Jerusalem is a wonderful city for hat-spotting. There are the black fedoras and other varieties worn by Hassidic and ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews, sometimes magnificent in height and breadth, and there is also an almost infinite gradation of birettas, hoods and bonnets and headgear defying easy definition worn by Christian clergy of various denominations. We had an ecclesiastical fashion show one afternoon while lingering in an alley leading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Unexpectedly, along came the King of Jordan’s cousin Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad on an official visit, proceeded by a dragoman who banged the ground with a staff and rather roughly pushed us out of the way, and accompanied by differently bearded and clothed representatives of Christendom. The latter were not fighting in an unseemly fashion as they occasionally still do over the right to various nooks and corners of the Holy Sepulchre — which contains the sites of both the crucifixion and the tomb of Christ — but beaming. The King of Jordan’s cousin, who was wearing elegant Arab robes and headdress, smiled amiably at my wife and daughter.
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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has often affronted visitors, especially ones from prissy northern Europe. In his epic history of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore notes that late medieval pilgrims ‘found that the church resembled a bazaar-cum-barbershop with stalls, shops, beds and large quantities of human hair’. Jacobean traveller George Sandys, in 1610, found the annual Easter ceremony of the Holy Fire ‘befitting better the ceremonies of Bacchus’. In the past there have been pitched battles between priests of different denominations; a fight in 1846 between Catholics and Greek Orthodox over which had the right to say mass first left 40 dead. The hair — the result of a belief that shaving oneself might lead to miraculous cure — has gone, as have the beds and stalls, but a general impression of darkness, crowding and chaos remains, also a constant dense queue to get into the sepulchre itself. My wife and daughter, wanting to attend mass there, went in at the designated time but couldn’t find the service amid the prevailing confusion. The Ethiopians, who were edged out during Ottoman times in the struggle for territory among competing clerical groups, have in a way the best of it. The compound which they now inhabit on the roof has a peaceful, spiritual air in comparison with the chaos below.
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The King of Jordan’s cousin was accompanied on his visit, it turned out, by the Grand Mufti of Egypt, Ali Gomaa. They had also gone to the Al-Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount and their joint appearance in Jerusalem caused quite a stir. There were those in the Muslim world who denounced it as a sop to Israel, regarding it as out of the question to go there under present circumstances. Others, including the Christian taxi driver who took us back to the airport, felt it was a gesture of solidarity with the Palestinians. The one undeniable deduction from the whole affair is that few events in Jerusalem — even a visit to venerable holy sites on a sunny afternoon — are straightforward. The place is, and frequently has been, criss-crossed by invisible forces of sanctity, enmity and prohibition.
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Through the centuries, beauty is the quality that travellers have frequently found in Jerusalem even when — as has happened on quite a few occasions — it has been in ruins, its population massacred or fled. Today it is divided between West Jerusalem, a largely modern Jewish city, and Palestinian East Jerusalem. The old town in the centre is encircled by bristling new settlements and looped by motorways. But miraculously, though even a casual visitor cannot fail to notice the electric political tension of the place, it is still picturesquely beautiful. Walking through the 14th-century Cotton Merchants’ Market, or down Al-Wad Road — one of the two main streets built by the Emperor Hadrian — is still a bit like inhabiting a watercolour by the Scottish painter David Roberts, from the 1830s.
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Toiling down the Mount of Olives one hot morning, we passed a sign reading ‘The Tombs of The Prophets’. Intrigued, we went in and explored an underground complex of burial chambers by candlelight. The burials are said, without much in the way of definite evidence, to include the prophets Zechariah, Haggai and Malachi. We were shown round by one of the family which has looked after the site for many years, a charming and dignified man with a splendid Ottoman moustache. He told us how he had sheltered there with his parents during the 1967 war. In Jerusalem there always seem to be many layers of history, even if it isn’t always clear what some of them are.
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Temple Mount, known to Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary, is Jerusalem’s most extraordinary place. The site of Solomon’s and Herod’s Temple, it is now the location of the spectacular 7th-century Dome of the Rock and the venerable Al-Aqsa mosque. Only one entrance is allowed to non-Muslims, and there we queued up in hot sun for airport-type security, which — though tedious — is understandable in view of the fact that few places on earth are more sacred to more than one religion, or more disputed. The transformation when we passed through the x-ray machine and climbed up was dramatic. Our wait had been close to a contemporary version of hell, slowly grilling among coachloads of international tourists; the Mount itself was pervaded by a sense of space, light, calm and tranquillity.