DAVID WALLACE Crisis in the Middle East – 4
Israel’s holy brew L
iving as an English-speaking Catholic in Jerusalem, even briefly, is not easy. Most newcomers seek out the Holy Sepulchre, and this proves instructive:
first you get lost, and then find yourself in a hole in the ground. Navigation through dense markets from Jaffa Gate, or along the Via Dolorosa from Lion Gate, requires spotting side-turnings that are easily missed. Once before the site, you are immediately aware of inter-Christian competition; this intensifies as you head down into the church proper. November 2008 saw full-scale fighting break out between Armenian and Greek Orthodox monks (yielding many YouTube postings, some of Turkish provenance). When Paul VI, during the first papal visit to Israel in 1964, sought permission to pray in the Calvary Chapel, he was refused, but his seeking permission was taken to reinforce Orthodox claims on the holiest space. Major incidents are not commonplace, but
memory of them lingers in the site’s everyday devotional intensity; the muezzin from the Mosque of Omar, looming above the square, adds new strains to the mix with amplified calls to prayer. Visitors, feeling some relief in reclimbing the stairs, may climb again to the Coptic Monastery of St Anthony, on Holy Sepulchre’s roof. But it is Islam, one realises, that controls the vertical axes of Jerusalem: the golden-domed Qubbat al-Sakhra, com- pleted in 691 and currently maintained by Jordanians, supplies the image of the city that dominates most guidebooks.
English-speaking Catholics will thus likely pursue alternative weekly options. The Franciscans who welcomed Margery Kempe of Lynn in 1414 still exercise co- or sub- custodianship of holy sites. The French Dominicans of St Etienne, like other Catholic orders with national affiliations, arrived in the late nineteenth century (attending the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire); their sung concelebrations prove as exquisite as only French liturgy can be. But the English Catholic service that visitors
are likeliest to find is that celebrated in the almost-new Chapel of Notre Dame, high up by Jaffa Gate. Forming part of a highly pros- perous, glass-and-chrome hotel complex, this chapel serves mostly passing pilgrims and full-time care workers, mainly Filipinos, released from their duties at the end of Shabbat.
10 | THE TABLET | 19 February 2011
Each Mass ends with a prayer for the Pope; passing priests are likely to be tagged as pos- sible celebrants. During autumn 2010, this role was played by Fr Sidney Griffith, of the Catholic University of America, who came as a congregant but was spotted as a priest by his habit of wearing grey socks. And so, through the autumn, this ad hoc Catholic congregation was treated to simple sermons by one of the world’s great experts in Arabic Christianity, Syriac monasticism and interfaith dialogue; week by week, through the gospel readings, Jesus draws nearer to Jerusalem. This church itself faces judgement, however, as an offshoot of the Legionaries of Christ and its disgraced leader, Fr Marcial Maciel. With this uncertain but sustaining ground- ing, then, I took the number 19 bus to meet my students at the Hebrew University. The bus heads past the pre-Raphaelite Holman Hunt’s house and an Ethiopian church, skirts the city walls of Suleiman the Magnificent, and then ploughs upwards and eastwards to Mount Scopus. To the right lie the Arab bus station, the mosques of Nablus Road, the Anglican Cathedral of St George, and the American Colony Hotel. To the left lies the Russian cathedral and streets swarming with black-hatted, ultra-orthodox Haredim. At the top of Mount Scopus, a Common- wealth Cemetery, beautifully tended by Muslim gardeners, contains the remains of Christian and Jewish young men who fought under Allenby during the First World War. The bus is finally swallowed into the bunker- like complex of the Mount Scopus campus. Down to the west lies the Dome of the Rock, dominating the city. Looking east, standing in Africa but looking at Asia (geologically speaking), you see the Jordanian mountains from which Moses could look, but not enter.
To outsiders, Israel can seem a place of sharp contrasts and divisions between Arab and Jew. But as one visiting Catholic professor of English found while living and teaching at the Hebrew University, it is a place of subtle but complex distinctions, both small and large
Posters on a West Bank wall proclaim as a martyr a suicide bomber. Photo: Reuters
My students, thanks to the pho-
netic qualities of Hebrew and Arabic, get the hang of Middle English surprisingly fast. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with its tour d’horizon of medieval Catholic gen- res, proves an exemplary pedagogical text: the “Prioress’ Tale” harbours anti-Semitism, the “Man of Law” caricatures Islam, and the
“Wife of Bath’s Prologue” occasions vigorous debate – would a wife really have spoken of her husband pissing on a wall? My course on pre-modern women draws mostly female students, plus a male intelli- gence officer from the army (enrolled, he jokingly said, “to study the enemy”). Gender theory, typically conflated with Women’s Studies, is a fragile plant here; limits to female participation in religious practices prove dif- ficult to negotiate. But there is scant sense that motherhood impedes the will to educa- tion. Children are everywhere in Israel. This holds true in both Jewish and Palestinian areas: to travel with children is to be seen as a more complete and intelligible person. Israeli students usually start university edu- cation when they are 24: men serve three years in the army (women generally two) and then head overseas to decompress, often in India. They receive no grants from the state to support their studies – a point that espe- cially grates when they see young Haredim receiving grants to study Torah, coupled with exemption from military service. This state of affairs sparked student protests all over Israel in the autumn, with rooftop tyre- burning at the Hebrew University; the mothers of students, especially, fail to see why their children should risk their lives to protect those who will not defend the country, nor – to speak of most Haredi men – do any paid work. The reasons for this strange state of affairs are historical. In the earliest years of statehood, Israel’s semi-secular military leaders proposed special provisions to replace those scholars of Torah lost in the Shoah; these men would perform, in effect, the work of reforming and sustaining Israel’s religious soul. But the rate of immigration, and of reproductive fertility, has led to these ultra-conservative groups –
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