Jerusalem: The Biography

The Temple Mount – Har haBayit in Hebrew, Haram al-Sharif in Arabic, known in the Bible as Mount Moriah – is the centrepiece of Jerusalem. The Western Wall, the holiest shrine of Judaism, is part of Herod’s western supporting wall of the esplanade, the setting for the Islamic shrines, the Dome of the Rock and the Aqsa Mosque. To many, these 35 acres remain the centre of the world.

In 1994, archaeologists found this stele at Tel Dan on which Hazael, King of Aram-Syria, boasts of his victory over Judaea, the ‘house of David’, thereby confirming David’s existence.

The site of Solomon’s temple has been ravaged and rebuilt so often that little remains, except this ivory pomegranate inscribed ‘to the House of Holiness’. It was probably used as the head of a staff during religious processions in the First Temple.

In 701 BC, King Hezekiah fortified the city against the approaching Assyrian army. His so-called broad wall can be seen in today’s Jewish Quarter.

Meanwhile two teams of his engineers started digging the 533-metre-long Siloam Tunnel to provide water for the city: when they met in the middle, they celebrated with this inscription, which was discovered by a schoolboy in 1891.

Before he turned to Jerusalem, Sennacherib, master of the mighty, rapacious Assyrian empire, stormed Hezekiah’s second city Lachish. The bas-reliefs in his Nineveh palace depict the bloody siege and the punishments suffered by its citizens. Here Judaean families are led away by an Assyrian.

King Darius, seen here in a relief from his Persepolis palace, was the real creator of the Persian Empire that ruled Jerusalem for over two centuries. He allowed the Jewish priests to govern themselves, even issuing this Yehud (Judaea) coin.

After Alexander the Great’s early death, two Greek families vied to control his empire. Ptolemy I Soter hijacked Alexander’s corpse, founded a kingdom in Egypt and stormed Jerusalem. After a century under the Ptolemies, their Seleucid rivals grabbed Jerusalem. The effete, flamboyant King Antiochus IV polluted the Temple and tried to annihilate Judaism, provoking a revolt by Judah the Maccabee , whose family created the new Jewish kingdom that lasted until the arrival of the Romans.

The Roman strongman of the east, Mark Antony, backed a new ruler, Herod, but his mistress Cleopatra, the last Ptolemaic queen, wanted Jerusalem for herself.

Ruthless, murderous and brilliant, Herod the Great, half-Jewish and half-Arab, conquered Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple (shown here in a model reconstruction) and created the city at its most splendid.

This ossuary, marked ‘Simon the builder of the Sanctuary’, probably contained the bones of his architect. The inscription in Greek from the Temple warning gentiles not to enter the inner courts on pain of death.

Most of the southern and western walls of the Temple Mount, including the shrine, the Wall, are Herodian. The impregnable south-eastern corner was the Pinnacle where Jesus was tempted by Satan. A seam in the wall (just visible on the far right of this picture) seems to show Herod’s giant ashlars to the left and the older, smaller Maccabean stones to the right.

Jesus’ Crucifixion, depicted by van Eyck in this painting, was almost certainly a Roman measure, backed by the Temple elite, to destroy any messianic threat to the status quo.

Herod the Great’s son Herod Antipas, ruler of Galilee, mocked Jesus but refused to judge him.

King Herod Agrippa was an urbane, happy-go-lucky adventurer and the most powerful Jew in Roman history. His friendship with the psychotic Emperor Caligula saved Jerusalem, and he later helped raise Claudius to the throne.

After four years of independence, Titus, the son of the new Roman Emperor Vespasian, arrived to besiege Jerusalem. The city and its Temple were destroyed in the savage fighting: archaeologists have discovered the skeletal arm of young girl trapped in a burned house and the heap of Herodian stones pushed off the Temple Mount by the Roman soldiers as they smashed Herod’s Royal Portico. The Arch of Titus in Rome celebrates his Triumph in which the candelbra, or menorah, symbol of the Maccabees, was displayed, and this coin, inscribed ‘Judaea Capta’, commemorates the victory.

Restless, petulant and talented, Emperor Hadrian banned Judaism and refounded Jerusalem as a Roman town, Aelia Capitolina, which provoked a Jewish rebellion led by Simon Bar Kochba (who issued this coin depicting the restored Temple.

This graffiti (Domine Ivimus ‘We go to the Lord’) was discovered by the Armenians beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1978. Possibly dating from around ad 300, does it show that Christian pilgrims prayed beneath Hadrian’s pagan temple?

Constantine the Great was no saint – he murdered his wife and son – but he embraced Christianity and transformed Jerusalem, ordering the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he sent his mother Helena to supervise.

Emperor and philosopher Julian overturned Christianity, restored paganism and gave the Temple Mount back to the Jews, before he was killed fighting the Persians.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian I and his wife Theodora, once a promiscuous showgirl, promoted themselves as universal Christian monarchs and built the colossal Nea Church in Jerusalem.

The Madaba Map shows the magnificence of Byzantine Jerusalem and ignores the Temple Mount which was kept as the symbolic rubbish-heap of Judaism. After the East fell to the Persians, Emperor Heraclius entered the city in 630 through the Golden Gate, which Jews, Muslims and Christians believe to be the setting for the Apocalypse.

Arab conquest: This illustration from Nizami’s poem Khamza shows Muhammad’s Night Flight (Isra) to Jerusalem, riding Buraq, his steed with the human face, followed by his Ascension (Miraj) to converse with Jesus, Moses and Abraham.

Caliph Abd al-Malik (seen here in one of the last Islamic coins to show human features) was the real formulator of Islam and a visionary statesman – yet it was said that his breath was so vile it could kill flies. In 691 he built the first surviving Muslim shrine, the Dome of the Rock, inscribed with the earliest quotations from the Koran.

Abd al-Malik’s Dome affirmed the supremacy of Islam and his Umayyad empire, challenged Christianity, outshone the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and emphasized the Muslims as successors to the Jews by building on the Rock, the foundation stone of the Jewish Temple.

In 1099, after four hundred years of Islamic rule, the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem with an orgy of killing. The city still stank of putrescent flesh six months later.

King of Jerusalem Baldwin I was a tireless warrior and worldly politician, but also a bigamist who was accused of indulging his fleshly appetites.

For the Christians of the Crusader era, Jerusalem was the centre of the world – as shown in many twelfth-century maps, such as this one from Robert the Monk’s Chronicle.

Crusader splendour: the city reached its apogee under Queen Melisende, here seen marrying Fulk of Anjou. He accused her of an affair with Hugh of Jaffa. This exquisite Psalter may have been his marital peace offering.

The curse of Jerusalem: the boy Baldwin IV shows his tutor William of Tyre how he feels no pain during games played with friends, the first sign of leprosy. The Leper King symbolized the decline of the kingdom.

Merciless when he needed to be, patient and tolerant when he could afford to be, Saladin created an empire embracing Syria and Egypt, annihilated the army of Jerusalem and then took the city.

Emperor Frederick II, known as Stupor Mundi – the Wonder of the World to some, the Anti-Christ to others – is seen here entering the Holy City. He negotiated a peace deal that divided Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims.

Saladin and his family re-Islamized Jerusalem often using Crusader spolia. Muslims regard the Dome of the Ascension, built in 1200 on the Temple Mount, as the site of Muhammad’s Miraj, yet it started life as the Crusader Templar baptistery. But it was the Mamluks who really created today’s Muslim Quarter. Sultan Nasir al-Muhammad built the Market of the Cotton Merchants in the distinctive Mamluk style; Sultan Qaitbay commissioned this fountain on the Temple Mount.

Suleiman the Magnificent: a Sultan to the Arabs, a Caesar to the Christians. He never visited Jerusalem but, regarding himself as the second Solomon, he rebuilt most of the walls and gates that we see today.

Suleiman used a Crusader sarcophagus and decoration to build the Fountain of the Gate of the Chain and asserted Ottoman splendour and legitimacy by adding mosaics to the Dome of the Rock.

Charismatic, schizhophrenic, Sabbatai Zevi was rejected in Jerusalem but the self-declared Jewish Messiah excited Jewish hopes – until the Ottoman Sultan forced his conversion to Islam.

The red-bearded Albanian generalissimo Ibrahim Pasha conquered Syria in 1831 and almost took Istanbul on behalf of his father Mehmet Ali. He crushed rebellious Jerusalem brutally and opened up the city to Europeans.

Mehmet Ali received the Scottish painter David Roberts on his way to Jerusalem: his paintings of Oriental scenes, such as this interior of the Church of the Holy Sepuchre, influenced the European view of Palestine.

The plutocrat and Jewish philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore visited Jerusalem seven times and was one of the first to build outside the Old City. In 1860, he started his windmill and cottages. He was what Victorians thought a ‘noble Hebrew’ should be like, but he had his secret scandals too: he fathered a child with his teenaged maid in his eighties.

Much of the Old City was surprisingly empty in this period. This photograph taken in 1861 by the pioneering photographer Yessayi, the Armenian Patriarch, shows the deserted landscape behind the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

From the 1830s, the Sephardic Arab-speaking Jews of Jerusalem were joined by Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Russian Empire and more Sephardis from the Arab world. European visitors were appalled and fascinated by the squalor and exoticism of Yemenite and Ashkenazi Jews.

Jerusalem was also dominated by Russian Orthodox peasants, outside the Church at Easter), who prayed and caroused with equal fervour, while Jaffa Gate and David Street became the hub of European Jerusalem.

Theodore Herzl, assimilated Viennese journalist and brilliant publicist, was the organizer of political Zionism. In 1898, he approached Kaiser Wilhelm II who ordered Herzl to meet him in Jerusalem. Regarding himself as a German Crusader, the Kaiser wore a specially designed white uniform with a full-length veil attached to his pickelhauber.

The Kaiser visits the Tomb of Kings. In the archaeological race between the Great Powers, the Frenchman de Saulcy had claimed this was King David’s tomb. It is actually the tomb of the first-century Queen of Adiabene.

The American Colonists arrived as a millenarian Christian sect but they soon became beloved philanthropists: here, Bertha Spafford, a daughter of the founders, poses with Bedouin friends.

Jerusalem’s mayor Selim al-Husseini: the very model of an aristocratic Jerusalemite.

Ne’er-do-well aristocratic rogue and huckster, Montagu Parker, later Earl of Morley, whose three-year project to uncover the Ark of the Covenant ended in the sole riot in Jerusalem’s history to unite Jews and Muslims. He only just escaped with his life.

For almost half a century the fixer, aesthete, socialite and oud-player Wasif Jawhariyyeh knew everyone, saw everything, and recorded it all in his peerlessly vivid diary.

Jemal Pasha, the dictator of Jerusalem during the First World War, was a Turkish nationalist with a taste for cigars, champagne, beautiful Jewish courtesans and brutal executions.

Born in a Russian shtetl, Chaim Weizmann was at home with kings and lords. His passionate charm helped convert Britain’s imperial panjandrums, Lloyd George, Churchill and Balfour, to Zionism, while Lawrence of Arabia promoted the Arab cause.

Surrender, 1917: Hussein al-Husseini, mayor of Jerusalem (centre, with walking stick), tried six times to surrender to the British with a sheet tied to a broom.

Mandate: conqueror of Jerusalem, General ‘the Bull’ Allenby (right), and military governor Ronald Storrs celebrate the Fourth of July with Bertha Spafford (left) at the American Colony in 1918.

Lawrence of Arabia and Amir Abdullah follow Winston Churchill through the gardens of Augusta Victoria in 1921: the British Colonial Secretary created the new realm of Transjordan for the Hashemite Abdullah.

The glories of Imperial Jerusalem: Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, son of Queen Victoria, hands out awards in Barracks Square, though he grumbled when some recipients wore Ottoman and German medals.

High Commissioner of Palestine Herbert Samuel (seated, centre) and Jerusalem governor Storrs (standing, fourth from the right) host the religious hierarchs of the city after a service to celebrate British liberation in 1924.

Sherif of Mecca, King of Hejaz, Hussein meets the early Palestinian nationalist leader Musa Kazem Husseini (left) in Jerusalem.

The sherif never forgave his ambitious sons, Faisal (left), king first of Syria then Iraq, and Abdullah (right), later king of Jordan (seen here in Jerusalem in 1931) for seizing kingdoms of their own.

David Ben-Gurion, working on new Jewish housing in 1924, emerged as the tough Zionist leader just as the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, emerged as Arab nationalist leader: here he leads the annual Nabi Musa, Jerusalem’s main Islamic festival, on horseback in 1937.

The annual Easter ritual of the Holy Fire (seen from the dome of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre) was crowded, passionate and often fatal.

The prayers at the Western Wall in 1944 to commemorate the dead of the Holocaust show the tiny, constrained area permitted for Jewish worship.

Asmahan: Arab singer, Druze princess, Egyptian film star, spy and temptress of the wartime King David Hotel.

The Mufti Amin al-Husseini meets Hitler who admired his fair hair and blue eyes. His cousin, Abd al-Kadir Husseini, was an aristocratic warrior and Arab hero of 1947–8, whose death was a blow to Palestinian hopes. His funeral on the Temple Mount was a chaotic, tense occasion: some mourners were killed by guns fired in the air.

1946–8: as Arabs and Jews massacred each other’s civilians, Menachem Begin’s Irgun bombed the British headquarters in the King David Hotel. British General Bubbles Barker (bottom right on newspaper) already loathed the Jews, encouraged by his charming, exuberant mistress, the leading Palestinian hostess Katy Antonius.

The battle of Jerusalem in 1948,: Arab soldiers escorting a Jewish prisoner during the fight for the Jewish Quarter; a Jewish girl fleeing from the fighting; Arab Legionaries behind sandbag barricades.

The Arab victor of 1948 King Abdullah of Jordan waves to crowds in Jerusalem, but he paid with his life. His assassin lies dead in the Aqsa mosque. Abdullah’s grandson, King Hussein of Jordan prepares for war in 1967: he reluctantly and disastrously placed his forces under Egyptian command.

Israeli government in crisis: Israeli Chief of Staff Yitzhak Rabin (left) collapsed under the pressure and had to be sedated; Moshe Dayan (right), brought in as Defence Minister, seen here with Rabin at a cabinet meeting as the crisis intensifies in 1967. Dayan thrice warned Hussein not to attack but held back until Syria and Egypt were defeated.Israeli paratroopers advance towards Lions’ Gate.

Minutes after its capture in June 1967, Israeli soldiers pray at the Western Wall; the sheikh of the Haram al-Sharif watches from the Maghrebi Gate; behind him, Israeli jeeps fight across the Haram, before celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem in front of the Dome.