Fantastic Metropolis

When I think of the longing which filled my father and great-grandfather I remember that they were Jerusalemites: my father by birth and my great-grandfather by adoption. Jerusalem is a place which engenders longing.

I cannot help regarding the city as a strange accident. It is not positioned on any trade route. Nor is it really in the ideal position for a political capital. The region is hostile to both industry and agriculture. For centuries the nations have dreamed of it returning to some state of glory which supposedly it once possessed, but Jerusalem remains obstinately provincial, gripped by that spirit of desolation so often associated with the presence of God.

The road from the coast to Jerusalem winds from the plains to the hills. It passes through the territory of Abu Ghosh, past the monastery of Latrun and through the dark ravine of Bab el Wad, the Gate of the Vale. If the nations ever stream towards Zion, they must pass through this sinister gorge. It has always been a place of ambush.

The Jews captured Jerusalem from the Jebusites, the Babylonians from the Jews and the Persians from the Babylonians. The Greeks snatched it from the Persians, the Maccabees from the Greeks and the Romans from the Maccabees. The Temple of Solomon was thrown down and rebuilt, was dedicated, desecrated and resanctified, and at last destroyed under the Emperor Titus, for which act he was punished in the following manner: a gnat, entering his head, knocked against his brain for seven years, and when he died they opened his brain and found there something like a sparrow.

As for the Temple treasures, they have been sighted all over the world: two pillars in San Giovanni in Porta Latina, Rome; a bronze candelabrum in the cathedral at Prague; another in Constantinople. The golden plate of the High Priest was taken to Rome; other gold and silver items were hidden in a tower at Barsippa and under the great willow tree in Tel Beruk. The throne of Solomon itself was taken from Babylon to Persia, from there to Greece and Rome, “and,” writes Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yossi, “I saw its fragments in Rome.”

The Byzantines took the city from the Romans, the Arabs from the Byzantines, the Crusaders from the Arabs. The Jews returned, were exiled, returned; were tolerated, banned and readmitted. The Crusaders gave way to the Mamelukes and the Mamelukes to the Ottoman Turks.

The Sephardi Jews fled there from the Inquisition, from southern Europe and the Arab lands. The Ashkenazi Jews came from Poland, dressed in white robes, with their leader, Rabbi Judah the Pious.

When they reached Jerusalem Rabbi Judah the Pious founded a synagogue, and died. His followers mortgaged the synagogue and living quarters at a high rate of interest and could not pay. They were driven out and the synagogue burned. That was the end of the first settlement.

A hundred years later, seventy students of the Gaon of Vilna made the journey to Jerusalem: from Shakluv by raft along the rivers, and from Odessa by fishing-boat to Jaffa. Disguised in eastern dress they gained admittance to the city, and settled around the ruined synagogue of Rabbi Judah the Pious.

When my great-grandfather arrived Jerusalem was still contained within its walls. The gates were locked at night and reopened in the morning, and all around lay wilderness, wild animals and robbers.

Perhaps the wilderness has been exaggerated. There were also villages: Et Tur, Lifta, Deir Yassin. Vegetables were grown in the village of Silwan, roses were brought from Kolonya. The roses were sold by weight, and in season the fellaheen women could be seen soaking them in the aqueduct on their way up to the Jaffa Gate.

There was the city of streets and there was the city of roofs. It was possible to cross Jerusalem without setting foot on the ground. Every cat knew this and so did every robber. On cool evenings the citizens of Jerusalem went up onto the roofs and enjoyed the breeze. Women sat behind perforated walls where they could observe without being observed. Neighbours could be visited by stepping from one roof to the next.

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.

Sometimes they gathered in the nearby bathhouse, where Reb David of Vilna, author of the famous almanac, led daily sessions of numerological jousting. Reb David, who under different circumstances might have been a great mathematician, was a numerologist of exceptional ability. It had been a passion with him in his youth and in his maturity it had become an obsession. Gradually it took over his life, until in old age he devoted himself entirely to his calculations. He was rarely seen without a slip of paper and a pencil, and had the permanent skyward gaze of a man totting up numbers in his head.

Each autumn he published a diary of sacred quotations whose numerical total was equivalent to the Jewish year. They might be regarded as either prophecies or curiosities. Meanwhile he was secretly working on a project of far greater significance: the date of the end of the world. Since there were enough relevant verses with enough suggestive totals to place the apocalypse anywhere within the next several thousand millennia, he only succeeded in endorsing what the world knew already; though it is always good to have some confirmation.

At dawn, after a night of sleepless calculation, he would join Reb Zalman the watchman on his rounds of the quarter as he cried: “Rise up, holy people, and serve the Creator, blessed be His Name!” Reb Zalman was a pious scholar and a man of many wives. For the wife of his youth, his first, who had died in childbirth, he retained the greatest affection. Since then he had never been a bachelor for long. To marry was not difficult: it required only a blank contract bought at the local stationer’s. Divorce was more complicated: that required a dispensation from the rabbis. The rabbis did not like Reb Zalman’s frequent divorces, but since he was old and his wives were old, they continued to humour him.

Reb Zalman had strange habits of excessive piety, though perhaps in Jerusalem they did not seem so strange. He would drink his tea boiling as he stood outside the gates of the study house at midnight, muttering quick blessings as it burned his mouth. If he saw a funeral procession he would join it. Sometimes he stood by the steep alley which led from Habad Street to the Armenian Quarter and which was reputed to be the toughest hill in Jerusalem because the martyred bodies of Hannah and her seven sons lay below. He stopped the passersby and insisted on carrying their bundles up the hill, to the gratitude of some and the profound embarrassment of others.

Jerusalem lay sleeping on the ashes of her seventeen destructions. Houses were built upon houses; ruins tottered on a foundation of ruins. Sometimes there were earth-tremors and the ruins collapsed down into each other like an ancient honeycomb. There were strange events: shooting stars, a rain of yellow mud. Each year on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, the lights on the Temple mount would be extinguished. Tears would spring from the stones of the Western Wall.

Jerusalem was a city of many wells. At one time the wells of Jerusalem were left uncovered, which could be very dangerous where the mouth of the well was flush with the ground. In the Hurvah Square at the heart of the Jewish Quarter there were several such wells.

It happened once that a boy from the Tree of Life Yeshivah went missing. They searched and after three days they had not found him.

Then the elders of the yeshivah gathered and decided to draw lots to discover the whereabouts of the boy.

They asked the lots: Is he alive or dead? The answer came back: Dead. They asked: Where is he? Answer: In the well. Which well? Answer: In the Hurvah.

Then the people searched the wells in the Hurvah and they found him in the third well, head downwards, with his lunch in his pocket.

After that the wells in the Hurvah Square were covered, and only Reb Israel the Righteous was permitted to uncover them each day, to draw water for the Tree of Life Yeshivah.

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The Genizah at the House of Shepher by Tamar Yellin will be published in March 2005 by The Toby Press. For further details and ordering information please visit the publisher’s website.