A Millennium-Old Arabic Inscription Acknowledging the Presence of a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem

While it has become a mainstay of Muslim anti-Israel propaganda to deny the historical Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and the very existence of the two Temples there, an obscure Arabic inscription serves as a reminder that it was not always thus, as Ilan Ben Zion writes:

The previously overlooked dedicatory inscription from the mosque of Umar in Nuba, a village some sixteen miles southwest of Jerusalem, mentions the village as an endowment for the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque. But what’s striking is that the Dome of the Rock is referred to in the text as “the rock of the Bayt al-Maqdis”—literally, “the Holy Temple”—a verbatim translation of the Hebrew term for the Jerusalem Temple that early Muslims employed to refer to Jerusalem as a whole and to the gold-domed shrine in particular. . . .

Israeli researchers, who presented their findings during a conference on Jerusalem archaeology last week, dated it to the 9th or 10th centuries CE, based on the Arabic writing’s orthography and formulation comparable to dedicatory inscriptions from mosques in Ramleh and Bani Naim. . . .

Further, medieval Muslim traditions surrounding the Dome of the Rock cited by the authors “identified the mount again and again with King David and with King Solomon’s Temple” and “understood the mount to be the ancient Temple rebuilt, the Quran the true faith, and the Muslims the true children of Israel.”

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: First Temple, History & Ideas, Islam, Jewish history, Temple Mount

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society