Jerusalem’s subterranean discoveries and disputes
Yehuda Amichai, Israel’s most celebrated poet, wrote often about Jerusalem with language and imagery that ricochets off the ancient stone walls and into a reader’s heart. Jerusalem was where Amichai lived after escaping Nazi Germany; it is where he died in 2000; it is where his accessible, imaginative, descriptive style transformed him into a sort of poetic prophet.
His long, gorgeous poem “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Why Jerusalem?” has a haunting refrain. “Why, of all places, Jerusalem?” he asks repeatedly. Why not New York, Athens, Egypt, Mexico, India, Burma? Why not Babylon, Petersburg, Mecca, Rome?
What is it about this city, where ordinary life rubs up against parading pilgrims, where bombs and crucifixions commingle with church bells and the muezzin’s call, where the ground is heavy with history - in Amichai’s words, “submerged and sunken” - that draws adventurers, scholars and ideologues like a magnet?
That question propels the narrative of Andrew Lawler’s new book, “Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City,” a sweeping tale of archaeological exploits and their cultural and political consequences told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.
Beginning when Abraham Lincoln was in the White House, and going up until the raucous headlines of today, Lawler introduces us to an array of men and women drawn to explore the hidden tunnels, broken cisterns, collapsing walls and sewage pits that lie under a small plot of land sacred to the world’s Jews, Muslims and Christians.
“Under Jerusalem” is one of several new books chasing this Indiana Jones of a tale. And it’s easy to sense the allure. The archaeologists and adventurers who came to excavate the past and claim its treasures were seeking scientific knowledge, professional glory and tangible proof of their connection to the ancient biblical text. At times, their eagerness led them to burrow and bulldoze through sacred space, even if, in so doing, they disrupted centuries of civilization and rocked the foundation physically and spiritually - of Western faith traditions.
Today, controversy over excavations in the Old City is too often framed as simply a conflict between Jews seeking to legitimize their connection to Jerusalem and Muslims resistant to those claims. But in this “city of political hypervigilance,” as Lawler calls it, the real story is far more complicated.
From the beginning, and for many decades following, it was in fact Christians first from France, then from Britain, mostly Protestants who swooped into the Holy Land and made a holy mess. In 1863, Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy of France was the first to conduct an archaeological dig in the city, fueled by the conviction that “Jerusalem’s ancient heritage belonged not to those who lived in and ruled there, but to foreigners like himself,” Lawler writes.