Thursday, March 28, 2024
Thursday, March 28, 2024
Get the Daily
Briefing by Email

Subscribe

The Treasure of the Jews

Matti Friedman

Jewish Review of Books, Spring 2022

“It’s impossible to understand the city without grasping that Jerusalem has existed at the center of Jewish consciousness since Rome was a village on the Tiber and that it has that role in no other religion.”

In 1867, the Scottish adventurer John MacGregor descended a rope ladder into a subterranean tunnel by the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. His guide was the famous British archaeologist Charles Warren, engaged just then in one of the first serious excavations of Jerusalem. Once underground, the men scrambled happily through the filthy shafts “like cats or monkeys,” peering into the city’s ancient layers, the walls slick with moisture and the floor soggy with sewage. “Once we have got down,” Macgregor wrote of the experience, “we can scan by the magnesium light a subterranean city, the real city of Jerusalem.”

That idea—that the real city of Jerusalem lurks somewhere beneath the actual city with its grocery stores, traffic, and inconveniently present residents—has been a powerful one since the mid-1800s, when the seductive aura of that real city began to draw a string of fascinating and often misguided characters with a Bible in one hand and a shovel in the other, looking for something beneath the surface. These are the stars of Andrew Lawler’s book Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, a survey of some of the colorful and fraught episodes that have played out here underground over the past century and a half.

Matti Friedman is a journalist in Jerusalem. His new book is Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai (Spiegel & Grau).

To view the original article, click here

Donate CIJR

Become a CIJR Supporting Member!

Most Recent Articles

Day 5 of the War: Israel Internalizes the Horrors, and Knows Its Survival Is...

0
David Horovitz Times of Israel, Oct. 11, 2023 “The more credible assessments are that the regime in Iran, avowedly bent on Israel’s elimination, did not work...

Sukkah in the Skies with Diamonds

0
  Gershon Winkler Isranet.org, Oct. 14, 2022 “But my father, he was unconcerned that he and his sukkah could conceivably - at any moment - break loose...

Open Letter to the Students of Concordia re: CUTV

0
Abigail Hirsch AskAbigail Productions, Dec. 6, 2014 My name is Abigail Hirsch. I have been an active volunteer at CUTV (Concordia University Television) prior to its...

« Nous voulons faire de l’Ukraine un Israël européen »

0
12 juillet 2022 971 vues 3 https://www.jforum.fr/nous-voulons-faire-de-lukraine-un-israel-europeen.html La reconstruction de l’Ukraine doit également porter sur la numérisation des institutions étatiques. C’est ce qu’a déclaré le ministre...

Subscribe Now!

Subscribe now to receive the
free Daily Briefing by email

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

  • Subscribe to the Daily Briefing

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.