Chapter one
Introduction: Two Jerusalems
1. Heat
This book is about the lethal feedback loop between the actual
city of Jerusalem and the apocalyptic fantasy it inspires. It is a book,
therefore, about two Jerusalems: the earthly and the heavenly, the mundane
and the imagined. That doubleness shows up in the tension between
Christian Jerusalem and Jewish Jerusalem, between European
Jerusalem and Islamic Jerusalem, between Israeli Jerusalem and Palestinian
Jerusalem, and between the City on a Hill and the Messiah
nation that, beginning with John Winthrop, understands itself in its
terms. But all recognizably contemporary conflicts have their buried
foundations in the deep past, and this book will excavate them. Always,
the story will curve back to the real place: the story of how humans living
on the ridge about a third of the way between the Dead Sea and the
Mediterranean have constantly been undermined by the overheated
dreams of pilgrims who, age in and age out, arrive at the legendary
gates with love in their hearts, the end of the world in their minds, and
weapons in their hands.
It is as if the two Jerusalems rub against each other like stone against
flint, generating the spark that ignites fire. There is the literal fire of
wars among peoples and nations, taken to be holy because ignited in
the holy city, and that will be our subject. There is the fire of the God
who first appeared as a burning bush,1 and then as flames hovering
over the heads of chosen ones.2 That God will be our subject. But Jerusalem
also ignites heat in the human breast, a viral fever of zealotry
and true belief that lodged in the DNA of Western civilization. That
fever lives — an infection but also, as happens with the mind on fire, an
inspiration. And like all good metaphors, fever carries implications of
its own opposite, for preoccupation with Jerusalem has been a religious
and cultural boon, too. “Salvation is from Jerusalem,”3 the Psalms say,
but the first meaning of the word “salvation” is health. That the image
of fever suggests ecstasy, transcendence, and intoxication is also true
to our meditation. “Look,” the Lord tells the prophet Zechariah, “I am
going to make Jerusalem an intoxicating cup to all the surrounding
peoples.”4
Jerusalem fever consists in the conviction that the fulfillment of
history depends on the fateful transformation of the earthly Jerusalem
into a screen onto which overpowering millennial fantasies can be
projected. This end of history is conceived variously as the arrival of
the Messiah, or his return; as the climactic final battle at Armageddon,
with the forces of angels vanquishing those of Satan (usually represented
by Christians as Jews, Muslims, or other “infidels”). Later, the end of
history sheds its religiosity, but Jerusalem remains at least implicitly the
backdrop onto which millennial images are thrown by social utopias,
whether founded by pilgrims in the New World, by communards in
Europe, or by Communists. Ultimately, a continuous twentieth- and
twenty-first-century war against evil turns out, surprisingly, to be centered
on Jerusalem, a pivot point of both the Cold War and the War
on Terror. Having begun as the ancient city of Apocalypse, it became
the magnetic pole of Western history, doing more to create the modern
world than any other city. Only Jerusalem — not Athens, Rome, or
Paris; not Moscow or London; not Istanbul, Damascus, or Cairo; not
El Dorado or the New York of immigrants’ dreams — only Jerusalem
occupies such a transcendent place in the imagination. It is the earthly
reflection of heaven — but heaven, it turns out, casts a shadow.
Thus, across the centuries, the fancied city creates the actual city, and
vice versa. “The more exalted the metaphoric status of Jerusalem,” as
the Jerusalem scholar Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi writes, “the more dwarfed
its geopolitical dimensions; the more expansive the boundaries of the
Holy City, the less negotiable its municipal borders.”5 Therefore, war.
Over the past two millennia, the ruling establishment of Jerusalem has
been overturned eleven times, almost always with brute violence, and
always in the name of religion.6 This book will tell the story of those
wars — how sacred geography creates battlefields. Even when wars had
nothing literally to do with Jerusalem, the city inspired them with the
promise of “the glory of the coming of the Lord . . . with his terrible
swiftsword,” as put by one battle hymn from far away. Metaphoric
boundaries obliterate municipal borders, with disputes about the latter
spawning expansions of the former, even to distant reaches of the
earth.
Jerusalem fever infects religious groups, certainly the three monotheisms
that claim the city. Although mainly a Christian epic, its
verses rhyme with what Judeans once did, what Muslims took to, what
a secular culture unknowingly pursues, and what parties to the city’s
contemporary conflict embody. Yet if Jerusalem is the fever’s chosen
niche, Jerusalem is also its antidote. Religion, likewise, is both a source
of trouble and a way of vanquishing it. Religion, one sees in Jerusalem
as nowhere else, is both the knife that cuts the vein and the force
that keeps the knife from cutting. Each tradition enlivens the paradox
uniquely, and that, too, is the story.
For Jews, Jerusalem, after the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians
and then the Romans, means that absence is the mode of
God’s presence. First, the Holy of Holies in the rebuilt Temple of biblical
times was deliberately kept vacant — vacancy itself mythologized.
Then, after the destruction by Rome, when the Temple was not rebuilt,
the holy place was imagined in acts of Torah study and observance
of the Law, with a return to Jerusalem constantly felt as coming “next
year.” Throughout centuries of diaspora, the Jewish fantasy of Jerusalem
kept communal cohesion intact, enabled survival of exile and oppression,
and ultimately spawned Zionism.
For Christians, the most compelling fact of the faith is that Jesus
is gone, present only through the projections of sacramentalism. But
in the ecstasies of evangelical fervor, Jesus can still be felt as kneeling
in the garden of Gethsemane, sweating blood for “you.” So Jerusalem
lives as the locus of piety, for “you” can kneel there, too. The ultimate
Christian vision of the future — the Book of Revelation — is centered in
the city of the Lord’s suffering, but now that anguish redeems the very
cosmos. Even in the act of salvation, the return of Jesus to Jerusalem is
catastrophic.
Muslims came to Jerusalem as occupiers in 637, only five years after
the death of...