Jerusalem: The Biography

* Christian accounts make the exaggerated claim that 10,000 to 90,000 Christians were murdered by the Jews and buried by Thomas the Gravedigger. Christian legend claims the victims were buried in the Mamilla cemetery of the Lions’ Cave, so named because survivors hid in the cave until they were saved by a lion. The Jews claim that it was Jewish victims of a Christian massacre who were saved by the lion.

* Some traces of a building at the Temple Mount’s south-west corner seem to show a menorah painted over a cross, possibly a Christian shrine inherited for a short time by Jews. But this may date from the early Islamic period.

* The Golden Gate, actually two gates, is directly and precisely aligned with the Tomb itself in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the place to which Heraclius took the Cross. The place had further symbolism, as we have seen, because the Byzantines mistakenly believed it also marked the Beautiful Gate where Jesus entered on Palm Sunday and where his apostles performed a miracle after his death. Nonetheless some scholars believe the gate was actually built by the Ummayad caliphs. The Gate soon assumed mystical significance for the Jews who called it the Gate of Mercy.

* The word ‘mosque’ derives from the Arabic masjid, which led to the Spanish mezquita and the French mosquée.

* Muhammad’s successors used the title Commander of the Believers. Later the Heads of State were known as Khalifat Rasul Allah – Successor to the Messenger of God – or caliph. Abu Bakr may have used this title but there is no evidence it was again used for another seventy years, until the reign of Abd al-Malik. Then it was applied retrospectively: the first four rulers became known as the Righteous Caliphs.

† The early history of Islam, including the surrender of Jerusalem, is mysterious and contested. The pre-eminent Islamic historians wrote one or two centuries later and far from Jerusalem or Mecca: Ibn Ishaq,Muhammad’s first biographer, wrote in Baghdad, dying in 770; al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri and al-Yaqubi all lived in late-ninth-century Persia or Iraq.

* The early Muslims seem to have called themselves ‘Believers’ – the word appears 1,000 times in the Koran while ‘Muslim’ appears about 75 times – and as we will see in Jerusalem, they were certainly not yet hostile to their fellow monotheists,Christians or Jews. Professor Fred M. Donner, an authority on early Islam, takes this further: ‘There is no reason to believe’, he writes, ‘that the Believers viewed themselves as a new or separate religious confession. Some of the early Believers were Christians or Jews.’

* There is no contemporary account of the fall of Jerusalem but the Arab historians describe the armies that simultaneously invaded Persia and this is based on those sources.

* Jews and most Christians would not have had a problem with the earliest versions of the Muslim statement of faith – the shahada – which read ‘There is no God but God’, as it may not have been until 685 that they added ‘Muhammad is the apostle of God’. Jewish and Muslim names for Jerusalem overlap: Muhammad called Palestine ‘The Holy Land’ in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. The Jews called the Temple Beyt ha-Miqdash (the Holy House) which the Muslims adapted: they called the city herself Bayt al-Maqdis. The Jews called the Temple Mount Har ha-Beyt (the Mount of the Holy House); Muslims initially called it Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis, the Mosque of the Holy House, and later also Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. Ultimately Muslims had seventeen names for Jerusalem; Jews claimed seventy, and both agreed ‘a multiplicity of names is a sign of greatness’.

* The traditional text of the Covenant or Pact of Omar with the Christians claims Omar agreed to ban the Jews from Jerusalem. This is Christian wishful thinking or a later forgery because we know that Omar welcomed the Jews back in Jerusalem, that he and the early caliphs allowed Jewish worship on the Temple Mount and that the Jews did not leave again as along as Islam held sway. The Armenians were already a large Christian community in Jerusalem with their own bishop (later patriarch). They established close relations with the Muslims and received their own Covenant. For the next millennium and a half,Christians and Jews were dhimmi, people of the Covenant, tolerated but inferior, sometimes left to themselves, sometimes viciously persecuted.