilation at his safe return, but again he is unable to join in. Some terminal disenchantment has fallen over him. Like a time traveler from science fiction, he has journeyed too far and grown middle-aged in the space of a year. Haggard and brooding, he confesses everything to his old companions: displays the scar on his neck, shows them the girdle, his “token of untrawthe,” and declares his intention to wear it till his dying day. They listen but they don’t understand what this self-flagellating gloom is about, and he can’t seem to explain it to them. It’s over, you’re alive, any possible wrong you may have done you’ve more than atoned for; who cares about anything else? Irrepressible laughter surges back through the court. The king himself tries to cheer up Gawain. Someone has the merry idea that they should all lace a green girdle around themselves, and that henceforth it will be the Round Table’s special symbol of honor and renown. And whatever pang of helpless exasperation or anguish this idea provokes in Gawain can only be imagined, because with that final image of a man forgiven everything by everyone but himself, indeed assured that there is nothing to forgive, the story ends.

Speaking for myself, though, nothing has ended and not much has changed, at least on the face of it. Nasreen’s emails continue. I block the sender addresses, but new ones spring up in their place. Sometimes there are long periods of silence, sometimes the old rapid-fire bursts start up again. For a year or so the messages were more oblique, less overtly threatening, sometimes not even especially malicious at all. A while ago there was a link to a long, frankly confessional piece titled “To Sir, With Love”: “I called him Sir because his father was knighted Sir by the English royal family as a carrot for the esteemed architecture the monarchy despised behind his back… Sir had lovely teeth, full lips, curly Jew-hair, a sexy amount of which peeked out of the collar of shirts that never were ironed. He looked disheveled, un-professorial and uber-professorial, all at the same time. I loved calling him Sir.” (Not that it matters, but a more objective eye would never have been able to discern much in the way of “curly Jew-hair” on either my head or my chest.) “My stalking of Sir began only a few days after I’d blindly sent out an unfinished manuscript of my novel-in-progress… Sir’s former mistress, Elaine, made me fall in love with Sir. I fell in love with the way Sir saw me or the way Sir saw the female muse behind his writing, which Elaine made me believe is me and I wanted to believe is me (it is me!)…”

In May 2011 I went to Los Angeles to give a reading. It was advertised in the L.A. listings and Nasreen, who had been quiet for some time, went into a fresh frenzy of emailing. I knew she lived somewhere near L.A., and as the day approached and her demands to know where I was staying started coming in, along with renewed protestations of love and hate and all the rest of it (including a mildly obscene photo of herself), I began to wonder if she was going to show up at the reading and stage some kind of incident.

The day before I was due to fly in happened to be the day Osama Bin Laden was killed. Given Nasreen’s identification with the spirit of terrorism (not to mention her assertion that I myself was “the reason for terrorism”), I couldn’t help feeling that this was a peculiarly fateful piece of timing, and at a certain point I realized I was going to have to warn the organizers of the reading about her. I called them up: “Er, there’s something I need to tell you…” I felt like the Ancient Mariner: doomed to tell his mad tale to every new stranger he encounters as he wanders the earth. I gave my reading under guard, with a security detail in the auditorium and the LAPD patrolling outside.

There have been tender words: “i’m still in love. so much in love…”; an invitation to join her on a yoga retreat in Australia; some haunting cell phone photographs of little street scenes caught on the fly (sent to me as if I’d been temporarily recategorized from eternal enemy to dependably approving friend or mentor); even, in the spirit of Sir Bertilak inviting Gawain back to the castle as if nothing has happened, a social invitation: “can we have coffee?”

But the old crazed hatred still persists. Recriminations about the unfinished novel: “I want the full JEW treatment… polish it… pretty it up you fucking animals”; demands for recompense for the “theft” of her work: “Pay me for it or I’ll continue the music”; more Holocaust taunting: “I wish Hitler had seen it through”; a link to Kate Bush singing “James and the Cold Gun,” with the lyrics helpfully typed out: “You’re a coward, James! You’re running away from humanity…”

Since my visit to L.A. these odi et amo vacillations have grown increasingly elemental: “James. I need you” one day; “I want you banished from this earth” the next. She alludes to a new affair that seems to have gone wrong-“he too is a rapist…” Her own family join the cast of villains: “my brother, my father, my mother, my uncle and most of my siblings are SHIT.” Her self-presentation as the ultimate victim becomes ever more acidly emphatic: “I’m just a dirty darky muslim girl…” while her inflated image of my standing in the world grows correspondingly surreal: “Oh, but you love charity and to do super-star celebrity charity…”

Meanwhile the stain of defamation continues to spread. In the summer of 2011 Nasreen launched a Facebook campaign, trying to “friend” people connected to me, and posting the full smoldering litany of accusations against me on various walls. Google entries under my name began to list links to these accusations, which now included having her drugged and raped at the national magazine where she’d worked. From Facebook she proceeded to The Guardian, where, in the online comments section under a book review I’d written, she posted:

Coming from James Lasdun, a mediocre writer himself, whose last book is sexually sophomoric, I find this review to be funny. At least the writer doesn’t steal his students’ work and give it to others of the same ethnicity. And, Mr. Lasdun, your own personal life is a bad porn film and I’m sorry I didn’t sleep with you and so you had me raped and gave my work to AIPAC babies for $. I see you’re well connected at the Guardian. American women would like you to move to England. -Nasreen, a former student.

Other comments in the same vein followed. Unlike, say, my Wikipedia entry, Guardian articles and comments are seen by large numbers of people. “Don’t even try to repair your rep.,” she had written a couple of months earlier (I assume she meant “reputation”), and at this point it did seem as if that tattered article was beyond repair. I hit the “report” button, and the comments were quickly taken down, but I was badly shaken (in fact I was literally shaking). How long had they been up? How many others had been posted and taken down? What was to stop her from posting more? I write regularly for The Guardian: Was I going to have to monitor my online pages around the clock? Or would I simply have to accept that this was now going to be a part of my life; that my public self, such as it is, was going to manifest this strange disfigurement wherever it appeared? If so, was there perhaps some different attitude I could acquire, some way of not minding about being publicly accused of rape and theft? Is such a thing humanly possible?

Abandoning her former caution, Nasreen now began making overt threats. Demands that I “fix the fucking book” mingle with what appear to be dire warnings about what will happen if I don’t: “You are to blame for innocent deaths…”

She also began targeting my daughter, attempting to friend her on Facebook, warning me, “your daughter is fucked,” and proclaiming, “I do voodoo. You’ll see. She’s going to go through fucking HELL for what you did to me…” When she informed me point-blank that “your family’s going to get it if you do not right your wrongs,” I realized the time had come to call the police again. “go call the cops…” she wrote, ever clairvoyant, “… you get me in trouble and you’re fucked. give me everything you have and go kill yourself…” I called the Albany FBI again (I had seen a notice on their website soliciting calls about Internet crimes) and was listened to politely, only to be instructed to contact a local field office instead, where an answering machine repeatedly informed me: “This mailbox is full and not currently taking messages. Please try again later.” I left several urgent messages with Detective Bauer, but never heard back from him. Through Janice, however, I heard that he still didn’t think the DA would extradite Nasreen, even for the more explicit threats she was now making. I had to wonder what it would take to stir that mighty personage into action. In desperation I called my local village police department, which I’d assumed wouldn’t be able to do much about the situation. But they sprang into action, calling Nasreen immediately and warning her she would be arrested if she continued harassing me. I can’t say I’m hopeful of any kind of long-term result (she has already broken her promise that she wouldn’t contact me again), but it was reassuring just to be taken seriously.

It was Detective Bauer who had told me not to stop reading the emails in case they became violent enough to qualify as a felony. But if the bar for a felony was as impossibly high as it appeared to be, then what was the point of subjecting myself to the excruciating pain of reading the damn things? I began blocking them again, intermittently; allowing myself the luxury of a few weeks’ silence, before misgivings of one kind or another would get the better of me (might I have missed an allusion to some critically damaging Web posting or, worse, some crucial warning of impending violence?) and I reopened the channel.

On it goes, then; on and on and on. Supplications and imprecations flaring up and dying away like fevers of a recurrent illness. Threats, pranks with misappropriated email addresses (I opened one the other day from the British Council, hoping to find an invitation to some literary junket, only to read, under the official letterhead: “your family is dead you ugly JEW”). Phone calls too, lately, with long obscene messages demanding money, promising to go on harassing me until I pay, telling my wife I slept with all my female students (except for Nasreen herself), all in a bizarre, unrecognizable, sing-song voice, full of wearily sarcastic allusions to the things Jews do (“I know it’s in the Torah, I know it’s in the Talmud, that you’re supposed to rape gentiles, steal from them…”).

I try not to pay any more attention than I do to the midnight voices in my own head, which at times it closely resembles. Occasionally I lapse back into my old Inca torture agony, writhing prostrate on a sofa. More often, now that the saga has entered its fifth year and I have given up waiting for it to stop, I find myself simply wanting to make sense of it. Why is this happening? What does it mean? I want to understand this tormentor of mine who knows the workings of my mind so intricately and uses them so cleverly to make me suffer. I want, as St. Augustine said, “to comprehend my comprehender.” I want to know what she thinks she is doing. She must be aware, at some level, that I haven’t stolen her work or sold it through some network of nefarious Jews to her literary rivals (she has never made any attempt to describe what it is she thinks these writers have stolen from her), that I didn’t have her drugged and raped at the magazine where she worked. Why, then, is she devoting so much time and energy to making and pressing and elaborating these accusations? What happened-between us, or to her alone-to make my unremarkable existence matter so much to her?

A large part of understanding something is finding analogies for it. What is it like? What other situation does it resemble? For me, being who I am, the analogies that come to mind are most often from things I’ve read. Gawain, Macbeth, the Highsmith and Singer novels, Emily Dickinson’s letters: all have seemed to shed some light. Lately I have also been looking at Sylvia Plath’s poems, especially “Lady Lazarus,” that little tour de force of chortling malediction. It’s a poem in the form of a piece of hate mail, after all (or so it seems to me now), complete with Nazified recipient: Herr God, Herr Lucifer… “O my enemy. / Do I terrify?” Lady Lazarus asks this unlucky figure, and at once I hear Nasreen’s mocking, menacing grandiosity. “I am your opus,” Lady Lazarus declares (she seems to be on the point of accusing her addressee of plagiarism); “I am your valuable, / The pure gold baby…” And she too, in her search for ever more extreme terms to evoke her pain and fury, reaches for the Holocaust: her skin “Bright as a Nazi lampshade,” her face like “Jew linen.”

What do I learn from these resemblances? Among other things, they force me to consider (given Plath’s fate) the extremities of despair entailed in Nasreen’s gleefully uninhibited aggression: its likely proximity to some unendurable pain. And this in turn, occasionally, causes me to feel compassion for her.

Or again: there is a recurrent gesture in classical mythology that might be termed the gesture of the offended woman. This consists of the splashing of water or some other liquid into the face of the offender, to drastic effect. Ceres, jeered at by a boy for drinking from her cup with unladylike gusto, spatters the boy with the brew, causing him to shrivel into a little wriggling-tailed lizard. When the hunter Actaeon stumbles on Diana bathing naked in a pool, the angry goddess splashes water at him, turning him into a stag (his dogs tear him to pieces). Proserpina flings water from the underworld river into the face of Ascalaphus when he reveals that she has violated the terms of her release from hell. The water turns him into a screech owl.

In my (crudely Freudian) reading of these stories, the liquid represents the state of female desire, aroused by attraction and then immediately weaponized by wounded pride; the men’s crimes consisting, essentially, of an affront to sexual self-esteem, whether by mockery, clumsiness, or betrayal.

In pagan terms, rejection of a woman’s offer of love is a sin against nature, whose sole imperative is procreation, and it is always punished. There are stories that explicitly address that act of sexual rejection, and these have no need of the symbolic splashing (though you can feel how the symbol might have evolved from them: for instance, when the bashful youth Hermaphroditus rejects the advances of the nymph Salmacis in her pool, she deluges his naked limbs with her own in a watery embrace that merges their two bodies into one, creating the original hermaphrodite). I like the splash, though; the image it offers of elementally unbridled self-expression, the explosive manifestation of the goddess’s inner core. For me this has connotations of extreme creativity as well as destructiveness. Both aspects seemed to me present in Nasreen’s “splash,” the electronic tsunami she unleashed in response to what she saw as my offense. There was the pure destructiveness of the self-styled “verbal terrorist.” But there was also something manifestly creative in her unstoppable productivity, a vitality I couldn’t help envying.

Behind my constant sense of being up against the narrow limit of my own abilities is a vaguer, more intermittent sense of having possessed, at some point in the real or imaginary past, precisely an abundance of powers (I suspect many writers feel this). I began to think about that countervailing sense now. Was it just wishful thinking or did it have some basis in reality? If the latter, then how were such powers lost? Could they be destroyed by misuse? Forfeited because of something one had done or failed to do? Was there anything one could do to regain them? Dimly, certain ingrained habits of mine-decisions I had made, consciously or unconsciously; positions I had taken regarding this or that aspect of life or work-began to emerge out of memory and cluster around these questions, as if summoned for reappraisal.

What I am trying to express is that without being entirely aware of it, I had enlisted Nasreen as a guide to help me through the very crisis she herself had precipitated. Or at least my image of Nasreen, the real Nasreen bearing, I realized, no more resemblance to Diana or Ceres or Proserpina (or for that matter Lady Lazarus or Emily Dickinson or the Three Witches) than I myself do to Actaeon or Sir Gawain or Joseph Shapiro. But one way or another this shape-shifting, quasi-phantasmal being, veiled in her skeins of rage and madness, had become a part of my private navigational system; a Fluchthelfer, to use that word again, through what she had once, presciently (and in her own idiosyncratic fashion), referred to as my “mid-life.” You could say I had stumbled on a way of deploying my own preferred form of resistance: weakness as strength; absorption of the blow rather than opposition to it. It didn’t make the situation any better in practical terms, but it made it fractionally more bearable. It was certainly the only kind of resistance that did me any good.

And so here I am at the Wall. And naturally, having built it up in my mind as some kind of grand revelation-in-waiting, I am feeling suddenly a bit blank. The stones are impressive. The ones on the lower courses have framelike indentations around them. They date from the time of Herod, when they formed the retaining wall under the Second Temple, destroyed in A.D. 70, after which the Jews went into exile. The ones above are plainer but equally massive. Weeds hang down here and there from the crevices, green and whiskery. I wonder idly if it would be in poor taste to describe them in my article as rabbinical-looking; if I could perhaps even bring in Gawain somehow, make a joke, Sir Gawain and the Green Rabbi… The truth is, I am not sure what I was expecting to find or feel or learn here.

Or no, that isn’t quite the truth. I had actually planned to make this moment the climax of my amateur private investigation into the origins of anti-Semitism. With all due discomfort of self-exposure I was going to, as it were, lift the lid off my own brain here among these worshippers and find the little evil meme lurking there, the last unharried “insult to mankind that exists in oneself” and make it, as Fanon said one must, “explicit.”

But I don’t seem to have the heart, or the appetite, or the courage, or whatever quality it would take, to complete this process of psychological auto-vivisection. It’s possible that I simply don’t possess the meme (though for professional reasons I hate to exempt myself from any human tendency, good or bad), and my half-formed theory of its physiological origin and consequent latent universality is fatally flawed. Or maybe it was just that those Brooklyn accents I heard earlier put me in mind of the other notorious remark made by the author of that “Zionist SS” poem: that the Brooklyn-born settlers “should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them…,” and I am just recoiling in nausea from the whole exercise.

The poet is very sure that he is not an anti-Semite. An anti-Zionist, yes, and an opponent of Israel’s right to exist, but not an anti-Semite. It seems to be important to him not to be thought of as anti-Semitic. People who have accused him of anti-Semitism are just playing the race card: “They use this card of anti-Semitism. They fill newspapers with hate letters. They are useless people.” Nasreen also was sure that she was not anti-Semitic. “I sound anti-semitic but I’m not,” she wrote in one email, and likewise it seemed important to her to discredit any accusation to the contrary.

Which raises the question of whether you can be an anti-Semite even if you categorically deny that you are one. Is it something you alone can decide that you are or aren’t, like being a vegetarian, or is there something more involuntary about it, like a sexual orientation, which no amount of deciding or wishing or denying can change, and which may be clearer to others than it is to yourself? If the latter, then the next question might be whether society is going to continue to reject it or gradually accept it; in other words, whether it is going to go the way of pedophilia or of gay pride. If the latter, then… then what? The thought peters out before I can get to the end of it. I don’t seem to be as interested in thinking about any of these questions as I had planned to be, now that I’m here.

And something is distracting me: an elderly man standing right up against the Wall, rocking on his heels and lost in what appears, from his half-turned face, to be a somewhat anguished state of prayer or supplication. He is wearing a plain gray yarmulke over his long, unkempt, not very clean-looking gray hair. His beard is matted and his coat is shabby in the extreme, brown and threadbare, with torn pockets. He is the first genuinely down-and-out-looking person I have seen in Jerusalem, and I can’t help wondering what his story could possibly be, and projecting all sorts of sentimental things onto him: Shapiro’s piety, some kind of old-world shtetl simplicity, the outcast raggedness of the Wandering Jew himself, until it occurs to me from a glimpse of rolling whiteness in his eyes as his head tips back (along with the very extreme nature of his swaying and moaning) that he is most likely just a bit cracked.

But what really interests me about him isn’t the bowing and praying at all, but the fact that he is also engaged in screwing a little piece of balled up paper into a chink between two stones. I realize I have been forgetting all about this aspect of the Wall, the thing that probably comes to mind before anything else for most people when they think about it: that it is a place where you come to post messages to the Almighty.

Moving all the way up to it, I see that little folded or balled up bits of paper have been crammed and jammed into every seam: not just the thin gaps between the stones but every crack and cranny in the stones themselves, and every pitted indentation on their surfaces. The accumulated scale and intensity of the little gesture is powerfully affecting; you feel the extreme urgency of the need to communicate awoken by this sanctified and monumental surface.

On our last walk in Provence we climbed into the Mercantour wilderness, to see the Bronze Age rock inscriptions in the high valleys under Mount Bego. Bego, it is conjectured, was a storm god and bull god, patron of the cattle-raising clans who lived there in the Bronze Age and covered the flat-faced boulders with their pictograms. A sign at the top of the trail points to the highest local concentration of the engravings, a sort of long, tilted wall of massive, glacier-polished stone tablets known as the Voie Sacrée, the Sacred Way.

I think of them now, those great, flat, sky-facing pages of rock, and the mysteriously communicative images their surfaces summoned from the hands of the cattle herders with their new bronze tools. Horns turning into daggers, daggers into lightning bolts. Figures brandishing axes. A bull’s head tumbling. Storms drawn as thick stipplings in the orange-patinated schist. Meandering horns turning into rivers irrigating rectangular grids of pasture.

What are they all saying, those images, these balled-up texts here in the Western Wall? Nobody knows, but perhaps it isn’t so hard to imagine. Send rain. Send love. I do love you and am in love with you. I’m sorry if I got screwy on you. You don’t love me at all anymore. Would you like to see me in a veil, sir? Your silence is scary, sir. You lack depth. You lack compassion. Say something. Give me your fucking keys. You pose as an intellectual but you’re a corrupt thief. I am fond of you. I really am. Mr. Horned God, so tacky. Fine, stay silent. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. You need a garden full of me. Get a toupee. I’m sorry I’ve blamed you for so much. I want every cent. Old, shitty man! Two-faced psychotic. Give me everything you have. I’m still in love, so much in love. Can we have coffee?

And it’s hard to know whether to be struck more by the conviction and energy of the effort, or by the tenacity of the silence surrounding it. Somehow they seem the measure of each other.