CYNTHIA OZICK
41
blotted out the name of Jerusalem and ploughed over the ruins on the
Temple Mount. In honor of Jupiter he built over the rubble a new city
called Aelia Capitolina, populated it with Phoenician and Syrian merce–
naries, and erected a triumphal column where the Temple had stood.
Statues of the mythical gods-Jupiter, Venus, Adonis-proliferated. Cir–
cumcision, Sabbath observance, and Torah study were prohibited to the
remnant of Jews-all this in the wake of the massacre of half a million
Jewish citizens of Jerusalem. Roman sovereignty over Jerusalem signi–
fied raw power and lust for land-land alone, uninterpreted land, naked
of principle, naked of heritage, land viewed through the empty sockets
of a skull.
Why, after all, does Melville, visiting Jerusalem, see only a skull? The
year, you recall, is
1850.
Hadrian's glorious Aelia Capitolina has long
been dust; his gods were always dust. But now the foreign sovereign
power is the Ottoman Empire, and Jerusalem's Jewish inheritance is
again, and still, suppressed. Therefore Jerusalem can be viewed only,
and again, through the empty sockets of a skull. Melville may regard the
Jews of Jerusalem as flies, but he fails to note the fly-swatters. Another
visitor during this same period, an Italian architect named Pierotti, who
was for a time employed by the Ottoman pasha of Jerusalem, is more
observant. "One day in
1858,"
he writes:
On going out of my house in Jerusalem, I saw a very respectable
Jew running at full speed, pursued by some Arabs, who as soon as
he reached me claimed my protection against his assailants. These
tried to drag him away from me; I asked what was the matter; but
had only yells and screams in reply; so I determined to place the
Jew inside my own door, for security....When (with the help of
my European servants) I got the Jew safe within, he told me the rea–
son of the disturbance. As he was walking through the town he
found a little boy crying, and stopped to ask what was the matter.
He found that the child had lost his way, so he took him by the
hand and went to help him find his house. Some men, however,
suddenly snatched the child from him, saying, "You have taken
him to kill him, and you shall suffer for it."
In short, the blood libel in the very heart of Jerusalem. But the ital–
ian architect sees more, much more. "On Good Friday," he continues:
The Jews cannot quit their own quarters, as the Latins, Greeks, and
Armenians would insult and otherwise ill-treat them. On some
occasions the pasha has been obliged to guard the entrances of
