CYNTHIA OZICK
43
Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem in
II87 .
All this warring, conquering,
destroying, usurping, renaming, and claiming of the immemorial central
Jewish sacral site-how can it be explained? There is, to be sure, a sim–
ple explanation. Until just the other day, Christianity's millennial asser–
tion was that it supersedes Judaism; Islam's unchanged assertion is that
it supersedes both Judaism and Christianity. But all this is insufficient.
Surely the repudiations of supersession ism ought logically to lead the
newer faith away from the locus of the primary faith; a fresh singular–
ity bent on separation and superiority can hardly be expressed through
clinging to the original wellspring. Why, after all, should a new religion
not sanctify a new location, a location dedicated to its own new
insights? And this has, of course, been precisely the path of Christianity
at Rome and Islam at Mecca. Yet the desire also to possess, even secon–
darily, the ancient site of Jewish religious primacy scarcely reinforces
supersessionist cla ims; it undermines them. Possession becomes
acknowledgment; appropriating a Jewish sacred place for one's own,
the very place where the Temple rose and fell and rose again, is, unas–
sailably, an admission of the continuing force of the matrix of Jewish
nationhood.
And that is what the Temple Mount signifies today: the fount of Jew–
ish civilization-recognized especially, and most acutely, when that
recognition is withheld or denied. There is no stronger confirmation of
Jewish primacy than the declaration that Judaism has been superseded.
Yet Judaism had the burgeoning strength to deepen in richness and
intellectual potency even without the Temple as its religious center.
It
was the Jewish religious genius that created the link between study and
worship, a portable and protean link-so that the so-called secular
realms of science and the arts and the humanities will take on, for the
Jewish intellect, a devotion akin to the exaltations of strenuous piety.
Jews are, notoriously, a studying people. And still the Temple Mount as
a sign and a remembrance of the mandate for civilization remains pow–
erful and pure, and is sustained in the inmost channels of the Jewish psy–
che. When Jews, wherever they are, utter "Next year in Jerusalem," it
is a statement both keenly literal and keenly mindful, with all the reso–
nance of a morally aspiring culture. Jerusalem is a high place because
inherent in it is a high idea. Jerusalem is a coveted city because it is a
covenanted city.
So when Herman Melville, whose supernal language owes nearly
everything to Biblical poetry, arrives in Jerusalem and fails to discern its
heritage of Covenant, what will he see? Jewish flies in a skull; or, as the
Italian architect put it, Jews who do not know how to make themselves
