No God but One
Such was the sheer number of pilgrims who travelled from across the world to the Holy City that at times it appeared in danger of bursting at the seams. In 516, when a great army of ascetics descended upon Jerusalem, in a particularly rowdy demonstration of support for Chalcedon, ten thousand of them barged into a single church. A few years later, Justinian, looking to raise a monument proportionate to his self-regard, was obliged to extend the ridge on which his new church was being built, so that its foundations ended up “partly on solid rock and partly on air.”28 Space was running out. Jerusalem, which even in the off-season had some eighty thousand inhabitants, was full to overflowing.
Yet, one part of the city—the most prominent of all—remained undeveloped. South of the Church of the Resurrection, beyond the multitude of golden crosses rising triumphantly above the crowded streets, there loomed a great, flat expanse of rubble-strewn and garbage-piled rock. Evidence, perhaps, that the site was of no great significance? Quite the opposite. The rock was the very spot commemorated by ancient prophets as “the mountain of the house,” a haunting phrase that Jerome, in his Latin version of the Bible, had chosen to translate as Mons Templi—“Temple Mount.”29 In doing so, he had commemorated the most famous building ever raised in the city: a temple fashioned back in the mists of time by Solomon, the wise and fabulously wealthy son of King David, to serve Almighty God as His earthly house. Here, for anyone with a taste for church-building, was the obvious model to beat: Justinian himself, entering Hagia Sophia, was said to have cried out in triumph, “Solomon, I have vanquished you!”30 The Temple itself, though, had long since been obliterated: for in 586 BC, after some four hundred years of existence, all its gold and cedar-wood had gone up in flames, together with the rest of Jerusalem, when the King of Babylon had stormed the city. True, the return of the Jews from their exile in Mesopotamia had seen them build a second, and ultimately even more imposing, Temple; but this too, in AD 70, had been put to the torch, after the Jews, resolved to throw off Roman rule, had risen in revolt and been comprehensively flattened for their pains. Roughly sixty years later, another, even more desperate, rebellion had resulted in an even more desperate defeat. The Promised Land was left a charnel-house. The Roman authorities, resolved to abolish the wearying cycle of insurgency and repression once and for all, promulgated a new set of title-deeds. The Jewish homeland became, by imperial fiat, “Palestine”—the name by which it would still be known in the time of Justinian. Furthermore, the Jews were banned from their own ancient capital altogether, so that for them even to glance at Jerusalem from the crest of a far-off hill was accounted a crime. The smoking ruins themselves were renamed “Aelia Capitolina” and rebuilt as a pagan city. This rebranding policy was so successful that by the time of Constantine, when the first Christian tourists began to turn up in the Holy Land and ask for the road to Jerusalem, many of the local officials had no idea where they were talking about, and pointed them vaguely in the direction of Persia.
This ignorance had not lasted for long, of course; but even as the Church set to cleansing the city of demon worship, it showed little enthusiasm for turning back the clock. Just as Christ had superseded the Law of Moses, so did His Holy City glitter all the more brightly for having been raised amid the rubble of the erstwhile capital of the Jews. It was not enough to succeed; others had to fail. Nowhere better served to express this presumption than the Temple Mount. Here, in the wake of repeated Jewish rebellions, a pagan emperor had raised a temple—the Kapitolion—to Jupiter, the king of the Romans’ gods. Christian emperors had refined the humiliation. While the Kapitolion was left to crumble into ruins, the Temple Mount was converted into a sterquilinum—a refuse dump. What better proof than the reek of shit and pigs’ carcasses that the Jews were no longer a Chosen People? It was to ram the point home that the Roman authorities, always suckers for a good procession, allowed the Jews, once every year, on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple, to star in a humiliating piece of street theatre. A band of Jewish pilgrims—pale, weeping and bedraggled—would climb up the steps of the Temple Mount, reach the perforated rock on the summit, and then start to blow on rams’ horns, wail and tear out their hair. It was, for any watching Christians, a most edifying spectacle. “For while the mob of wretches congregates and groans over the ruins of their temple,” as Jerome, with palpable relish, had once put it, “the manger of the Lord sparkles, the church of his resurrection glows and the banner of his cross shines forth from the Mount of Olives.”31
Scorn that was paid back by the Jews themselves with undaunted hatred. Time had not eased the trauma of the ruin that the Romans had wrought on their Holy City. The general whose legions had torched the Temple, so the rabbis taught, now shared a corner of hell with Jesus, where he was destined to be consumed by fire, reassembled and then burned to ashes again for all eternity, as punishment for his unspeakable crime. Four centuries on from the destruction of the Temple, Jewish horror at the sacrilege had, if anything, intensified. The rabbis, struggling to articulate what the Temple itself had once so eloquently expressed, had come to identify its ruins with a novel concept to which they gave the name of “Shekhinah”: the notion that God Himself might be present on earth. It was not, as the blasphemous and arrogant Christians taught, the rock of Golgotha that stood at the centre of the world, but the Temple Mount. There it was, upon “the foundation-stone of the whole of the universe,”32 that Abraham had brought Isaac to be sacrificed; that Adam lay buried; and that “the world itself, moulded from its dust, had originally been founded.”33 Reading into the future the patterns cast by such a past, the Jews maintained an invincible confidence, amid all their desolation, that the Temple would one day rise again. Tantalisingly, back in the reign of Julian, they had enjoyed a brief glimpse of how such an eventuality might actually come to pass: for the apostate emperor, ever imaginative when it came to Christian-baiting, had ordered the Temple rebuilt. Only a few months’ preparatory excavations had been possible before Julian’s untimely death in Mesopotamia, however; and even those had been marked by the eruption on the site of “terrifying balls of fire”34—which the Christians, naturally enough, had attributed to divine displeasure, and the Jews to arson. Ever since then, the site had remained barren; but still, three times every day, the Jews would solemnly pray for the restoration of its former glory. Only rebuild the Temple, they knew, and much else as well would be fulfilled: the humbling of Rome; the humiliation of its ruler, who would be forced to eat “dirt like a worm”;35 and the coming of the Messiah.
As things stood, however, many Jews believed that Jerusalem under its Christian rulers was no less polluted than pagan Jerusalem had been: a sump of blood and idols. Ironically enough, those who did journey to the Temple Mount were likely to have been influenced, not by their own teachers, but by the example set by Christian pilgrims. Certainly, in the opinion of most rabbis, energies were better devoted to the study of the Torah, the holiness of which remained inviolably sacrosanct, than in trekking to the nest of heretics that Jerusalem had become. Nor was it necessary to inhabit the schools of Sura and Pumpedita, far from the Holy City, to hold this view: for there were rabbis in Palestine. An entire Talmud too. The scholars responsible for its composition might not have possessed the sheer exhaustive love of nit-picking displayed by their counterparts in the East; but that scarcely dented the growing weight of their authority. Indeed, the rabbis of Palestine were acknowledged to hold the advantage over those of Mesopotamia in several distinctive ways: they were more open to those who were not themselves scholars; they were better able to incinerate those who displeased them with a single glare; and they were more obsessively alert to the menace posed by menstruating women. Valuable though all of these attributes undoubtedly were, however, the Palestinian rabbis’ most trend-setting talent was for something more portentous: a rewriting of Jewish tradition so as to give themselves a starring role in it. Control of the past, not for the first time, promised control of the future.