February 12, 2012 | National Post

3,000 Years of Mass Murder: Jerusalem’s Bloody History, and How It Shaped Us All

Seen by tourists, Jerusalem is a city of wonders. Seen by historians, it is a city of agonies.

Reading through the 3,000-year chronology presented in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s newly published Jerusalem: The Biography (excerpts from which will appear all this coming week on the Issues & Ideas pages of the National Post), one finds scarcely a century in which some substantial portion of the city’s population was not burned alive or crucified. During one 20-year stretch of Macedonian dominance in the 4th century AD, Jerusalem changed hands six times. In at least one case — Hadrian’s genocidal annihilation of the Jews following the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 AD — the scale of the slaughter approached that of modern industrial genocides.

Jerusalem’s status as a holy city didn’t win its residents mercy. It had the opposite effect: Warlords and empire-builders were drawn to loot the Jewish Temple and the homes of its wealthy clerical aristocracy. When besieged, the city often was bloated with pilgrims and festival-goers, who fell into butchery, cannibalism and derangement before the walls even had been breached. As Titus prepared to destroy the city in 70 AD with his four Roman legions, the historian Josephus described Jerusalem as “a wild beast gone mad which, for want of food, fell now upon eating its own flesh.”

In a prefiguring of Auschwitz, surviving Jerusalemites were collected in concentration camps by Titus’ men and filtered out, the strong from the weak. “The young and the handsome were sold as slaves, chosen to be killed fighting lions in the circus,” Montefiore writes. Thousands of Jews died this way, fighting animals and each other to the death.

Montefiore’s book reads, at times, like a script for a horror movie. Weeks after consuming it, macabre details stick in my mind — such as Fulcher of Chartres’ observation that the city stank of corpses for at least half a year after the Crusader slaughter of 1099. Yet there is a point to it all: The endless cycle of massacres, uprisings, siege and martyrdom that Montefiore describes shaped the religious world that survives to this day. The Abrahamic faiths, which arose to give explanation and purpose to our earthly horrors, all took their lifeblood, directly or indirectly, from the veins of the city’s victims.

When Nebuchadnezzar obliterated Jerusalem in 586 BC, he destroyed the Temple and everything around it — “the abomination that maketh desolate,” as the Book of Daniel described it. But he also took 20,000 Jews back to Babylon, whereupon they set about transforming their local faith into a uniform and portable set of written narratives and commandments.

In their fervent commitment to the one God, the Jews of this period also created the template for extreme self-sacrifice that we now more commonly associate with the Christian martyrs of the late Roman period, and with modern Islamic fanatics.

After the 167 BC sacking of Jerusalem by the Seleucids, the notorious emperor Antiochus ordered the Temple to be loaded up with pig’s meat, prostitutes and pagan idols. “An old man perished rather than eat pork,” Montefiore writes. “Women who circumcised their children were thrown with their babies off the walls of Jerusalem. The Torah was torn to shreds and burned publicly; everyone found with a copy was put to death. Yet the Torah, like the Temple, was worth more than life. These deaths created a new cult of martyrdom.”

Titus’ destruction of the Temple further shaped Jewish civilization, whose rabbis no longer could aspire even to their former status as leaders of a minor, besieged Middle Eastern theocracy. Instead, the fate of the Second Temple became a guiding lamentation for a bewildered, homeless and eternally victimized people.

But not for Titus’ rampaging legionnaires, Christianity probably would never have risen above the status of short-lived Levantine cult, just one of hundreds promoted by the steady stream of long-forgotten Jewish pseudo-prophets who preached in Jerusalem during the Herodian period. As Montefiore observes, it was the Temple’s destruction that caused Christians to believe “that Jews had lost the favour of God,” and to separate definitively from the mother faith. Five and half centuries later, Muhammad embraced more or less the same logic.

To this day, each of the Abrahamic faiths remains obsessed with Jerusalem, and in particular with the Temple Mount — the fabled site of Abraham’s binding of Isaac, and, in Montefiore’s words, “the superlative place for divine-human communication on earth.”

Judaism, Christianity and Islam also are united by the belief that Jerusalem is a portal to the “last days” originally foretold in the Book of Isaiah, a theme seized on by Jesus and his followers as the core of their Apocalyptic sect. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jews, and America’s fervent Christian Zionists all share an underlying belief that their mission on earth somehow involves laying the groundwork for supernatural events that will be centered on a few dozen acres in Jerusalem’s Old City.

Will Jerusalem witness yet another epic massacre in our lifetimes? Or has humanity learned anything since the days of Babylonians and Hittites?

Consider this: In June, 1967, when Israeli troops took Jerusalem’s Old City, the chief chaplain of the Israeli army urged his commanders to accelerate the arrival of the Messiah “by dynamiting the mosques on the Temple Mount.” It was a move that Titus, Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus all would have regarded as perfectly rational — expected, even. But IDF Jerusalem commander Uzi Narkiss immediately rejected the idea. In historical terms, the Israeli capture of Jerusalem ranks as one of the most bloodless power-shifts in the city’s history.

Progress? Definitely. A precedent for Ahmadinejad and Jerusalem’s other would-be conquerors? That’s more doubtful.

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— Jonathan Kay is Managing Editor for Comment at the National Post, and a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, D.C.

Issues:

Issues:

Israel

Topics:

Topics:

Christianity God Islam Israel Jerusalem Jewish people Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Middle East Muhammad Old City Temple Mount Washington