A new upbeat biography of Jerusalem’s Old City and its four quarters
Review by David Eimer
One of Jerusalem’s oddities is its inauspicious location: sited away from the sea and rivers, and any obvious sources of wealth or trade and overlooked by scrubby hills that render it vulnerable to attack. But Jerusalem’s significance is entirely religious: inside the Old City are the holiest sites of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Without them, Jerusalem is just a sprawling and not very attractive provincial town to which most travellers would give a wide swerve.
Matthew Teller’s focus in this illuminating and deeply researched book is the Old City, the walled area in disputed East Jerusalem that’s divided into four quarters: Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Armenian. That carving up of the Old City is one of the legacies of British colonial rule in the former Palestine, and is as artificial as the restoration work done on the Old City in the aftermath of the First World War by the English architect Charles Ashbee, best known as a pioneer of the Arts and Crafts Movement.
Teller’s approach is far more nuanced. He takes the many gates of the Old City as starting points for his chapters and then explores the communities living near them. What this reveals is the sheer diversity and complexity of the place, where West and North African Muslims, the Dom – the gypsies of the Middle East – Sufis, Ethiopian Christians and Copts live alongside stateless Palestinians, who make up the majority of the population, a small Armenian community and the Jews who started to move back to the Old City after Israel captured East Jerusalem in the Six Day War in 1967.
There is a wealth of stories here as Teller delves into this city within a city. His enthusiasm for his subject is palpable and, at times, he’s a bit too eager to disappear down historical rabbit holes, some of which are fascinating, others obscure. But Teller writes in an accessible, upbeat style and is surely correct to state that, ultimately, residents, pilgrims and visitors, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish, look at Jerusalem and see only what they want to see.
