Throughout history, and particularly under Jewish rule, Jerusalem has been the main city in the Judaean Hills, and the chief reason is its geography. Jerusalem stands atop a range of hills, encircled and protected by deep valleys, at the junction of mountain highways, and has always enjoyed an excellent economy, between grainfields to the West and the desert to the East, and with a good supply of water.

The Canaanite Period (330-1200 BCE)

The city is called “Rushalmam” in Egyptian execration texts of the nineteenth century BCE; Kathleen Kenyon discovered a nine-foot-thick wall of this period near the Spring of Gihon. In the days of the Patriarch Abraham, Jerusalem was governed by Melchizedek, described in chapter x1v of Genesis as “King of Salem” and “the priest of the most high God”, a description suggesting its importance and holiness even in Abraham’s time

and hinting at identification with Mount Moriah.

It probably gained its sacred character from the Spring of Gihon, the largest source on the hill-top and held by the ancients to be of miraculous property, as its waters rise and fall at regular intervals. Hence, too, several kings of Judah were crowned beside it.

Jerusalem is mentioned in the Tell elAmarna letters, written in the fourteenth century BCE, as the principal town of Canaan. At the time of the Israelite entry into the Promised Land in the following century, its Amorite king, seemingly a vassal of Egypt, led an alliance of the kings of the mountains and the plains, banded together to fight the Tribes.

The First Temple Period (1200-586 BCE)

In the reign of David, Jerusalem was a Jebusite city (H Samuel v:6). David brought the Ark of the Covenant from Kiryat Ye’arim to Jerusalem, and bought a threshing-floor from Araunah. the Jebusite as site of an altar (11 Samuel 24:24). By this act, he made Jerusalem the centre of worship of theTribes, but the Temple was built by his son Solomon, and thenceforward Jerusalem became the unique focus of Jewish creed and nationhood.

Solomon did more: he launched a vast building programme and concluded pacts with the kings of Egypt, Ammon, Moab, Tyre and the Hittites, that gave the city international renown. From its foundation and throughout the Canaanite period, Jerusalem had been a provincial capital and no mote; only under the kings of Israel did it become the national and political capital of Jewry, the very heart of its faith and philosophy, symbobsing the unity of the Tribes.

The Second Temple Period (586 BCE-70 CE)

Jewish authority in Jerusalem and Judah became firmly entrenched again after the return from the Babylonian Exile. Under the Hasmonacans, sovereign Jewish sway was extended over the entire Land. Nehemiah had repaired the city walls in fifty-two days (Neheiniah iv), Hastrionean Hyrcanus rebuilt them and their watch-towers.

Ten thousand builders and a thousand priests toiled to build Herod’s Terriple, a thousand chariots hauled the building materials. The courtyard and colonnades took eight years to finish, the Sanctuary itself only eighteen months. The Sages could rightly say, “Who has not seen the Sanctuary has not seen a magnificent building.” But the total rebuilding of Jerusalem and its walls in Herod’s days took approximately forty-six years.

During the Second Temple period, a span of about six hundred years, Jerusalem drew the prayers and commanded the allegiatice of everyjew in the Land and the Diaspora alike: the First Temple had been a centre of veneration and national liturgy forJews in the Land alone, The sanctity of the city was evident in learning of the Torah, pilgrimages, the establishment of schools and synagogues. Synagogues were built for public worship, but the Temple was the hub of communal fife in Jerusalem and the supreme national institution of Jewry throughout the world.

Jews were under religious commandment not only to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land but to settle there. Christians and Moslems were content with pilgrimage. Even when the Temple no longer stood, Jews everywhere regarded it, nonetheless, as a Divine behest to make their devotions in a Jerusalem that lay in ruins.

The Roman Period (70-324 CE)

Jews lived on in Jerusalem and worshipped their God amid the wreckage of the Temple Mount. Such was the strength of this passionate attachment that, when the Emperor Hadrian sought to establish a Roman town upon the Mount, defiling the holy city, rebellion broke out under BarKochba and the Jews recap rured it for a time (132-135 CE). The revolt was bloodily suppressed and the Romans forbade Jews to dwell in Jerusalem, on pain of death.

Yet, the lament entitled AnZai Expanon (”Cedars of Lebanon”), written immediately after the rising collapsed, tells that a certain “Rabbil-lanina BenTaradion gathers after him

congregations in ravished Zion”, an indication, perhaps, that the anti-Jewish decree was not, in fact, enforced, and the soil of the Land was still sacred to Jews. Defying Roman edicts, synagogues were established in the third century on Mount Zion in Jerusalem itself and throughout the Land, particularly in Galilee.

The Byzantine Period (324-637)

Jerusalem had become holy to a rising Christianity, and, early in the fourth century, Constantine the Great and his mother Helena built magnificent churches there, but now Jews were excluded, and for a time Jerusalem was the only city in the Land with a Christian majority. Jerome, writing in the fourth century, mentions that Jews might only enter on the Ninth of Av, to mourn the quenching of past glory: “Silently they come and silen dy they go, weeping they come and weeping they go, in the dark night they come and in the dark night they go,” as the Sages told.

The Traveller of Bordeaux, writing in 333, speaks of that marked stone on the Temple Mount whither Jews went to pray In 362, at last, the Emperor Julian promised a delegation of Syrian and Cilician Jewry: “I shall rebuild the Sanctuary of the most high God with all vigour.” But a mysterious fire that broke out on the Temple Mount during the early stage of the building operation brought the project to an abrupt halt, and it was never renewed. In 443, heartened by the goodwill of the Empress Eudocia, Jewry again dreamt of the Day of Redemption, and from Jerusalem a message went to the Diaspora:

The time of the Exile of our people has already passed and the Day of the Ingathering of the Tribes come. The kings of the Romans have bidden that our city, Jerusalem, be returned to us. Make haste and come up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. Manifestly, jews were being vouch safed to dwell peocefullyinjerusalem. St. Cyril of Scythopolis records that St. Sabbas journeyed to Constantinople in 512 to persuade the Emperor to exempt the poor of Jerusalem from taxation while a certain Marianus went to the Emperor to denounce the exemption of theJews: it may be inferred that the Jewish population enjoyed a modicum of equal rights.

But Justinian, in the early sixth century, enacted discriminatory laws and Jews were denied the holding of government office: humiliation was carried to such lengths that their stone of prayer on the Temple Mount was littered with garbage.

The Later Persian Period (614-629) Upon the Persian conquest of Palestine, a pact was concluded between the Persians and its Jews, one mutually desirable: the Jews hoped for the restoration of Jewish autonomy, the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple, the Persians needed Jewish help to gain control of the Eastern Mediterranean. A Jewish administration was, indeed, established in Jerusalem and worship renewed. But, in 629, the Byzantine Emperor Heraelms seized the city and

“decreed the expulsion of the Jews to a distance of three miles. In 638, it fell to the army of the Cqhph Orrar.

The Early Moslem Period: The Umayad Caliphate

(638-750)

Jewish soldiers had served in Omar’s victorious army, and he countenanced the renewal of Jewish settlement in Palestine and Jerusalem, declaring that the Moslems had come to the country because they were kinsmen of the Israelites, both being scions of Abraham. Contemporary Arab writers record that stones were piled on the Temple Mount by thejews, in readiness for the rebuilding of the Temple; the Moslems did, in truth, deliver the Mount into Jewish hands, and Jews could celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles upon it.

So now, Jerusalem was a city holy to three faiths, if not in equal measure, Arabia was to Islam what the Land of Israel was to Judaism, and, in any event, Palestine was never independent under Moslem aegis; its governance throughout that period was entrusted to overlords in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo or Constantinople.

But Omar at least proclaimed the Temple Mount to be a place of jewish prayer. By the Jews this was eagerly and happily interpreted as a sign of the beginning of Redemption. Omar asked the Jews-where do you wish to live in the city? And they answered-at the southern end of the city, which is the Jews’ market. And [the reason for] their plea was the proximity of the Temple and its relics and the waters of Siloam for immersion- And the Emir of the Faithful gave this to them.” The Jewish quarter - or market - lay near the Western Wall.

Under the Umayyad Caliphate, Syria and Palestine were the major provinces of the Moslem empire with its capital in Damascus. Between 691 and 697, Abd al-Mahk built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem is monument rather than mosque, and his elder son al Walid built the mosque of El Aqsa beside it, and in El Aqsa, since Mecca was far away, the Moslems of Syria and Palestine began to hold their festal services.

Mughir ad-Din says that Jewish families were actually appointed guardians of the Haram of Abd al-Malik. Suleiman, his second son, chose to live in Palestine and built Ramla to be its capital, relegating Jerusalem to humble provinciality. The townsfolk of Palestine consisted of Jews, Arabs, Persians and Samaritans, all living side by side - in Tiberias and its surroundings, in Dan, Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and Hebron, and as far south as the Jewish settlement of Filar. Jews flocked to Jerusalem after the Moslem conquest, and their community had quickly become the most important in the country, so that jewry everywhere looked no longer to Tiberias but to Jerusalem.

The Abbasid Caliphate (750-969)

Baghdad, not Damascus, was the capital now. In the Abbasid heyday, the importance of Jerusalem dwindled by reason of its remoteness from the “metropolis”, and Mecca became the magnet of the Moslem devout. Haroun al-Rashid made that pilgrimage every second year, but never once to Jerusalem, for the Abbasid Caliphs, in general, neglected Jerusalem; only Mamoun (813-833) gave money to repair Moslem institutions on the Temple Mount. The viceroys of the Abb-asids and of their successors, the Fatimids, governed Palestine from Rainla. Meanwhile Jewish fife went on. It is of this period that Rabbi Ben-Meir, principal of the Palestinian Academy, tells that the courtyard of the Temple Mount was a meefing-place for Jews.

The Fatimid Caliphate (969-1071)

Al-Hakian, Fatayrid despot of Egypt, first ordered that the synagogues and churches of Jerusalem be destroyed, but in the end relented and Jews and Christians were permitted to rebuild them. Salmon Ben-Yeruham, the Karaite, writes in the middle of the tenth century: ‘When the Kingdom of Ishmael appeared, Israel was given licence to enter and live there Derusalem] and the courtyards of the House of the Lord were handed back to them, and there for years they prayed.”

The Seljuks took Jerusalem in 1071 in an assault of unbridled devastation. As Se1juks and Fatimids fought thereafter, the citizenry of Palestine grew less and less, The Arab historian, al-Muclaclassi, who lived in Jerusalem in that century, writes that, after four hundred years of Moslem rule in Palestine, “the scholar of religious law is forsaken, and the

secular scholar is not to be seen-the Jews and the Christians have long since superseded them, and the mosque is empty of worshippers and of the secret of study.”

Sahal Ben-Matzliah, a resident in Jerusalem at the end of the previous century, writes: “Our brothers knew that Jerusalem in this time was a sanctuary for every fugitive, a comfort for every mourner and a repose for every pauper, and the worshippers of the Lord congregate within it, one from the town and two from the family [Meaning, in large numbers]…”

Neveragain- from the Seljuk conquest until the twentieth century- was Jerusalem to be under Arab hegemony.

The Early Crusader Period (1099-1187)

Crusader Jerusalem was circumscribed in area, and its walls followed the lines of those standing today. Godfrey de Bouillon always stressed that the territory which he had conquered was the Land of Israel: the letter in which he informed the Pope of his taking of Jerusalem bore the superscription: “cle Terra Israel”. But in the ravaging of Jerusalem, the Crusaders slaughtered Moslems and Jews indiscriminately, and set fire to the Jewish quarter, in those days sited to the north of the Temple Mount, burning its synagogues, one of them with all its worshippers.

A Ci:usader ordinance specifically banned Jewish and Moslem settlement in Jerusalem as profane, and the wrecked and deserted Jewish quarter was given over to Syrian Christians. But Benjamin of Tudela (1170) could

report: “And there is a dye-factory there, which the Jews rent yearly from the king, so that no man but the Jews shall do any dyeing work in Jerusalem, and there are about two hundred Jews Living below the Tower of David at the limits of the City-State,”

The Late Crusader Period (1187-1260)

The Ayyubid Sultan Saladin and his successors favoured the dwelling of Eastern Jews and Christians in Jerusalem. That great soldier and statesman recognized the Jewish right to the Land, but was also mindful that Jews had fought in the Arab ranks to take Jerusalem from the Crusaders. Alhqrizi (1170-1235) recounts that, after Saladin’s proclamation, “three hundred rabbis” from France and England came to live in Palestine, andjews from North Africa, accompanied by Moslems, to Live in Jerusalem itself.

The Mamluks (1260-1516)

Saladin had permitted Moslems and Jews once more to live at least in the hilly parts of Palestnie, and the ban on Jewish residence in Jerusalem was

formally Lifted, but Jews did not be& to return in any numbers until the coming and encouragement of, Nahmarrides. In 1267, he had found two lonely Jewish farralies, and wrote to his son: “Only rwoJews, brothers, dyers by

trade, did I find. And behold, we pressed them, and we found a ruined housewith marble pillars and a beautiful dome, and we took it [to serve] as a synagogue … and they already began to build, and we sent to the town of Shechem [Nablus], to bring thence the Scrolls of the Law, which had been in Jerusalem and had been smuggled out when the Tartars came, and, behold, they built a synagogue and they will pray there, for many come to Jerusalem all the time, men and women, to see the site of the Temple and weep over it…”

A. Lunz notes that “the Jews then established a special quarter in the south of the Old City near Mount Zion, and the life of the Jewish settlement centered around the synagogue of Nahmanides, which the Moslems sought to seize from them.”

The Mamiluks ruled Jerusalem from Cairo. Accordingly, many jewish citizens left what was again a provincial city, and went to Damascus and Egypt, and thence, on to Turkey.

Earthquake, epidemic, drought locust, plagues and famine precipitated this Inigration; but there were, as well, the tyranny of the court in Cairo, persecution by petty satraps governing from Syria, and the cruelty of local emirs, whereof the upshot was anarchy, peasant uprisings and Bedouin raids. Arab writers speak of Mamluk recognition of the links between the Jewish people and its Land, and of Marnluk plans to discuss the restoration to it of the whole of Palestine. All the same, Jews had to wear yellow turbans, Samaritans red ones and Christians blue ones; the Moslem turbans were white.

But the Mamluks oppressed their Moslem subjects in Palestine no less:

according to a Moslem account, the fate of a slave was preferable to a farmer’s. When Rabbi Ovadia of Bertinoro (1415-1510) settled injerusalem, things improved for the Jewish community under his inspiring leadership, and there was an influx from Spain and Portugal. At this stage, the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the end of the Byzantine empire, and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain marked a turningpoint [n the history of the Jewish congregations in the Land of Israel, and signified a new and large return.

The Ottoman Period (1516-1917)

The Turks ruled Palestine for four hundred years. Though still denied autonomous statehood, Palestine now entered the global scene of merchant and trader. Suleiman the Magnificent repaired and rebuilt the walls and gates of Jerusalem (1537), restored the Citadel of David, improved the city’s water supply; like his predecessor, Selim, he employed Jewish physicians -,it his court. In the late sixteenth century, Sultan Bayezid 11 called upon Jews to settle in his new domain; Spanish Jews from Salonica, Constantinople, Adrianople and other Turkish centres responded to the call, settling in Tiberias, Safad and Jerusalem. Palestine’s status as the spiritual home of Jcwry rose momentously.

With the arrival of Spanish refugees, the Jewish population rose, and this Sephardic element was to characterise Jewish settlement for virtually the next, four centuries. It was now that the splendid complex of four Sephardic

houses of worship came into being on the traditional site of the Academy of Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai. Yet the community in Jerusalem began to contract as a result of burdensome taxation and confiscation of property, until only the poor were left: the Ottomans levied a poll tax, a watch-andward tax, a tax on gifts at festivals, a Government-aid tax and a land tax.

After the massacres in the Caucasus in 1648 and 1656, Jews made their long way to Palestine from Russia and Poland. In 1700, Rabbijudah Hehassid

assembled his disciples and set out for Palestine with fifteen hundred of them, to hasten the coining of the Redemption. He bought the plot of land upon which Nahmanides had built his synagogue, and on it set up his own conventicle, which, after his death, came to be known as the “Hurva”. In 1721, the Arabs burnt it down with its forty Scrolls of the Law, and the Ashkenazi Jews then prayed in the principal Sephardi place of worship; the “Hurva” was rebuilt in 1837.

In 1777, the Hassidic Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk brought three hundred of his followers from the Ukraine, Lithuania and Rumania.

After Sir Moses Montefiore visited Palestine in the mid-nineteenth century, the condition of the Jews of Jerusalem

became better and their area of settlement wider. The first Jewish quarters were established outside the city walls, and Jewish hospitals and educational institutions founded.

Yitzhak Ben-Zvi wrote: “There were periods of devastation and ruin in Jerusalem, as occurred in Safad; yet the Jewish population withstood the onslaught, and settlement was never abandoned.”

For, in truth, no town in Palestine could be like unto Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the only city in which Jews had succeeded in holding out for two thousands years after the fall of the Second Temple, despite religious and economic sanctions, pain of death for entry, and widespread havoc. The Jews always believed that they were but regaining what had been taken from them by force. Under alien dornination Jerusalem was never a great city; on the contrary, it lost size. Only underjewish rule did it expand, and its population, Jewish and non-Jewish, increase.

Population and Extent of the City Throughout the Ages

Under Melchizedek, in the days of the Patriarchs, and under the Amorites in the time of Joshua, Jerusalem was the capital of the southern region of the Hills of Judah and the plain. jebusite Jerusalem covered only ten acres. Under Solomon, it was the capital of the Land of Israel, and, under the kings of Judah, the upper and lower cities extended over an area sixteen times as large. Jerusalem was constricted under Persian rule, but expanded again under the Hasmonean dynasty, and attained its zenith iii’the late Second Temple period, to cover

four hundred and fifty acres and house a population of two hundred thousand (equal to the total population of Palestine at the end of the nineteen century). It was at its highest level of development in respect of water supply and neighbouthood farming. After the death of Herod, and until the BarKochba revolt, the Roman governors ruled judaca from Caesarea, and, from Hadrian’s reign onwards, the limits of the neglected city shrank to two hundred acres.

The Byzantines, too, dignified Caesarea as the capital of Palestine, although Christendom held Jerusalem-now peopled by only eighty thousand souls -in holy regard. The Moslem conquerors shifted the capital to Rarrila, as we saw, and at its peak was a Moslem city under the Fadmids in the eleventh century. Jerusalem’s population was no more than thirty thousand and its area less than a square kilomette, not half its dimension in Second Temple days. When the Crusaders entered, the count of Citizens was about the same- Arabs and Jews, but thereafter it dropped to a handful of three thousand, even including Syrian Christians and the Christian Bedouin attracted to Jerusalem by Baldwin by pledges of tax exemption. True, the Crusaders had regarded Jerusalem as a sacred city, and expelled its Jews and Moslems, but they chose Acre as their political and economic capital. At its peak Crusader Jerusalem’s population reached 30,000.

Under Mam Ink control, Jerusalem’s fertile hinterland was rui-ned by systematic robbery, so that, from the final Mamluk period, and through the Ottoman rule up to the eighteenth century, the population of the city swung sparsely from ten to fifteen thousand. By the end of the century, the total population was only two hundred thousand, a density lower than any since the Canaanite period.

From 1860 onwards, Jewish and Christian quarters were established outside Jerusalem’s walls. The city was linked to the telegraph network and a carriage-way built to Jaffa and other towns. In 1892, theierusalem Jaffa line, one of the earliest railways in the Middle East, began to run. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Jerusalem had a population of twenty-five thousand; with Zionist aliya it rose to seventy-five thousand, fifty thousand of theinjews. At the close of the century, 60 per cent of all Palestinian Jewry lived in Jerusalem. Thereafter, the Arab population also rose, both in Jerusalem

and throughout Pales-tine and Transjordan.

At the termination of the British Mandate in 1948, there were a hundred and sixty-five thousand. residents in Jerusalem as a whole, of whom a hundred thousand were Jews; of the Arabs and others, thirty-three thousand lived in the Old City. The area of the Jewish city was 25.76 square kin., double its size at the beginning of the twentieth century, The Arab part had an area of 2.6 square km, of which the Old City constituted a third. Twenty years later, in a reunified Jerusalem, the Jewish population had doubled to approximately two hundred thousand, equal to the population in the late Second Temple period, the Arab population was unaltered at sixty-five thousand, twenty-four thousand residing in the Old City.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 29th, 2001 and is filed under history.