thoroughfare as its name implies. Its historical portion is that steep
and often angled part between the Holy Sepulchre and the house of
Pilate, but we traversed the whole length of it to make our exit from
St. Stephen's Gate toward the Mount of Olives. It is only about
four hundred years ago that this street obtained the name of the Via
Dolorosa, and that the sacred “stations” on it were marked out for
the benefit of the pilgrim. It is a narrow lane, steep in places, having
frequent sharp angles, running under arches, and passing between gloomy
buildings, enlivened by few shops. Along this way Christ passed from
the Judgment Hall of Pilate to Calvary. I do not know how many times
the houses along it have been destroyed and rebuilt since their
conflagration by Titus, but this destruction is no obstacle to
the existence intact of all that are necessary to illustrate the
Passion-pilgrimage of our Lord. In this street I saw the house of Simon
the Cyrenian, who bore the cross after Jesus; I saw the house of
St. Veronica, from which that woman stepped forth and gave Jesus a
handkerchief to wipe his brow,—the handkerchief, with the Lord's
features imprinted on it, which we have all seen exhibited at St.
Peter's in Rome; and I looked for the house of the Wandering Jew, or
at least for the spot where he stood when he received that awful mandate
of fleshly immortality. In this street are recognized the several
“stations” that Christ made in bearing the cross; we were shown the
places where he fell, a stone having the impress of his hand, a pillar
broken by his fall, and also the stone upon which Mary sat when he
passed by. Nothing is wanting that the narrative requires. We saw also
in this street the house of Dives, and the stone on which Lazarus sat
while the dogs ministered unto him. It seemed to me that I must be in
a dream, in thus beholding the houses and places of resort of the
characters in a parable; and I carried my dilemma to a Catholic friend.
But a learned father assured him that there was no doubt that this is
the house of Dives, for Christ often took his parables from real life.
After that I went again to look at the stone, in a corner of a building
amid a heap of refuse, upon which the beggar sat, and to admire the
pretty stone tracery of the windows in the house of Dives.
At the end of the street, in a new Latin nunnery, are the remains of
the house of Pilate, which are supposed to be authentic. The present
establishment is called the convent of St. Anne, and the community is
very fortunate, at this late day, in obtaining such a historic site for
itself. We had the privilege of seeing here some of the original rock
that formed part of the foundations of Pilate's house; and there are
three stones built into the altar that were taken from the pavement of
Gabbatha, upon which Christ walked. These are recent discoveries; it
appears probable that the real pavement of Gabbatha has been found,
since Pilate's house is so satisfactorily identified. Spanning the
street in front of this convent is the Ecce Homo arch, upon which Pilate
showed Christ to the populace. The ground of the new building was until
recently in possession of the Moslems, who would not sell it for a less
price than seventy thousand francs; the arch they would not sell at all;
and there now dwells, in a small chamber on top of it, a Moslem saint
and hermit. The world of pilgrims flows under his feet; he looks from
his window upon a daily procession of Christians, who traverse the Via
Dolorosa, having first signified their submission to the Moslem yoke
in the Holy City by passing under this arch of humiliation. The hermit,
however, has the grace not to show himself, and few know that he sits
there, in the holy occupation of letting his hair and his nails grow.
From the house of the Roman procurator we went to the citadel of
Sultan Suleiman. This stands close by the Jaffa Gate, and is the most
picturesque object in all the circuit of the walls, and, although the
citadel is of modern origin, its most characteristic portion lays claim
to great antiquity. The massive structure which impresses all strangers
who enter by the Jaffa Gate is called the Tower of Hippicus, and also
the Tower of David. It is identified as the tower which Herod built and
Josephus describes, and there is as little doubt that its foundations
are the same that David laid and Solomon strengthened. There are no such
stones in any other part of the walls as these enormous bevelled blocks;
they surpass those in the Harem wall, at what is called the Jews'
Wailing Place. The tower stands upon the northwest corner of the old
wall of Zion, and being the point most open to attack it was most
strongly built.
It seems also to have been connected with the palace on Zion which David
built, for it is the tradition that it was from this tower that the king
first saw Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, when “it came to pass in an
eventide that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of
the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself;
and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.” On the other side
of the city gate we now look down upon the Pool of Bathsheba, in which
there is no water, and we are informed that it was by that pool that the
lovely woman, who was destined to be the mother of Solomon, sat when
the king took his evening walk. Others say that she sat by the Pool of
Gibon. It does not matter. The subject was a very fruitful one for the
artists of the Renaissance, who delighted in a glowing reproduction
of the biblical stories, and found in such incidents as this and the
confusion of Susanna themes in which the morality of the age could
express itself without any conflict with the religion of the age. It is
a comment not so much upon the character of David as upon the morality
of the time in which he lived, that although he repented, and no doubt
sincerely, of his sin when reproved for it, his repentance did not take
the direction of self-denial; he did not send away Bathsheba.
This square old tower is interiorly so much in ruins that it is not easy
to climb to its parapet, and yet it still has a guardhouse attached to
it, and is kept like a fortification; a few rusty old cannon, under the
charge of the soldiers, would injure only those who attempted to fire
them; the entire premises have a tumble-down, Turkish aspect. The view
from the top is the best in the city of the city itself; we saw also
from it the hills of Moab and a bit of the Dead Sea.
Close by is the Armenian quarter, covering a large part of what was once
the hill of Zion. I wish it were the Christian quarter, for it is the
only part of the town that makes any pretension to cleanliness, and it
has more than any other the aspect of an abode of peace and charity.
This is owing to its being under the government of one corporation, for
the Armenian convent covers nearly the entire space of this extensive
quarter. The convent is a singular, irregular mass of houses, courts,
and streets, the latter apparently running over and under and through
the houses; you come unexpectedly upon stairways, you traverse roofs,
you enter rooms and houses on the roofs of other houses, and it is
difficult to say at any time whether you are on the earth or in the
air. The convent, at this season, is filled with pilgrims, over three
thousand of whom, I was told, were lodged here. We came upon families of
them in the little rooms in the courts and corridors, or upon the roofs,
pursuing their domestic avocations as if they were at home, cooking,
mending, sleeping, a boorish but simple-minded lot of peasants.
The church is a large and very interesting specimen of religious
architecture and splendid, barbaric decoration. In the vestibule hang
the “bells.” These are long planks of a sonorous wood, which give
forth a ringing sound when struck with a club. As they are of different
sizes, you get some variation of tone, and they can be heard far enough
to call the inmates of the convent to worship. The interior walls are
lined with ancient blue tiles to a considerable height, and above them
are rude and inartistic sacred pictures. There is in the church much
curious inlaid work of mother-of-pearl and olive-wood, especially about
the doors of the chapels, and one side shines with the pearl as if it
were encrusted with silver. Ostrich eggs are strung about in profusion,
with hooks attached for hanging lamps.
The first day of our visit to this church, in one of the doorways of
what seemed to be a side chapel, and which was thickly encrusted with
mother-of-pearl, stood the venerable bishop, in a light rose-colored
robe and a pointed hood, with a cross in his hand, preaching to the
pilgrims, who knelt on the pavement before him, talking in a familiar
manner, and, our guide said, with great plainness of speech. The
Armenian clergy are celebrated for the splendor of their vestments,
and I could not but think that this rose-colored bishop, in his shining
framework, must seem like a being of another sphere to the boors before
him. He almost imposed upon us.
These pilgrims appeared to be of the poorest agricultural class of
laborers, and their costume is uncouth beyond description. In a side
chapel, where we saw tiles on the walls that excited our envy,—the
quaintest figures and illustrations of sacred subjects,—the clerks
were taking the names of pilgrims just arrived, who kneeled before them
and paid a Napoleon each for their lodging in the convent, as long
as they should choose to stay. In this chapel were the shoes of the
pilgrims who had gone into the church, a motley collection of foot-gear,
covering half the floor: leather and straw, square shoes as broad as
long, round shoes, pointed shoes, old shoes, patched shoes, shoes with
the toes gone, a pathetic gathering that told of poverty and weary
travel—and big feet. These shoes were things to muse on, for each
pair, made maybe in a different century, seemed to have a character
of its own, as it stood there awaiting the owner. People often, make
reflections upon a pair of shoes; literature is full of them. Poets have
celebrated many a pretty shoe,—a queen's slipper, it may be, or the
hobnail brogan of a peasant, or, oftener, the tiny shoes of a child;
but it is seldom that one has an opportunity for such comprehensive
moralizing as was here given. If we ever regretted the lack of a poet in
our party, it was now.
We walked along the Armenian walls, past the lepers' quarter, and
outside the walls, through the Gate of Zion, or the Gate of the Prophet
David as it is also called, and came upon a continuation of the plateau
of the hill of Zion, which is now covered with cemeteries, and is the
site of the house of Caiaphas and of the tomb of David and those Kings
of Jerusalem who were considered by the people worthy of sepulture here;
for the Jews seem to have brought from Egypt the notion of refusing
royal burial to their bad kings, and they had very few respectable ones.
The house of Caiaphas the high-priest had suffered a recent tumble-down,
and was in such a state of ruin that we could with difficulty enter it
or recognize any likeness of a house. On the premises is an Armenian
chapel; in it we were shown the prison in which Christ was confined,
also the stone door of the sepulchre, which the Latins say the Armenians
stole. But the most remarkable object here is the little marble column
(having carved on it a figure of Christ bound to a pillar) upon which
the cock stood and crowed when Peter denied his Lord. There are some
difficulties in the way of believing this now, but they will lessen as
the column gets age.
Outside this gate lie the desolate fields strewn with the brown
tombstones of the Greeks and Armenians, a melancholy spectacle. Each
sect has its own cemetery, and the dead sleep peaceably enough, but
the living who bury them frequently quarrel. I saw one day a funeral
procession halted outside the walls; for some reason the Greek priest
had refused the dead burial in the grave dug for him in the cemetery;
the bier was dumped on the slope beside the road, and half overturned;
the friends were sitting on the ground, wrangling. The man had been dead
three days, and the coffin had been by the roadside in this place since
the day before. This was in the morning; towards night I saw the same
crowd there, but a Turkish official appeared and ordered the Greeks to
bury their dead somewhere, and that without delay; to bury it for the
sake of the public health, and quarrel about the grave afterwards if
they must. A crowd collected, joining with fiery gesticulation and
clamor in the dispute, the shrill voices of women being heard above all;
but at last, four men roughly shouldered the box, handling it as if it
contained merchandise, and trotted off with it.
As we walked over this pathless, barren necropolis, strewn, as it
were, hap-hazard with shapeless, broken, and leaning headstones, it was
impossible to connect with it any sentiment of affection or piety. It
spoke, like everything else about here, of mortality, and seemed only a
part of that historical Jerusalem which is dead and buried, in which no
living person can have anything more than an archaeological interest.
It was, then, with something like a shock that we heard Demetrius, our
guide, say, pointing to a rude stone,—
“That is the grave of my mother!”
Demetrius was a handsome Greek boy, of a beautiful type which has almost
disappeared from Greece itself, and as clever a lad as ever spoke all
languages and accepted all religions, without yielding too much to any
one. He had been well educated in the English school, and his education
had failed to put any faith in place of the superstition it had
destroyed. The boy seemed to be numerously if not well connected in the
city; he was always exchanging a glance and a smile with some
pretty, dark-eyed Greek girl whom we met in the way, and when I said,
“Demetrius, who was that?” he always answered, “That is my
cousin.”
The boy was so intelligent, so vivacious, and full of the spirit of
adventure,—begging me a dozen times a day to take him with me anywhere
in the world,—and so modern, that he had not till this moment seemed
to belong to Jerusalem, nor to have any part in its decay. This chance
discovery of his intimate relation to this necropolis gave, if I may say
so, a living interest to it, and to all the old burying-grounds about
the city, some of which link the present with the remote past by an
uninterrupted succession of interments for nearly three thousand years.
Just beyond this expanse, or rather in part of it, is a small plot of
ground surrounded by high whitewashed walls, the entrance to which is
secured by a heavy door. This is the American cemetery; and the stout
door and thick wall are, I suppose, necessary to secure its graves
from Moslem insult. It seems not to be visited often, for it was with
difficulty that we could turn the huge key in the rusty lock. There
are some half-dozen graves within; the graves are grass-grown and
flower-sprinkled, and the whole area is a tangle of unrestrained weeds
and grass. The high wall cuts off all view, but we did not for the time
miss it, rather liking for the moment to be secured from the sight of
the awful desolation, and to muse upon the strange fortune that had
drawn to be buried here upon Mount Zion, as a holy resting-place for
them, people alien in race, language, and customs to the house of David,
and removed from it by such spaces of time and distance; people to whom
the worship performed by David, if he could renew it in person on Zion,
would be as distasteful as is that of the Jews in yonder synagogue.
Only a short distance from this we came to the mosque which contains
the tomb of David and probably of Solomon and other Kings of Judah. No
historical monument in or about Jerusalem is better authenticated than
this. Although now for many centuries the Moslems have had possession of
it and forbidden access to it, there is a tolerably connected tradition
of its possession. It was twice opened and relieved of the enormous
treasure in gold and silver which Solomon deposited in it; once by
Hyrcanus Maccabæus, who took what he needed, and again by Herod,
who found very little. There are all sorts of stories told about the
splendor of this tomb and the state with which the Moslems surround it.
But they envelop it in so much mystery that no one can know the truth.
It is probable that the few who suppose they have seen it have seen only
a sort of cenotaph which is above the real tomb in the rock below. The
room which has been seen is embellished with some display of richness
in shawls and hangings of gold embroidery, and contains a sarcophagus of
rough stone, and lights are always burning there. If the royal tombs are
in this place, they are doubtless in the cave below.
Over this spot was built a church by the early Christians; and it is a
tradition that in this building was the Conaculum. This site may very
likely be that of the building where the Last Supper was laid, and it
may be that St. Stephen suffered martyrdom here, and that the Virgin
died here; the building may be as old as the fourth century, but the
chances of any building standing so long in this repeatedly destroyed
city are not good. There is a little house north of this mosque in which
the Virgin spent the last years of her life; if she did, she must have
lived to be over a thousand years old.
On the very brow of the hill, and overlooking the lower pool of Gibon,
is the English school, with its pretty garden and its cemetery. We
saw there some excavations, by which the bedrock had been laid bare,
disclosing some stone steps cut in it. Search is being made here for
the Seat of Solomon, but it does not seem to me a vital matter, for
I suppose he sat down all over this hill, which was covered with his
palaces and harems and other buildings of pleasure, built of stones
that “were of great value, such as are dug out of the earth for the
ornaments of temples and to make fine prospects in royal palaces, and
which make the mines whence they are dug famous.” Solomon's palace
was constructed entirely of white stone, and cedar-wood, and gold and
silver; in it “were very long cloisters, and those situate in
an agreeable place in the palace, and among them a most glorious
dining-room for feastings and compotations”; indeed, Josephus finds
it difficult to reckon up the variety and the magnitude of the royal
apartments,—“how many that were subterraneous and invisible, the
curiosity of those that enjoyed the fresh air, and the groves for the
most delightful prospect, for avoiding the heat, and covering their
bodies.” If this most luxurious of monarchs introduced here all the
styles of architecture which would represent the nationality of his
wives, as he built temples to suit their different religions, the hill
of Zion must have resembled, on a small scale, the Munich of King Ludwig
I.
Opposite the English school, across the Valley of Hinnom, is a long
block of modern buildings which is one of the most conspicuous
objects outside the city. It was built by another rich Jew, Sir Moses
Montefiore, of London, and contains tenements for poor Jews. Sir Moses
is probably as rich as Solomon was in his own right, and he makes a most
charitable use of his money; but I do not suppose that if he had at his
command the public wealth that Solomon had, who made silver as plentiful
as stones in the streets of Jerusalem, he could materially alleviate the
lazy indigence of the Jewish exiles here. The aged philanthropist made
a journey hither in the summer of 1875, to ascertain for himself
the condition of the Jews. I believe he has a hope of establishing
manufactories in which they can support themselves; but the minds of the
Jews who are already restored are not set upon any sort of industry. It
seems to me that they could be maintained much more cheaply if they were
transported to a less barren land.
We made, one day, an exploration of the Jews' quarter, which enjoys
the reputation of being more filthy than the Christian. The approach to
it is down a gutter which has the sounding name of the Street of David;
it was bad enough, but when we entered the Jews' part of the city we
found ourselves in lanes and gutters of incomparable unpleasantness,
and almost impassable, with nothing whatever in them interesting or
picturesque, except the inhabitants. We had a curiosity to see if there
were here any real Jews of the type that inhabited the city in the
time of our Lord, and we saw many with fair skin and light hair, with
straight nose and regular features. The persons whom we are accustomed
to call Jews, and who were found dispersed about Europe at a very early
period of modern history, have the Assyrian features, the hook nose,
dark hair and eyes, and not at all the faces of the fair-haired race
from which our Saviour is supposed to have sprung. The kingdom of
Israel, which contained the ten tribes, was gobbled up by the Assyrians
about the time Rome was founded, and from that date these tribes do
not appear historically. They may have entirely amalgamated with their
conquerors, and the modified race subsequently have passed into Europe;
for the Jews claim to have been in Europe before the destruction of
Jerusalem by Titus, in which nearly all the people of the kingdom of
Judah perished.
Some scholars, who have investigated the problem offered by the two
types above mentioned, think that the Jew as we know him in Europe and
America is not the direct descendant of the Jews of Jerusalem of the
time of Herod, and that the true offspring of the latter is the person
of the light hair and straight nose who is occasionally to be found in
Jerusalem to-day. Until this ethnological problem is settled, I
shall most certainly withhold my feeble contributions for the
“restoration” of the persons at present doing business under the
name of Jews among the Western nations.
But we saw another type of Jew, or rather another variety, in this
quarter. He called himself of the tribe of Benjamin, and is, I think,
the most unpleasant human being I have ever encountered. Every man who
supposes himself of this tribe wears a dark, corkscrew, stringy
curl hanging down each side of his face, and the appearance of nasty
effeminacy which this gives cannot be described. The tribe of Benjamin
does not figure well in sacred history,—it was left-handed; it was
pretty much exterminated by the other tribes once for an awful crime; it
was held from going into the settled idolatry of the kingdom of
Israel only by its contiguity to Judah,—but it was better than its
descendants, if these are its descendants.
More than half of the eight thousand Jews in Jerusalem speak Spanish as
their native tongue, and are the offspring of those expelled from Spain
by Ferdinand. Now and then, I do not know whether it was Spanish or
Arabic, we saw a good face, a noble countenance, a fine Oriental and
venerable type, and occasionally, looking from a window, a Jewish
beauty; but the most whom we met were debased, mis-begotten, the
remnants of sin, squalor, and bad living.
We went into two of the best synagogues,—one new, with a conspicuous
green dome. They are not fine; on the contrary, they are slatternly
places and very ill-kept. On the benches near the windows sat squalid
men and boys reading, the latter, no doubt, students of the law; all the
passages, stairs, and by-rooms were dirty and disorderly, as if it were
always Monday morning there, but never washing-day; rags and heaps of
ancient garments were strewn about; and occasionally we nearly stumbled
over a Jew, indistinguishable from a bundle of old clothes, and asleep
on the floor. Even the sanctuary is full of unkempt people, and of the
evidences of the squalor of the quarter. If this is a specimen of the
restoration of the Jews, they had better not be restored any more.
The thing to do (if the worldliness of the expression will be pardoned)
Friday is to go and see the Jews wail, as in Constantinople it is to see
the Sultan go to prayer, and in Cairo to hear the darwishes howl. The
performance, being an open-air one, is sometimes prevented by rain or
snow, but otherwise it has not failed for many centuries. This ancient
practice is probably not what it once was, having in our modern days,
by becoming a sort of fashion, lost its spontaneity; it will, however,
doubtless be long kept up, as everything of this sort endures in the
East, even if it should become necessary to hire people to wail.