As legend has it, the 16th-century Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent issued a royal edict (or firman) allowing Jews to pray at the Western Wall. But a record of this firman has never been located. To further complicate matters, in the early 20th century Itamar Ben-Avi—whose father, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah, was responsible for the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language—wrote extensively of a later, similar firman, issued by Sultan Abdulaziz, who ruled from 1861 to 1876. This too has never surfaced in the Ottoman archives. Nadav Shragai describes the quest for these mysterious documents, and cites the best evidence available:

[T]he British-appointed International Commission of Inquiry for the Wailing Wall (1930) brought relative order out of the chaos. The committee was established after the dispute over the Western Wall and the riots of 1929 that erupted in its wake. The commission generated tens of thousands of pages of documents and protocols that are now stored in the Central Zionist Archives. . . . The three members of the committee . . . mention no fewer than five firmans that the [two] sides claimed to have existed. They do not include the earliest one from Suleiman the Magnificent, but they look into the existence and substance of others.

The firmans mentioned by the commission date from 1840, 1880, 1889, 1893, and 1911. According to the commission’s findings, none of them explicitly mentions the Western Wall, but they do state that . . . there would be no interference with the visits of Jews to pray [at] places overseen by the Chief Rabbinate. It was obvious to the commission that this included the Western Wall. The commission said it had translations of the firmans from 1840, 1889, and 1911. The authenticity of the 1840 firman, the committee writes, “cannot be doubted.” . . .

The commission even stated that the Muslim Waqf [the religious authority that still administers the Temple Mount] saw these decrees as an expression of a positive policy toward the Jews and their freedom of religion, and there was no reason to believe that the Jews who prayed at the Western Wall were cases of exceptional tolerance. Official statements of that policy, the commission said, were at least as important as the firman of 1889, [as the Waqf’s decision was officially] registered with the Shariah court.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.