Michael L. Satlow

Then and Now

temple

The Temple Mount: Conference Report

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I have spent much of the last month attending conferences.  Fun, but tiring.  But fun.

Let me offer a few thoughts on one of them,  “Marking the Sacred: ​The Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem,” which took place at Providence College on June 5-7, 2017.  The conference involved about thirty scholars who discussed the archaeology and significance of the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim perspectives.  Given the intensely political nature of this topic, it was refreshing to be able to engage in a sustained civil, critical, and productive discussion that crossed ideological, political, and religious fault-lines.  Tremendous credit goes to the organizer, Professor Joan Branham, for creating such an environment.

I was unable to attend the last day, but through the first two there were a few leitmotifs that struck me:

1. There was a temple on the Temple Mount.  Now, this might be rather obvious but both modern political discourse and a recent kerfuffle over an inaccurate article in the New York Times a couple of years ago (for my own response to this, see here) led to review of the various kinds of evidence that demonstrate that a Jewish temple existed on this site.  For example, Jodi Magness discussed the literary evidence; Shmuel Gibson the archaeological evidence that can be gleaned from archival sources; and Yuval Branch some of the extant archaeological finds.  It was fascinating to see a discussion of a photograph of a piece of mosaic floor found on the Temple Mount and published long ago (picture above).  While this mosaic floor almost certainly was not from the Jewish temple, there was uncertainty about whether it could be part of an ancient church built on the site or was put in later by the Umayyads.  It was also heartening for me to hear Sari Nusseibeh explicitly condemn the attempts to deny that there was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount.

2.  It is a bit misleading to speak of a single “Second Temple.”  There was an original “second” temple that according to literary sources was renovated.  That was followed by what must have been another renovation in the Hellenistic period.  The Hasmoneans then either renovated or reconstructed the temple after they took control in the mid-second century BCE; Lawrence Schiffman argued that the plan of that temple is preserved in Mishnah Middot.  And then, of course, Herod extensively reconstructed the temple.  There was more than one “Second Temple.”

3.  The Temple Mount has always been a political football.  After its destruction, Romans and Christians had a stake in keeping it desolate: the desolation was a living testament to the supercession of Judaism.  This is highlighted by the Christian building program in Jerusalem in the fourth century and beyond.  Thus, as discussed especially by Robert Ousterhout, Jon Seligman, and Tracy Thorpe, the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre intentionally was meant to create a contrast with the devastated Temple Mount.  Christian supercessionism was deliberately etched into the urban landscape.  This very downgrading of the Temple Mount created a strange and newly competitive dynamic when Muslims gained control of and began to build on the site.  Michael Press has an informative post on this issue.

4.  Given the impossibility (and undesirability) of actually digging in the Temple Mount, there are emerging new approaches to the evidence that is available.  Ancient lumber, for example, can be analyzed for age and provenance.  Most interesting to me was the approach to ancient garbage, which can provide some insight (as discussed by Helena Roth) into pilgrimage at the site.

A fuller record of the papers can be found at twitter using the handle: #templemountharam.  A volume of the papers is forthcoming.

Telling the Story of the Holocaust in Germany. Or Not.

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German soldiers reacting to footage of the Holocaust
http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/german-soldiers-forced-watch-footage-concentration-camps-1945/

It must be a daunting task to memorialize the Holocaust. The fact is, there is no real way to do this right. No matter how good your representation, in whatever medium, you know that you will face harsh, withering criticism. There is simply no way around this. The Holocaust is too raw and has too many dimensions to capture and there will always be people – a sizable number of good, well-intentioned people – who stand read to take you to task for what you miss.

I recently had the opportunity to see the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. The above ground monument is powerful. Consisting of an undulating field of stone pillars that progress from shorter to taller, it first evokes the tombs of Jerusalem graveyards before giving way to a Kafkaesque set of higher pillars that is disorienting as you walk through them. When I was there a group of children were playing hide and seek among the pillars, which I totally understood (might I have done the same at that age?) even if at the same time it made me slightly nauseous. And the placement, so close to the government buildings, the Brandenburg Gate, the old dividing line between East and West, the additional monuments to those slaughtered by the Nazis, and the government buildings gives it an additional punch.

I went downstairs into the exhibition, located in the area of a the Nazis’ bunker system. The exhibition mixes emotional power with unvarnished fact. There is a straightforward, unapologetic narrative of the efforts at extermination and a powerful exhibition of written fragments of Jews who would soon be killed by the Nazis. A room devoted to the doomed fates of Jewish families from across Europe also put a human face on the Holocaust.

What I missed, though – and here I wonder if I just am asking for too much – is the how and why. Not how the extermination was carried out; there was plenty about that. How did the Germans, for whom this exhibit was built, come to treat their own (as well as Jews elsewhere) so murderously? While I know that there is no single “right” answer to this question, this is the question at the heart of the Holocaust (and perhaps the division of Germany into East and West) and I doubt anyone could leave the Memorial without asking it.  Yet I don’t know if anything in the exhibition would help anyone to answer it.

Earlier in my trip to Germany I visited the city historical museum in Potsdam. There was a panel dealing with the treatment of the Jewish community there. That exhibition was totally appropriate. It was factual and unapologetic. As far as I could see, though, it was also the first and only mention of Jews as part of the city’s narrative. Jews, and the relationships they had with Germans, just seemed to float unmoored, alien to the essential history of the city.

The Germans that I meet are extraordinarily sensitive to this issue, in a good way. They are not responsible for what happened, or at least not any more than many Americans are for the way that their ancestors treated their slaves. Both cases bring to mind the slogan “truth and justice”, and make me wonder what that really entails.

There Was a Temple on the Temple Mount

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I have many friends who find the New York Times’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be “anti-Israel.”  By this, I think that they mean that given a (surprisingly large) number of possible narratives through which to present a news story, the Times often picks one that lies somewhere within the Palestinian spectrum.  I never really bought this argument.  The Times to me reads somewhat to the right of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.  While the Times maintains a fairly consistent bias, that bias would fit well within the current Israeli spectrum, and not even all that close to the left edge.  So I have not always agreed with the coverage, but it has rarely riled me.  Today’s article by Rick Gladstone, though, Historical Certainty Proves Elusive at Jerusalem’s Holiest Place, was so misleading and confused that it really got my goat.

The article claims that there is no definitive evidence that the two ancient Jewish temples stood on the present day Temple Mount.  The article strongly implies that this remains a live historical controversy.  The problem with posing the issue that way is that it confuses several distinct historical questions.  Once those questions are teased apart, it is clear that there is actually very little disagreement among professional historians about most of them.  These questions are:

  • Did a Jewish temple stand on the present day Temple Mount?  Yes.  This is as historically certain a fact as one can get in the study of ancient history.  The Temple Mount was built by Herod beginning at the end of the first century BCE – the Western Wall is the western retaining wall of that reshaping of the natural hill – and on top of it were a number of structures that belonged to the Jewish temple.  These included courtyards, altars, and the Holy of Holies.  Now it is true (and has long been recognized even in Jewish law) that we do not know precisely where on the Temple Mount those structures stood, but there is no question that they stood there.
  • Prior to Herod’s renovation of the temple, did it stand at this site?  Almost certainly.  I would give it a 98% possibility.  The second temple was built around 520 BCE and underwent a few renovations before Herod gave it a major overhaul.  If Herod moved the site of the temple we would know, both from the extensive archaeological excavations conducted all around the temple as well from literary sources.  People notice stuff like that.
  • Was the second temple built on the same site as the first?  Here there is scholarly uncertainty.  The first temple was destroyed in 586 BCE along with the entire city of Jerusalem.  When Jews returned from Babylonia to rebuild the temple, were they careful to find the site of the old structure, clear the rubble, and build it on the same exact spot?  It seems likely, but this we really don’t know.  The question is further complicated by the biblical record, in which God never tells Solomon precisely where in Jerusalem he is to build a temple.  It is possible that the precise spot did not matter very much to the Israelites at this time.  If the first temple did not stand within the confines of the present Temple Mount, though, it would have been within a couple of hundred meters.

The historical issues are thus both more complex and far more interesting than Gladstone implies.  But this article is not really about history, it’s about politics.  For some Jews and Muslims, this history really matters: it stakes claims to this plot of land.  Yet to my mind ancient history can never add clarity or provide a solution to the very real and disturbing conflict presently being played out.  It is just too great a burden for history to bear.  Israelis, Jews, Palestinians, Arabs, Christians, and Muslims (overlapping groups that are themselves quite internally diverse) all have legitimate claims and grievances.  To admit the simple historical truth that there was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount in no way lessens Palestinian claims or grievances or supports Israeli claims to sovereignty.  Denying it equally serves no useful purpose.  By encouraging a broad readership to focus on the ancient history, and by distorting history in order to promote specific claims, stories like this bring us all only further away from peace.