Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1938. JERUSALEM ETERNAL

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 98, 22 October 1938, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1938. JERUSALEM ETERNAL

Jerusalem, where the British are fighting to suppress ah Arab rebellion, has not known such an experience, reported a cable message this week with a rare incursion into history, since its capture by Saladin in the Twelfth Century. This was, to be precise, in 1187, and this ancient city, excepting for brief periods, 1229-39 and 1243-44, remained in Moslem hands until it opened its gates to General Allenby in December, 1917. On that occasion there was no fighting in the precincts of the city, though there was plenty before and after its evacuation by the Turks on the hills within sight of the walls. Neither side wished to damage the Holy City nor to profane its streets, sacred to three great religions, with the harsh din of conflict or the blood of the slain. So Jerusalem remained immune through the rest of the War. It was not so always. In her long history as a settlement of man, which goes back to the Stone Age, Jerusalem j has suffered much from warfare. She has endured, the' historian re-! counts, over 20 sieges and blockades, has been destroyed and rebuilt nearly as often, and for two long periods, | after Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon and Hadrian of Rome, was a mere desolation over which history is silent. Her valleys have been filled and her hills levelled, her buildings have been razed, and her people slaughtered or exiled. Six times in history she has passed from one religion to another. She survives as the Holy City still with a spirit that is eternal.

It is believed that Jerusalem was originally, at the dawn of history, a hilltop fort of the Pharaohs of Egypt, protecting an important trade route between the uplands across the Jordan and the sea. When Joshua conquered the Promised Land the city was in the hands of the Jebusites. Its greatness began with David and Solomon, who made of Zion a noble city destined for ever after to be the centre of the Jewish faith. Solomon's Temple passed away in the stormy years that followed, but archaeologists believe that the Holy of Holies stood over the rock in the so-called Mosque of Omar, the Dome of the Rock, which still dominates the old city. Always a fortified stronghold, with its commanding site, Jerusalem went through tribulations at the hands of enemies within the land and of alien races from over the border. In 586 B.C. it was destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and its inhabitants sold into captivity. About a century and a half later Nehemiah rebuilt the walls on a plan which, with its gateways, still apparently holds. In 332 8.C., Alexander the Great in his imperial progress through the East entered Jerusalem. He left the Jews undisturbed, the historian records to his credit, in their customs and religion, and, recognising their gifts, enrolled some of them in the intelligence corps of his army. Jews were also among the first settlers in the new city he founded in Egypt under the name of Alexandria. Unhappily for the Jews, Alexander died in 323 8.C., at the age of 32. Had he lived to the normal span, he might have consolidated his great Eastern Empire and succeeded in blending all that was best in Hellenism and Judaism. The fate of the Jews might then have been far different from what it has been and is. His memory has always been retained in affection by the Jewish race. There is a monument to him from the citizens of Palestine, the famous "Alexander" Sarcophagus, now in the museum at Stamboul. His name was adopted among the Jew 3, and only last month died the greatest contemporary philosopher in Britain, almost in the world, Professor Samuel Alexander, of Manchester, a Jew.

The next few centuries were both the most terrible and the most glorious in the chequered story of Jerusalem. Under the Maccabean priest-princes the process of Helienisation fostered by the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, Alexander's successors, was rudely checked, and for a century, until Pompey in 65 B.C. seized and looted Jerusalem, Palestine enjoyed a measure of troubled independence. After Porapey's death in 48 B.C. and the assassination of Julius Caesar, the friend of the Jews, four years later, came Herod the Great and a return of prosperity and splendour to the cjty. Then followed the events which have for ever associated Jerusalem with the whole world as the birthplace of, Christianity. Of the actual scenes of those events only tradition indicates the places, for Jerusalem was totally destroyed after the siege and capture by the Romans under Titus in A.D.

70. The destruction of Jerusalem I was followed by the dispersal of the Jews, for whom till then it had been the religious and political centre. But the Jews did not disappear like the ten tribes of Israel in Assyria. They held together, as they have held together since, through thick and thin, and in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian struck another blow for freedom under Bar-Cochba, recognised as the Messiah by the influential Rabbi Akiba. The • insurrection was crushed and Hadrian turned Jerusalem into a Roman colony under the name Aelia Capitolina. A temple to Jupiter was built on the site of the Jewish Temple and Jews were forbidden, under pain of death, to appear within sight of the city. This was in A.D. 135, and the disaster, says the historian, was the death-blow to hopes of a Jewish national independence. Henceforward, for over seventeen hundred years, the destiny of the Jews lay elsewhere, though their hearts turned always to Zion.

After a period of peace under the Christianity of the Byzantine Emperors, in which the cult of pilgrimage to the holy places grew with the growth of tradition, Jerusalem was again sacked in A.D. 611 by Chosroes II of Persia, and within .twenty-five years fell to the rising power of Islam represented by the Caliph Omar, after whom the Mosque of the Rock, on the site of the Temple, was named. Thus Jerusalem (El Khuds) became a Holy City of a third great religion. This time the Christians suffered, and to save them and the Holy Land began the fantastic series of Crusades, at first successful under Godfrey of Boulogne, who established the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, no credit to Christianity and doomed to pass after less than a century. Saladin the Saracen was th.c next notable figure in Jerusalem, and in the third Crusade Richard Coeur de Lion, of England, distinguished himself for the Cross against Saladin for the Crescent. It was then that the last fighting, recalled in the cable news, was seen in the old city. With the Turks in the sixteenth century came an era of peace, but also an era without a history. The last forty years of the last century were marked by a revival of interest, both Christian and Jewish, in Palestine. Colonies were founded and throve so far as was possible under Turkish rule. In 1896, Dr. Theodor Herzl issued his proposal for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, and Zionism entered practical politics as the faith of the Jewish race scattered all over the world. But there is no peace in Palestine. It has always been a maelstrom of racial cross-currents and warring interests. And so it remains, with the Holy City, set on a hill, as the lure afar off to conflicting ardours of creeds and to the ambitions of

princes and potentates, as it was In a humbler way to the British soldiers from the Empire toiling up the steeps from Jaffa and Jericho, or marching over the plateau from Bethlehem.