kopia lustrzana https://github.com/thinkst/zippy
265 wiersze
18 KiB
Plaintext
265 wiersze
18 KiB
Plaintext
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
A Brief History
|
||
Jerusalem’s recorded history begins with its mention in
|
||
Egyptian court records 4,000 years ago, but there had been human
|
||
settlements here for centuries, probably millennia, before that. At the
|
||
beginning of the second millennium b.c. , Jerusalem was a Canaanite
|
||
mountain stronghold on a secondary trade route, far less important than
|
||
biblical cities such as Hazor, Megiddo, Beth Shean, and Shechem. The
|
||
earliest name associated with the city, Ur usalim, perhaps meant “city
|
||
of Shalim” or “founded by Shalim. ” Scholars speculate that Shalim
|
||
might have been an ancient Semitic deity of peace, for the name
|
||
resembles the modern Hebrew and Arabic words for “peace”: shalom and
|
||
salaam, respectively. If true, this is an ironic name for a city that
|
||
would become one of the most constantly and bitterly embattled places
|
||
on the face of the earth.
|
||
Biblical Jerusalem
|
||
In the Bible, Genesis 14:18–20 records that Abraham visited
|
||
the city of “Salem” in approximately 1800 b.c. and was blessed by the
|
||
city’s ruler, Melchzedik, who offered him bread and wine. The city is
|
||
not mentioned again in the Bible until the time of the great poet
|
||
warrior, King David, who captured the city from the Jebusites in about
|
||
1000 b.c. The Bible describes how David’s soldiers conquered Jerusalem
|
||
by discovering a water tunnel under the walls and using it to take the
|
||
city by surprise. Warren’s Shaft, part of a Canaanite water system
|
||
discovered by 19th-century archaeologists and open to visitors, might
|
||
be the very tunnel infiltrated by David’s army.
|
||
Perhaps because Jerusalem was in neutral territory not
|
||
allotted to any of the twelve rival tribes of Israel, David made it the
|
||
capital of his newly formed kingdom and brought the most talented
|
||
artisans, dedicated priests, magical poets and musicians, and the most
|
||
formidable soldiers from each of the tribes to live in his city. He
|
||
also brought the Ark of the Covenant, the portable tabernacle
|
||
containing the Tablets of the Law received on Mount Sinai, to the
|
||
Spring of Gihon, just outside the walls of Jerusalem. There the Ark
|
||
rested until it was placed in the Temple, built in approximately 960
|
||
b.c. on Mt. Moriah, the high point at the northern end of the city.
|
||
The Temple (today known as the “First” Temple) was completed
|
||
by David’s son and successor, King Solomon. According to biblical
|
||
tradition, although David bought the land for the Temple and carefully
|
||
assembled its building materials, he was deemed unworthy of
|
||
constructing the Temple because he was a man of war with blood on his
|
||
hands. At the Temple’s dedication, Solomon addressed his God: “... the
|
||
Heavens, even the Heaven of the Heavens, cannot contain Thee; how much
|
||
less this House that I have built? ”
|
||
The site of the Temple eventually became identified as Mt.
|
||
Moriah, on which it stood, where Abraham was called to sacrifice his
|
||
son Isaac. Along with this splendid house of worship, Solomon built a
|
||
royal palace, mansions for his wives, temples for the foreign gods
|
||
worshipped by the princesses he had married, and towers for the defense
|
||
of the capital. Under the wise reign of Solomon, the city flourished as
|
||
the capital of an empire that stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea
|
||
and controlled the trade routes from Egypt to Phoenicia. The Temple and
|
||
royal palace were adorned with gold and ivory from Africa and with
|
||
cedar from Lebanon; the beauties and glories of Jerusalem under Solomon
|
||
have captivated readers of the Bible for almost 3,000 years. But with
|
||
his death the empire collapsed, and the Israelite kingdom was divided
|
||
into two separate, impoverished, often warring nations: Israel, with
|
||
its capital at Shechem in the north, ruled by a series of northern
|
||
dynasties; and the smaller kingdom of Judah, with its capital at
|
||
Jerusalem, from which the Davidic dynasty continued to rule. The Bible
|
||
tells us that the cruelty and impiety of the rulers of both kingdoms
|
||
aroused the fury of the great Prophets.
|
||
In 701 b.c. the Assyrian armies of Sennacherib destroyed
|
||
Israel and moved southward to besiege Jerusalem. Thanks to King
|
||
Hezekiah’s hidden water tunnel, the city narrowly escaped destruction.
|
||
The end of David’s dynasty came in 587 b.c. , when Nebuchadnezzar, King
|
||
of Babylon, invaded Judah to lay siege to Jerusalem. When it fell, the
|
||
Temple and all the buildings were burned. The people of the
|
||
once-glorious city were forced into an exile known as “the Babylonian
|
||
Captivity. ”
|
||
In time, the kingdom of Babylon was overthrown and the
|
||
Israelites were permitted to return to Jerusalem in 539 b.c. The city
|
||
was now under the more tolerant rule of the Persians, but rebuilding
|
||
was slow work. The Second Temple was finished in 515 b.c. , but much of
|
||
the city still lay in ruins.
|
||
Jerusalem submitted peaceably to the rule of the Greeks in
|
||
332 b.c. under Alexander the Great and, subsequently, to his
|
||
Hellenistic successors as well as the Egyptian Ptolomeys and the Syrian
|
||
Seleucids. When Seleucid rulers outlawed Judaism, Jews led by Judah
|
||
Maccabee and his brothers staged a revolution in 167 b.c. and, against
|
||
all odds, restored the primacy of Jewish religious life in Jerusalem.
|
||
The Macabbees cleansed the Temple of Hellenistic idols and the blood of
|
||
pagan sacrifices; the eight-day celebration of Hanukkah (Feast of
|
||
Dedication) commemorates their victory. The Hasmonean dynasty,
|
||
descendants of the Maccabee family, ruled an independent Jewish
|
||
Commonwealth that stretched from the Negev to the Galilee. Jerusalem
|
||
grew, surrounded with a formidable wall and defended by towers beside
|
||
the Jaffa Gate. The Hasmoneans ruled until Pompey’s Roman legions
|
||
arrived in 63 b.c.
|
||
Roman Jerusalem
|
||
After the initial years of Roman administration and
|
||
political infighting, Rome installed Herod (scion of a family from
|
||
Idumea, a Jewish kingdom in the desert) as King of Judea. He reigned
|
||
from 37 to 4 b.c. , during which time he fortified the Hasmonean wall
|
||
and rebuilt the defense towers beside Jaffa Gate, the foundation of
|
||
which still stand. Several palaces were built and a water system
|
||
installed. Herod also completely rebuilt the Temple, making it one of
|
||
the most important religious centers in the Roman Empire. The courtyard
|
||
around the Temple was expanded to accommodate hundreds of thousands of
|
||
pilgrims, and the Temple Mount was shored up by retaining walls made
|
||
with great stone blocks. One of these walls, the Western Wall, is today
|
||
a major reminder of Jerusalem’s greatness under Herod. A massive
|
||
fortress was built overlooking the Temple Mount, which Herod named
|
||
“Antonia” in honor of his Roman friend and benefactor, Mark Antony.
|
||
For all his accomplishments, Herod was nevertheless hated
|
||
by his subjects; he taxed, he tortured, and he ordered the massacre of
|
||
male Jewish infants in an attempt to do away with the heralded Messiah.
|
||
When Jesus was born in about 4 b.c. , Joseph and Mary escaped Herod’s
|
||
paranoia by fleeing into Egypt with the new-born infant. They returned
|
||
to live in the Galilee village of Nazareth, making pilgrimages to
|
||
Jerusalem.
|
||
According to biblical accounts, Jesus spent his life
|
||
ministering in the Galilee Valley. In about a.d. 30 he and his
|
||
followers went for Passover to Jerusalem, which was in unrest at this
|
||
time, dissatisfied with Roman domination. Jesus’s entry into the Temple
|
||
caused a commotion; after the Passover dinner he was arrested by the
|
||
temple priests, who were under direct Roman rule. Jesus was put on
|
||
trial quickly and condemned to crucifixion, a Roman form of execution
|
||
for political and religious dissidents as well as for common criminals.
|
||
In a province rife with rebellion and retaliation, the execution in
|
||
Jerusalem of yet another religious leader from the Galilee did not by
|
||
itself have an immediate effect on history.
|
||
After Jesus’s crucifixion, harsh Roman rule continued until
|
||
a.d. 66, when the Jews rebelled. For four years Jewish zealots fought
|
||
against the might of Rome. At the end, the Roman general Titus laid
|
||
siege to Jerusalem in a.d. 70, finally attacking its starved and
|
||
weakened defenders. Those who didn’t escape were executed or sold into
|
||
slavery. The Holy City and the Temple were destroyed. The last of the
|
||
zealots held out for another three years at Masada (see page 76). Half
|
||
a million civilians died in the Galilee and Judea as a result of this
|
||
first revolt against Rome, a number unequaled in ancient warfare.
|
||
Christian and Islamic Jerusalem
|
||
For 60 years Jerusalem lay in ruins, until the Roman
|
||
Emperor Hadrian ordered the city rebuilt as a Roman town dedicated to
|
||
Jupiter. In outrage, the Jews began a second revolt against Rome, led
|
||
by Simon bar Kochba. The ruins of Jerusalem were briefly liberated,
|
||
but, in the end, Jewish resistance to Rome was defeated with great loss
|
||
of life. The planned new Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, was built over
|
||
the ruins of Herodian Jerusalem, and Jews were barred from residing
|
||
there for all time. Jerusalem’s physical existence as a spiritual city
|
||
seemed finished, but its spiritual power for Jews, and for the
|
||
struggling new Christian religion, remained. For the next two centuries
|
||
Aelia Capitolina enjoyed an innocuous history.
|
||
But the Roman Empire became Christian in the fourth
|
||
century, and Jerusalem became a center of religion once again. Queen
|
||
Helena, a devout Christian and the mother of Emperor Constantine the
|
||
Great, made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 326 to identify the sites
|
||
associated with Jesus’s life. She found that the city’s most beautiful
|
||
Roman temple, dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite, stood on the site of
|
||
the crucifixion. The temple was demolished and a vast, Classical-style
|
||
church was built around Golgotha (the hill where Jesus’s crucifixion
|
||
was believed to have taken place). Throughout Jerusalem, other spots
|
||
important to Jesus’s life were commemorated with religious structures.
|
||
Pilgrims came from all over the Roman (and, later, Byzantine) Empire
|
||
during the following centuries, but the prosperity they brought lasted
|
||
only until 614, when Persian armies overtook Judea and reduced
|
||
Jerusalem to rubble again. In 629, Jerusalem was recaptured by the
|
||
Byzantines.
|
||
Still reeling from the effects of the Persian devastation,
|
||
Jerusalem was conquered in 638 by the forces of Islam. The Temple Mount
|
||
was identified in Islamic tradition as “the farthest spot” (in Arabic,
|
||
el-aksa), the site to which the Prophet Muhammad was transported in one
|
||
night from Mecca on a winged horse, as described in the 17th chapter of
|
||
the Koran. From here the Prophet ascended to the heavens and was
|
||
permitted to glimpse paradise. The rock on the Temple Mount from which
|
||
he ascended, at or close to the site of the ruined Temple, was
|
||
commemorated by the construction of the Dome of the Rock in 691. The
|
||
Dome of the Rock remains Jerusalem’s most striking monument; it is
|
||
counted among the most beautiful buildings ever created. By about 715,
|
||
the El-Aksa Mosque, third holiest place of prayer in Islam (after Mecca
|
||
and Medina), had been built on the southern side of the Temple Mount.
|
||
Jerusalem continued under Islamic rule for the next four and a half
|
||
centuries. In 1099, under their leaders Godfrey de Bouillon and
|
||
Tancred, the Crusaders captured the Holy City for Christendom by
|
||
slaughtering both Muslims and Jews.
|
||
Crusaders, Mamelukes, and Turks
|
||
The Crusaders established a feudal Christian state with
|
||
Godfrey at its head. They built many impressive churches during the
|
||
term of the first Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, but in 1187 they were
|
||
driven out by Muslim forces under the great warrior Saladin. During the
|
||
Sixth Crusade (1228– 1229), the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II managed
|
||
to secure Jerusalem for the Christians by negotiation.
|
||
The Christians, however, could not hold the city. After
|
||
they lost Jerusalem, a Mongol invasion swept through, and in 1244 the
|
||
Mameluke dynasty of Egypt took control, ruling Jerusalem for the next
|
||
250 years. The city struggled to rebuild from Crusader wars and
|
||
invasions. Much of the best Islamic architecture in the city was
|
||
constructed in the Mameluke era, but the past thousand years had taken
|
||
their toll: Jerusalem was unable to regain the prosperity it had
|
||
enjoyed in earlier times.
|
||
In the early 16th century, the Ottoman Turkish Empire was
|
||
advancing through the Middle East. Jerusalem fell to the Ottomans in
|
||
1517, remaining under their control for 400 years. Suleiman the
|
||
Magnificent rebuilt the walls and gates in the form they retain to this
|
||
day. Fountains, inns, religious schools, and barracks were constructed.
|
||
But when Suleiman died, his empire, including Jerusalem, began a long
|
||
period of decline. The Holy City remained a backwater until the 19th
|
||
century, when renewed interest among Christian pilgrims made it the
|
||
destination of thousands of travelers each year.
|
||
19th-Century Aspirations
|
||
At the same time, many Jews sought religious freedom and
|
||
fulfillment by moving to Palestine (as the Holy Land was traditionally
|
||
called) and especially to Jerusalem. In the 1890s, Theodor Herzl
|
||
(1860–1904) worked to organize a movement, Zionism, to create a Jewish
|
||
state. Chaim Weizmann (1874–1952), a scientist born in Russia but later
|
||
a British subject, did much to put Herzl’s hopes into practice.
|
||
Weizmann was an important figure in the negotiations with the British
|
||
government that led to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, supporting the
|
||
idea of a Jewish “national home” in Palestine that also respected the
|
||
rights of existing non-Jewish people already living there. The problem
|
||
was that British strategists, who were fighting the Ottoman Turks in
|
||
1917, had secretly promised the lands to their World War I Arab
|
||
allies.
|
||
In 1922 the League of Nations granted the British a mandate
|
||
to administer Palestine. Jerusalem flourished during the early years of
|
||
the Mandate. Modern neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, and the Hebrew
|
||
University were built in West Jerusalem, the new Jewish enclave. But
|
||
Arab opposition to new Jewish immigration and construction in Palestine
|
||
led to increasing strife; by 1946, Jerusalem was an armed camp. In 1947
|
||
the United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine into two
|
||
states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem as an international
|
||
city that belonged to neither. But lacking the means to enforce its
|
||
decision, the United Nations was powerless to halt the fighting that
|
||
erupted as the British withdrew their troops in 1948.
|
||
Modern Israel
|
||
The State of Israel was declared during this difficult
|
||
time. In response, member states of the Arab League sent troops to help
|
||
the Palestinian Arabs. West Jerusalem, separated from the rest of the
|
||
new Jewish nation, held out under siege for several months until
|
||
Israeli forces secured a land corridor connecting the city to the
|
||
coastal areas. Jews were evacuated from the Old City’s Jewish Quarter,
|
||
and thousands of Arab families fled their homes in West Jerusalem. As a
|
||
result of armistice agreements in 1949, Jerusalem was divided: West
|
||
Jerusalem was to be under Israeli control, and East Jerusalem
|
||
(including the Old City, with its Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and
|
||
Armenian quarters) came under Jordanian authority. Free access to holy
|
||
sites for members of all religions was guaranteed by the armistice
|
||
agreements. However, with the city partitioned by fortifications and
|
||
barbed wire, no Israeli or Jewish pilgrims were allowed to visit the
|
||
Western Wall or other Jewish sites in East Jerusalem.
|
||
For the next 19 years, Jerusalem was two cities. Political
|
||
and religious boundaries were aggravated by occasional incidents of
|
||
terrorism or sniping until the Six Day War in June 1967. Within three
|
||
days the city was completely in Israeli hands, and in two weeks it was
|
||
physically and administratively reunited. Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy
|
||
Kollek, spent the next 25 years orchestrating a vast program of
|
||
development, adding new cultural institutions and parks and instituting
|
||
neighborhood restoration projects while tirelessly me diating the
|
||
concerns of Jerusalem’s many communities.
|
||
Today, as always, Jerusalem is a city of controversies:
|
||
religious Jews in conflict with secular Jews; Palestinians calling for
|
||
independence; many residents protesting a wave of high-rise development
|
||
that many claim will turn the Holy City into a holy megalopolis. But
|
||
the ideas and mystique that have always made this an extraordinarily
|
||
special place rise above the ebbing and flowing concerns of present-day
|
||
Jerusalem as it continues to tug at the world’s attention into the new
|
||
millennium.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|