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The Treasure of the Jews

(Jewish Review of Books) Matti Friedman - Andrew Lawler's book Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World's Most Contested City, surveys some of the colorful and fraught episodes that have played out underground over the past century and a half. 1865 saw the creation of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London, where the founders included the archbishop of York, who "called for a new crusade to rescue from darkness and oblivion much of the history of that country in which we all take so dear an interest." The explorers were inflamed by the possibility of grand findings from Jewish antiquity. A central problem affecting many Western observers is their narrative of a city "sacred to three faiths." There is a failure to understand the unique centrality of Jerusalem in Judaism or to admit that the city is of interest to other religions only because it was sacred to Jews first. Jerusalem has existed at the center of Jewish consciousness since Rome was a village on the Tiber and it has that role in no other religion. Christianity cares about Jerusalem because Jesus and his followers were Jews who orbited the Jewish ritual center on the Temple Mount. Islam built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount because that was the site of the Jewish temple. Both religions have more important cities elsewhere, but came here to claim they had supplanted the numerically insignificant but historically imposing natives of Judea. The lack of interest in archaeology on the part of Arab residents is related to the common, and politically dangerous, knowledge that if you dig past the city's Islamic and Christian layers, what you're going to find is Jewish. The writer was an Associated Press reporter in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011.
2022-05-19 00:00:00
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