The Sacred and the Cruel

by Prof. Benjamin Z. Kedar

My earliest memory relating to the Esplanade—the Temple Mount—is a mistaken notion. As a child in postwar Nitra, Czechoslovakia, I was convinced that the imposing domed building on the cover of a Passover Haggadah we had at home was none other than the Temple of Jerusalem, for whose speedy rebuilding we implored God in a concluding hymn of the Passover seder as well as in sundry other prayers.

Somewhat later, already in Kfar Netter, Israel, I realized that the domed building was the Hurva, the main synagogue in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, destroyed in 1948 by a victorious Arab Legion along with some 30 other synagogues. In 1956 I was surprised to learn, from a Hebrew volume on Jerusalem’s early history, that a part of the southern supporting wall of Herod’s Temple Mount—and not only the famous Western Wall—was still standing.

As a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in around 1960, I often brought my guests to the observation post at Abu Tor, close to the Israel-Jordan armistice line, from which one could see the Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, whose dull gray dome was at the time being replaced by a golden one. There was great curiosity, but I do not recollect a desire to visit those shrines, to say nothing of incorporating them into Israel. Later, as a graduate student in New Haven I was repeatedly asked how I could accept the fact that the Old City and the Temple Mount were part of the Kingdom of Jordan, and I remember how shocked my interlocutors were to hear that, in my opinion, the Almighty did a great favor to Israel by keeping those places outside its borders, for I could well imagine the frenzy their possession by Israel would have generated. Moreover, in those years I had already begun to explore the hypothesis that the destruction of the Second Temple was a windfall for the Jewish scholarly elite of that time and to some extent a blessing in disguise for Judaism in general. And yet I was soon to learn that my stance was much more complex.

Upon the outbreak of the Six Day War I hastily left New Haven, rushing to take part in what then appeared to be a perilous, desperate fight for Israel’s survival. And when a few days later I joined the jubilant, several-miles-long procession of West Jerusalemites who streamed for the first time into the recently conquered Old City and trudged through the pulverize remains of the Magharibah Quarter down to the Western Wall, I found myself touching one of its stones while silently reciting the words of Juda Halevi, the twelfth-century Jewish poet from Spain:

Surely shall I take pity on your stones and kiss them
And the taste of your clods will please me more than honey.

Somewhat later I stood, alone, before the remains of the still deserted Southern Wall.

When, forty years afterwards, I think of Jerusalem’s sacred Esplanade, what scenes come to my mind? Abraham making ready to sacrifice his second son, Isaac? King David conveying the Ark of the Covenant? King Solomon praying at the consecration of the First Temple or Judas Maccabaeus reconsecrating the Second? King Herod inspecting the progress of his grandiose building scheme? Mary and Joseph coming to the Temple to offer their infant son to the Lord? Muhammad descending onto the Rock amidst the Temple’s ruins and ascending thence to the heavens? Archbishop Peter of Lyon consecrating the Dome of the rock as “the Temple of the Lord” in 1141 or Saladin reconsecrating it as a Muslim shrine 46 years later?

Yes, I am aware of these scenes, some historical, some mythical. But pomp and ritual, let alone the sacrificial slaughter of animals, leave me cold; the the extent that I’m capable of being attuned to religion, I may be tempted by the “still small voice” of Kings I 19:12. The scenes that come to mind most readily are the recurring doublets of victory and defeat, from 586 BCE and 70 CE down to 1099, 1187, and 1967. Of these events I’ve studied in detail the Crusader massacre of about 3,000 Muslim men and women at the Aqsa Mosque upon the conquest of Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, and its variegated, sometimes blatantly biased, reconstructions by Western writers from the twelfth century to the present. In short, for me the Esplanade connotes, first and foremost, the extremes of humankind’s frenzy at a spot where the sacred and the cruel have mingled all too often.

Benjamin Kedar is a professor of history at The Hebrew University, specializing in the history of the Crusades. This essay was excerpted from Where Heaven and Earth Meet:Jerusalem’s Sacred Esplanade, which he co-edited with Prof. Oleg Grabar of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton. The book, which focuses on the Temple Mount, is distributed by the University of Texas Press, and in Israel by Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi.