Palestine Twilight: The Murder of Dr Glock and the Archaeology of the Holy Land

There is a charming legend in the Islamic tradition of the holiness of the Holy Land, about a magical secret passage. According to a hadith, a saying of the Prophet Muhammad, the prophet declared that there would be a man, a Muslim, who would enter Paradise on foot while still alive and return to tell the tale. This prophecy came true after the Prophet’s death in the following way. During the caliphate of Omar, who captured Jerusalem and introduced Islam into the Holy Land in the seventh century of the common era, a man named Shuraik ibn Hubashah came to Jerusalem with his tribe, the Banu Tamim. He went to the Temple Mount to fetch water from a well there. He lowered his bucket into the well, and the bucket fell in. So he climbed down into the well to retrieve it. At the bottom of the well he found a door. He opened it, and found himself in the garden of Paradise, exactly as described in the Qur’an. He walked around, amazed at what he saw. The thought occurred to him that no one would believe him if he could not prove he had been there, so he plucked a leaf from a tree, put it behind his ear, and climbed up out of the well, with the bucket. The man showed the leaf to the Governor of Jerusalem, who despatched a letter to Omar, the Commander of the Faithful, in Mecca, seeking advice on the marvel. Omar wrote back with the judgement that if the leaf really did come from Paradise it would not wither or dry up.

The leaf stayed green. It was like the leaf of a peach tree, the size of the palm of a hand, and pointed at the top. Shuraik placed the leaf between the pages of his Qur’an, and when he died the Qur’an, with the leaf in it, was buried with him.

The legend refers to a cistern under the Aqsa Mosque that now bears the name Bir al-Waraqah, the Well of the Leaf. Other Islamic legends refer to miraculous channels of water running under the Temple Mount. According to one legend, the waters of the well Zamzam inside the sacred enclosure at Mecca flow into the spring of Siloam, in Jerusalem on the night of ‘Arafat, an Islamic holiday commemorating God’s transmission of the text of the Qur’an to the Prophet. A further legend tells that the four rivers of Paradise – Sihon, Gihon, the Euphrates and the Nile – originate from the base of the Rock on the Temple Mount. ‘The Prophet said, “All the rivers and clouds and the winds come from under the Rock of Jerusalem … The sweet waters and rain-bearing winds issue from the base of the Rock of Jerusalem.’”

These legends elaborate the fact that the Temple Mount contains a system for supplying water to the Temple for ritual purposes. They claim the tunnels for Islam in the same way that Warren’s tradition gnosticized them. They are separate, dreamlike traditions about the same thing: a response to the marvellous quality of this massive structure.

Jerusalem was built by the Canaanites because it had three physical advantages: it was on a hill, which made it easy to defend; it was close to an established road to the Mediterranean coast; and it had a secure water supply, the Gihon spring, which supplied the original Bronze Age city. (The site of this original city lies outside the familiar Ottoman walls of the Old City of Jerusalem.) The water supply allowed the city’s survival. When the first Temple was built, water was channelled to it from Gihon for the purpose of ritual cleansing. The marvel of water had been turned into something sacred. Once captured by the Israelites, Jerusalem became their political and religious capital. Political and sacred power came to rest in the same place. The whole vast corpus of the contending traditions of the holiness of the Holy Land grows from this.

The original attraction of a securely defended city with a safe water supply developed over the millennia into a tradition that generates traditions, which then become layered over others, occluding their original mythic impetus, clashing with each other, producing a spiritual swarm, swirling chaotically over the ancient city. And so now, for this reason, the Ethiopians – to cite just one example – are among those who believe that the sacredness of Jerusalem is theirs. They have their own way of expressing their claim: they believe that the spiritual leadership of Israel under Solomon has passed to them. In the ancient Ethiopian text the Kebra Negast, Makeda, the Queen of Sheba, travels to Jerusalem to hear the famed wisdom of Solomon from the king’s own lips. After entertaining her sumptuously, Solomon consummates his desire to have a son by her. That night, Solomon had a dream in which the sun, which by divine command had shone over Israel, ‘suddenly withdrew itself, and it flew away to the country of Ethiopia, and it shone there with exceeding great brightness for ever, for it willed to dwell there’. Later tradition holds that it is in Ethiopia that the Ark of the Covenant, the seat of God, came to rest; such is the power of the sacredness of Jerusalem, and the holiness of the Holy Land.

In the same fashion, the Islamic tradition builds on this original strategic attraction of Jerusalem, creating a new idea of holiness. The Dome of the Rock, the city’s most recognizable landmark, an ornate octagonal shrine topped with a golden dome that dominates the skyline of the Old City, symbolizes the Islamic claim that the Qur’an and the religion it enjoins both absorbs and supersedes its two monotheistic predecessors, Judaism and Christianity. The Dome of the Rock is the Temple of Solomon rebuilt. For a few years during the prophetic career of Muhammad, the earliest Muslims prayed towards Jerusalem, and the Rock over which the Dome of the Rock is built – an exposed natural outcrop upon which Abraham bound his son Isaac, and from which Muhammad is held to have risen to heaven – was circumambulated in the way that the Ka’ba, the central shrine at Mecca, is now. The Islamic holiness of the Holy Land (which has been taken up and developed in recent years by the Palestinian Islamist movement as part of its political ideology, arguing that the whole of Palestine is an Islamic trust, occupation of which by modern Israel is a violation of religious law) is expressed in a traditional Arabic literature in praise of Jerusalem.

Texts like ‘The book of arousing souls to visit Jerusalem’s holy walls’ of Ibn al-Firkah, written some time in the late sixth or early seventh century, tell the main Islamic legend of Jerusalem, of how Muhammad was carried supernaturally from Mecca to the Rock on the Temple Mount, where he joined the other prophets of God and led them in prayer before ascending to heaven on a fantastic winged horse, accompanied by the angel Gabriel. Ibn al-Firkah also relates that God created Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem a thousand years before the rest of the world, and that when the waters of the Flood subsided, the first earthly thing to appear was the Rock. The sweet waters of the earth originate from it, and hell-fire is heated here. ‘Who gives alms to the amount of a loaf of bread in Jerusalem, it is as if he gave alms to the weight of earthly mountains, all of them gold. Who gives alms to the value of a dirham, it will be his redemption from the Fire. Who fasts a day in Jerusalem, it will mean his immunity from the Fire.’ This work’s translator notes that ‘Moslem reaction to the Crusades was a potent factor in the development of the Islamic literature on the “merits” of Jerusalem and Palestine.’

Charles Warren evoked a sense of kaleidoscopic dismay in a description of the discord of daily life in the holy city, where these multiple conflicting religious visions overlap, cancel and drown each other out, to produce something ultimately absurd and meaningless.

An Anglican bishop guards the interests of the German church, a Jew, converted by a miracle, adorns with images the walls of the Latin church, whose altar is placed below the arch where Pontius Pilate exclaimed Ecce Homo. The Queen of Sheba’s representatives have sold their birthright in Jerusalem for a daily dole of pottage. The Syrian bishop, feted in India, with a man-of-war at his disposal, here lives in a cellar. The Arab Protestant takes off his shoes in one English church and his turban in another.

The priest of one communion cannot marry; in another, priest’s orders are not given until a son is born to him. German plans of the city show no English buildings thereon; they are all evangelical; but the German buildings are shown as German. The French consul acts for the Italian convents; an Italian consul acts for the Spaniards; a Spanish consul acts for the Mexicans, of whom there are none; the German consul is chairman of the English library. Russian Jews, after six months’ residence in Jerusalem, become British subjects …

This is negative cosmopolitanism in its everyday appearance in the nineteenth century. The passage produces an effect rather like motion sickness, where a multitude of images rushes by too fast for the eye to settle.

About the same time that the Earl of Shaftesbury was exulting in the establishment of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem, seeing it as the beginning of the fulfilment of biblical prophecy, a Russian foreign ministry report noted, ‘Jerusalem is the centre of the world and our mission must be there.’ Contemporary with Shaftesbury’s scheme of the holiness of the Holy Land, based on an Anglican New Jerusalem absorbing Jerusalem of old, was an equally potent Russian idea of the holiness of the Holy Land: a belief in a divine role for Russia in Palestine. Proclaiming itself the successor to Byzantium as the world’s Christian empire, imperial Russia encouraged its subjects, mostly poor peasants, to undertake gruelling pilgrimages to Jerusalem and the sites around it. A Russian hospice and cathedral were built for the purpose. It was not difficult for anyone visiting Jerusalem at the time to see that there was a political aim behind this policy: the Russian spiritual claim to Palestine, expressed through its role as the traditional protector of the interests of the Orthodox Church, could without much adjustment be translated into an assertion of political rights. Under Czar Nicholas I, Russia demanded the Ottoman Empire accept a Russian protectorate over all its Orthodox subjects. Within a few years, the Crimean War began.

The Crimean War was a war of negative cosmopolitanism. Its nominal cause was a feud between the Catholic and Orthodox caretakers of the shrine of the Nativity in Bethlehem, priests and monks who in the past had fought each other with broomsticks over the right to adorn and maintain parts of the shrines associated with the life of Christ, mainly in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Nativity. In 1847, an ornate silver star marking the traditional site of the birth of Christ was stolen. The Catholics blamed the Greeks. The conflict escalated. With its own mystical claim to the Holy Land, expressed in a claim to protection of Catholic interests in Palestine, France took the side of the Catholics. France and Russia needed a war for extraneous political reasons, and so war was joined over the Orthodox-Catholic conflict over control of the holy sites, with France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire on one side and Russia on the other. Russian public opinion viewed the war as a religious crusade.

The religious claims of the imperial states were the means of establishing political footholds in a geopolitically strategic corner of the crumbling Ottoman Empire. Britain had established a consulate in Jerusalem in 1838, as a result of the lobbying of the Earl of Shaftesbury, but with practical political interests underlying Shaftesbury’s millenarian aspirations, and other powers did the same. Where the faith went, the flag followed.

In the years after the Crimean War, Prussia too joined the competition for a political stake in Palestine, again expressing its involvement in distinctive religious terms. Like Britain, a Protestant country with no indigenous co-religionists in Palestine, Prussia established a religious claim to the land by identifying itself with the medieval Crusaders, by searching for the tomb of the German Crusader King Frederick Barbarossa and other Crusader remains, and by encouraging religious colonies modelled on the Knights Templar. In 1898, the Prussian Emperor, Frederick II, consolidated diplomatic relations with the Ottoman state with a ceremonial visit to the Holy Land. An opening was cut in the wall of the Old City of Jerusalem, built nearly 500 years earlier by Sultan Suleiman, so that the imperial party could enter in full pomp, with the Kaiser on horseback. The intended symbolism was that Frederick would enter the holy city like his earlier Crusader namesake. The day was also the anniversary of Luther’s protest against the papacy, and once inside the city, the Kaiser inaugurated a church built on the site of an old Crusader hospice.

Twenty years earlier, a Prussian archaeological institution in Palestine had been established. This was the Palästina Verein, founded in 1878. This organization sent vast amounts of antiquities back to the national museum in Berlin, and established formidable archaeological operations, which caused Britain in particular grave diplomatic and scholarly anxiety. Their main project was the excavation of the biblical site of Taanach, an expedition conducted in 1902–1904 by the Austrian biblical scholar Ernst Sellin. Sixty years later, in a re-excavation of the site sponsored by the Lutheran Church, this was the place where a young and idealistic Albert Glock was to cut his teeth as an archaeologist.

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