Jerusalem: the Eternal City, the Contested City, the City That Will Not Rest

Introduction: a City Unlike Any Other

There are cities that are merely old. There are cities that are merely holy. There are cities that have merely been fought over. And then there is Jerusalem. In the entire history of human civilization, no other place has concentrated within its ancient walls so much meaning, so much blood, so much prayer, so much grief, and so much hope as this limestone city perched on a ridge in the Judaean Mountains. Jerusalem is not simply a city. It is an idea made of stone, an argument made into geography, a wound in the human story that has never fully healed and perhaps never will.

To walk through the Old City of Jerusalem is to move through layers of history so compressed that one epoch bleeds into another with barely a boundary. A Roman column stands in the corner of a medieval marketplace. A Byzantine mosaic lies beneath a Crusader church that was converted into a mosque and then back into a church. Beneath the feet of pilgrims who have been walking these streets for centuries lies the rubble of earlier streets, earlier walls, earlier prayers. The archaeologist's spade in Jerusalem rarely reaches bare ground. It simply finds more history.

Jerusalem sits at approximately 760 meters above sea level on a limestone plateau in the Judaean Mountains, positioned with a geographic precision that seems almost deliberate. It lies roughly 60 kilometers east of the Mediterranean coast and approximately 35 kilometers west of the Dead Sea, the lowest point on the surface of the Earth. In that short distance between sea and desert, the terrain plunges more than 1,200 meters. Jerusalem occupies the ridge between two worlds, the green western slopes that catch the rains coming off the Mediterranean and the stark, sun-blasted eastern descent toward the Jordan Valley and the profound geological wound of the Rift Valley. Its position on this watershed gave it strategic value from the earliest moments of settled human life in the region.

The city is simultaneously the holiest site in Judaism, one of the holiest in Christianity, and the third holiest in Islam. That single fact, so easily stated, contains within it the entire architecture of one of the world's most enduring and anguished conflicts. Three of the world's great monotheistic religions have laid claim to this city, each for reasons deeply embedded in their founding narratives, their scriptures, and their most sacred memories. None has found a way to share it entirely without dispute. The result is a city in which the sacred and the political are so thoroughly intertwined that it is often impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins.

Jerusalem has been conquered and reconquered, destroyed and rebuilt, divided and reunified more times than any comparable city in human history. By most scholarly counts, it has been attacked 52 times, captured and recaptured 44 times, besieged 23 times, and destroyed twice. The list of its conquerors includes Canaanites, Jebusites, Israelites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Arab Muslims, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, Jordanians, and Israelis. And yet throughout all of this destruction and occupation, the city has endured, rebuilt itself, and continued to draw pilgrims, armies, prophets, and refugees from every corner of the world.

This is the story of Jerusalem. It is a story that is not yet finished.

Geography and Physical Setting

Jerusalem stands at an elevation of approximately 760 meters above sea level, though the elevation varies across the city, from the valleys between its hills to the higher ground of the central ridge. The city is built on and between several hills, a topography that has profoundly shaped its history, its defense, and its spiritual geography. The most significant of these elevations is the Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary. Rising to approximately 740 meters, the Temple Mount has served for three millennia as the spiritual axis around which Jerusalem revolves.

The terrain of the Judaean Mountains in which Jerusalem sits is characterized by hard limestone and dolomite formations, weathered by centuries of wind and rain into a landscape of sharp ridges, narrow valleys, and a distinctive pale golden stone that gives the city much of its visual character. Jerusalem stone, the local limestone used in construction for thousands of years, has a quality of absorbing sunlight during the day and releasing it in a warm golden glow in the late afternoon, giving the Old City its famous luminosity at dusk. Israeli law has long required that new construction in Jerusalem use this local stone as a facing material, ensuring a degree of visual continuity that connects modern buildings to the ancient landscape.

The Kidron Valley lies to the east of the Old City, separating it from the Mount of Olives, which rises to approximately 808 meters. The Hinnom Valley curves around the south and west of the Old City. These valleys made Jerusalem naturally defensible from three sides, which was one of the reasons the Jebusites chose this ridge for their fortress city in the Bronze Age. To the north, however, the land is higher and more open, which is why the city's defenses to the north have always been its most vulnerable point, and why so many conquerors throughout history have approached from the north.

The city's position on the watershed means that rain falling on the western slopes drains westward toward the Mediterranean, while rain on the eastern slopes drains toward the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea. The ancient city relied primarily on rainwater collection in underground cisterns and on the spring of Gihon, which lies in the Kidron Valley below the City of David, the oldest part of Jerusalem. Control of this spring was essential to the survival of the ancient city. The Siloam Tunnel, carved through solid rock by order of King Hezekiah in the eighth century BC to bring water from the Gihon Spring inside the city walls against the threat of Assyrian siege, is one of the great engineering achievements of the ancient world and can still be walked today.

The Name Jerusalem: Etymology and Meaning

The name Jerusalem is among the most studied place names in the world, yet its precise etymology remains a matter of scholarly debate. The name appears in some of the oldest written documents ever recovered from the ancient Near East. It occurs in the Execration Texts of Egypt, inscribed on pottery and figurines dating to approximately 1900-1800 BC, where it appears in the form Roshlamem or Rushalimum. It appears in the Amarna Letters, diplomatic correspondence between Egyptian pharaohs and Canaanite city rulers, dating to the fourteenth century BC, where the name appears as Urusalim.

The most widely accepted interpretation breaks the name into two Semitic elements. The first part, Uru or Yeru, is thought to derive from a Semitic root meaning to found or to lay a foundation. The second part, Shalem or Salem, is generally understood as either the name of a Canaanite deity of the evening star or as the Semitic word for peace, wholeness, or completeness. On this reading, Jerusalem means Foundation of Shalem or Foundation of Peace. The biblical text in Genesis identifies Salem as the city of Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king who blessed Abraham, and this Salem is traditionally identified with Jerusalem.

There is a profound and melancholy irony embedded in this etymology. The city whose name has been interpreted to mean Foundation of Peace or City of Peace has been, throughout most of its recorded history, the scene of extraordinary violence, conflict, and sorrow. Theologians, historians, and philosophers have wrestled with this paradox for centuries. Some see in it a kind of aspiration embedded in the name itself, a statement of what the city was meant to become rather than a description of what it has been. The Jewish prayer tradition speaks of a heavenly Jerusalem, the ideal city, the perfected city, alongside the earthly Jerusalem, the broken and contested city. The tension between these two Jerusalems, the city that is and the city that might be, has driven much of the spiritual creativity that the name has inspired over three thousand years.

In Hebrew, the city is Yerushalayim, a name with a dual form in its grammatical ending, which some scholars interpret as expressing the dual nature of the city: the earthly and the heavenly, the present and the hoped-for future. In Arabic, the city is al-Quds, meaning the Holy, or the Holy Sanctuary. This Arabic name, entirely different from the Semitic root shared by the Hebrew and English forms, emphasizes sanctity above all other qualities. It is the name through which Arab and Muslim traditions have related to this place for fourteen centuries. In Amharic, the Ethiopian religious community speaks of Jerusalem with a reverence that stretches back to ancient contacts between Ethiopia and the Hebrew world. In Greek and Latin, the name Hierosolyma and later Hierusalem echoed through the literature of the early Christian world. Each name is a window into a different relationship with the same piece of ground.

The Earliest Inhabitants: Canaanites and Jebusites

The hill on which Jerusalem stands has been inhabited by human beings for an extraordinarily long period. Archaeological excavations in the area around the City of David, the oldest nucleus of the ancient settlement, have revealed evidence of continuous human habitation extending back to approximately the Chalcolithic period, roughly 4000-3500 BC. These earliest inhabitants left behind pottery, tools, and the structural traces of rudimentary occupation, though not yet the organized urban settlement that would emerge in later millennia.

By the Early Bronze Age, roughly 3300-2100 BC, the settlement had grown into a small town. The Canaanites, the indigenous Semitic-speaking inhabitants of the land that would later be called Israel, Judah, and Palestine, were the primary inhabitants of the region during this period. The Canaanites were not a single unified people but a collection of city-states and tribal confederacies bound by shared language, culture, and religious practices. Their religion centered on a pantheon of deities including El, the high god, and Baal, the storm god, and their ritual sites and temples have been found across the Levant.

The particular group of Canaanites who occupied the Jerusalem hill in the Middle and Late Bronze Age are known in the biblical text and in some archaeological contexts as the Jebusites. The Jebusites built a fortified city on the ridge above the Gihon Spring, a natural stronghold whose walls have been partially uncovered by archaeologists over the past century. This Jebusite city is what the biblical text calls Jebus, and it is described in the Hebrew scriptures as a formidable fortress with walls so strong and a position so naturally defensible that the Jebusites reportedly taunted the approaching Israelites, claiming that even the blind and the lame would be sufficient to defend it.

The Jebusite city stood for centuries while the Israelite tribes established themselves in the highlands around it. The Book of Judges records that Jerusalem remained in Jebusite hands even after the initial Israelite settlement of Canaan, an anomaly in the otherwise incomplete conquest of the land. The Jebusites occupied a small but strategically vital piece of ground, positioned on the border between the northern tribes of Israel and the southern tribe of Judah, belonging fully to neither, which may have been one reason the city persisted as an independent enclave for so long.

King David and the Establishment of Jerusalem as Capital

The history of Jerusalem as the capital of the Israelite people begins with King David, the second king of Israel, who reigned approximately 1010-970 BC. David's conquest of the Jebusite city of Jerusalem around 1000 BC was one of the most consequential acts in the political and religious history of the ancient Near East, with repercussions that have echoed continuously to the present day.

According to the biblical account in the Second Book of Samuel, David captured the Jebusite stronghold through a daring military operation that exploited a water shaft, likely connected to the Gihon Spring, which the Jebusite garrison had not adequately defended. The city was taken without the wholesale destruction that characterized many ancient conquests, which may explain why Jebusites and Israelites continued to live in proximity in the city even after the conquest. The Jebusite threshing floor of Araunah, purchased by David as the site for an altar, would become the location of the Temple Mount itself, suggesting the absorption of some Jebusite sacred traditions into the emerging Israelite religious framework.

David's choice of Jerusalem as his capital was an act of political genius. The city did not belong to any of the twelve Israelite tribes. By establishing his capital on neutral ground, David avoided the tribal jealousies and territorial disputes that would have erupted if he had chosen a city associated with one particular tribe. Jerusalem became a royal city, associated with the dynasty of David rather than with any tribal heritage. It was David's personal possession, won by his own military prowess, and he called it the City of David. This formula, the capital as the personal achievement of the monarch rather than the tribal inheritance of any faction, helped create a unified national identity around the city in a way that a tribal capital could never have achieved.

David brought the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest containing the stone tablets of the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai, to Jerusalem with great ceremony. The Ark was the most sacred object in Israelite religion, the portable throne of the invisible God, the physical symbol of the covenant between God and the people of Israel. By bringing the Ark to Jerusalem, David fused the political and religious identities of the city in a way that has never been undone. Jerusalem became simultaneously the political capital and the religious center, the dwelling place of both the king and the divine presence. This fusion of the political and the sacred in a single city is one of the defining features of Jerusalem's history and one of the reasons the city remains so uniquely contested.

David organized the religious institutions of Jerusalem and made preparations for the construction of a permanent temple to house the Ark, though the biblical text records that God told David through the prophet Nathan that it would not be David but his son who would build the temple. David's reign established Jerusalem as the uncontested center of Israelite national and religious life, a status the city has retained in Jewish memory and practice even through the centuries of exile, dispersion, and diaspora that followed. The Jewish prayer tradition, which orients toward Jerusalem three times daily, and the Passover declaration Next year in Jerusalem, represent the unbroken thread connecting two thousand years of diaspora to the city that David made the center of his people's world.

King Solomon, the First Temple, and the Golden Age

David's son and successor, Solomon, who reigned approximately 970-930 BC, carried out his father's dream and constructed the First Temple on the summit of Mount Moriah, the ridge north of the City of David. Construction of the Temple is recorded in the First Book of Kings as beginning in the fourth year of Solomon's reign and completed seven years later, giving an approximate completion date of around 957 BC. The building of the Temple was an undertaking of extraordinary ambition and scale for the resources of the ancient Levant. Solomon is said to have engaged Hiram, king of Tyre in Phoenicia, for skilled craftsmen and timber from the famous cedar forests of Lebanon. Egyptian, Phoenician, and Israelite architectural traditions combined in a structure that became the spiritual center of the ancient Israelite world.

The Temple was not primarily a place of congregational worship in the modern sense. Its innermost sanctuary, the Holy of Holies or Kodesh HaKodashim, housed the Ark of the Covenant and was entered only by the High Priest, only on the Day of Atonement, and only after elaborate rituals of purification. The presence of God was understood to dwell between the cherubim above the Ark in this innermost chamber. The Temple functioned as the place where heaven and earth met, where the divine and the human dimensions of reality touched. It was the navel of the world, the axis mundi around which the universe was organized.

The rituals of the Temple centered on animal sacrifice, the burning of incense, and elaborate liturgies conducted by a hereditary priestly class, the Kohanim, descended from Aaron, brother of Moses. Israelites from across the land came to Jerusalem on the three pilgrimage festivals: Passover in the spring, Shavuot in early summer, and Sukkot in the autumn. The city swelled with pilgrims, traders, musicians, and the overflow of a national gathering that fused religious observance with social and economic exchange. Jerusalem under Solomon became not merely a religious center but a genuine cosmopolitan city, a place of international trade and diplomatic contact, where merchants and envoys from Egypt, Arabia, and Mesopotamia mingled with the local population.

Solomon's reign is remembered in tradition as the golden age of ancient Israel, a period of unprecedented peace, prosperity, and cultural achievement. The Book of Kings describes his wisdom, his wealth, and his diplomatic marriages to foreign princesses, which also brought foreign religious practices into Jerusalem and ultimately, according to the biblical narrative, planted the seeds of the religious divisions that would eventually split the kingdom. Solomon's building program extended beyond the Temple to include a royal palace complex, administrative buildings, and significant expansion of the city's walls and infrastructure. Jerusalem under Solomon was a genuinely impressive city by the standards of its era, and its reputation had spread sufficiently to attract the visit of the Queen of Sheba, whose journey to Jerusalem is celebrated in both Jewish and Ethiopian tradition.

The shadow that falls across the golden age of Solomon's reign is the internal stress that his building ambitions created. The forced labor and heavy taxation required to fund his projects generated deep resentment in the northern tribes of Israel. When Solomon died and his son Rehoboam refused to lighten the burden, ten of the twelve tribes revolted and established a separate northern Kingdom of Israel, leaving only the tribes of Judah and Benjamin in the southern Kingdom of Judah, with Jerusalem as its capital. This division, which occurred around 930 BC, was the beginning of the long unraveling that would ultimately lead to Jerusalem's destruction.

The Babylonian Conquest and the First Exile

The First Temple and the city of Jerusalem that Solomon built stood for approximately three and a half centuries, from its construction around 957 BC to its destruction by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC. During this period, Jerusalem experienced foreign invasions, periods of religious reform, internal political turmoil, and the ministry of the great Hebrew prophets, including Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Micah, who addressed the spiritual condition of the city and the nation with passionate urgency.

The Assyrian Empire, the dominant military power of the ancient Near East in the eighth century BC, destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and deported its population, creating the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Jerusalem and the southern Kingdom of Judah survived the Assyrian onslaught, partly through military resistance and partly through the payment of tribute. The biblical account of King Hezekiah's resistance to the Assyrian siege under Sennacherib in 701 BC, in which the Assyrian army withdrew without taking the city, was understood as a miraculous divine intervention and reinforced the deep conviction that Jerusalem occupied a specially protected place in the divine order.

The Babylonian Empire that replaced Assyrian hegemony in the late seventh century BC was less forgiving. Nebuchadnezzar II, the most powerful king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, moved against Judah in a series of campaigns beginning in 605 BC. He besieged Jerusalem in 597 BC and deported the king, Jehoiachin, along with a significant portion of the Judean elite, including craftsmen, soldiers, and religious leaders, to Babylon in the first deportation. The prophet Ezekiel was among those exiled. A puppet king, Zedekiah, was placed on the throne, but when Zedekiah rebelled against Babylonian authority, Nebuchadnezzar returned with his full army.

The final siege of Jerusalem lasted from 589 BC until 586 BC, approximately eighteen months. The city, reduced by famine and disease, fell in the summer of 586 BC. The Babylonian army breached the walls and Zedekiah fled but was captured, forced to watch his sons killed before being blinded and led in chains to Babylon. The city was then systematically destroyed. The Temple of Solomon, which had stood for more than three centuries, was burned to the ground. Its sacred vessels, the gold and silver objects that had ornamented the divine service, were stripped and carried off to Babylon. The walls of Jerusalem were torn down. The royal palace was burned. The city that had been the center of Israelite religious and political life was reduced to ruins.

The Babylonian Exile, which lasted from 586 BC until 538 BC when the Persian king Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon and permitted the Jews to return, was one of the most transformative periods in the history of Judaism. The exiles in Babylon, deprived of their Temple and their land, confronted the fundamental theological question of how to maintain faith in a God whose Temple had been destroyed and whose people had been carried away. Out of this crisis emerged many of the spiritual and literary achievements that gave Judaism its enduring form: the editing of the Torah and the historical books, the composition of much of the Psalms, the development of synagogue worship as a substitute for Temple sacrifice, and a deepened understanding of the covenant between God and the Jewish people that transcended any particular place or institution.

The memory of Jerusalem in exile became one of the most powerful poetic and spiritual motifs in all of literature. Psalm 137, By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion, captures the anguish of displacement with a directness that has moved readers across two and a half millennia. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill, the psalmist declares. This declaration became the foundation of a Jewish relationship to Jerusalem that would survive two thousand years of exile and dispersal: the city as memory, as prayer, as destination, as the place toward which all longing turns.

The Second Temple Period: Persian, Hellenistic, and Hasmonean Jerusalem

Cyrus the Great, the Persian king who conquered Babylon in 539 BC, issued his famous edict the following year permitting the exiled Jews to return to their land and rebuild their Temple. This edict, recorded in both the biblical Book of Ezra and in a contemporary Babylonian document known as the Cyrus Cylinder, was the beginning of the Second Temple period, which would last more than five centuries, from approximately 515 BC to 70 AD. The second Temple was completed in 515 BC, during the reign of the Persian king Darius I. It was a more modest structure than the magnificent Temple of Solomon, and the returning exiles who had seen Solomon's Temple reportedly wept when they saw the foundations of the new building, overwhelmed by the contrast between the remembered glory and the present reality.

Jerusalem in the Persian period was a small, underpopulated city slowly rebuilding itself. The prophet Nehemiah, appointed as governor of Judah by the Persian king Artaxerxes I, organized the rebuilding of Jerusalem's walls in 445 BC, an account given with vivid administrative detail in the Book of Nehemiah. The walls were completed in a remarkable 52 days, according to Nehemiah's account, amid considerable opposition from neighboring peoples who feared the revival of Jewish Jerusalem.

The conquests of Alexander the Great transformed the ancient Near East with the speed and thoroughness of a geological event. Alexander swept through the Persian Empire between 334 and 323 BC, bringing the entire Levant under Macedonian Greek rule. Jerusalem came under Greek control in 332 BC. Alexander himself is reported to have visited Jerusalem, though the historical reliability of this account is disputed. What is clear is that Jerusalem, like most cities of the ancient Near East, was soon drawn into the orbit of Hellenistic culture, the fusion of Greek and Eastern traditions that Alexander's conquests spread across three continents.

After Alexander's death in 323 BC, his empire was divided among his generals. Jerusalem and Judea fell first under the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt and then, after 200 BC, under the Seleucid dynasty of Syria. The Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who came to power in 175 BC, pursued a policy of aggressive Hellenization, attempting to transform Jerusalem into a thoroughly Greek city. He renamed the city Antioch and built a gymnasium in the city where Jewish youth trained in the Greek athletic tradition, including the controversial practice of competing naked, which the Hebrew tradition considered deeply shameful. In 167 BC, Antiochus went further, desecrating the Temple by erecting an altar to Zeus within it, sacrificing pigs on the altar, and forbidding the practice of the Jewish law on pain of death.

The response was the Maccabee revolt, one of the first recorded examples of a religiously motivated guerrilla war in history. A priestly family from the town of Modi'in, the Hasmoneans, led by Mattathias and his son Judah Maccabee, rose in revolt against Seleucid rule in 167 BC. After several years of asymmetric warfare in the Judaean hills, the Maccabees recaptured Jerusalem and purified the Temple in 164 BC. The rededication of the Temple, celebrated during the eight-day festival of Hanukkah, marks one of the great moments of national and religious survival in Jewish history. The Hasmonean dynasty that emerged from the Maccabee revolt ruled an independent Judean state for approximately a century, from around 142 BC until the Roman conquest in 63 BC, and during this period Jerusalem was again the capital of an independent Jewish kingdom.

Roman Jerusalem: Pompey, Herod, and the Birth of Christianity

Roman general Pompey brought an end to Hasmonean independence in 63 BC when he captured Jerusalem and entered the Holy of Holies, an act of profound desecration in Jewish eyes, though he did not plunder the Temple's treasures. Jerusalem became a client state of Rome, eventually administered by Roman-appointed governors and kings. The most consequential of these appointed rulers was Herod the Great, an Idumean by origin, who was appointed King of Judea by the Roman Senate in 37 BC and who ruled until his death in 4 BC.

Herod was a builder of genius and a political survivor of extraordinary skill. He maintained his position through the treacherous waters of late Republican and early Imperial Roman politics, successfully cultivating relationships with Antony, Augustus, and successive Roman rulers. He was also a man of spectacular cruelty, responsible for the execution of his own wife Mariamne, several of his sons, and countless political rivals. The ancient world's summary of his character, attributed to Augustus Caesar, was that it was better to be Herod's pig than his son. Yet his building achievements were among the greatest in the ancient Near East.

The project for which Herod is most remembered in Jerusalem was his massive expansion and rebuilding of the Second Temple and its surrounding platform. Beginning around 19 BC, Herod undertook a rebuilding of the Temple on a scale that dwarfed the modest structure built by the returning exiles. To create a suitable platform for the enlarged Temple, he built enormous retaining walls around the summit of Mount Moriah, enclosing an artificial platform of approximately 36 acres, the largest artificial platform in the ancient world. It is the western retaining wall of this massive Herodian construction that survives today as the Western Wall, the holiest accessible site in Judaism.

The Temple that Herod built was a structure of breathtaking grandeur, described by the ancient Jewish historian Josephus as one of the most magnificent buildings the world had ever seen. Its gleaming white marble and gold ornaments were visible from a great distance, and pilgrims approaching Jerusalem on the pilgrimage festivals reportedly shielded their eyes from the reflection of the golden roof in the morning sun. The platform Herod created became a public space of colonnaded porticos, ceremonial gates, and gathering areas that could hold hundreds of thousands of pilgrims during the major festivals. Jerusalem in the time of Herod was a genuine world city, drawing visitors from Jewish communities across the Roman Empire and beyond.

It was into this world, the Jerusalem of Roman imperial power, Herodian building ambition, and intense Jewish religious expectation, that Jesus of Nazareth was born. The Gospels of the Christian New Testament describe his ministry centered primarily in the Galilee region of northern Israel but culminating decisively in Jerusalem. The narrative of the final week of Jesus's life is set entirely in Jerusalem and its immediate surroundings, and it is this narrative that has made Jerusalem permanently central to Christian faith and practice.

The Gospel accounts describe Jesus entering Jerusalem on a donkey to the acclaim of pilgrims who spread palm branches in his path, an event commemorated in Christian tradition as Palm Sunday. He taught in the Temple courts, drove out the money changers from the Temple precincts in an act of prophetic protest against the commercialization of the sacred space, and engaged in debate with the religious authorities of the city. He celebrated the Passover Seder with his disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem, the meal that Christians call the Last Supper, at which he instituted the Eucharist. After the meal, he went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, where he was arrested by the Temple authorities.

Jesus was tried before the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, condemned, and crucified at a place called Golgotha, Skull Place, outside the walls of the city. The date of the crucifixion is generally placed by modern scholars between 30 and 33 AD. The Gospels describe his resurrection on the third day after his death, and it is this claim of resurrection that became the founding event of the Christian faith. The tomb from which he is said to have risen, identified in the fourth century by the empress Helena with the location now occupied by the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, became and remains the most sacred site in Christendom.

The Great Jewish Revolt and the Destruction of the Second Temple

The relationship between the Jewish population of Judea and the Roman imperial administration deteriorated progressively through the first century AD. Roman governors grew increasingly corrupt and contemptuous of Jewish religious sensitivities. Social tensions between the wealthy priestly aristocracy aligned with Rome and the impoverished peasant population, combined with the apocalyptic expectations of various Jewish messianic movements, created a pressure that finally burst in 66 AD when the Jewish population of Jerusalem rose in open revolt against Rome.

The Great Jewish Revolt of 66 to 70 AD was one of the most catastrophic events in Jewish history, and the destruction it brought upon Jerusalem has shaped the Jewish relationship to the city ever since. The initial Jewish military successes stunned Rome. The Roman governor of Syria, Cestius Gallus, led a force of twelve thousand Roman troops to suppress the revolt and was defeated in the Beth Horon pass north of Jerusalem in November 66 AD. The news of this Roman defeat sent shockwaves through the empire and brought the full weight of Roman military power to bear on Judea.

The Emperor Nero dispatched Vespasian, one of the empire's most experienced military commanders, with an army of sixty thousand men to suppress the revolt. Vespasian systematically conquered the Galilee region and most of Judea between 67 and 68 AD. Then the political turmoil in Rome following Nero's suicide in 68 AD, and the Year of the Four Emperors that followed, gave the Jewish rebels in Jerusalem a respite. When Vespasian himself became emperor in 69 AD, he handed command of the Judean campaign to his son Titus.

Titus surrounded Jerusalem in the spring of 70 AD with a massive force of approximately sixty thousand soldiers. The siege coincided with Passover, when the city was crowded with pilgrims, swelling its population to perhaps one million people. The Jewish defenders were divided among themselves, with three rival factions fighting for control of the city even as the Roman siege progressed. The ancient Jewish historian Josephus, who had commanded the Jewish forces in Galilee before surrendering to Vespasian and subsequently serving as an interpreter and intermediary for the Romans, recorded the siege in harrowing detail.

The Romans systematically reduced the city's outer walls, their siege engines and earthworks advancing methodically despite ferocious Jewish resistance. As the siege progressed through the summer of 70 AD, famine became the greatest killer. Josephus records scenes of desperate starvation, of people eating leather and hay, of mothers stealing food from children, of bodies too numerous to bury left in the streets. The psychological dimension of the siege was as severe as the physical one, with Josephus serving as the Romans' spokesman, appealing to the defenders to surrender and spare the city, while the defenders refused to yield.

On the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av in the year 70 AD, corresponding to late August by the Roman calendar, the Temple caught fire. Whether the fire was set deliberately by Roman soldiers, started accidentally in the chaos of battle, or was a deliberate act by defenders who preferred destruction to desecration, remains disputed. Josephus records that Titus attempted to save the Temple but that his soldiers, burning with the frenzy of battle, could not be restrained. The Temple burned. The gold that had adorned its structure melted and ran into the cracks of the stones beneath it. According to Josephus, Roman soldiers dug apart the stones to retrieve this melted gold, unknowingly fulfilling the prophecy attributed to Jesus that not one stone would be left on another.

The Ninth of Av, Tisha B'Av in Hebrew, became the saddest day in the Jewish calendar, the day of fasting and mourning that commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples. The coincidence of both destructions falling on the same calendar date, whether historical accident or later theological interpretation, has given this day an almost unbearable weight in Jewish religious memory. The Roman army sacked the city, killing or enslaving most of its population. Josephus estimated that 1.1 million people died during the siege, and that 97,000 were enslaved, though modern historians consider these numbers likely inflated. The Menorah and other Temple vessels were carried back to Rome in triumph, depicted in the reliefs of the Arch of Titus that still stands in the Roman Forum, where it can be seen today.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt and the Birth of Aelia Capitolina

The destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD did not end Jewish resistance to Roman rule, nor did it end the Jewish connection to the land of Israel. In the decades following the destruction, Jews continued to live in Judea, though the Temple was gone and the political structures of Jewish life had been shattered. A new form of Judaism, centered on rabbinic learning and synagogue worship rather than Temple sacrifice, emerged from the destruction under the leadership of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who had smuggled himself out of besieged Jerusalem in a coffin and established a rabbinic academy at Yavneh on the Mediterranean coast.

Sixty years after the destruction of the Temple, in 132 AD, a second major Jewish revolt erupted against Roman rule. The immediate triggers were the Emperor Hadrian's plan to build a Roman colony city, Aelia Capitolina, on the ruins of Jerusalem, and his reported prohibition on circumcision. The revolt was led by Simon Bar Kokhba, a charismatic military leader whom the great Rabbi Akiva proclaimed as the Messiah, giving the revolt a powerful religious dimension. The Bar Kokhba revolt achieved significant military success in its early phases, with Jewish forces capturing Jerusalem and maintaining control of it for approximately three years.

The Roman response was enormous and methodical. Hadrian brought additional legions from across the empire. The fighting lasted until 135 AD and was marked by ferocity on both sides. The Romans destroyed village after village, killing or enslaving the population. Bar Kokhba was killed at the fortress of Betar in the summer of 135 AD. The aftermath of the revolt was deliberately devastating. Hadrian expelled Jews from Jerusalem and the immediate vicinity, decreeing the death penalty for any Jew who entered the city. Jerusalem was rebuilt as Aelia Capitolina, a thoroughly Roman colonial city oriented around the standard Roman grid plan, with temples to Jupiter and other Roman gods on the sites of the Jewish sacred places. Even the name of the province was changed: Judea was renamed Syria Palaestina, from the Philistines, in an apparent attempt to sever the Jewish connection to the land by expunging its name from official usage. This Roman administrative name, Palestine, passed through Byzantine and Arab usage into modern political discourse, where it retains its charged significance.

Hadrian's prohibition on Jewish residence in Jerusalem was gradually relaxed over the following centuries. By the late third and early fourth centuries, Jews were permitted to enter the city on the Ninth of Av to mourn at the ruins of the Temple.

Byzantine Jerusalem: Constantine, Helena, and the Christian City

The conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine to Christianity in the early fourth century transformed Jerusalem from a Roman provincial city into the center of a new Christian empire's religious geography. In 313 AD, the Edict of Milan granted religious tolerance throughout the Roman Empire, ending the persecution of Christians that had been a recurrent feature of the imperial period. Within a decade, Constantine had made Christianity the favored religion of the imperial court, and attention turned to the holy sites of the Christian faith in Palestine.

Constantine's mother, the Empress Helena, made a pilgrimage to Palestine around 325 to 328 AD and is credited with identifying and marking the sites of the most important events in the life of Jesus. Whether her identifications were historically accurate or reflected traditions that had developed in the Christian community over the preceding three centuries is a matter of ongoing scholarly discussion. What is certain is that her pilgrimage and the imperial building program it initiated permanently shaped the physical landscape of Jerusalem and established the framework within which Christians have related to the city ever since.

The most important of Helena's identifications was the site of the crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus. She identified this site with a temple that Hadrian had built to the goddess Aphrodite, which itself sat over what local Christians believed was the site of Golgotha and the tomb. Constantine ordered the temple demolished and construction of a great basilica over the identified holy sites. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was consecrated on September 13, 335 AD, and has been the most sacred site in Christendom ever since. Despite centuries of damage, partial destruction, and rebuilding, the church stands today as a remarkable layering of Byzantine, Crusader, and later architectural additions, still enclosing within its walls what Christians venerate as the site of Christ's crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

Helena is also credited with identifying the site of Jesus's birth in Bethlehem, where the Church of the Nativity was built, and the site of the Ascension on the Mount of Olives. Throughout Jerusalem and Palestine, the imperial building program created a network of churches and shrines that transformed the physical landscape and established Palestine as a destination for Christian pilgrimage from across the known world.

The Byzantine period from the fourth through seventh centuries saw Jerusalem become a genuinely Christian city in its population, its architecture, and its institutional life. The population was a mixture of Greek-speaking Byzantines, local Aramaic-speaking Christians, and a small number of Jews who were permitted limited residence. Churches, monasteries, and pilgrimage hostels were built throughout the city and its surroundings. Jerusalem became one of the great patriarchates of the early church, a bishopric of the highest rank, with a patriarch whose authority over Christian life in the Holy Land was recognized throughout the eastern Christian world.

The Byzantine period was not without violence. The Sassanid Persian Empire invaded Palestine in 614 AD, sacked Jerusalem, and briefly captured the city, in the process destroying numerous churches including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Persians carried off the True Cross, the most sacred relic of Christendom, to Ctesiphon. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius recovered Palestine and the True Cross in 629 AD, but the damage done to the Byzantine position in the region was enormous. Less than a decade after the Byzantine recovery, a new force would arrive that would permanently change the religious character of Jerusalem.

The Arab Conquest and the Birth of Islamic Jerusalem

The death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 AD had set in motion a wave of Arab Muslim conquest that within a decade would overturn the entire order of the ancient Near East. The Arab armies, infused with the religious energy of the new faith of Islam, swept out of the Arabian Peninsula with a speed and decisiveness that stunned the great empires on their borders. The Byzantine and Sassanid Persian empires, exhausted by decades of warfare against each other, proved unable to mount effective resistance.

Jerusalem fell to the Arab forces in 638 AD following a siege. The circumstances of the surrender are significant in the history of the city. The Patriarch Sophronius, the Byzantine Christian leader of the city, negotiated the surrender terms directly with the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph of Islam and one of the most consequential figures in the history of the faith. In an act that became famous in Muslim tradition, Umar himself came to Jerusalem in person to receive the surrender, traveling simply and without ostentation on a camel.

The terms of surrender that Umar granted were notable for their relative generosity. Christians were to be allowed to keep their churches and practice their faith freely. Jews, who had been barred from the city by the Byzantines for centuries, were permitted to return and settle. Umar is reported to have visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but declined to pray inside it, fearing that if he did so, Muslims would use his example as justification for converting the church into a mosque. Instead, he prayed outside the church, and the spot where he prayed was later commemorated by a small mosque. This act of deliberate restraint has been cited throughout the history of Muslim-Christian relations in Jerusalem as a model of interreligious respect.

Jerusalem's significance in Islam rests on several foundations. The city was the first direction of prayer in early Islam, the Qibla, before the direction of prayer was changed to Mecca. The al-Isra wal-Miraj, the Night Journey and Ascension of the Prophet Muhammad, is understood in Islamic tradition as having taken place partly in Jerusalem. According to this account, Muhammad was transported miraculously from Mecca to Jerusalem in a single night and from Jerusalem ascended through the heavens to the Divine presence. The specific rock at the summit of the Temple Mount, known in Arabic as al-Sakhra, the Rock, is identified as the point from which Muhammad began his ascent to heaven. This rock is also the rock that Jewish tradition identifies as the Foundation Stone, the spot where Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, and the spot beneath which the Ark of the Covenant was traditionally believed to have been placed in the Holy of Holies of Solomon's Temple.

The Dome of the Rock, built between 685 and 691 AD by the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik, was constructed over this sacred rock. It is the oldest surviving Islamic monument in the world and one of the masterpieces of early Islamic architecture. Its great golden dome, visible from miles away, has defined the Jerusalem skyline for fourteen centuries. The building is an octagonal structure with a double ambulatory circling the central rock beneath the dome. Its interior is decorated with extraordinary mosaics of Byzantine craftsmen employed in an Islamic artistic program, featuring Arabic inscriptions from the Quran that, among other things, explicitly affirm Islamic theological positions on the nature of Jesus, rejecting the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. The Dome of the Rock is thus an architectural argument, a statement of Islamic theological claims made in stone and mosaic on the most contested ground in the world.

Al-Aqsa Mosque, built by the Umayyad Caliph al-Walid and completed around 705 AD, stands at the southern end of the Temple Mount platform. Unlike the Dome of the Rock, which is a shrine, the al-Aqsa Mosque is a functioning congregational mosque, the third holiest in Islam after the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina. The entire Temple Mount platform, the Haram al-Sharif, is administered by the Islamic Waqf, a religious endowment authority, and constitutes the third holiest site in the Islamic world.

The Crusades: Conquest, Kingdom, and Catastrophe

The sermon of Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 set in motion one of the most consequential movements in medieval history. Calling on the knights of Christendom to take up arms and reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule, Urban sparked a response that would bring Western European armies to Jerusalem for the first time. The First Crusade was as much a mass popular movement as it was a military campaign, drawing not only knights and nobles but thousands of ordinary people, clergy, women, and children, animated by a mixture of genuine religious devotion, desire for adventure, economic ambition, and the promise of spiritual redemption.

The Crusader armies reached the walls of Jerusalem on June 7, 1099, having marched across three thousand miles of territory over nearly three years, fighting their way through Anatolia and the Levant. They were a reduced force by the time they reached their destination, with perhaps thirteen thousand fighting men remaining from the much larger army that had left Europe. On July 15, 1099, after a siege of five weeks, the Crusaders breached the walls of Jerusalem.

What followed was a massacre of the city's Muslim and Jewish population that contemporary accounts describe with a graphic horror that has never been forgotten. The killing continued for days. The Muslim population that sought refuge in the al-Aqsa Mosque was surrounded and killed. The Jewish community that had gathered in their synagogue was killed when the building was set on fire around them. The streets, according to contemporary accounts on both sides, ran with blood. The massacre was so severe that it became a defining element in the Muslim collective memory of the Crusades, and it has remained a reference point in Muslim-Christian relations down to the present day.

The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, established after the conquest, was one of the more unusual political entities of the medieval world. A small Latin Christian minority ruled over a majority Muslim and Eastern Christian population in the heart of the Islamic world. Jerusalem functioned as the capital of this kingdom for nearly a century, from 1099 to 1187. The Crusaders transformed the al-Aqsa Mosque into a royal palace and the Dome of the Rock into a church, adding a cross to its summit. They built new churches and fortifications and left an architectural legacy in Jerusalem that survives to this day, most visibly in parts of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which they extensively rebuilt during this period.

The Crusader kingdom's survival depended on the political divisions among the surrounding Muslim powers, and it was the reunification of those powers under a Kurdish Muslim general from Tikrit named Salah ad-Din, known in the West as Saladin, that ultimately destroyed it. Saladin, who had unified Egypt and Syria under his rule in the 1170s and 1180s, decisively defeated the Crusader forces at the Battle of Hattin on July 4, 1187, in the hills above the Sea of Galilee. With the main Crusader army destroyed, the cities of the kingdom fell to Saladin one by one. Jerusalem surrendered on October 2, 1187.

In deliberate and remarkable contrast to the Crusader massacre of 1099, Saladin forbade violence against the Christian population of the city. The terms of surrender were negotiated, the civilian population was allowed to ransom themselves and depart, and the Christian holy sites were respected. The True Cross, which the Crusaders had carried into battle at Hattin where it was captured, was taken by Saladin but the church buildings were left standing. The cross on the Dome of the Rock was replaced with a crescent. The al-Aqsa Mosque was reconsecrated as a mosque. Saladin's conduct of the reconquest of Jerusalem contributed enormously to his reputation across cultures and centuries as a model of chivalric conduct and enlightened rule.

The Ottoman Period and Suleiman's Walls

After further Crusader-Muslim conflict through the thirteenth century, including a brief return of the city to Crusader control through a diplomatic agreement between Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the Ayyubid Sultan al-Kamil in 1229, Jerusalem passed under the control of the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate in 1244 and remained a somewhat neglected provincial city through the Mamluk period. The Ottomans under Sultan Selim I conquered Jerusalem in 1517, and it became part of the vast Ottoman Empire that would govern the city for the next four centuries.

The most significant Ottoman contribution to the physical landscape of Jerusalem was the rebuilding of the city walls under Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent between 1535 and 1542. The walls that surround the Old City of Jerusalem today are not Roman, Byzantine, or Crusader, but Ottoman. They were built on the foundations of earlier walls and follow roughly the lines of walls from earlier periods, but the current structure was built in the sixteenth century and gives the Old City its present form and appearance. Approximately 4.5 kilometers in circumference, with 34 watchtowers and 8 gates, the walls of Suleiman the Magnificent have defined the perimeter of the Old City for nearly five centuries.

The Ottoman period was in many ways a period of relative stability and tolerance in Jerusalem's turbulent history. The empire's millet system, which granted religious communities a degree of autonomy in managing their internal affairs according to their own laws, allowed the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities of Jerusalem to maintain their distinct identities and institutions. The Jewish population of Jerusalem, which had gradually returned to the city during the medieval period despite periodic expulsions and restrictions, grew steadily during the Ottoman era, augmented by waves of Jewish refugees from the Spanish Expulsion of 1492 and subsequent persecutions in Europe.

By the nineteenth century, however, the Ottoman Empire was in deep decline, and the great powers of Europe were increasingly involved in the affairs of Palestine. The question of who would control Jerusalem and the holy sites, the so-called Eastern Question, became one of the central issues of nineteenth-century European diplomacy. The Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 was partly triggered by a dispute between France and Russia over the rights of Latin and Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem's holy places. Throughout this period, the population of Jerusalem grew and diversified, and new neighborhoods began to be built outside the walls of the Old City for the first time, as the population expanded beyond what the ancient walls could contain.

The British Mandate and the Birth of the Modern Conflict

The First World War brought the Ottoman period in Palestine to an end. British General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Ottoman forces on December 9, 1917, entering the city on foot through the Jaffa Gate in what was deliberately presented as a contrast to the German Kaiser's triumphalist mounted entry into the city during a visit in 1898. Allenby's entry on foot was widely understood as a gesture of respect for the holy city.

The British conquest of Jerusalem came against the backdrop of a promise that would haunt the region for a century. The Balfour Declaration, issued on November 2, 1917, a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, stated that His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people. The declaration also contained the crucial qualifier that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. This dual commitment, to Jewish national aspirations and to the rights of the Arab majority population, proved impossible to fulfill simultaneously, and the contradiction embedded in the Balfour Declaration became the central tension of the British Mandate period and the Arab-Israeli conflict that succeeded it.

Under the British Mandate, which began formally in 1922, both Jewish and Arab nationalism intensified in parallel, and Jerusalem became the focal point of their competing claims. Jewish immigration to Palestine increased dramatically, particularly as antisemitism intensified in Europe and the Nazi persecution that began in 1933 created a refugee crisis of catastrophic dimensions. The Arab population of Palestine, alarmed by the scale of Jewish immigration and the explicit goal of establishing a Jewish national home, responded with strikes, riots, and ultimately the Arab Revolt of 1936 to 1939. The British, caught between their commitments to both communities and their imperial interests, progressively limited Jewish immigration at precisely the moment when European Jews most desperately needed a refuge.

The Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945, transformed the international politics of Jewish statehood. The moral case for a Jewish state became overwhelming to many in the international community. The United Nations voted on November 29, 1947, for a partition plan that would divide Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states, with Jerusalem designated as an international city under UN administration. The Jewish leadership accepted the plan; the Arab states rejected it.

The 1948 War and the Divided City

When the British Mandate officially ended and the State of Israel was declared by David Ben-Gurion on May 14, 1948, the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon immediately declared war and invaded. The fighting that followed was the first Arab-Israeli War, known in Israel as the War of Independence and among Palestinians as the Nakba, the Catastrophe. Jerusalem was among the most bitterly contested arenas of this war.

The fighting for Jerusalem was intense and at times desperate. The Jewish neighborhoods of the city were besieged by Arab forces, and the road connecting Jerusalem to the Jewish coastal population centers was blocked. Jewish forces attempted to open a supply corridor to the city through the Judaean Hills, the difficult supply route known as the Burma Road. The Old City of Jerusalem, with its Jewish Quarter and its population of around two thousand Jews, was besieged and ultimately fell to the Jordanian Arab Legion on May 28, 1948. Its Jewish population was expelled, the Jewish Quarter's synagogues were largely destroyed, and the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives was desecrated.

The armistice agreements that ended the fighting in 1949 left Jerusalem divided. Jordan controlled the Old City, including all the holy sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam within the walls, as well as the eastern portions of the city including the Mount of Olives and the City of David. Israel controlled the western part of the city, known as West Jerusalem, which became the capital of the newly established state. A no-man's land of barbed wire and fortifications ran through the heart of the city.

For nineteen years, from 1948 to 1967, the city was divided. Jews were denied access to the Western Wall and to the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, in violation of the armistice agreement. The Jordanian administration restricted Christian access to the holy sites as well. The division of Jerusalem was one of the most painful aspects of the 1948 war for Israeli Jews, cutting them off from their most sacred site and from the ancient heart of their civilization.

The Six-Day War and the Reunification of Jerusalem

The Six-Day War of June 1967 was one of the most transformative events in the modern history of the Middle East, and for Jerusalem it was the pivotal moment that has defined the city's situation ever since. Triggered by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's expulsion of UN peacekeeping forces from the Sinai, closure of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, and the mobilization of Arab armies on Israel's borders, the war began on June 5, 1967, with a preemptive Israeli air strike that destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground. Within hours, Israel had achieved air superiority over the entire theater.

Israel initially sent messages to Jordan's King Hussein asking him to stay out of the fighting. Hussein, believing the Arab coalition would prevail, ordered the Jordanian army to open fire on Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv area. The Jordanian shelling of West Jerusalem on June 5 brought Israel into direct military confrontation with Jordan and made the Old City a theater of war.

Israeli paratroopers under General Uzi Narkiss fought their way through East Jerusalem on June 6 and 7, 1967. On the morning of June 7, the 55th Paratroop Brigade under Colonel Mordechai Gur broke through the Lion's Gate of the Old City and moved toward the Temple Mount. The radio transmission of Gur's famous announcement, The Temple Mount is in our hands, was broadcast to the world and electrified the Jewish people. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, General Yitzhak Rabin, and other Israeli military and political leaders gathered at the Western Wall within hours. Dayan placed a note in a crevice of the Wall, following the traditional Jewish custom, praying for peace.

For the first time in nineteen years, Jews could access the Western Wall. For the first time in two thousand years since the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jewish people exercised sovereignty over the site of the Temple. The emotional weight of the moment was extraordinary. Soldiers who had fought their way through the narrow streets of the Old City wept at the Wall. The chief rabbi of the Israeli army, Shlomo Goren, blew a shofar, the ram's horn blown on Jewish holy days, at the Wall.

Israel extended its civil jurisdiction over East Jerusalem immediately after the war, and in 1980 the Knesset passed a Basic Law declaring Jerusalem the complete and united capital of Israel. The international community, with very few exceptions, has not recognized this annexation of East Jerusalem. The United Nations Security Council, in Resolution 478, declared the annexation a violation of international law. The majority of countries maintain their embassies in Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem. In December 2017, the United States under President Donald Trump formally recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018, a step that was welcomed by Israel but condemned by the Palestinian Authority and most Arab governments.

The status of Jerusalem remains among the most intractable issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel claims the entire city as its eternal and undivided capital. The Palestinian Authority claims East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state. International law, as expressed through UN resolutions, does not recognize Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem, which it regards as occupied territory subject to the final status negotiations that have repeatedly stalled.

The Old City and Its Four Quarters

The Old City of Jerusalem, enclosed within the Ottoman walls of Suleiman the Magnificent, covers an area of approximately one square kilometer, about 220 acres. Into this extraordinary dense space are packed some of the holiest and most historically significant sites on Earth, along with a permanent residential population of approximately 36,000 people living in four distinct quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter.

The Muslim Quarter is the largest, occupying the northeastern portion of the Old City, and is home to approximately 27,000 people. Its main thoroughfares are among the most vibrant commercial streets in the Old City, lined with shops, food stalls, and workshops that have been operating in essentially the same locations for centuries. The Via Dolorosa, the processional route that Christian tradition identifies as the path Jesus walked on his way to crucifixion, runs through the Muslim Quarter.

The Christian Quarter, in the northwestern section of the Old City, centers on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and contains numerous churches, monasteries, pilgrimage hostels, and institutions of various Christian denominations. The extraordinary diversity of Christian communities represented in Jerusalem, including Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, and others, is reflected in the multiple chapels, altars, and entrance rights that different denominations maintain within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself. The management of the church is governed by a complex arrangement known as the Status Quo, an agreement dating in its modern form to the Ottoman period and in its underlying structure to the Crusader era, which specifies in minute detail the rights of different Christian communities over different portions of the church. Disputes between communities over the Status Quo, sometimes physical, have been a recurring feature of life in the church.

The Jewish Quarter, in the southeastern section of the Old City adjacent to the Western Wall, was largely destroyed during the Jordanian occupation and extensively rebuilt after 1967. It contains the Western Wall Plaza, the excavations of the Cardo, the main north-south street of Byzantine Jerusalem, the Wohl Archaeological Museum with its display of wealthy Herodian residences, and numerous synagogues. The quarter has been substantially rebuilt and now has a somewhat more modern appearance than the other quarters.

The Armenian Quarter, in the southwestern corner of the Old City, is the smallest of the four quarters but has a history that makes it particularly poignant. The Armenian Christian community has been present in Jerusalem since the earliest centuries of Christianity, when Armenia became the first nation to adopt Christianity as its official religion in 301 AD. The Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem, with its magnificent Cathedral of Saint James built over the traditional site of the martyrdom and burial of the Apostle James, is one of the most beautiful and historic institutions in the Old City. The Armenian community of Jerusalem was significantly augmented by survivors of the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and the quarter maintains a small but intensely committed community that has been present in the city for seventeen centuries.

The Temple Mount and Haram Al-Sharif

No place on Earth concentrates so much religious significance, historical memory, and contemporary political conflict into so small a space as the Temple Mount, known in Arabic as the Haram al-Sharif. This approximately 36-acre platform, built by Herod the Great on the summit of Mount Moriah, is simultaneously the holiest site in Judaism, the site of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque, and the most explosive flashpoint in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For Jews, the Temple Mount is holy because it is the site of the First and Second Temples, the place where the divine presence, the Shekhinah, dwelt in the Holy of Holies. Jewish religious tradition teaches that the Foundation Stone, the rock at the center of the Dome of the Rock, is the place from which the world was created and from which God gathered the dust to create Adam. It is also identified with the altar on Mount Moriah where Abraham bound his son Isaac, the Akedah. The longing to rebuild the Temple on the Temple Mount is a central element of Jewish messianic hope, and prayers for the rebuilding of the Temple have been part of the Jewish liturgy for two thousand years.

For Muslims, the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, is holy because it is the site of the Night Journey and Ascension of the Prophet Muhammad, and because the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque have stood there as Islamic monuments since the seventh century. Al-Aqsa Mosque is the third holiest site in Islam, and any threat to Muslim sovereignty over the Haram al-Sharif is felt throughout the Muslim world as an existential provocation.

Control of the Temple Mount after 1967 was handled through an arrangement that has been the source of continuous tension. Israel took military control of the site but agreed that day-to-day administration would remain with the Islamic Waqf, the Jordanian-administered Islamic charitable trust that had managed the site under Jordanian rule. Non-Muslim visitors are permitted to enter the Temple Mount during specified hours but are not permitted to pray there. Israeli law prohibits non-Muslim prayer on the Temple Mount, a restriction maintained to prevent provocations that could trigger violence. Repeated attempts by Jewish activists and politicians to assert a Jewish prayer right on the Temple Mount have led to cycles of violence, as did the visit of Ariel Sharon to the Temple Mount in September 2000, which many have cited as one of the triggers of the Second Intifada.

The Western Wall

The Western Wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel and sometimes in older literature as the Wailing Wall, is the most sacred site in Judaism that is currently accessible for worship. It is a section of the massive retaining wall that Herod the Great built around the Temple Mount, approximately 488 meters of the original wall of which about 57 meters are visible above ground in the main prayer plaza. The wall is built of enormous limestone blocks, some weighing hundreds of tons, set without mortar in the distinctive Herodian style with finely dressed margins and raised bosses.

After the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, the Western Wall became the primary site for Jewish mourning over the destruction and prayer for redemption. Jewish tradition attributes particular sanctity to this wall because of its proximity to the former Holy of Holies. The practice of inserting written prayers into the crevices between the stones is attested to from at least the early modern period and continues today on a massive scale, with hundreds of thousands of notes placed in the Wall annually. The notes are periodically removed and buried in the Jewish cemetery on the Mount of Olives.

During the Jordanian period from 1948 to 1967, Jews were barred from the Western Wall in violation of the armistice agreement. The square that now constitutes the Western Wall Plaza did not exist then; the wall fronted directly onto a narrow alley of the Moroccan Quarter, a densely settled neighborhood of the Old City. After the Israeli capture of the Old City in 1967, the Moroccan Quarter was demolished within days to create the open plaza that now allows hundreds of thousands of worshippers to gather at the Wall simultaneously. The demolition of the Moroccan Quarter, carried out without advance notice and without allowing the residents to remove their possessions, is a source of ongoing grievance among Palestinian Jerusalemites and human rights advocates.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands at the western end of the Via Dolorosa in the Christian Quarter of the Old City, occupying the site identified since the fourth century as the location of Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, and of the tomb from which he rose from the dead. It is the most sacred site in Christendom.

The church as it stands today is a complex structure accumulated over seventeen centuries, with the most significant surviving elements dating from the Crusader rebuilding of the twelfth century. Entering through the single main entrance, which faces south onto a small courtyard, the visitor moves through a space of considerable darkness, incense, and spiritual intensity, where pilgrims from dozens of countries pray simultaneously at different stations, in different languages, in different liturgical traditions.

The Stone of Unction, a flat stone slab near the entrance, marks the traditional site where the body of Jesus was anointed for burial. The Chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, inside a small ornate rotunda at the western end of the church, encloses the tomb itself within an elaborate marble edicule, a small chapel, built over the rock-cut tomb. Golgotha, the rock of the crucifixion, rises beneath a separate chapel in the southeastern portion of the church. The church is shared among six Christian denominations: the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic Franciscans, the Armenian Apostolic, the Coptic Orthodox, the Ethiopian Orthodox, and the Syriac Orthodox. The Status Quo arrangement governs the rights of each community within the church in extraordinary detail.

A famous curiosity of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is that the key to its main door has been held for centuries by a Muslim family, the Joudeh family, and the honor of opening and closing the door belongs to another Muslim family, the Nuseibeh family. This arrangement, which dates to the Saladin period or possibly earlier, was designed to prevent disputes between different Christian denominations over control of the entrance. It has become one of the most visible symbols of the complex interreligious arrangements that govern life in Jerusalem.

The via Dolorosa and the Mount of Olives

The Via Dolorosa, the Way of Sorrow or Way of Grief, is a route through the Old City of Jerusalem that Christian tradition identifies as the path that Jesus walked carrying his cross from his condemnation to his crucifixion. The route, marked by fourteen Stations of the Cross, begins at the site of the Praetorium, the location where Jesus was condemned, near the Lion's Gate in the Muslim Quarter, and ends at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The exact route of the Via Dolorosa is not historically certain, and scholarly opinion on the precise locations of the Stations has varied. The current route was established in its present form primarily during the Ottoman period, and some stations correspond to events not mentioned in the canonical Gospels. Nevertheless, the route has been walked by pilgrims from around the world for centuries, and the act of walking this path, pausing at each station, and meditating on the events of the Passion narrative is one of the most powerful pilgrimage experiences in Christianity.

The Mount of Olives, the ridge rising immediately to the east of the Old City across the Kidron Valley, is one of the most sacred and historically resonant landscapes in Jerusalem. The mount takes its name from the olive groves that once covered its slopes, some of which still survive in the Garden of Gethsemane at the base of the mount, including olive trees that tradition holds are ancient enough to have been present during Jesus's lifetime. The Garden of Gethsemane is identified as the place where Jesus prayed on the night of his arrest, and the Church of All Nations, built over the rock where tradition places this prayer, is one of the most evocative sacred spaces in Jerusalem.

The summit of the Mount of Olives offers the most famous panoramic view of Jerusalem, with the golden dome of the Dome of the Rock, the silver dome of al-Aqsa Mosque, and the walls of the Old City spread out below. This view has been reproduced in art and described in pilgrimage accounts for centuries. The slope of the Mount of Olives contains the largest and oldest continuously used Jewish cemetery in the world, where Jews have been buried for three thousand years in the belief that the resurrection of the dead will begin here, in proximity to the site of the future Temple.

The Church of the Ascension, marking the traditional site from which Jesus ascended to heaven, stands on the summit of the mount. The Dominus Flevit chapel, designed by Antonio Barluzzi in the shape of a teardrop, marks the spot where Jesus is said to have wept over Jerusalem. The great sweep of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim sacred sites on this single hill captures in miniature the overwhelming sacred density of the Jerusalem landscape.

Jerusalem in the Twenty-First Century

Jerusalem today is a city of approximately 900,000 people, making it the largest city in Israel by population. It is a place of extraordinary vitality and extraordinary tension, where the ancient and the modern coexist in sometimes jarring proximity, where heavily armed Israeli soldiers stand guard in the Old City lanes near shops selling Palestinian embroidery and Christian religious icons, and where the call to prayer from the mosques of the Old City mixes with the bells of Christian churches and the sound of the shofar on Jewish holy days.

The city is divided in practice along lines that do not always correspond neatly to geography. West Jerusalem is a predominantly Jewish Israeli city with universities, hospitals, government ministries, museums, and the full infrastructure of a modern capital. East Jerusalem, which Israel claims as part of its unified capital, is predominantly Arab Palestinian, with a population that has Israeli permanent residency status but not citizenship, voting in municipal but not national elections, in a status that many human rights organizations describe as a form of second-class citizenship. The disparities in infrastructure, services, and investment between the eastern and western parts of the city are significant and well-documented.

The international status of Jerusalem remains legally unresolved. While Israel declares the entire city its capital and houses its government institutions there, including the Knesset, the Supreme Court, and the residence of the President and Prime Minister, the majority of the world's nations do not recognize Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem and maintain their embassies elsewhere. The Palestinian Authority continues to assert its claim to East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, and this claim is recognized by most of the Arab world and many other nations.

Jerusalem continues to draw pilgrims, tourists, scholars, diplomats, and ordinary seekers by the millions every year. They come from every corner of the world, from every religious tradition, drawn by the weight of history, the presence of the sacred, and the unresolved mystery of why this small limestone city, with no natural resources, no great river, no ocean port, has stood at the center of human conflict and human longing for three thousand years. The question Jerusalem poses to every generation that encounters it is not merely a political or geographical one. It is a question about what human beings hold most sacred, what they are willing to fight and die for, and whether the aspiration embedded in the city's very name, Foundation of Peace, can ever be more than an unrealized hope.

Jerusalem endures. It has been destroyed, exiled, reconquered, divided, and reunified, and yet it persists. The prayers offered at the Western Wall, the incense burned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the call of the muezzin from the minarets of al-Aqsa Mosque, represent three streams of living faith flowing from a single source, three traditions that trace their lineage to Abraham and to the covenant made, in each tradition's telling, on the same contested, sacred, inexhaustible piece of ground. Whether humanity can find a way to share it, to let it be what its name suggests it might be, remains the great unfinished question of Jerusalem's ancient and ongoing story.

Sources

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