YOURS, MINE AND OURS

By Johanna McGeary

When I went to live in Jerusalem nearly a decade ago as a reporter, the very stones of the city seemed to whisper, Beware religion. Not even a strictly professional observer could miss the spiritual vibrations that emanated from those ancient walls and shrines, infecting every aspect of social and political life. In her immensely erudite chronicle Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (Knopf; 427 pages; $30), Karen Armstrong, British author of the best-selling A History of God, delineates how, quite literally, the stones of Jerusalem came to embody the deepest faith and identity of the three religions of Abraham: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. In so doing, even in a determinedly nonpolemical book, she arrives at some suggestive ideas about who should rule Jerusalem today.

At the heart of all religion lies a sacred geography, the place where God reaches down to connect the human and the divine. From the time nearly 4,000 years ago when men first settled Mount Zion, a hill that stood out dramatically from its surroundings to betoken the "holy," all successive conquerors have found there an unshakable primal attachment, however different their rites and rituals. But instead of living up to their sacred ideals, the religious conquerors always fell into warfare for sole possession of the place, a battle that goes on unabated as the city enters its fifth millennium.

Though a lay reader may get lost amid the dense references--who knows the difference between Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin or the meaning of tohu-bohu?--the basic argument is clear. Each conquering faith must contend with the potent presence of its predecessors, and none have fully succeeded. Construction is ideology: building has always been employed, also unsuccessfully, to cement permanent ownership.

The Jews were not the first to take possession of Zion, but the first to connect it with worship of the one true God. The building of the Temple was a statement of the meaning and permanence of Jewish belief against the threatening tide of paganism. For nearly 2,000 years, as the Jews made themselves into a faith and a nation with Jerusalem as their capital, the city represented the promise of final salvation and the soul of their identity. That very veneration begot a fierce possessiveness and, when the Temple was lost, a perpetual desire to return.

Armstrong's step-by-step march down the years shows how a succession of spiritual decisions and political circumstances passed the city from faith to faith. The rise of Greco-Roman power opened the way for the followers of Jesus to remake Jerusalem into Christendom's holiest place, a development she regards with little sympathy. Christians were taught to worship God's presence in Jesus rather than a specific place, she says; only in the 4th century with the archaeologically suspect "discovery" of Christ's tomb within Jerusalem's walls did the church project ideas of the divine onto the city itself, wrecking Jewish shrines to build Christian ones. The Byzantines and later the Crusaders, she argues, were the least worthy inheritors of the city because they so thoroughly failed to live up to holy ideals, brutally suppressing those of other creeds.

In any case, the brief era of Christian domination was swept away beginning in the 7th century, when the followers of Muhammad marched into the city with their fresh revelations. Armstrong acknowledges that initially, Jerusalem held no special meaning for them, but as the developing religion sought symbols to unite its adherents, Muslims consciously transformed the city into their third holiest place. Because Jerusalem represented continuity with the older faiths of Abraham, Muslims easily incorporated it into their sacred geography. Later, they evolved a belief in Muhammad's mystic journey to Jerusalem to receive his revelation of heaven, at once intensifying and reshaping the city's holiness--and its skyline--to their own prescriptions.

Armstrong reads the next thousand years of Muslim control as a relatively benign reign in which the Jews were gradually permitted to return and practice their faith, while the Christians fought viciously to exclude the others. She describes the city's reversals of fortune in the 20th century as the next steps in the ceaseless procession of conquerors.

In the end, Armstrong suggests, claims to Jerusalem cannot be settled by who was there first or who identifies most deeply with its spirituality. All the monotheistic religions have to understand that Jerusalem was and is legitimately sacred to others. Its long and mutable history shows that sovereignty by itself is less important than how well the possessors live up to their faith's ideals of peace, harmony, tolerance and charity, how successfully they encourage inclusion and coexistence. That, says Armstrong, "must be the way to celebrate Jerusalem's sanctity today." But as she sadly notes, never in history has true holiness triumphed in the Holy City.