The 19th century saw the rise of a new genre: the guidebook for tourists, associated above all with the Baedekers of Germany. In a survey of several guidebooks and travelogues written by Europeans about their visits to the Holy Land, Jerold Auerbach cites the description of the Western Wall from Reverend D.A. Randall’s Egypt, Sinai, and the Holy Land:
At “the Jews’ Place of Wailing,” Randall noted that Friday afternoon was “the special time” for “these sorrow-stricken children of Abraham . . . to congregate here and weep for the departed glory of their city and temple.” He was riveted by the “venerable old men” who “seemed overpowered by their deep and apparently heartfelt emotions; their strong frames trembled, the great tears rolled like rain drops down their cheeks, and they wept aloud.” He was so deeply touched that “almost before I was conscious of it, I was weeping with them.” Amid their “tears and lamentations,” Randall saw “the traces of an omniscient and overruling God.”
Less sympathetic was the account of the American writer Charles W. Elliott:
Elliott described Jerusalem as “a Muslim and Oriental town” with a Jewish Quarter that “a man may smell far off.” Its alleys and courts, “unspeakably offensive to eye and nostril, . . . reek with decaying fruit, dead animals, and human filth . . . in the midst of which . . . innumerable armies of rats and lizards race and fight.” Around its edifices “reek and starve about 4,000 Israelites, many of them living in a state of filth . . . unlike the condition of their clean, bright ancestors.”
More about: Land of Israel, Ottoman Palestine, Western Wall
