A mountainous city with a harsh climate and away from major trade routes, Jerusalem has never had great strategic importance. Its main natural resource? Its myths. “In Jerusalem, don’t ask me for the history of facts. Take away the fiction, and nothing remains,” explains Palestinian historian Nazmi al-Jubeh. In this triple holy city, fiction and reality, theology and history merge to the point of dizziness. While they successively controlled Jerusalem, the three great monotheistic religions invested, recovered and hijacked different places. Deciphering these main myths.
Judaism: Abraham on the Temple Mount
In Genesis, God asks Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on a mountain in the “land of Moriah.” This testing is a founding episode of Judaism (and later of Christianity and Islam). According to Jewish tradition, the biblical Mount Moriah is none other than the real Temple Mount in Jerusalem, on which King Solomon is said to have built the First Temple in the 10th century BC. However, historically, we only find the first written trace of this link in the second book of Chronicles, dating from the 5th century BC: “Solomon then began the construction of the house of Yahweh. It was in Jerusalem, on Mount Moriah, where his father, David, had a vision.” In other words, it was at the time of the Second Temple, five centuries after Solomon, that people sought to make this place even more sacred by associating it with the quasi-sacrifice of Abraham. “This feedback of the myth on the real place is a constant in the history of Jerusalem”, underlines the historian Vincent Lemire, former director of the French Research Center in Jerusalem and co-author of the successful comic strip History of Jerusalem. The Samaritans (one of the oldest branches of Judaism) associate Mount Moriah with Mount Gerizim, their holy place, near Nablus.
According to Talmudic tradition, the Temple Mount even provided the clay used in the creation of the first man, Adam. Enough to truly make Jerusalem the “navel of the world”.
Christianity: Helen at open tomb
“Jesus did not like Jerusalem,” notes Vincent Lemire. Most of the action of the Gospels takes place outside the city. “Jesus only comes to Jerusalem to be presented at the Temple, then he returns there to die. When you then seek to Christianize Jerusalem to create holy places there, you do not have much to eat! ” During the first centuries after Jesus Christ, Jerusalem was in no way a stronghold of Christianity. The patriarchates were then located in Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch, as if this new religion born from Judaism had to distance itself from its model. The heavenly Jerusalem, where believers will experience eternity, then seems more important to Christians than the earthly Jerusalem.
But everything changed at the beginning of the 4th century with Constantine, the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. Around 325, three centuries after the crucifixion, the septuagenarian Helen, mother of Constantine, arrived in Jerusalem. Its mission: to identify the places of the Passion. If we trust her legend and the numerous relics that she discovered (crosses, nails, sign, crown thorns, etc.), the empress is the greatest archaeologist in History.
According to Eusebius of Caesarea, hagiographer of Constantine, a Christian community would have transmitted from generation to generation the memory of the place of the crucifixion and resurrection. However, Jerusalem was razed by Titus in 70 and had as its only inhabitants the troops of the 10th Roman legion for several decades, before being rebuilt and Romanized by Hadrian after 130. How then can we find the most sacred place for Christianity? “The sleight of hand consisted of assuming that the Romans necessarily knew of the burial place of Jesus, and that they had done everything to hide it by building a temple of Venus on top. This hypothesis is very fragile , because there were many Roman temples in Jerusalem at the time”, notes Vincent Lemire.
Helene thus destroyed the Roman temple dedicated to Venus to discover a tomb there, “as there are thousands underground in Jerusalem”, specifies the historian. According to the edifying stories of Christian authors of the 4th and 5th centuries, it was a rabbi who identified the place and miraculously found three crosses, before converting. According to Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, written in the 5th century, a dying woman would have even stood up when touching the True Cross, thus making it possible to distinguish it from those of the “thieves” crucified at the same time as Jesus. Very quickly, Constantine had a sanctuary built on the cave, the first Holy Sepulchre. This church will have a major importance in the outbreak of the First Crusade. After the partial destruction of the Holy Sepulcher by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim in 1009, then the conquest of the city by the Seljuk Turks, Pope Urban II invited Christianity in 1095 to liberate the holy places. It is really the Holy Sepulcher which will mobilize the European crusaders.
If the question of the authenticity of Christ’s tomb cannot be resolved historically, we do know that the pilgrimage of the Via Dolorosa, the supposed route of Jesus’ way of the cross and which begins near the Lions’ Gate, at is, only dates from the 14th century. Previously, the Stations of the Cross were associated with Mount Zion, to the south. “But, ultimately, that doesn’t change much: when you make a pilgrimage, you come to strengthen your faith, and not seek historical truth,” emphasizes Vincent Lemire.
Islam: from the forgetting of the Koran to Al-Quds
While references to the Bible are numerous in the Koran, Jerusalem is never mentioned. Upon arrival, the Arabs continued to name it “Ilyia”, after its Roman name, Ælia Capitolina. In a few centuries, however, the city would become Al-Quds (“the Holy”). “On the theological level, Jerusalem was built late as the third holiest site of Islam, but, on the chronological level, it is much earlier,” explains Vincent Lemire.
It was between 635 and 638 that the Arabs took the city from the Byzantines. While the Christians had moved the heart of Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to the Holy Sepulchre, the Muslims will reinvest the sacred place of Judaism, which has become “a public dump”. According to legend, after the surrender, the Caliph Omar, second successor to Mohammed, was even led to the Rock of Abraham by a rabbi converted to Islam. However, according to recent research, Omar never set foot in Jerusalem, these retrospective accounts aiming to sacralize Jerusalem as the third sanctuary of Islam.
It was with the Umayyad dynasty (661-750) that Jerusalem took on new importance in the eyes of Muslims. Its founder, Mouawiya, was proclaimed caliph there. Between 688 and 692, Abd al-Malik had the Dome of the Rock built there, the oldest preserved Islamic monument in the world. Of Byzantine architecture, the new emblem of Jerusalem is not a mosque, but aims first and foremost to honor the memory of Abraham (or Ibrahim), who, according to the Koran, would be the builder of the Kaaba. The Dome of the Rock is also a criticism of Christianity, and in particular of the dogma of the Trinity. Abd al-Malik inscribes: “O people of the Book [NDLR : les chrétiens], do not be excessive in your religion, and only tell the truth about God. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was only a messenger of God, he was the word of God entrusted to Mary. So believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of the Trinity; refrain from talking about that, it’s better for you!” For Vincent Lemire, “first of all there is the desire of the Umayyad power to demonstrate the superiority of Islam over the Christian religion. Islam took over a Byzantine city which had sought to forget the Temple and the old Alliance by building the Holy Sepulcher in the 4th century. Islam, on the contrary, claims direct affiliation with Judaism, considered the only true monotheism.
This valorization of Jerusalem by the Umayyads also took on a strategic dimension, as the dynasty transferred the heart of the Islamic Empire to the west, to Damascus. Faced, in the 680s, with the revolt of Ibn Zubayr, who had proclaimed himself commander of the believers and had taken control of Mecca, the Umayyad caliphs undoubtedly sought to highlight the prestige of their Syrian territories in the face of to the old families of Hedjaz.
The large mosque south of the Dome of the Rock, the second highest Muslim site in Jerusalem, was undoubtedly completed by Al-Walid, son of Abd al-Malik. Destroyed by two earthquakes, it was rebuilt in the 11th century by the Fatimid caliph Al-Zahir, while Jerusalem regained strategic importance in the fight against the Abbasids of Baghdad. The place becomes the Al-Aqsa mosque (“the farthest”), due to a free interpretation of sura 17 of the Koran, which evokes theIsrael, Muhammad’s nightly journey from the “sacred mosque” (i.e. Mecca) to “the very distant mosque”. According to ancient traditions, this nocturnal journey would have been towards the sky. But, in the 9th century, exegetes like the Persian Tabari began to associate the destination with Jerusalem, and what matter if the city did not have a mosque during the lifetime of Mohammed. The latter would have met the prophets Abraham, Moses and Jesus there, before ascending to heaven in the company of the archangel Gabriel (the miraj, “ascension”). An imprint of Mohammed’s foot on the rock would even testify to this flight. And so the esplanade at the top of the Temple Mount would eventually be renamed “Al-Haram Al-Sharif” (“Noble Sanctuary”). Conclusion of Vincent Lemire: “Lavoisier’s famous formula applies perfectly to Jerusalem: ‘Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.'”
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