-Caveat Lector- From >From the issue dated September 21, 2001 http://chronicle.com/free/v48/i04/04b00701.htm The Politics of Holiness in Jerusalem By BERNARD WASSERSTEIN Jerusalem, we are often told, is a holy city to three world religions. But the holiness of Jerusalem is neither a constant nor an absolute. It may be conceived of as divinely inspired or as a human attribution. What is undeniable is that, considered as a historical phenomenon, the city's sanctity has waxed and waned according to social, economic, and cultural conditions, and, perhaps above all, political influences. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam claim to venerate Jerusalem as holy - - and no doubt the adherents of each make the claim with full sincerity and zeal. But, in the case of the first, religious devotion did not carry with it, until very recently, a demand for restoration of sovereignty. As for the two successor faiths, of each it can be demonstrated that the holiness of Jerusalem was a late historical development rather than present ab initio. In all three cases, the dispassionate observer is compelled by the evidence to conclude that the city's sanctity arose as much from political as from purely spiritual sources. What is at stake here is not merely the destiny of one medium-sized city, nor even the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but nothing less than the future relationship of the Islamic, Christian, and Jewish wo rlds. Each has invested the Jerusalem question with emotional freight deriving from the attribution of holiness to specific areas of the city. Scholars of all three religions have been mobilized to verify the authenticity of proprietorial claims. As the Palestinian writer Edward Said has conceded, "We must also admit that Jerusalem, in particular, and Palestine, in general, have always provoked extraordinary projections that have combined distant though reverential assertion with rude grabbing." Thus we find Elie Wiesel, in the summer of 2000, opposing the right of an elected Israeli government to cede Palestinian control over the greater part of the Old City of Jerusalem, which he said was far more central to Je wish identity and consciousness than to Islam. The late A.L. Tibawi, a Palestinian historian who worked in exile in Britain, wrote as if Jerusalem were sacred only to Muslims and Christians, denying Jews any legitimate pl ace there at all. Such denials continue today. On a recent visit to Jerusalem, I listened to a Palestinian scholar earnestly insisting that any Jewish religious interest in the Temple Mount was bogus, since the ancient Jewish Temple could be proved to have been sited elsewhere. There is nothing new in all this. Under Muslim, Christian, and Jewish rulers, generations of scholars have acted as handmaidens of power, embroidering history to justify exclusive political pretensions. Two Jewish voices. The first is that of Ananus, the oldest of the priests of Jerusalem on the eve of the destruction of the Second Temple 70 years after Christ. According to the account of his contemporary Josephus, Ananu s, in tears and casting his eyes toward the Temple, which had been seized by the party of Jewish extremists known as Zealots, said: "Certainly it had been good for me to die before seeing the house of God full of so many abominations, or those sacred places that ought not to be trodden upon at random filled with the feet of these blood-shedding villains." The second voice is that of the proto-Zionist Moshe Leib Lilienblum. Writing in 1882 of the future Jewish state in Palestine, he declared: "We do not need the walls of Jerusalem, nor the Jerusalem temple, nor Jerusalem itself." Two Jewish voices; two Jewish views of Jerusalem. The Jewish presence in the Holy Land may, as we are often told, have remained continuous throughout the period between the end of the second Jewish Commonwealth and the rise of Zionism. The contention is sometimes extende d to an allegedly continuous Jewish presence in Jerusalem. For example, the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, in a speech in Jerusalem in 1948, referred to "the unbroken chain of Jewish settlement in this city." Whatever the truth of such a claim for Palestine in general, the evidence for it in the case of Jerusalem is questionable. Jews were forbidden to live in the city under Roman and Byzantine rule. Although some Jewish pilgr ims appear to have visited it, there is no evidence of a Jewish community there between the second and the seventh centuries. Jews resumed residence in Jerusalem after the first Arab conquest of the city, in 638. A number of documents in the Cairo Geniza (a store of old manuscripts uncovered at the end of the 19th century) record financial contr ibutions by Jews in Egypt, Syria, and Sicily toward the support of poor Jews and the maintenance of a synagogue next to the Western ("Wailing") Wall in Jerusalem. When the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem in 1099, Jews were once more thrown out of the city. Only after 1260, under the government of the Mamluk sultans, based in Egypt, did they slowly return, although they came into conflict with Christians, particularly over Mount Zion. The conquest of the city by the Ottoman Turks, in 1516, created conditions for secure Jewish settlement and slow demographic growth. But in the 17th century, the estimated Jewish population was still only one thousand sou ls, perhaps 10 percent of the total. In that period, the main center of Jewish life in Palestine, certainly of Jewish intellectual life, was not Jerusalem but Safed. For a long time in the 18th century, Jewish bachelors a nd persons under 60 were forbidden by the Jewish "Istanbul Committee" to live in Jerusalem. The object of the ban was to limit the size of the Jewish population, which, it was feared, would otherwise be too large to suppo rt. The earliest community records of the Jews in Jerusalem, as distinct from records elsewhere about them, date from no earlier than the 18th century. As the Israeli historian Jacob Barnai has written, "the lack of mater ial reflects the lack of organic continuity in these communities during the late Middle Ages and the Ottoman period." Yet if Jewish settlement in Jerusalem for much of the premodern period was sparse and patchy, Jerusalem has nevertheless always been central to the thought and symbolism of Judaism: the resting place of its holy tabernacl e, the site of its Temple, the capital of its monarchy, the subject of lamentation from the year 70 down to our own time. Jews faced Jerusalem when they prayed. They called it "the navel of the earth." Biblical literature , halakha (Jewish law), aggada (nonlegal rabbinic teaching), tefilla (liturgy), kabbala (mystical writings), haskala (the Hebrew enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries), and Jewish folklore all celebrated Jerusalem' s ancient glory and mourned its devastation. In medieval Spain, Yehuda Halevi and Shlomo ibn Gvirol wrote poignant verses expressive of yearning for Jerusalem. In Eastern Europe, a picture of Jerusalem traditionally hung on the eastern wall of the Jewish house. In our own day, Shmuel Yosef Agnon rejoiced in the renewal of Jewish creativity in the city whose "hills spread their glory like banners to the sky." Throughout the ages, Jerusalem remained the foremost destination of Jewish pilgrimage. Above all, Jerusalem carried for Jews an overwhelming symbolic significance as the focus of messianic hope and the locus of the imminently expected resurrection. At the same time, Judaism differentiated between the heavenly Jerusalem (Yerushalayim shel ma'lah) and the earthly, or everyday, one (shel matah). Religious devotion to the city was not regarded as involving any duty to r egain Jewish sovereignty over it. Indeed, when the idea of such a restoration first began to be discussed, in the 19th century, the dominant strain of religious opinion was strongly opposed. That remained true until the d estruction of the religious heartland of Jewry, in Eastern Europe, between 1939 and 1945. At least until then, most Orthodox Jewish authorities opposed Zionism as a blasphemous anticipation of the divine eschatological pl an. And on this point they found common cause with most early leaders of Reform Judaism -- though the two groups would have shrunk with horror from any thought of commonality. Orthodox Zionists were a relatively insignifi cant stream within the Zionist movement -- and equally so within Orthodox Judaism. Zionism, until long after the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, remained predominantly and often aggressively secular. Early Zionist thinkers generally avoided attributing special importance to Jerusalem. The exponent of "spiritual" Zionism, Ahad Ha'am, was repelled by his first encounter with the Jews of Jerusalem, in 1891; later, when h e moved to Palestine, he chose to settle in Tel Aviv. The founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was shocked by Jerusalem's filth and stench when he first visited, in 1898. When Arthur Ruppin set up the Zionist Orga nization's first Palestine Office, in 1908, he did so in Jaffa, not Jerusalem. The early Zionist settlers in Palestine, from the 1880s onward, and particularly the socialist Zionists, who arrived in large numbers after 19 04, looked down on Jerusalem and all it stood for in their eyes -- obscurantism, religiosity, and squalor. In particular, they despised what they saw as the parasitism of Jerusalem's Jews and their dependence on the haluk ah (charitable dole) from co-religionists in Europe and North America. David Ben-Gurion, who was later, as Israeli prime minister, to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, did not bother to visit it until three years a fter his own immigration to Palestine. Modern Hebrew literature also contained deeply contradictory tendencies regarding Jerusalem: In the last two decades of the 19th century, writers of the ahavat Zion (love of Zion) school tended to extol Jerusalem and sing its praises; modernist poets and novelists, from Haim Nahman Bialik onward, took a more harshly realistic view. In the first half of the 20th century, a stream of writing (Yosef Haim Brenner, Nathan Alterman, Avraham Shl onsky, the early Uri Zvi Greenberg) that was hostile to Jerusalem -- loathing it, demystifying it, even stressing its irrelevance -- shaped a profoundly negative view of the city in the Hebrew literary imagination. Of cou rse, that was only one stream of thought -- but, in its time, perhaps the most influential and truly expressive of the Zionist revolution against Jewish traditionalism. Thus spiritual values exalting Jerusalem competed with, and were overshadowed by, other religious, social, political, and intellectual forces in forming the ambivalent modern Jewish view of Jerusalem. Two Christian voices. First, St. Jerome (c. 342-420), who went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and spent the last 34 years of his life in a monastery in Bethlehem. He argued that it was part of the Christian faith "to ador e where His feet have stood and to see the vestiges of the nativity, of the Cross, and of the passion." The second voice is that of St. Gregory of Nyssa (4th century), who wrote to a disciple, "When the Lord invites the b lest to their inheritance in the Kingdom of Heaven, he does not include a pilgrimage to Jerusalem among their good deeds." Two Christian voices; two Christian views of Jerusalem. For Christians, the sanctity of Jerusalem derives wholly from the events associated with the life, death, and resurrection of the Savior in that city. Historically speaking, however, there is no evidence of any particular sanctity attached to Jerusalem by Christians until the 4th century, and it is only then that we encounter the first recorded account of a Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Recent scholarship has focused on the ecclesiastical struggle in 4th-century Christianity between those who affirmed the holiness of Jerusalem and those who tended to play it down. As P.W.L. Walker writes, "Jerusalem and the 'holy places' showed from the outset that, despite their capacity to be focuses for Christian unity, they also had great potential for division." Walker lays stress on the "largely negative and dismissive" views of Eu sebius, bishop of Caesarea, in Palestine (c. 260-340), regarding Jerusalem's holiness. Eusebius's opinion may have derived in part from competition between his episcopal see and that of Jerusalem. Beyond that, it has been argued, his view was born of a desire to combat an incorrect emphasis on the physical, earthly Jerusalem -- an error he attributed to the Jews. By contrast, and in opposition to Eusebius, Bishop Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 320-386) maintained that the "prerogative of all good things was in Jerusalem." That became, indeed, a dominant view in the church. Just as Eusebiu s's somewhat negative view of Jerusalem has been connected to his attitude toward Jews, the more affirmative Christian attitude to Jerusalem in the early Middle Ages was also bound up with hostility to the Jews. According to Amnon Linder, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "The complete destruction of Jewish Jerusalem and its transformation into a Christian city, with the resultant expulsion, dispersion, and subjugation of the Jews, w as seen as a Divine punishment and as an essential stage on mankind's road to complete salvation." The triumph of the Christian theological view of Jerusalem's holiness was, however, an outcome not only of debate among th e church fathers, but also of the political triumph of the emperor Constantine, who ruled Jerusalem from 324 to his death in 337. The celebrated journey of his mother, Helena, to Jerusalem to identify the sites of the cru cifixion and resurrection marked a turning point in the Christian history of the city. The Anastasis (later known as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), erected over the reputed tomb of Jesus at Constantine's command and d edicated in 335, replaced a temple to Aphrodite at the same location. Like so many other holy places and shrines in Jerusalem, the Anastasis thus, from its very outset, gave physical expression to competitive religious sp irit -- in this case, between Christianity and paganism. With Helena's visit, Jerusalem became firmly established as a center of veneration and pilgrimage for Christians. The Itinerarium Burdigalense, an account of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from Bordeaux in 333, is one of the e arliest examples of what became a common literary genre. Christian glorification of Jerusalem was briefly challenged in 363, when the pagan emperor Julian the Apostate proposed to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. But afte r his death in battle that year, the process resumed with even greater momentum. It was in full flood by the last two decades of the century, when Egeria, probably a Spanish nun, wrote a narrative of her pilgrimage to Jer usalem -- still widely read today. External financial support for Christian institutions in Jerusalem, as for Jewish ones, is a longstanding feature of the city's history, in the case of the Christians extending back to the Byzantine period. During the fir st period of Muslim rule over the city, non-Muslims almost certainly still formed a majority of the population of the city. At one point in the early Arab period, there is even said to have been a Christian governor of t he province. On Christmas Day 800 -- coronation day of Charlemagne in Rome -- the new emperor is reported to have received the key to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the flag of the holy city as tokens of respect fro m the Patriarch of Jerusalem (or, according to another account, from the Muslim Caliph Harun al-Rashid). Charlemagne and his son Louis built a number of new Christian institutions in Jerusalem. That construction work gave rise to some conflict. In 827, for example, Muslims complained that Christians had built a bigger dome over a church than that over the Muslim shrine of the Dome of the Rock. Similarly, competition in pilgrimages, a feat ure of religious and commercial life in the city throughout the ages and into modern times, is recorded very early. The pilgrimages and the holy days with which they were associated were frequently occasions of communal v iolence. On Palm Sunday in 937 or 938, a Christian procession was attacked and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was burned to the ground. On Pentecost in 966, a number of churches were pillaged. And on September 28, 1009, the Holy Sepulchre was again destroyed, by order of the mad Caliph al-Hakim. It was not rebuilt until 1048 -- and then only partially. The conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusader forces of Godfrey de Bouillon, on July 15, 1099, inaugurated a new period of terror against Muslims and Jews, all of whom were driven out of the city, their mosques and synagogues destroyed. The Muslim shrines on the Temple Mount were turned into Christian churches. The Crusader kings carved the city into separate districts based on the nationality of the Christian settlers, the knightly orders, a nd the various eastern Christian communities. The Orthodox Patriarch was packed off to Constantinople, and the Latins (Roman Catholics) assumed the praedominium (right of pre-eminence) over the holy places. After the final ejection of the Crusaders from Jerusalem, in 1244, Christians were compelled to translate their conception of Jerusalem from an earthly to a heavenly sphere. Christian pilgrimages, however, continued: Chau cer's Wife of Bath went to Jerusalem three times. And books of Laudes Hierosolymitanae (praises of Jerusalem) were produced in large quantities. The Christian struggle for Jerusalem now assumed a new form. Having lost the war against the Infidel, Christians embarked on a war against each other. Now began in earnest the great contest between the Eastern and Western churches for control of the holy places, above all the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem, and the Church of the Nativity, in Bethlehem. Unabl e to agree among themselves, the squabbling Christian sects were compelled by the Muslim authorities, in or before 1289, to hand over the keys of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to a Muslim family for safekeeping. When t he last Crusader fortress in Palestine, at Acre, fell in 1291, the only remaining Latin institutional presence in Palestine was that of the Franciscans, who had arrived in 1217. In the early 14th century, Pope Clement VI appointed them to the "Custody of the Holy Land" (Custodia Terrae Sanctae). That little outpost of Roman Christianity saw as its primary task the battle against the pretensions of the Eastern churches to proprietorship of the holy places. It fought by every means to uphold the enduring rights in Jerusalem of the true Rome. The fight carried on into modern times and, in modified form, endures still. It has colored every aspect of Christian life in Jerusalem, as well as the diplomacy of the Christian powers in relation to the holy city. Thus for Christians, as for Jews, though in different ways, Jerusalem was both a symbol of unity and a fault line of profound internal schism. Two Muslim traditions. The first is a statement attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, according to which he said, "He who performs the pilgrimage to Mecca and visits my grave [in Medina] and goes forth to fight [in a holy w ar] and prays for me in Jerusalem -- God will not ask him about what he [failed to perform of the prescriptions] imposed on him." The second tradition concerns Umar, the second Muslim caliph, who reigned at the time of the first Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, in 638. Umar, it is said, was in a camel enclosure when two men passed by. He asked where th ey came from and they said Jerusalem. Umar hit them with his whip and said, "Have you performed a pilgrimage like the pilgrimage to the Kaaba [in Mecca]?" They said, "No, O Commander of the Faithful, we came from such and such a territory and passed [Jerusalem] by and prayed there." To which Umar said, "Then so be it," and let them go. Two Muslim voices; two Muslim views of Jerusalem. For Muslims, the holiness of Jerusalem derives primarily from its identification with the "further mosque" (al-masjid al-aqsa), mentioned in the Koran as the place to which the Prophet was carried on his "night journey" f rom Mecca. From Jerusalem he ascended to the seventh heaven. There is some evidence, however, to suggest that the attribution of sanctity to Jerusalem was, at least in part, connected to the city's central position in the two precursor religions that Islam claimed to supersede. Acc ording to Muslim tradition, Jerusalem was the first qibla (the direction of prayer) before it was changed to Mecca in 624. The practice is not attested to in the Koran, but it is ingrained in Muslim tradition -- and has s urvived within living memory in the practice of some elderly worshippers in the Dome of the Rock. In the earliest period of Islam, there appears to have been a tendency to emphasize the holiness of Mecca and Medina and to stress the importance of pilgrimages to those cities rather than to Jerusalem. There were also, h owever, some contrary views, and it was not until the second Islamic century (719-816 of the Christian era) that there developed a general acceptance of the holiness of all three cities. A decisive point came during the c aliphate of Abd al-Malik b. Marwan (685-705). He was engaged in conflict with a rival caliph, Abd Allah b. al-Zubayr, who was installed at Mecca. Abd al-Malik built Jerusalem's most impressive surviving religious monument , the Dome of the Rock -- often wrongly called the "Mosque of Umar": It is, in fact, a shrine, not a mosque, and has nothing to do with Umar. One authority, Richard Ettinghausen, an Islamic-art historian, has argued that the Dome of the Rock was not merely a memorial to the ascension of the Prophet: "Its extensive inscriptions indicate that it is a victory monument commemorating triumph over the Jewish and Christian religions." The great Hungarian orientalist Ignaz Goldziher argued that Abd al-Malik's motive in building the shrine and reaffirming the city's sanctity was to compete with the rival Meccan caliph and divert the pilgrim trade to his own domini ons. That view has been widely accepted, although S.D. Goitein, the distinguished scholar of Islamic-Jewish relations, who worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., disagreed, suggesting that Abd al-M alik's object was to create a structure that could match the magnificent churches of Jerusalem and other towns in geographical Syria. What unites all those interpretations is the attribution of an underlying competitive m otive to the caliph. The Arabic name of the city, al-Quds ("the Holy"), first appears only in the late 10th century. Surprisingly, the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders was greeted, at first, by Muslim indifference rather than fervor for its recapture. Even those Muslims who called for a holy war against the invading Franks refrain ed, with few exceptions, from stressing the sanctity of Jerusalem -- which seems in that period to have been neither widely diffused nor deeply implanted in Muslim thought. A change of attitude emerged only in the mid-12t h century. As so often in the history of Jerusalem, heightened religious fervor may be explained in large measure by political necessity. In the 1140s, Zenki, ruler of Mosul and Aleppo, with his son and successor Nur al-D in, called for an all-out war against the Crusader state. Their official propagandists consequently placed a sudden emphasis on the holiness of Jerusalem in Islam. That tendency was further accentuated under the leadershi p of Saladin, who used the sanctity of Jerusalem as a means of cowing potential opponents. In the late 12th century, the idea of the holy city was invoked no less in internal Muslim quarrels than in the external conflict with Christendom. The Muslim reconquest of Jerusalem, on October 2, 1187, was greeted with an outburst of enthusiasm and rejoicing in the Islamic world. Saladin's victory was hailed in letters, poems, and messages of cong ratulation. During the following years, the literature in praise of Jerusalem (Fadail Bayt al-Maqdis) was hugely amplified and extended. Muslims were encouraged to resettle there or to go on pilgrimage. Returning pilgrims carried to their homes the concept of the sanctity of Jerusalem. Henceforth, Muslim rule over the city came to be regarded as a veritable act of faith. In 1191, Saladin wrote to Richard the Lion-Hearted, in the course of armistice negotiations, that even if he (Saladin) were personally disposed to yield the city, the crusading English king "should not imagine that its surrender would be possible; I would not dare even to utter the word in front of the Muslims." Jerusalem was nevertheless returned to th e Christians by the Treaty of Jaffa in 1229. Under that agreement, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Nazareth were handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, though the Muslims were permitted to retain their holy places there. At the same time, the walls of Jerusalem were demolished so that it would no longer serve as a fortified point. The result was that, for many years, the city was vulnerable to military attack and to raids from nom ads. The treaty was to last for 10 years. After that, fighting broke out again, and, in 1244, the city was sacked by invading Kharezmian Tartars. Only after 1260 was order restored under the Mamluks. Under Mamluk rule, Jerusalem was not a place of any political importance. The division of the city into four quarters -- Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and Armenian -- had its origins in this period. Islamic institutions were established and the Muslim character of the city enhanced, though, unlike the Christians, Muslims tolerated the presence of other faiths. Religious groups tended to settle around their most important shrines and holy pla ces: Muslims north and west of the Haram al-Sharif (literally "noble sanctuary" -- the name given to the Temple Mount); Armenians in the southwest, near their Cathedral of St. James; the other Christians in the northwest, near the Holy Sepulchre; and the Jews in the south, near the Western Wall. By the dawn of the modern era, divided Jerusalem was a geographical as well as a spiritual fact. So we see that within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam there have been countervailing positive and negative tendencies regarding Jerusalem -- and that, in each case, political considerations have played a significant part in the affirmation or qualification of Jerusalem's holiness. Competition among the faiths has repeatedly focused on Jerusalem. Each has tried to outbid the other two in claiming Jerusalem as a central religious symbol, o ften by means of hyperbolic special pleading. Yet each religion has been ambivalent or fractured in its relationship to Jerusalem -- in how it has seen the city's degree of holiness, its holy places, and its function in t his world and the next. These lines of division have determined the history of the earthly city in the modern period. This cautionary tale should serve as a warning to those who would invoke religious fervor in support of political claims to Jerusalem. Of course, any settlement must make provision for the legitimate spiritual interests o f all three faiths. But those can be met without impairing the longstanding principle of the "status quo," traditionally applied to Jerusalem in religious disputes. Muslims already control the Haram al-Sharif. Every Israe li government since 1967 has recognized their right to do so; none has sought to impose direct Israeli control; none has permitted Jewish extremists, hoping to prepare for the rebuilding of the Temple, to establish a foot hold. Christians control all of their holy places and no longer seek to use them as stalking-horses for claims of sovereignty over Palestine. Nor does the Vatican any longer seek the internationalization of Jerusalem (a e uphemism for what would, in effect, have been Christian control of the city). As for the Jewish holy place, the Western Wall: That is securely in Israeli hands, and Palestinian representatives, in talks with Israelis in r ecent years, have accepted that it should remain so. At his final meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators, on December 23, 2000, President Clinton proposed the application to Jerusalem of "the general principle that Arab areas are Palestinian and Jewish ones are Is raeli." That, he suggested, should apply to the Old City. In subsequent discussions at the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba, the negotiators made significant progress toward agreement on the outstanding issues regarding a permanent settlement both of the Arab-Israeli dispute, in general, and of the problem of Jerusalem, in particular. That progress has been cast aside as a result of the continuing Palestinian intifada and the Israeli response. But sooner or later, since neither side can totally defeat the other, the two will have to return to the negot iating table. Jerusalem will once more be on the agenda for discussion. Israel has claimed since 1967 to have "unified" the city. Yet no city in the world today is more deeply divided -- politically, socially, religiously . Neither side wishes to see a wall re-erected between Jewish and Arab areas, as existed from 1949 to 1967. The population of the city today, including Arab and Jewish areas beyond the city limits but within its sociogeog raphic region, is approximately half-and-half Jewish and Arab. Somehow, a way must be found to enable people to live together -- but the task is not helped by the trahison des clercs of those scholars who help stir up religious emotions to assert political claims. "The religious mind will not easily relinquish its hold on the sacred ground of mystery and miracle," Edward Gibbon warned in a passage on the Crusades in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "But the holy wars which have been waged in every climate of the globe, from Egypt to Livonia, and from Peru to Hindostan, require the support of some more general and flexible tenet." Of course, the tenet to which Gibbon, a child of the Enlightenment, referred wa s reason. The faithful may scoff. But does not reason's still, small voice, even in this unreasonable age, have some place in the search for a solution to this most intractable of conflicts? Bernard Wasserstein is a professor of history at the University of Glasgow and president of the Jewish Historical Society of England. This essay is adapted from Divided Jerusalem: The Struggle for the Holy City, being pub lished this month by Yale University Press. 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