What was it like?

Being a tour guide in this land I am constantly looking for sources that can reveal something about the past to me. One of my favorites is Mark Twain.
He embarked on a journey which would last for five months from June 1867 onwards. The purpose of the trip was to see Europe and the East in his own time and to describe to the readers what he saw. Mark Twain did it in a delightful way.
To read his book, “The Innocents Abroad” , is great fun. He writes so well that I almost get the feeling of walking right beside him. I know what these places look like “in my time”. When I “go for a walk” with him I get some insight in the past.

His description of Jerusalem is almost heartbreaking. He describes the group of travelers as they ride towards the city from the north :

--we longed to see Jerusalem. We spurred up hill after hill, and usually began to stretch our necks minutes before we got to the top--but disappointment always followed:--more stupid hills beyond--more unsightly landscape--no Holy City. At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bite of wall and crumbling arches began to line the way--we toiled up one more hill, and every pilgrim and every sinner swung his hat on high! Jerusalem!
Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun. So small! Why, it was no larger than an American village of four thousand inhabitants, and no larger than an ordinary Syrian city of thirty thousand. Jerusalem numbers only fourteen thousand people.

Jerusalem in those days consisted mainly of what we know today as the Old City. It was considered unsafe to live outside the protection of the city walls. The first Jewish neighborhood to be built was Yemin Moshe which was established in 1861 right outside the city to the west. It could no be seen from where Twain and his fellow travelers were standing. Most of the other neighborhoods were established later.

I record it here as a notable but not discreditable fact that not even our pilgrims wept. I think there was no individual in the party whose brain was not teeming with thoughts and images and memories invoked by the grand history of the venerable city that lay before us, but still among them all was no "voice of them that wept."There was no call for tears. Tears would have been out of place. The thoughts Jerusalem suggests are full of poetry, sublimity, and more than all, dignity. Such thoughts do not find their appropriate expression in the emotions of the nursery.

Jerusalem had been under the Ottoman Empire since 1517. The Turks made sure that any group of believers other than the Moslems kept their heads down. No church or synagogue were allowed to dominate the landscape. Church bells were kept silent and monks would beat a wooden plank to call for prayers.

A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour. I do not know how else to make one understand how small it is. The appearance of the city is peculiar. It is as knobby with countless little domes as a prison door is with bolt-heads. Every house has from one to half a dozen of these white plastered domes of stone, broad and low, sitting in the centre of, or in a cluster upon, the flat roof. Wherefore, when one looks down from an eminence, upon the compact mass of houses (so closely crowded together, in fact, that there is no appearance of streets at all, and so the city looks solid,) he sees the knobbiest town in the world, except Constantinople. It looks as if it might be roofed, from centre to circumference, with inverted saucers. The monotony of the view is interrupted only by the great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of Hippicus, and one or two other buildings that rise into commanding prominence.

The situation of the inhabitants was not good.

It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently--the eternal "bucksheesh."

The only thing familiar with today’s Jerusalem has to do with the rich history of the city.

The sights are too many. They swarm about you at every step; no single foot of ground in all Jerusalem or within its neighborhood seems to be without a stirring and important history of its own. It is a very relief to steal a walk of a hundred yards without a guide along to talk unceasingly about every stone you step upon and drag you back ages and ages to the day when it achieved celebrity.

Elin Elkouby