42
PARTISAN REVIEW
their streets with bodies of soldiers and police to protect them from
the fanatical Christians, who would have made an attack on them.
No Jew who lives in Jerusalem dares
to
pass in front of the court
of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, for he well knows how great
a risk he runs of suffering for it.
If,
on an occasion like this, he were
murdered, the malefactors would not be severely punished; for all
the native population unfortunately hold the opinion that
to
injure
a Jew is a work well pleasing in the sight of God. This is due to the
fact that the Jews, though numerous, do not know how
to
make
themselves respected; and
to
the sermons constantly delivered by
the Latins, Greeks, and Armenians, in which the most opprobrious
and unseemly epithets are heaped upon them, even in the churches
themselves....Again, the poorer Jews, when going or returning
from pilgrimages between Jerusalem and Hebron, avoid passing
through Bethlehem to escape the insults which the "good
Christians" of that place, excited by the monks, always inflict
upon them.
That is the condition of Jews in Jerusalem a century and a half ago
when Melville encounters them and is reminded of flies in a skull. "The
Jews, though numerous, do not know how
to
make themselves
respected," the Italian architect remarks. What he is pointing to, though
perhaps unwittingly, is that a Jerusalem lacking in Jewish sovereignty
becomes at best a spittoon (the Jews are reviled) and at worst a grave–
yard (the Jews are murdered).
And so it had been since the destruction of the Second Temple in the
year 70 of the Common Era. Foreign incursion followed foreign incur–
sion . Among the waves of conquerors were Egyptian, Assyrians, Baby–
lonians, Persians, Seleucids, Romans, Arabs, Seljuks, Crusaders,
Saracens, Mamelukes, and Ottomans . Between the Roman and the
Ottoman Empires came the Arab invasions of the seventh century and
the Crusader invasions of the twelfth. And here, with regard to
Jerusalem and the Temple Mount, one faces a profound enigma. Under
Umayyad rule-a dynasty stemming from Damascus-two Muslim reli–
gious edifices, the Dome of the Rock and the al -Aksa Mosque, were
built on the very spot of the ruined Temple. Five centuries later, during
the Crusader siege of Jerusalem in
1099,
following a massacre of Mus–
lims, Godfrey of Bouillon drove the Jews into a synagogue and set fire
to it, burning everyone alive. The Knights Templar, distinctly less
romantic than King Arthur's knights and distinctly unlegendary, took
over the Temple Mount, renamed it Templum Domini, and placed a
gold cross on the dome, seizing it for Christianity-but only until the
