Beyond the Wall - Chapters on Urban Jerusalem
By HEIKE ZAUN-GOSHEN
...Nehemia surveyed the ruined city after his return from the Babylonian exile, as recounted in his chronicle. Jerusalem lay in waste, consumed with fire, a ghost city. It was 'large and great: but the people were few therein, and the houses were not builded.' Nehemiah draws a lively picture of the city he saw.... 1
Only a little more than a century ago, Jerusalem began to flourish once more. It's ancient holy sites and landscapes drew renewed interest and investment from the great European powers and their church representatives, as well as from European Jewish immigrants and their wealthy benefactors. Although the city had been inhabited continuously since its foundation thousands of years ago, it had been fought over, besieged and conquered so many times in the course of a troubled history, had been destroyed and laboriously rebuilt so often, that living conditions in the city in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire were almost unbearable. This is what Amos Elon, the well-known Israeli writer, recalls when he cites the words of the prophet Nehemiah above.
Jerusalem is a child of the desert, a city precariously hovering on its brink, exposed to a bright, unrelenting sun whose light is reflected by the city's almost white stone walls. It is not only a historical and spiritual site claimed by the world's three great monotheistic religions, but a modern urban center that today is home to more than half a million people. Given its unique religious and cultural legacy, the city we know today can actually only be understood against the background of the comprehensive and rapid changes that took place here during the century and half that have preceded the year 2000. In the course of these years, Jerusalem struggled to develop from a sleepy, provincial one-horse town somewhere in the Turkish Empire. The city saw the most far-raching changes ever made over the thousands of years of its history, with modern highrise buildings and freeways sprouting up on the edges of ancient historic sites.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, after more than 300 years of Turkish rule, Jerusalem as a political center was of only minor importance. It was a sparsely inhabited, rather neglected town of between 10,000 and 20,000 inhabitants, distinguished only by its past historical and religious legacy. Among the cramped, dilapidated dwellings there were fields of rubble, which the townspeople used primarily for the cultivation of vegetables, for their own supply. Trades and crafts, economy and transport were extremely limited. The changes and modernization processes which were taking place in cities of the Western world at the time seemed to have passed Jerusalem over. Sanitary conditions were unspeakable, and there was no orderly water supply. After his visit in 1867, Mark Twain describes a lamentable state of affairs:
The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are intolerably crooked - ...Rags, wretchedness, poverty, and dirt... abound...Jerusalem is mournful and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. 2
For hundreds of years, the old city walls had defined Jerusalem's size and shape. Upon nightfall, their gates were locked shut, to be opened again only after sunrise the next morning. Those unable to arrive on time had to remain outside - which was hardly a pleasant prospect. The surrounding, barren hills and valleys were terrorized by gangs of thieves roaming the countryside, and the Turkish authorities possessed neither the means nor the will to enforce law and order beyond the walls. Outside the Old City, the land was mostly unsettled. Only a few scattered Arab villages dotted the hills of the Judean semi-desert. Here and there stood the isolated summer residences of wealthy Arab families, and there were a few other monuments outside the walls which since then have been engulfed by the New City.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, a new dynamic began to gain momentum. In the following decades, Jerusalem became the city that it is today. The two striking characteristics about Jerusalem's leap into modern times were its population explosion - both via natural growth and immigration - and the city's dynamic expansion beyond the Old City's walls. The mid-nineteenth century was a period of reform within the ruling Ottoman Empire. And with the reforms -- the so-called Tanzimat - the Turkish Empire's politics of isolation towards the outside world came to an end. To promote their imperialistic ambitions, the European powers had been trying to gain influence on the weakening Turkish Empire. Now, for the first time in centuries, westerners were admitted to the Holy Land on a large scale. European consuls took up residence in Jerusalem, with missionaries and church representatives from abroad settling in the city in growing numbers.
Jerusalem also gained new importance in this period as the Ottoman district's administrative capital. The status of Jerusalem's Jewish and Christian minorities improved; they were granted more and more rights. As the foreign consuls began to wield considerable influence in the city, they also extended their protection to related religious groups. France looked after the interests of the Catholic Church, Russia represented the Greek Orthodox, and the Protestant countries of Britain and Prussia (later Germany), which had no established clientele as yet, took new Anglican and Evangelical church communities under their wings, as well as representing the growing Jewish population at times. As the Christian and European presence grew, so did Jewish immigration. Groups of Jewish families from other towns in Palestine as well as from Europe, North Africa and even remote Yemen began arriving. Each group founded their own community within the Jewish population, adding to Jerusalem's growing ethnic variety. Soon, the Jewish sector became the largest in the city. By 1870, the number of Jews in Jerusalem had reached 11,000, as compared to 6,000 Moslems and 5,000 Christians.3 This influx of people changed Jerusalem's face forever.
The same Turkish reforms significantly loosened the restrictions on land purchase and building permits pertaining to non-Moslem and non-Turkish inhabitants. The cramped conditions in the Old City forced Jerusalem to expand. The first building projects in outside of the Old City walls which were implemented in the course of this expansion were the nuclei from which the New City was to emerge. Tucked away between contemporary buildings, these architectural landmarks form an inalienable part of Jerusalem's cultural heritage. With their numerous construction projects, the various population groups were able to consolidate their presence in Jerusalem.The Christian churches built religious, educational and medical institutions which were available to both a growing number of Christan pilgrims and visitors and the local Jewish and Arab populations - the target groups of missionary aspirations. Competing with each other, the Europeans played a major role in establishing Jerusalem's urban infrastructure.
While the Christians built monuments to their ambitions, the Jewish population built living quarters - which were much better than those in the Old City, but still consisted of modest, and cheap, mass housing.The first of those suburbs developed with the help of Jewish philanthropists abroad and were fortresslike compounds, almost autonomous entities with their own communal facilities such as cisterns, baking houses, ritual baths and synagogues. Until the beginning of the 1880s, nine such suburbs emerged beyond the Old City's walls, displaying a remarkable degree of social awareness and self-organization. By 1914, a total of 70 Jewish neighborhoods had been established in the New City. The well-known Jewish benefactor, Sir Moses Montefiore, who helped finance several of these projects, described in his diaries how his vision came to life:
Select land outside the city; raise...a number of suitable houses, with European improvements: have in the centre...a synagogue, a college, and public bath. Let each house have in front a plot of ground large enough to cultivate olive trees, the vine, and necessary vegetables, so as to give the occupiers a taste of agriculture.4
It was comparatively later that Jerusalem's Arab population, both Moslems and Christians, joined the economic and development intitiative and began building in New Jerusalem. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, most of the Old City's dwellings were in Moslem possession, thus the pressures for expansion outside the walls seemed less urgent. In addition, the Moslem-Arab community lacked the independent backing of European benefactors and the autonomous organizational framework that the Jewish and Christian communities enjoyed. Indeed, the Turkish, Moslem government took a belated interest in Jerusalem's development and limited itself to a policy of laissez faire. Thus the Muslim Arab buildings erected in the New City were primarily residential dwellings, intitiated by indivual, wealthy and influential families who built large and sometimes sumptuous, villas. Often, they were joined by related families, and clusters of homes emerged. Communal facilities, however, remained in the Old City's Moslem Quarter. Christian Arab development in the New City, meanwhile, proceded along a different pattern, becoming a significant factor much later, in the 1920s and 1930s, when well-to-do Christian families settled in mixed neighbourhoods to the south and west. Their often stunning houses, built during the British Mandatory period, still dot neighborhoods such as Baq'a and Talbieh, which became exclusively Jewish in the in the upheavals that occurred during Israel's War of Independence in 1948.
By the beginning of the 20th century, the main population groups could be discerned in three more or less distinct urban areas in the New City: Arab dwellings concentrated in the area northeast and north, close to the Old City; Christian settlement focused to the west and southwest; and the Jewish neighborhoods consolidated farther away to the northwest and west. At the same time, there were overlapping zones of influence -- the Street of the Prophets, for example, and along Jaffa Street, Jerusalem's main thoroughfare. In its day, the Street of the Prophets was Jerusalem's Latin Quarter, with a colorful population mix and an intense cultural and social life. Eliezer Ben-Yehuda took up residence here, establishing one of the first Jewish households in which Hebrew was the exclusive language of daily life. On Jaffa Street, businesses and banks, offices and stores owned by Greeks and Armenians, Arabs, Jews and Europeans prospered. From a network of numerous small neighborhoods New Jerusalem had grown into one continuous area of settlement.
While the city grew, the Turkish Empire declined. It finally crumbled at the end of the First World War, and in December 1917, General Allenby entered Jerusalem. Three decades of British Mandatory rule ensued. The British further developed Jerusalem, and during the Mandate period both middle class Jewish and Arab neighborhoods expanded significantly. Water supply, transport and other facilities were improved, while the unique cityscape was still largely preserved through the inspiration of British planners. The Old City remained the heart of Jerusalem. Today's green belt around the ancient walls which seems to protect it from being swallowed up by the New City, hearkens back to an original plan by the British mandatory government.
After Israel's independence in 1948, the city on the edge of the desert was divided. Populations were shuffled and dislocated, with Jews from the Old City resettling in West-Jerusalem, and Arabs from neighbourhoods like Baq'a, Musrara and Katamon being evicted or fleeing to the Jordanian-controlled areas. In the new Israeli state Jerusalem's western half, turned green with public parks and gardens. At the same time, large waves of immigration in the aftermath of WW II generated an unprecedented construction boom of modern mass housing. East Jerusalem developed at a slower pace under Jordanian rule. Following the Six-Day-War in 1967, the city was finally re-united under Israeli sovereignty, spurring another era of growth. Yet invisible tensions and lines still divide the available lebensraum, with each population group guarding their traditions and cultural heritage. Just as diverse as Jerusalem's people is the city's eclectic architecture. Visitors only have to lift their heads and raise their eyes above the ground-floor level of shops on Jaffa Street to take in the texture of facades, most of which date from only a hundred years ago. Off the beaten path, Jerusalem's early urban building style is even more discernable and makes one understand the city even better. The sometime strange mixture of designs and styles might seem grotesque elsewhere; in Jerusalem it adds to the city's peculiar charm.
As a result of the hustle and bustle, of the developments that started with Turkish reforms, Jerusalem largely became what it is today. It is a multi-layered city of striking contrasts and mystical ambiguities. Its geographic location alone makes it even more unique among the cities of the world. High up in the Judean Mountains, overlooking the Judean Desert's arid landscape to the east and Israel's lush coastal plains to the west, Jerusalem is a crossroads between Europe, Asia and Africa which has always made it a coveted prize for the numerous powers rising at various points in history. As Jerusalem's former mayor, Teddy Kollek, once put it:
The prophets often compared Jerusalem with a beautiful women - though the countless strangers who conquered her could keep her only for short periods. But all the invaders left traces of their presence, many still mysteriously hidden underground. Other traces have for centuries formed the city's most remarkable archaeological and architectural landmarks...1
The people who live in Jerusalem all leave their mark and contribute to the city's unique quality. By no means is Jerusalem a melting pot. Rather, it is a mosaic of cultures and urban landscapes, where the modern and the ancient meet. The city is full of hidden corners and tucked-away places, of tales and curiosities, which might easily be overlooked, but which account for many of the little patches that make up the Jerusalem quilt.
One never really can explore the city's depths conclusively. Something always remains hidden -- a lure to explore its nooks and crannies even further. Underneath the ever-present play of light and shadow among Jerusalem's sand-colored buildings, there is no vacuum. And so, some of the lesser known stories of contemporary Jerusalem as well as of its more recent past are bound to bring out the sparkle in this kaleidoscope of beliefs, cultures and people.
From the Introduction of:
Beyond the Wall - Chapters on Urban Jerusalem
© 2007 Heike Zaun-Goshen, 370 p.
heikez@netvision.net.il
Notes
1. Elon, Amos, Jerusalem - City of Mirros, Boston, 1989, p. 159f
2. ibid. Twain, Mark The Innocents Abroad, vol. 2, New York 1911, p. 295
3. Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua, Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century, Tel Aviv 1989,
p. 74
4. Montefiore, Sir Moses, and Montefiore, Lady Judith, Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Chicago, 1895, S. 281
5. Kollek, Teddy in: Dowley, Tim, and Goshen, Heike, Next Year in Jerusalem, Bnei Brak 1996, p.12
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