10
The Magnificence of the Metropolis
Israeli archaeologists, professional and amateurs, are not merely digging for knowledge and objects, but for the reassurance of roots.
—Amos Elon
On June 20, 1969, three bombs went off in an alley near the Western Wall, killing one Arab man and injuring several others. Israel blamed saboteurs from Jordan. An angry Prime Minister Golda Meir quickly approved the rabbinical request to demolish the fifteenth-century buildings clustered around the Mughrabi Gate, where members of the Abu Saud family still lived.
A century after Warren had sparred with the family, the Arab residents were evicted, and Israeli bulldozers leveled the compound without archaeological supervision. Its most famous resident had lived there as a child in the 1930s; his mother was an Abu Saud. Five months before the demolition, he had been chosen to chair the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which had as its goal the liberation of the region from Israeli control. His name was Yasser Arafat.
"On the few occasions he has spoken of his childhood, he mentioned the destruction of the Abu Saud house," noted one biographer. Arafat was already involved in demolition of his own, in the form of bombing attacks against both Israel and Jordan.
Israeli archaeologists, however, were more concerned with the Chief Rabbinate Council than the nascent PLO. They feared the compound's destruction marked the start of a campaign by the rabbis to extend its control south of the plaza. Soon after the bulldozer dust had settled, the clerics forbade archaeological work within thirty feet of the entire southern length of the Western Wall.
Mazar and Ben-Dov boldly ignored the decree. They expanded their excavations from the south slope of the southern wall to the south portion of the Western Wall. Alarmed Orthodox believers backed by the Ministry of Religions quickly created a prayer space south of the gate as a kind of spiritual barricade to block the profane researchers. The conflict threatened to turn violent until the ministry backed down, and the worshippers withdrew.
From then on, the Mughrabi Gate and its sloping ramp formed a second fraught frontier. While the first border separated Muslims on the platform to the east from Jews on the plaza to the west, the second separated religious Jews from their secular counterparts. Israeli archaeologists reigned supreme south of the gate, and rabbinical authorities held sway to the north.
Nowhere were the two starkly competing visions of Israel—one secular and scientific minded, the other traditional and religious oriented—more apparent. South of the border, tanned young men and a few women dug through ancient debris in shorts and tank tops. To the north, men had to wear head coverings and women were kept strictly segregated; all were expected to dress modestly.
Both secular and religious Israeli Jews soon united in surprise and delight by what Mazar's team found. Workers hit a stone inscribed with the Hebrew words for "the place of the trumpeting." That phrase echoed a mention by the Roman Jewish historian Josephus of a spot on the Temple Mount "where it was custom for one of the priests to stand and to give notice, by sound of trumpet, in the afternoon of the approach, and on the following evening of the close, of every seventh day."
The stone presumably had been cemented at the top of the platform wall built at the order of Herod the Great, and it was compelling evidence that this was, indeed, the site of the temple complex during the time of Jesus. When it fell—likely during the Roman destruction of 70 CE—it landed on a broad and well-paved street paralleling the Western Wall.
Subsequently, in a nearby trench, the team came across the fragment of a biblical verse written in Hebrew during the Byzantine or early Islamic period. "And you will see and your heart will rejoice," it said. This suggested a Jewish presence close to the Western Wall long after the temple was ruined, when either Christianity or Islam was dominant.
The discoveries created a sensation in Israel. One newspaper declared the dig "the most spiritual excavations ever in Israel," while another referred to the effort as "a holy work." Leading Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Meir and the retired Ben-Gurion, visited the site, as did scores of Israeli and international reporters. The media attention also attracted thousands of volunteers from around the world, Christian as well as Jewish, eager to participate in unearthing biblical artifacts.
The finds gave Mazar and Ben-Dov an edge in their battle with the rabbis, since it undercut their claims that archaeology could disturb the area's "sublime sanctity." Work continued in all seasons, employing an army of engineers, surveyors, architects, artists, and photographers as well as laborers, both paid and volunteer. Many of the day laborers were local Arab men. In the first five years, the team moved more than one million cubic feet of earth, or enough to fill a dozen Olympic swimming pools.
The focus of the work was squarely on what Mazar called "the magnificence of the metropolis in the first century A.D.," when Jewish Jerusalem was at the height of its glory. As a result, structures from later periods—from late Roman to Ottoman times—were recorded but removed. "One of the ironies of searching for and preserving the remains of the past is that the archaeological endeavor entails destruction," Ben-Dov explained. "The brutal fact is that if you want to know what lies under a certain stratum, you have no choice but to destroy it."
He added later that "the idea is to remove all the remnants of later periods and leave only those from Second Temple times." This period of Jewish dominance before the Roman destruction of 70 CE was considered the most important, since its ruins were "so impressive and numerous." Yet this decision, as is often the case at sites with multiple layers, came at a cost.
The team, for example, dismantled an elegant room in a medieval Islamic building that in turn revealed a late Roman chamber beneath littered with erotic oil lamps, elaborate rings once owned by Roman soldiers, and a small bronze Celtic cavalryman identical to one that turned up in the River Thames in London. When this area was taken apart, the excavators reached the paved street laid down next to the Western Wall during the time of Jesus. This monumental street remained for future tourists to walk; Israeli researchers judged this era to be of greater interest to visitors than what came after.
Later archaeologists cringed at the speed with which massive amounts of ancient material were swept away with little or no documentation. "It was one of the largest excavations," said one, "and one of the worst." Little of the tons of earth was closely sifted for small artifacts, which are often the most revealing.
Mazar's team was able to solve a number of research questions, including the purpose of Robinson's Arch, the bit of stone springing from the Western Wall near Mughrabi Gate. Warren and others believed it to be part of a massive bridge connecting the Temple Mount with the main part of the city that lay on the slope to the west. Instead, the team determined it was an enormous pedestrian interchange that was a wonder of the ancient world. Such discoveries, Mazar said, confirmed the boast found in the Babylonian Talmud, a foundation of rabbinical teaching compiled centuries after the city's destruction: "Whoever has not seen Jerusalem in its splendor has never seen a fine city."
Orthodox believers had long repeated the phrase, but it was secular Israeli archaeologists who made that splendor tangible.
Foiled in their attempt to expand the Western Wall Plaza to the south, the chief rabbis wasted no time in taking a page from nineteenth-century archaeologists like Warren. The Ministry of Religions turned its gaze north, to what the British explorer's colleague Charles Wilson had called "one of the most perfect and magnificent remains in Jerusalem."
Unlike Mazar's well-publicized digs, this effort was clandestinely planned and executed. Eventually it would become one of Jerusalem's most popular tourist attractions and extensive prayer spaces. It would also spark frequent protests, two international crises, and leave more than one hundred dead and nearly a thousand injured. Ultimately it would become a major stumbling block in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
The fully intact ancient arch named for Wilson had once acted as the final support for a broad stone aqueduct carrying water through the western side of the city to the Temple Mount, though the date of its construction was disputed. By the time the British Royal Engineer examined it with Schick in 1866, the monumental stonework was covered with later structures and the area beneath had been converted into a cistern.
Two years later, Warren had cut through the concrete floor of the reservoir, struggled past boulders and broken masonry, and dug through mud reeking of sewage. His team's efforts paid off when they opened up a labyrinth of ancient chambers, including what he called the Masonic Hall. Massive foundations of medieval Islamic schools to the north halted their progress, and complaints that the work endangered buildings above prompted the Ottoman governor to seal the entrance. No one had entered the space since then. As late as 1965, one American archaeologist noted that "presumably the pasha's wall is still there, waiting to be removed by a yet greater diplomat than Charles Warren."
Neither could have guessed that the work halted in 1868 would be resumed not by diplomats or scientists, but by Jewish clerics. Precisely a century later, Minister of Religions Wahrhaftig approved a plan to dig an underground passage north of the plaza to expose the foundation of the Western Wall. The entire wall is longer than the Empire State Building is tall, with most of its length and height buried under later construction. Accessing it required digging directly beneath the heart of the Muslim Quarter, which was thick with homes and businesses and included some of the city's oldest and most important Islamic structures.
Wahrhaftig's idea had the enthusiastic support of Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the former chief rabbi of the Israeli Defense Forces and a fervent Ashkenazi nationalist. Goren was bitter that the Temple Mount had been left in the hands of Muslims at the end of the 1967 war. This had been done at the direction of General Moshe Dayan, who saw it as a "historical site of commemoration of the past" rather than a place for Jewish prayer; he also hoped to avoid igniting a wider holy war.
In protest, Goren had organized a Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount in August 1967 that resulted in a riot, the first recorded clash between Jews and Muslims on the sacred platform. Exposing the foundations of the Western Wall would seemingly offer a less fraught alternative for Jewish worshippers. A second key supporter of the tunnel was Yehuda Getz, a Sephardic cleric who had just been appointed to the new post of rabbi of the Western Wall.
As a first step, the underground wall built by order of the pasha was dismantled in the summer of 1968. Since Wahrhaftig considered his ministry exempt from the nation's antiquities laws, no dig permit was requested, though an archaeological supervisor was appointed: Ben-Dov served as the project's nominal scientific supervisor for the next eighteen years. Busy with his other excavations, he visited the site only sporadically and published no scientific papers on the effort.
Keeping the project under wraps in its initial stages was vital. "Fear of disapproval within Israel and abroad was so great that all of the work was conducted in the utmost secrecy," wrote the archaeologist Dan Bahat, who took over for Ben-Dov in the mid-1980s.
Rabbi Getz oversaw the work. Born in Tunisia, he came from a long line of Jewish scholars trained in the mystical tradition of Kabbalah that had so fascinated the Finnish scholar Juvelius. This path, which developed in medieval Muslim Spain, influenced and was influenced by Muslim Sufi thought and practices. Kabbalah was rich in stories and imagery of the future Jewish return to Jerusalem, the appearance of the Messiah, and the end of history.