Fantastic Metropolis

The city was crowded and the houses small. Nevertheless whole rooms went to waste, as it was the custom to throw rubbish into the bottom chamber of the house, where it festered until the local boys carried it away on a donkey through the Dung Gate and flung it onto the spoil heaps which adorned the edges of the city.

And the Dung Gate, when questioned on the matter, said, Rather the rubbish of Jerusalem than the jewels of the whole world…

At the end of the summer the cisterns were low and the people were obliged to buy their water from the villagers of Silwan. The village youths brought the water on their backs, in bloated goatskins, from the spring of Ein Rogel. When the cisterns were low the scum would come to the surface and sometimes the dry cisterns cracked and sewage seeped in from the nearby water-closets. Even if the cisterns were clean, they were fed by rainwater, which was not always clean. The rain ran down gutters choked with dust and debris blown from the streets, and down the streets ran open sewers clogged with the outer leaves of vegetables and the dung of dogs and camels.

In Jerusalem there was a proliferation of dogs which multiplied without check. The Muslims hated them like the devil, unlike cats, which they loved. The dogs ran after every lantern carrier in the night and filled the alleyways with night-time howls and strange noises. They foraged in the debris left by the vegetable market on David Street and they hung round the tannery next to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They fought for entrails outside the slaughterhouse in the Jewish Quarter, and devoured the bodies of donkeys and camels which were left rotting in the street where they had fallen. At last the Pasha thought he would do the citizens of Jerusalem a favour and ordered his soldiers to shoot all the dogs, which brought an increase in fever to the city because there were no longer any dogs to consume the rotting offal.

In October the siege of the cisterns ended and the rains fell, which were called the shooting rains because the drops fell like lead shot. All over Jerusalem the rain performed its dance: bouncing off the domed roofs, trickling down the gutters and gullies and channels into the wells and cisterns of Jerusalem, disappearing down ancient drains and swallow holes into the vast reservoirs beneath the Temple Mount, Jerusalem’s hollow watery heart.

Jerusalem was a city of small trades in which the Jews found their niche. There were Jewish grocers, tinsmiths, sugar-sellers and many, many shoemakers. There were thirty-four Jewish tailors; none Muslim. Conversely, all sixty-six coffin-makers were Muslim (Jews were buried in shrouds).

No Jew worked on the land, or cut stone, or built houses, or owned property. Their businesses were concentrated on the Street of the Jews, a stinking lane lined with torn and filthy awnings, miserable wine shops and displays of bric-a-brac. Here it was possible to purchase ancient volumes of Talmud, Yiddish chapbooks describing the miracles of the Baal Shem Tov, and leather amulets to ward off sickness. Here the Jewish woman could, if she so wished, obtain a second-hand copy of Caro’s The Laid Table which would define for her the laws and limits of her entire married life.

Close by, Reb Jacob the seller of old clothes draped his stall with the cast-off wardrobes of the dead. He never looked a customer in the eye. Transactions were made across the psalter, and bargaining was peppered with sacred verses. Often it was impossible to tell whether he was addressing God or man, as he poured out his wrath upon the heathen, lifted his eyes unto the hills and sang the praises of a silk waistcoat all in the same breath.

Here the children gathered as Reb Israel the Righteous bent to draw water for the institutions. He never smiled. He never spoke. Each week he fasted two out of the seven days. But the children loved to watch him raise the bucket from the darkness of the well, and to speculate on what might ride up in the sparkling water.

Here, on a slab of Roman masonry outside the synagogue, sat the old loafers who had come to Jerusalem to die. In their youth they had been groomed as talmudists and never taught a trade, but since they were also bad students they had been idle their whole lives. Now their sole means of subsistence lay in reciting prayers for those already dead. In summer they sat outside with their prayer books, murmured portions of the liturgy and spat reflectively at the feet of the passersby. In winter they made the rounds of the synagogues and study houses, always taking the spot closest to the stove. They wandered in and out of the services, gossiped during the reading and sang lustily during the prayers. A few carried grubby pocket-books in which they gathered and recorded the takings of various charities: the Dowries for Poor Brides, for example, or the deposit needed for the publication of scholarly works written in their youth and long since eaten by mice.