History
History is an irresistible aroma in the air for the traveller to this sacred land. Israel is a living, breathing society. It is safe and it is an amazing society because it percolates with the dynamism of a modern society as much as it proudly embraces its ancient past. Any pilgrim will discover the vestiges of ancient civilizations and be drawn into the perennial conflict about who owns the truth of history in every holy site. History is an ongoing struggle waged through artefacts of archaeological research.
For 3,000 years, the eternal city of Jerusalem has held the most exalted position in the Jewish religion and a place of unparalleled importance in Jewish life and history.
King Solomon built the first Holy Temple in Jerusalem between the years 965 and 928 BCE. The people of Israel would come to the Holy Temple to pray and to give thanks, but especially to perform sacrifices on the three festivals of pilgrimage: Passover, Shavuot, and Succot. But in the year 586, the Babylonian monarch Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the Holy Temple, carried off its implements made of precious metals and exiled the Jews of Jerusalem to Babylon.
Although Nebuchadnezzar had laid waste to the Holy Temple, its holiness remained, and it was then the Jewish exiles swore:
If I forget you Jerusalem, may I forget my right hand and may my tongue adhere to the roof of my mouth if I do not remember, if I do not hold Jerusalem above my greatest joy.
Generations of Jews have kept this vow to the present day. The nation of Israel longingly remembered the holiness of Jerusalem throughout thousands of years of exile.
When Nehemiah returned to Jerusalem from Babylon around 536 with the first group of exiles, the city was rebuilt, and the Holy Temple and Jerusalem were again the principle focus of national religious life until the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in the year 70 CE. Following the suppression of Bar-Kochba's revolt, the Roman Legions burned all of Jerusalem to ashes and in its place built a pagan city they called Aelia Capitolina, which Jews were forbidden from entering for generations.
The strong, heartfelt desire of every Jew to see Jerusalem rebuilt in his lifetime and the centuries-deep Jewish affection for the city King David founded are embodied in many important customs and prayers from Judaism's great sages. For example, this prayer - "And to Jerusalem, your city mercifully return, and dwell within it as you said. And build in it soon in our lifetimes, the building for eternity, and may it hold a place for King David's throne" - is repeated by every praying Jew several times a day.
The reason why Jerusalem is the holiest city in Judaism is because, in the 5,000-year span of Jewish religious life, the nation's devotion to God has intersected more with this city and more intensely than it has with any other.
The holiness of Jerusalem in the Muslim tradition is also religious at heart, stemming from the belief that Muhammad, the prophet and founder of Islam, rose to heaven from the site of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem.
After the prophet died in June 632, a series of successors, or caliphs, assumed authority as Islam's leaders. Between 661 and 750 the Umayyad Dynasty held the caliphate and ruled from Damascus. During the time they ruled, on account of various internal and external pressures, the Umayyads exerted enormous effort to elevate Jerusalem's status, perhaps even to the level of Mecca.
Toward this end (as well as to assert Islam's presence in its competition with Christianity), the Umayyad caliph built Islam's first grand structure, the Dome of the Rock, right on the spot of the Jewish Temple, in 688-91. The next step the Umayyads took to make Jerusalem holy to Islam relates to a passage in the Koran (17:1) that describes Muhammad's Night Journey to heaven:
Glory to He who took His servant by night from the Sacred Mosque to the furthest mosque [al masjidi al aqsa].
In 715 the Umayyads built a second mosque in Jerusalem, again on the Temple Mount, and named this one the "Furthest Mosque" (i.e., al-masjidi al-aqsa), the exact same name written in the holy Koran. And in so doing, the Umayyads forced the city of Jerusalem to assume a role in the life of the prophet Muhammad.
The origin of Christian pilgrimage to the Holy Land began with the shrines, inspired by Helena's (mother of Emperor Constantine who converted to Christianity and declared the Roman Empire to be Christian in 335 CE) conversion that marked important places in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Christians went motivated primarily by the hope of seeing or experiencing a miracle. Whereas Muslims went to fulfil their obligation as given in the Koran. Jews began to make pilgrimages to Jerusalem at the time of King Solomon's Temple to visit the Tabernacle and Ark of the Law and later to visit the holy sites of their ancestors.
One of the holiest shrines in Christendom is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher - in the Christian quarter of the old city of Jerusalem. The church contains various chapels inside it, one of which is said to be the place where Jesus was laid down from the crucifix. Today this church contains a microcosm of differing narratives in a Christian context because several denominations and their clergy operate the church. The Armenians, Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox and Egyptian Coptics all own part of the church, and each has its own narrative about each order's role and right to ownership of this holy site. Just imagine the debates and the competition between the groups and their clergy who live and work there each day. Interestingly enough, an Arab Muslim family has held the keys to the church for centuries, which they lock each night and open up in the morning.
In AD 64, the Emperor Nero murdered hundreds of Christians in Rome, yet the fledgling faith continued to spread, and some 50 years later the Emperor Hadrian felt it necessary to discourage pilgrimage to Jerusalem by levelling the supposed site of Jesus’s tomb and building a temple to Aphrodite over it.
One of the holiest sites for both Judaism and Islam, the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is the spot where the world was first created according to Jewish tradition and the site where Mohammed ascended to Heaven according to the Quran. It's long been a flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and access to the site, including its famous Al-Aqsa mosque, is tightly controlled by the Israeli government. The site has been the setting of clashes between government security forces and Palestinian worshippers, as well as hard-line Jewish nationalists, who favor rebuilding the temple, destroyed by the Romans around 70 A.D.
The Roman emperor, Hadrian, who wanted to build a giant temple to the god Jupiter in place of the Holy Temple, sent an army of 35,000 soldiers against the Jewish warriors. After a desperate three-year struggle, the Jewish resistance ended at the fortress of Betar. It is estimated that in the ensuing Roman repression, some 500,000 Jews were either killed or sent into slavery throughout the Empire.
The first crusade started when Pope Urban II issued a bull, urging people to take up the cross and make a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. This pilgrimage was seen as a sort of “automatic ticket to heaven.” While it wasn’t advertised as a Holy War, many of these pilgrims were armed knights, trained for war. They were not simply going to travel to Jerusalem; they were going to reclaim it in the name of Christ. Ryan Owens
1095 - In France, Pope Urban II solemnly proclaimed the first crusade at the Council of Clermont. Urban's twin-purpose was to relieve the pressure by the Seljuk Turks on the Eastern Roman Empire, and to secure free access to Jerusalem for Christian pilgrims.
On 15 July 1099, the crusaders from western Europe conquered Jerusalem, falling upon its Jewish and Muslim inhabitants like the avenging angels from the apocalypse. In a massacre that makes 11 September 2002 look puny in comparison, some 40,000 people were slaughtered in two days. The entire Jewish population of Jerusalem was forced into the chief synagogue, and the building was set on fire. The crusaders marched around it, singing, "Christ, we adore thee" in a diabolical accompaniment to the screams of the men, women, and children burning alive.A thriving, populous city had been transformed into a stinking charnel house. Yet in Europe, scholar monks hailed this crime against humanity as the greatest event in world history since the crucifixion of Christ.
In the West, the crusades are a chapter of Christian history that has little impact on our everyday lives, but in the Middle East many believe that the Crusades are happening again. In the wake of the events of 11 September 2001, President George W. Bush described the War on Terror as a 'crusade.' This invocation of Christian Holy War alienated much of the Muslim world. Bush's comments have never been forgotten and are today exploited by Islamist terror organisations, who refer time and again to the West as crusaders.
Throughout the dark centuries of exile, Jewish pilgrims and refugees returned again and again to restore the ancestral Jewish homeland. Jewish prayers and festivals recited and celebrated in synagogues throughout the Diaspora, then as now, are based in large part upon the agricultural cycle of ancient Israel attesting yet again to the inextricable spiritual and aboriginal links with the ancestral homeland.
Palm branches were ancient symbols of victory and the triumph of faith. Palm branches were also emblematic of the journey to the Holy Land and were called palms of Jericho or Jerusalem feathers. In ancient times, the palm of Jericho symbol was the most well recognised pilgrim badge travellers brought back from their journey to Jerusalem.
On his return the pilgrim was considered a new man, firstly on a spiritual level and according to the mentality of the time, because he had drawn benefit from his pilgrimage, but also on the human level, because he had gone very far in Europe. He had approached other horizons, other nationalities and other cultures. Because he had known other ways of life and had learned how to emphasise difference, he had really taken part in the construction of a new world where inter-cultural dialogue plays a determining role. European Institute of Cultural Routes The pilgrim pathways
Christopher Columbus, the Genoa-born mariner has been blamed for everything from the germs that wiped out Native Americans to the looting of pre-Columbian civilizations to the violent efforts by Roman Catholic priests to expunge native beliefs throughout the Americas. Cultural anthropologist Carol Delany, a professor emerita at Stanford, presents a revisionist view in "Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem." After delving into 15th-century cultural history, she argues one of the main motivations for the voyages of Columbus was to amass wealth that would finance a new crusade to rescue Jerusalem from the Muslims, whose control of Constantinople had barred Christian Europe from the trade and pilgrimage route to the East.
Pilgrimage is a journey from home to a far away place for the purpose of spiritual enrichment. As a form of movement, pilgrimage has always been an active encounter with uncertainty. This coming to contact with uncertainty is minimized or made invisible through a rational system of organization which allows pilgrims to complete their journey efficiently, in an orderly manner, and apart from the social world in their surrounding. In the case of Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem today, this movement generates contact with uncertainty in a different way. Jerusalem is a locale where uncertainty is built into the conditions of living so that violent interruptions to daily life can erupt at any moment in time. One type of interruption is generated through the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Vida Bajc Christian pilgrimage in Jerusalem: Uncertainty, event, and the framing of social order
The Stations of the Cross are a Christian devotion with a long history. Pilgrims journeyed to the Via Dolorosa, the path that Jesus is said to have walked on his way to Calvary, and traced these steps, pausing to meditate at various spots.
It was clear that not everyone could get to Jerusalem, so the Franciscans began building shrines throughout Europe to recreate the stages of Jesus' journey so they could be meditated upon by pilgrims at home as well as in the Holy Land. The Stations often take the form of sculptures, paintings or drawings. The devotion caught on, and people continue to use the Stations of the Cross to trace the steps of Jesus today, particularly during the Lenten season.
There are usually fourteen Stations representing a sequential progression of scenes ranging from Jesus being condemned to death to being laid in the tomb, although some churches have added a fifteenth station to honour the Resurrection. A somewhat different sequence, known as the Scriptural Way of the Cross, was developed by Pope John Paul II and approved by Pope Benedict XVI. It includes scenes such as Peter denying Jesus, and Jesus speaking to the repentant thief.
The Shoshana Collection, assembled is an assembly of ancient coins related to the foundation of ancient Israel, with over 2,300 coins spanning more than 11 centuries. It includes the first silver shekel struck in Jerusalem by Jewish forces rebelling against Roman oppression in the first century CE.
Simon Sebag Montefiore in ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’ tells the 3,000-year-old story of the city: