Jerusalem - City of Peace?

The following article was written for and appears in the July Issue of Sussex Jewish News

Jerusalem – City of Peace?

This year the first eighteen days of July coincide with one of the most sombre periods in the Jewish calendar: On the 17th of Tammuz in the year 586 BCE the Babylonians breached the walls of the Temple in Jerusalem built by King Solomon (c. 961-922), and the Temple was finally destroyed three weeks later on Tishah B’Av – the ninth day of the month of Av – which falls this year on the 17th/18th July.

Although scholars disagree about the etymology of Yerushalayim - a word that may not even have Hebrew origins - nevertheless, in the popular imagination, Jerusalem, is the ‘city of peace’. And yet, again and again, throughout the course of our history, the ‘city of peace’ has been the centre of conflict and violence. The second Temple, completed with the support of the new Imperial overlords, the Persians, around the year 515 - a quarter of a century after the return of the exiles from Babylon - survived the conquest of Alexander the Great in 333, but was later converted into a pagan shrine by King Antiochus IV in 167, who ruled over Judea after the Greek empire split into northern and southern dominions following Alexander’s death.

We all know the story of how the Maccabees led a revolt, and retook the Temple in 164, purifying and re-dedicating it. But the troubles of the Temple and Jerusalem did not end there. One hundred years later, the Roman general, Pompey, captured Jerusalem, and, and less than a century after that, following the Jewish war against the Romans which began four years earlier, Jerusalem was put to the torch and the second Temple was destroyed in 70 CE.

Our people continued to live under Roman rule for centuries, and when the Emperor, Constantine, adopted Christianity in the early 300s, we became subject to a double oppression. Then, with the rise of Islam in the seventh century, and the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, Jerusalem became a centre not of one, not of two, but of three faiths. It was not until the twelfth century, that successive Christian crusades attempted to reclaim Jerusalem from Muslim domination.

The object of competing imperial and religious ambitions for millennia, how can Jerusalem become a ‘city of peace’? The word Yerushalayim can be read as ‘possession of peace’: Surely, the time has come to end the competition and for those who love Jerusalem to share it peacefully together.