In the mid-19th century, archaeologists and adventurers—mostly British—began arriving in the Holy Land, eager to find what one of them called “the real city of Jerusalem” hidden beneath the modern city. Their quests for the Ark of the Covenant and other high-profile treasures are among the subjects in Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City. In his review, Matti Friedman describes the problem with their search:
The explorers were inflamed by the possibility of grand findings from Jewish antiquity—palaces, figures, gold, the treasures of Solomon’s Temple!—to rival the ones from Egypt, Assyria, and Greece that were then filling up the storerooms of the British Museum. Much of this betrayed a misunderstanding of Jewish history, as a few lonely souls knew even at the time. The archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, for example, pointed out that the Jewish aversion to graven images meant the expeditions were unlikely to find statues. Even at their height, the Jewish kingdoms of the Bible were small, and monumental treasures would be hard to come by. . . . No one listened, but he’d identified the key problem with much of the Holy Land archaeology enterprise. Using the Bible’s words to locate the monuments and treasures of the Jews misses the point: the words are the treasures of the Jews.
As interesting as this story is, Lawler quickly abandons it for more recent history, as suggested by the book’s sensational title. Here, as Friedman points, Lawler not only commits basic errors, but betrays a more fundamental understandings of Jerusalem’s history:
By the end of World War I, he writes, “Yiddish-speaking Europeans” dominated Jerusalem, and “in many ways they had more in common with European Christian colonizers than with the Jews who had lived in Jerusalem for generations.” Whether you think the early Zionist pioneers fleeing pogroms had anything to do with European colonizers, they spoke Hebrew and tended to avoid Jerusalem. The “Yiddish-speaking Europeans” of the city at the time were still mostly impoverished ultra-Orthodox Jews who had nothing to do with European colonizers or with modern Zionism and its desire for a Jewish state.
[Such] problems are linked to a more central one affecting many Western observers, with their narrative of a city “sacred to three faiths”—namely, a failure to understand the unique centrality of Jerusalem in Judaism or to admit that the city is of interest to other religions only because it was sacred to Jews first. It’s impossible to understand the city without grasping that Jerusalem has existed at the center of Jewish consciousness since Rome was a village on the Tiber and that it has that role in no other religion. Christianity cares about Jerusalem because Jesus and his followers were Jews who orbited the Jewish ritual center on the Temple Mount. Islam built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount because that was the site of the Jewish temple. Both imperial religions have more important cities elsewhere but came here with architects and stonemasons to create a physical expression of a claim central to both—that they had supplanted the numerically insignificant but historically imposing natives of Judea. That’s the fact that exists “under Jerusalem.”
The [current Palestinian] aversion to archaeology is also related to the common, and politically dangerous, knowledge that if you dig past the city’s Islamic and Christian layers, what you’re going to find is Jewish.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/jewish-history/12261/the-treasure-of-the-jews/