“Under Jerusalem is a brilliant, highly innovative history of the most contested city on the planet. Andrew Lawler uses these untold stories of archeological digs near and under Jerusalem’s sacred sites to convey all the colorful and violent and contentious history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is an astounding achievement—and a compulsive read.”

—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author of The Outlier and The Good Spy

“What lies beneath? Lawler knows. Evoking the sights, sounds, and smells of ancient and modern Jerusalem, he introduces the reader to a myriad of archaeologists and other colorful characters, all concerned with unearthing the ancient remains of the city, frequently while grappling with thorny modern political, ideological, and theological issues. A must read for anyone interested in either the history or archaeology of Jerusalem.”

—Eric H. Cline, bestselling author of 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed

“Every review of Andrew Lawler’s book about the wild archaeological history of Jerusalem will mention Indiana Jones. This is not because the characters he describes are much like Jones—they’re much more obsessed, more bonkers, or more mendacious—but because the Indiana Jones stories are among the few examples we have of stories about archaeology that are pure fun. Well, now there is another one, just as swashbuckling as the Spielberg movies, but with the added advantage of being all true.”

—Charles C. Mann, New York Times bestselling author of 1491 and The Wizard and the Prophet

Outlook

Review By Jane Eisner

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.

Despite angering local Jews and Muslims and infuriating Ottoman authorities, de Saulcy managed to extract a sarcophagus from the Tomb of Kings that he believed was a consort of a Judean ruler from the 7th century B.C., take it to France and eventually display it in the Louvre. Never mind that experts questioned its true identification and significance. The discovery, Lawler writes, “opened the possibility that archaeology could yield concrete proof of scripture’s accuracy at a moment when advances in geology and biology had put Christianity on the defensive.”

This theme — that science can be used to verify religious beliefs and national claims — courses through this narrative like the streams flowing beneath the Old City. So does the political tumult that de Saulcy’s discovery ignited. Fearful of France’s influence, Britain very quickly launched its own archaeological strike force. Russia also sponsored digs, while Western philanthropists poured money underground — and still do.

One can see how Jerusalem natives, particularly the Muslims who retain authority over sections of the Old City, became so hostile to outside interference in the name of science. Their homes were damaged; their businesses disrupted; their autonomy questioned; their sacred space violated.

There is another, deeper reason for this antipathy, writes Lawler: “Excavating a cistern or searching for treasure might make sense to Jerusalem’s Arabs, but excavating to find your heritage did not. You were your heritage, and there was no need to find that which you had not lost. This profound cultural divide between Westerners and Arabs — and, later, between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs — would grow wider in generations to come, with devastating consequences for all those involved.”

Would that Lawler had delved more deeply into this fascinating cultural divide and the questions raised. What lies behind the compulsion to locate Jesus’s tomb or King David’s palace or Solomon’s temple? How do we balance the drive to uncover the past with reverence for the present? There is endless detail in this book about each excavation, contextualized with discussion of the ethical dimensions and methodological advances in the expanding field of archaeology. But there were times when I wished Lawler had stepped back to explore those larger, motivational questions more fully.

That said, he displays remarkable evenhandedness in cataloguing the politicization of archaeology today, especially considering that so many characters in this book believed that God — or Adonai, or Allah, or Jesus — was on their side. Lawler also carefully narrates the dramatic and consequential rifts between the increasingly powerful Orthodox Jewish rabbinate in Jerusalem and its largely secular, scholarly counterparts.

Tragically, we see positions harden and compromise made more difficult, whether it is in Yasser Arafat’s refusal to acknowledge the Jewish historical claim to the Old City or in the growing influence exerted by the fundamentalist City of David Foundation, widely known by its Hebrew acronym Elad. Sadly, too, we hear in this story echoes of broader troubling trends, as the neutral pursuit of science slams into ideology, greed, nationalism and faith.

Why, of all places, Jerusalem? Amichai offers a partial, poetic answer: “In Jerusalem,” he writes, “everything is a symbol.” Lawler’s timely book builds on that insight, showing how and why ordinary men and women, and great empires alike, continue to seek meaning in the dirt and debris beneath this magnetic, confounding city.

Story Link

By Dominic Green

‘Under Jerusalem’ Review: Layers of History and Faith

Victorian archaeologists dug to test a Christian idea of the heavenly city. Modern Israelis have a different idea.

In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud compared memory and its recovery to the archaeology of Rome. The visitor cannot see the earlier layers of civilization, but the guidebook says where they once were. This allows us to look at the Colosseum and imagine the Golden House of Nero below. But, Freud wrote, a single physical space cannot hold “two different contents.” If it did, then the Palazzo Caffarelli would occupy the same spot as the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and we would see the temple in both its early, Etruscan form and its later, imperial form.

Freud never saw Jerusalem. Not only is its visitor’s imagination incited by the Bible, the guidebook of guidebooks, but Jerusalem’s archaeology also presents the simultaneity that Freud thought impossible. The sacred core of Jerusalem is so great that, like New York, they named it twice: Raise your head as you emerge from the warren of the Old City, and you see the Temple Mount of the Jews and the Noble Sanctuary of the Muslims. Two different contents, two different contexts—not forgetting the Christians, who cannot agree among themselves where their sacred sites should be.

In “Under Jerusalem,” journalist Andrew Lawler directs our contemplation away from the heavenly city, and down into the roots of history and faith. Modern archaeology in Jerusalem began as an effort to substantiate Christian faith through modern science. The history of its practice in Jerusalem presents a parade of eccentrics and fanatics, enlivened by obscurantism and riot. Mr. Lawler, unlike so many of his characters, navigates the terrain without offending the political or religious sensibilities of his subjects.

In the 19th century, tourists like Twain and Melville were disappointed by the rundown and rather modest architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem. When Baedeker issued a guidebook in 1876, he apologized for the “modern crust of rubbish and rottenness” that obscured the “Jerusalem of antiquity.” Exceptional in being sacred to all three monotheisms, Jerusalem is unusual as ancient cities go. The tel, a man-made hill in which civilizations are stacked layer upon layer like stony pancakes, is common in the Middle East; the Israeli site at Har Megiddo, the “Armageddon” of the Christians, has 26 layers. But Jerusalem is rocky and hilly. Its layers are compressed as though by tectonic forces and honeycombed with cisterns and tunnels.

Archaeology was a European invention introduced to Jerusalem by French and British Christians. The European soldiers and churchmen viewed sacred archaeology in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson: “the earth belongs in usufruct to the living,” and the dead have “neither rights nor powers over it.” Mr. Lawler’s tale begins in 1863, when the French senator Louis-Félicien de Saulcy launched the first modern dig, just outside the Old City walls. Breaking into an ancient tomb, de Saulcy abducted an attractive sarcophagus and, while Jerusalem’s rabbis launched an international protest against this foreign graverobber, took it to Paris and declared its occupant to be “the consort of a Judean ruler from the seventh century BCE.” He was only 700 years off.

De Saulcy set the tone of most subsequent efforts: wild ambition, wild exaggeration, wild protests—and hardheaded chauvinism. In the 1850s, rivalry over foreign control of the Christian sites helped spark the Crimean War. In the 1860s, the digging of the Suez Canal turned the “scramble for Jerusalem” into a strategic rivalry. When the British public funded the creation of the Palestine Exploration Fund, and the Fund secured permission to dig by promising the Ottomans that it would fix Jerusalem’s sewage problem, the British government discreetly used the program as a front for intelligence-gathering.

The living, however, still had earthly powers. The local Jews and Muslims had a veto, rioting when a dig turned up human bones or got too close to the Temple Mount. The Ottoman authorities correctly saw foreign archaeologists as the advance parties of European imperialism, and withheld digging permits. The only locals who seemed to appreciate the archaeologists were the Arabs of the village of Silwan, who turned into a multigenerational workforce.

The Victorian diggers concentrated on a thousand-year slice of Jerusalem’s history: from King David’s conquest of a Jebusite hill fortress about a millennium before Jesus’ birth, to the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial. This being the British Empire, the work was entrusted to military eccentrics. A succession of Royal Engineers mapped Jerusalem, most driven equally by a surveyor’s training and an oddball’s conviction.

Charles Wilson, an “introverted bachelor,” discovered the monumental Herodian arch that now bears his name and created a topographical survey which remains the foundation of modern archaeology. Charles Warren went looking for the secrets of freemasonry and instead found the city’s ancient water network, a more successful enquiry than his subsequent pursuit of Jack the Ripper. Charles Gordon, later martyred at Khartoum, identified the site of the Crucifixion not in the precincts of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but on a skull-like knoll to the north of Damascus Gate; less persuasively, he created a pilgrimage site for Protestants by locating the site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection in a nearby rock tomb.

The subterranean disturbance became visible on the surface. The Ottomans called Warren “the mole,” for his habit of popping up in private wells and cisterns. The Abu Saud family, who lived next to the Western Wall, were complaining about subsidence. The Russians, the Germans and the British were all building their national churches and setting foot on the sacred rock. Landscapers improved the surrounds of Gordon’s “Garden Tomb” to assist the contemplations of British and American pilgrims. But no one could find the City of David, or the Ark of the Covenant for that matter.

One of the many surprising threads in Mr. Lawler’s tale is that Jerusalem’s Jewish archaeology began as Christian Zionist archaeology, and turned only slowly into Jewish nationalist archaeology. Muslim or Palestinian Arab archaeology began only recently, and by then the winners were writing the history of Jerusalem. In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job of striving for the diplomats’ ideal of “evenhandedness.”

In 1917, the British conquered Jerusalem, declared their support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” and then, in 1920, set up the Mandate for Palestine under the auspices of the League of Nations. The British created institutions, the Hebrew University among them, and fostered a generation of Jewish archaeologists. Again, no one found the Ark of the Covenant, but they did produce a mass of evidence that confirmed the Jewish claims in the historical record. After the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, recovering the Jewish roots of Jerusalem became a priority for nation-building.

When Israel conquered the Old City, in 1967, bulldozers erased the Mughrabi Quarter overnight to create the Western Wall Plaza. Shortly afterward, they demolished the Abu Saud family compound. According to Mr. Lawler, Yasser Arafat, then engaged on his own program of demolition, was the son of the Abu Sauds on his mother’s side. The period’s Israeli archaeologists viewed their work as Edmund Burke viewed society, a “partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Their job was to reconnect the spirit of the revived Jewish nation to the material evidence of ancient statehood. In Jerusalem, that meant removing the intervening layers, the better to recover the national memory, regardless of violent protests from Orthodox Jews, Islamists and Palestinian nationalists.

In 2005, the Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar returned to the ridge above Wadi Hilweh, on the southern side of the Old City. Charles Warren and the pioneering female archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon had suspected that King David’s Jerusalem lay there, but neither had found anything. Unlike them, Mazar read the guidebook correctly. Interpreting the account of King David’s response to a Philistine attack in 2 Samuel 5, and securing funding from the American Jewish philanthropist Roger Hertog, she spent two years exposing monumental walls that she dated to David’s era. She claimed them to be his palace, and excavations are ongoing at the City of David, as the site is now known. While Israeli and Palestinian archaeologists fight one another over her claims, and while the Ark of the Covenant eludes all, the ground continues to shift beneath Jerusalemites’ feet.

Story Link

What Happens When Everyone Is Writing the Same Book You Are?

By Olivia Parker

Oct. 31, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

It was as if the story were floating in the air, waiting to be rediscovered. And by coincidence, a handful of writers came across it at the same time.

The story was true: In the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, a British expedition set out for Jerusalem to find the ark of the covenant, only to fail, spectacularly, in 1911, in an eruption of political turmoil and religious animosity.

The leader of this failed treasure hunt was a tall, slim British man named Montagu Brownlow Parker. Known as “Monty,” he was my great-great-uncle.

Monty died in 1962, years before I was born. He was a bachelor who lived well, traveled far, spent freely and left the contents of his will to a married woman: That was nearly everything I knew of him. All my family had left of his adventure in Jerusalem was a black box of papers telling a captivating tale.

The expedition grew out of an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it; Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.

It was late 1908, and that summer’s Young Turk Revolution had injected a new spirit of liberalization across the Ottoman Empire, which controlled much of what was then Palestine. Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.After two years, finding little, the team grew impatient. Monty bribed officials for access to a more promising location: the Haram al-Sharif, or Temple Mount, a site sacred in Islam, Judaism and Christianity. There, the team started to excavate secretly at night, opening up a tunnel that led right underneath the Dome of the Rock.

A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths. Monty’s group raced from Jerusalem amid riots and headlines screaming that the explorers had stolen the Temple Mount’s treasures, narrowly escaping on their yacht.

That a relative of mine was part of this was mind-blowing. In 2019, I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.

Scraps of the tale — a short account in Simon Sebag Montefiore’s 2011 book “Jerusalem”; a mention of an “archaeological dig” in the Ottoman archives — had turned at least six others like me onto it. We were all tracking down sources and shaping our notes into book proposals at around the same time.

When we learned of one another’s existence, it felt a little awkward.

The person to tell us was Nirit Shalev-Khalifa, a curator at the Yad Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem, who had recognized the story’s power years before any of us had. In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England. My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.

This could have been an annoying position for Nirit to find herself in, but she occupied it with relish. She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.

It seemed less thrilling to me. I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness: Who were these people writing about what I felt, unjustly, to be my story?

They were a diverse group, Nirit explained, and erudite: Louis Fishman, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, who found a dossier on the dig in the Ottoman archives; Timo Stewart, a Finnish researcher whose book focuses on Juvelius; Graham Addison, a retired British businessman turned history writer; and Andrew Lawler, an American journalist studying underground Jerusalem.

Eleven days after telling me about these men, Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.

Nirit envisaged a conference that would explore our collective research, and decided to introduce us to one another on Zoom. Some of us admitted to feeling nervous, even competitive. But Nirit’s enthusiasm was a diffusing force. There was enough room in the world for each of our approaches — journalistic, novelistic and academic — she insisted.

Afterward, we kept in touch, from homes as far apart as New York, Helsinki and Hong Kong, swapping notes on the pandemic, on Monty, on writing. The friendly tone set by Nirit prevailed.

Brad offered me an early version of his book to read, along with his agent’s contact information. Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.

The present intruded into our reflections on the past, a reminder of the expedition’s lasting relevance. Before Lior and I discussed his novel, we talked about the Hamas rockets that had crashed in front of his house in Israel, during a recent outbreak of fighting that had been inflamed by a raid on the Aqsa Mosque, inside the Haram al-Sharif. “Everything is related,” Lior said, smiling.

It was as though we had formed a Parker expedition think tank and, together, were uncovering the event’s significance.

As Louis writes in a chapter in his book, the events of the expedition’s aftermath — including the revelation, shocking to Jerusalem’s Muslim residents, that corrupt Ottoman officials were aiding the British explorers — add depth to our understanding of the factors influencing the emergence of Palestinian nationalism. The expedition may have had an impact on British foreign policy in the region, Andrew said when we talked, and it helped spawn the world’s ongoing fascination with the ark of the covenant (and Indiana Jones). It illustrates how people at the time viewed the Bible, science and chronology, Timo explained over Zoom, and why secret ciphers might have made sense to them.

Five books about the expedition have now been published; one more comes out in November. I hope a bookshop will display them all together — one story told six different ways.

That leaves my own version, which remains theoretical, at least for now. I’m still turning over my thoughts on my maverick great-great-uncle. I believe there are still parts of his story left to crack.

Olivia Parker is an editor on the international edition of The Times, based in Hong Kong.

Starred Review: Under Jerusalem

Journalist Lawler (The Secret Token) explores in this sweeping account the complicated history of archaeological digs in Jerusalem. Ranging from imperialistic expeditions in the 19th century, when explorers competed in a “race to stake a claim to Jerusalem’s past,” to allegations that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government used archaeology “as a legitimizer for the state,” Lawler’s colorful narrative includes aristocrats, scientists, charlatans, and clerics who searched for the “authentic place of Jesus’s death and resurrection,” sought to uncover the remnants of the ancient City of David, and tried to find the Ark of the Covenant, among other archaeological treasures. He vividly describes early explorers navigating mud- and sewage-laden tunnels to “recover the biblical secrets locked beneath the Holy City,” and incisively untangles the contentious geopolitical dimensions of ancient history as modern-day Israelis and Palestinians use archaeological analysis to bolster their political viewpoints and territorial claims. Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written, this immersive history casts Jerusalem in a new light and reveals the tensions that meet at the intersection of science, politics, religion, and history. This fascinating, evenhanded chronicle is a treasure. Agent: Ethan Bassoff, Ross Yoon Agency. (Nov.)

Interview: Publisher’s Weekly Talks with Andrew Lawler

Journalist Lawler’s Under Jerusalem (Doubleday, Nov.) examines the history and politics of archaeology in the Holy City.

This was the big surprise for me. To discover that archaeology, which began in the 1860s, was actually part of the colonial race to control Jerusalem, because it was part of the Ottoman Empire, which was coming apart at the seams. Christian Europe had always looked at Jerusalem as its own—during the Crusades, it had actually captured Jerusalem—and the people who went there were generally deeply religious, and were seeking to corroborate the Bible in the face of the onslaught of doubt and new science that was coming to the fore, particularly in Europe, during the early and mid-19th century. To do that, they had to look beyond the old, medieval, largely Arab-speaking city for the mythical Jerusalem, which they’d heard about from the pulpit for so many years.

Who was the most memorable explorer you came across in your research?

It would have to be Capt. Montagu Brownlow Parker, an English aristocrat who came to Jerusalem right before WWI to seek the Ark of the Covenant. He raised the equivalent of $2.4 million from English aristocrats and American industrialists, who believed they would get several billion dollars on the art market if they found it. Of course, they didn’t find the treasure, and instead they began to dig on the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Noble Sanctuary, and caused riots, nearly caused the fall of the Ottoman government, and nearly sparked a revolt by Muslim subjects of the British empire, who were outraged by this English aristocrat attacking Islam’s third-holiest shrine. Now it’s considered a comic opera, but I discovered that Parker, in inflaming Muslim opinion against the English and against archaeology, and against treasure hunters, turned the Noble Sanctuary into a center of what became Palestinian nationalism.

How is archaeology politicized in modern-day Jerusalem?

Archaeology is used by politicians on all sides to prove that Jerusalem belongs to them—whether it’s the Christians, the Jews, or the Muslims. It’s become a weapon in the war to control the city. But I have what may be a naive belief that science can actually show that Jerusalem belongs to neither the Christians nor the Jews nor the Muslims. In fact, it is an accretion of all of these traditions, which over the centuries have created something quite unique. If there can be a recognition that the science shows this complexity, and the beauty of the diversity of cultures that have come together in Jerusalem, it might someday, perhaps, form some basis for Jerusalem to become the city of peace that it has been heralded as for so many centuries.

Publishers Weekly Names Under Jerusalem in Top Ten of Fall 2021 releases

–David Adams

Read on publishersweekly.com

Top 10

The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773–1783

Joseph J. Ellis. Liveright, Sept. 21 ($30, ISBN 978-1-63149-898-5)
Ellis’s latest focuses on the brutality of the Revolutionary War and how the founders dealt with the issue of slavery.

Conquering the Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery

Andrés Reséndez. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Sept. 14 ($28, ISBN 978-1-328-51597-1)
National Book Award–finalist Reséndez recovers the lost history of the 16th-century Black mariner who navigated an easterly course across the Pacific Ocean from the Orient to the New World.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

David Graeber and David Wengrow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Oct. 19 ($35, ISBN 978-0-374-15735-7)
Anthropologist Graeber, who died in 2020, and archaeologist Wengrow cast doubt on the assumption that civilization could only be achieved by taming humanity’s baser instincts.

Girly Drinks: A Women’s History of Drinking

Mallory O’Meara. Hanover Square, Oct. 19 ($27.99, ISBN 978-1-335-28240-8)
This feminist history features a Sumerian beer goddess and Savoy Hotel bartender Ada Coleman.

The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes

Zoë Playdon. Scribner, Nov. 2 ($27, ISBN 978-1-9821-3946-9)
Medical historian Playdon recounts the life of an aristocratic Scottish trans man whose victory in a 1968 civil case could have protected trans rights—if it hadn’t been kept secret.

Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire

Caroline Elkins. Knopf, Jan. 25 ($30, ISBN 978-0-307-27242-3)
Pulitzer-winner Elkins returns 17 years after Imperial Reckoning to examine how the use of systematic, racialized violence both enabled the British Empire and brought about its downfall.

The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece

Kevin Birmingham. Penguin Press, Nov. 9 ($30, ISBN 978-1-59420-630-6)
Birmingham examines a famous French killer’s influence on Crime and Punishment.

The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped a Nation

Matthew Pearl. Harper, Oct. 5 ($27.99, ISBN 978-0-06-293778-0)
In his first work of nonfiction, novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) recounts the 1776 kidnapping of Daniel Boone’s daughter by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party.

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City

Andrew Lawler. Doubleday, Nov. 2 ($32.50, ISBN 978-0-385-54685-0)
Journalist Lawler details how archaeological digs in Jerusalem have fueled religious conflicts, shed light on the ancient world, and helped shape the modern city.

Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler

David McKean. St. Martin’s, Nov. 2 ($29.99, ISBN 978-1-250-20696-1)
The former U.S. ambassador to Luxembourg examines how FDR’s ambassadors in Europe responded to the Nazi threat and shaped the president’s view of it.

Review: Uncovering the layers of history and politics in Andrew Lawler’s “Under Jerusalem”

Science and archeology journalist, Andrew Lawler, has made a name for himself writing unique and compelling books on somewhat unconventional subjects. His first book, Why Did the Chicken Cross the World?, explored the cultural history of the domesticated chicken and how it spread across the globe. His second title, The Secret Token: Myth, Obsession, and the Search for the Lost Colony of Roanoke, examined the known history and many theories of what happened to the residents of that early English colony in the New World.

Lawler’s latest, Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City, is an impressively absorbing, admirably executed exploration of the labyrinthine layers of history, politics, religion, and science buried beneath one of the most religiously significant and politically volatile cities on Earth. Painterly descriptions, engaging storytelling, and meticulous research turn what could be a yawning tale of endless bureaucratic permit wrangling and religious and political machinations into a surprisingly exciting page-turner.

Lawler takes readers on a journey through the archaeological discoveries, political tensions, and cultural conflicts that have shaped Jerusalem’s dense and layered underground landscape. Our story begins in the 1860s as French and English explorers/proto-archeologists, motivated by Biblical accounts of King David, Solomon’s Temple, and holy treasures like the Ark of the Covenant, set their sights on the Holy City. It continues up to the present day, where that golden age remains largely unverified and ever-alluring to the world’s archeologists, treasure seekers, and the world’s Judaeo-Christians.

Through ancient tunnels, cisterns, and sewers of the city’s layered past, carved in soft limestone, Lawler shows how Jerusalem’s subterranean realm has been both a source of mystery and wonder and the site of seismic scientific, historical, and religious contention. Along the way, he introduces readers to a colorful cast of characters, including archaeologists, Biblical zealots, treasure-hunters, politicians, and religious leaders, each with their own motivations and perspectives in dealing with the city’s buried past.

Some of the stories of discovery in Under Jerusalem detail events that are almost too jaw-dropping to believe:

A Muslim business owner of a leather menswear company hears early morning sounds in what he knows to be the crawlspace beneath his factory. He lifts the hatch to the space to find a “dozen drunken black-bearded Egyptian Coptic priests in robes” and the formerly shallow and dank crawlspace now transformed into “a forest of stone columns and arches extending into the shadowy distance.” It turns out the priests had discovered another entrance into this Crusader-era space–long filled to the ceiling with centuries of muck and garbage–and had been secretly digging it out during the day, their sounds masked by the factory machines clanking away overhead. Their work completed, the priests had celebrated their efforts, gotten drunk, and were subsequently discovered in the morning hours by the owner. This incident would lead to a 20-year legal battle over ownership of the space below and to the discovery of an even larger Crusader-era space beside it. (As Lawler points out in the interview below, that factory space is now a convenience store and the hatch to that ancient underworld is in the middle of the potato chip aisle.)

Then there was the shocking and brazen 1999 bulldozing on the Temple Mount when Muslim authorities approved a cover-of-darkness hauling away of thirty dump trucks worth of dirt. This was done in an effort to open up archways along “Solomon’s Stables,” another Crusader-era structure they wanted to turn into a prayer space for upcoming Ramadan worshipers. They insisted there were no items of archeological significance in the dirt they trucked to the dump. A later sifting project of this dirt, organized by a young Jewish archeologist, would reveal over half a million artifacts, items from every period of Jerusalem’s history.

Or, how about the shop opener in the Muslim Quarter who began digging behind a curtain in his 5′ deep convenience store and 30 years later(!) his efforts would reveal an elegant, arched room held up by stone pillars. He would turn this space into “an atmospheric café popular with foreigners.” He would also find another large space beneath that one and a cistern below that, along with a series of tunnels that lead to various important sites around Jerusalem.

While Lawler focuses primarily on the physical and historical aspects of Jerusalem’s underground, he deftly handles the spiritual and symbolic resonances that these spaces hold for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. By exploring the complex interplay of religion, politics, and culture that defines this city, Under Jerusalem offers an illuminating and thought-provoking picture of one of the world’s most fascinating and complicated places.

Under Jerusalem is an engrossing, eye-opening read that should appeal to history buffs, armchair archaeologists, and anyone interested in the complex web of religion and culture that’s shaped this ancient and enigmatic city. Weeks after finishing it, I keep thinking back to it, wishing that it wasn’t over. You really can’t ask for more from a book.

Science Magazine, Volume 374, No. 6573

Interpreting Jerusalem

Thomas E. Levy

Science • 9 Dec 2021 • Vol 374, Issue 6573 • p. 1330 • DOI: 10.1126/science.abn0362

Shortly after the 1967 Six-Day War between Israel and a coalition of its Arab neighbors, the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai visited the newly unified city of Jerusalem, later describing it as “a port city on the shore of eternity” (1). The poem pays tribute to the metaphorical role played by the landlocked city, referencing its deep-time history and its intersectionality with the God of the three monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Jerusalem and its history are closely linked to how people—ranging from scientists to religious practitioners to atheists—have imagined this mountain settlement over time. In his new book, Under Jerusalem, journalist Andrew Lawler seeks to unpack how the story of the city of Jerusalem, with its amazing underground world of ancient tunnels, roads, buildings, sewage works, and buried artifacts, is told in relation to the people who have populated it for longer than 5000 years. This ambitious book traces more than 150 years of continuous archaeological investigation of the world’s most excavated city.

In Lawler’s view, the social identity of Jerusalem’s storytellers—that is, whether they see themselves primarily as archaeologists, historians, theologians, university professors, activists, or politicians—largely determines how they confront the city’s buried past. He therefore pays careful attention to the nationality, ethnicity, political leanings, and socioeconomic standing of the individuals who appear in his account.

Lawler begins his story in 1863 with the earliest systematic investigation of the city, conducted by French senator Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy. While excavating a large burial complex known as the Tomb of the Kings, the amateur archaeologist mistakenly concluded that he had found the final burial site of the Israelite King David and his son Solomon, setting the stage for a series of competing digs conducted by researchers from France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. These endeavors, often firmly rooted in Christian perspectives of the Holy Land, brought renewed interest to Palestine, a forgotten corner of the dying Ottoman Empire.

Contemporary standard practices for exploring archaeological sites focus on careful surface-down excavations. However, in the 1860s, in an effort to locate the remains of King David’s palace, two young British military men, Charles Wilson and Charles Warren, used tunneling methods to explore Jerusalem’s labyrinth of underground passages, channels, and buildings. A number of subsequent excavators, most of them Israeli, eventually followed suit.

Lawler interrogates the complex ideological motivations that compel the region’s two Indigenous peoples, Jews and Arabs, to explore and alter the city. Jewish investigators are often motivated by a desire to explore clues to their heritage that lurk underground. Their efforts are frequently deeply interwoven with ideas about Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem today. For Arab interpreters, it is the aboveground Islamic monuments that most often resonate with their identity and spur their investigations.

Under Jerusalem highlights the numerous archaeological atrocities that have been carried out in this contested city. These include the Jordanian destruction of the Jewish Quarter and its 27 synagogues in the 1948 war, the Israeli bulldozing of the Mugrabi Quarter adjacent to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount shortly after the 1967 war, and the currently occupied houses that have been undermined by archaeological tunneling. Some of these incidents reflect the evolution of archaeological practice, others the religion and politics of the actors—but all reflect a desire to use Jerusalem for the perceived good of the groups to which the investigators belong.

Lawler hints that a commitment to science-based archaeology by a new generation of Israeli researchers, coupled with innovative underground excavation techniques, may herald a more objective telling of the history of the world’s most contested city. This offers a distinctive opportunity for archaeologists to write a new narrative of the “city of peace” from the ground up.

By Michal Hoschander Malen

– November 8, 2021

Jerusalem is a city of endless beauty and fascination for residents, visitors, and historians. It is also a political tinderbox with conflicting ethnic, religious, and societal claims to its many glories. Archaeology has been a focal point of Jerusalem study as layer after layer of its history is revealed, adding fact, nuance, detail, and drama to its story. Those who study Jerusalem and its unique history, which ranges from pre-Biblical times until the present day, are at the heart of a tempest of claims, counterclaims, and contentious political theater that seems never to wane.

Under Jerusalem by Andrew Lawler is an intriguing resource for those interested in learning what lies beneath the modern city and how those findings affect today’s political and social landscape. Its stories lie in layers, many of which have been undisturbed for centuries. Lawler presents a cast of characters and a progression of events that build one on another, much like the archaeological layers themselves, and the discoveries he shows us beguile and amaze. Each archaeologist who arrived, tools in hand and team at the ready, hoped to tease out Jerusalem’s underground secrets. Each was a product of his or her time. Some had an agenda. Each operated against a particular social and political landscape. Each unearthed discovery was evaluated in light of the ethos of its time but each gains deeper context as time goes on.

Some of the personae who came to explore and left their stories behind them are: Frenchman Louis-Felicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy, confidant of Napoleon; British cartographer Charles Wilson and his successor, military officer Charles Warren; German Protestant Conrad Schick; noted archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon who was “considered the most influential woman archaeologist of the twentieth century — and by some, the century’s greatest field excavator”; Israeli archaeologists Benjamin Mazar and his granddaughter, a prominent archaeologist in her own right, Eilat Mazar; Israeli archaeologists Yigael Yadin and Yigal Shiloh; and many others. Some of the issues faced by many of them as they searched Jerusalem’s layers included Israeli and Palestinian claims to significant religious sites and the frequent attempts of some groups of rabbis to block excavations for fear of disturbing ancient Jewish bones.

As Lawler’s account progresses, today’s territorial conflicts play an increasingly disturbing role in the explorations of the past. Who has the right to excavate where? Will discoveries support one political side and discredit another? What roles do the three major religions in the area play and how can archaeological finds square with religious doctrines? Can the lessons of the far-off past provide a guide to co-existence in modern times?

Lawler’s prose and the spotlight he shines on the history of each era make his account read like an exciting adventure story, some parts resembling unfolding mysteries, keeping the reader alert and eagerly turning pages to find out how each incident resolves itself. As long-buried secrets emerge into daylight, events and headlines of our time acquire new meaning, providing a useful sense of perspective. Archaeology feels like a vital, relevant, far-reaching endeavor shedding light on today’s headlines and tomorrow’s world.

Extensive front-and-back matter adds context. Included are numerous maps, a long list of suggested further reading, detailed notes, an introduction, an author’s note, and an epilogue that sums up Lawler’s findings. Those interested in Jerusalem both above and below ground will find Under Jerusalem both fascinating and useful.

Michal Hoschander Malen is the editor of Jewish Book Council’s young adult and children’s book reviews. A former librarian, she has lectured on topics relating to literacy, run book clubs, and loves to read aloud to her grandchildren.

Reviewed by: Marissa Moss

“A comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed story about one of the most argued over pieces of land on earth.”

Andrew Lawler has tackled big subjects before—the lost colony of Roanoke most recently. But he takes on a particularly complicated one in Under Jerusalem. Fortunately, he’s up to the task, delivering a story of not one excavation but several, not one culture or historical event but many. Just as Jerusalem is itself layered, so is this book:

“Like the marine organisms that created the limestone, succeeding generations created new strata. But Jerusalem is not like the abandoned towns, such as nearby ancient Jericho, dotting the Middle East that left behind high mounds resembling layer cakes, with the old neatly stacked beneath the more recent. Constant human activities jumbled the past; a Roman column might be repurposed for a Byzantine church, and stones cut by Jewish masons two thousand years ago could adorn a medieval mosque. Jerusalem is an old puzzle that reassembles itself in fresh ways, like the faiths that grew from it.”

What’s exceptional about this book, besides delivering fascinating characters and vivid excavation stories, is the way Lawler is acutely aware of the effect the past has on the present. The cultural, religious, and political tug-of-war between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam informs how he describes events. He is careful to show the motivations behind the different powers (from the Ottoman Turks to the French to the British), each with their own reasons to want to claim the holy city. He is equally careful to make clear the claims each religion has on the city, stressing the long-ago peaceful coexistence between Jews and Muslim Arabs, a balance that was changed by the influx of European or Ashkenazi Jews fleeing pogroms and the Holocaust in the late 19th and mid 20th century.

Though the book isn’t one story but several, each excavation serves to illuminate some aspect of archeology, history, or essential character of the city. The scope, however, is broad, allowing the reader to understand the different motivations behind the archeology. Science and historical understanding were rarely in the forefront. Treasure hunting and building reputations took a more prominent role. And politics was never far behind:

“The British empire in the early 1890s was nearing its global zenith, covering a quarter of the globe and dominating a quarter of the world’s population. The threat posed by Russia had faded as Czar Alexander III sought to avoid major international conflicts while grappling with growing domestic challenges. Britain’s purchase of the Suez Canal, meanwhile, had undermined French influence in the Middle East. Egypt was now out of the Ottoman orbit and under British sway.”

This kind of broad view and depth of knowledge undergirds every chapter in the book. Lawler has clearly done his research, and he pulls together all the elements into a fascinating story that presents the city of Jerusalem in all of its facets, much like a kaleidoscope offering us many different views of the same object. It’s hard to imagine a definitive book being written about such a complicated subject, but this one is as close as it gets. Lawler gives a comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed story about one of the most argued over pieces of land on the earth. But this is no dry treatise. It’s more of an adventure story with the main characters being archeologists and treasure seekers. Lovers of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark won’t be disappointed.

Marissa Moss is a staff reviewer at New York Journal of Books.

BY ORI Z. SOLTES

2021 November/December, Arts & Culture, Book Review

Book Review | Beneath the City of God

Under Jerusalem: The Buried History of the World’s Most Controversial City

The rabbinic tradition speaks of a Jerusalem above and a Jerusalem below. It imagines the earthbound city as a reflection of a heavenly one—the latter perfect and the former aspiring to perfection. The earthbound metropolis itself also has a dual personality: It is a sacred city, but one in which the profane, often ugly realities of everyday life play out. It is a city focused on a universal God of love that consistently yields expressions of schism and violence. Religion and politics have for two millennia found a particularly intense interplay in this city of contradictions, in which the shifting of a brick in an obscure neighborhood can yield cataclysmic consequences.

Andrew Lawler’s magisterial Under Jerusalem contributes a unique addition to the copious literature focused on the eternal city. He introduces another split in Jerusalem’s personality: the city above ground, which drags the past into the present and sometimes glimpses the future; and its buried history, the Jerusalem below the ground, honeycombed with tunnels and chambers that attract spiritual and material archaeologists.

Lawler has plunged beneath the surface to the hidden under-city, searching for hints of Jerusalem above within Jerusalem below. In so doing, he has also translated its incessant politics into poetry. He weaves his narrative threads into a tight tapestry of historical and contemporary events, at once comic and tragic, viewed through the lens of the archaeological enterprise that began in the middle of the 19th century. That story features a series of Christian European personalities who arrived with varied agendas, both religious and secular.

Lawler introduces a split in Jerusalem’s personality: the city above ground, which drags the past into the present and sometimes the future; and its buried history.

Some of those digging were determined to prove or disprove passages from the Bible or to locate the key paraphernalia from the destroyed Temple, whether they meant Solomon’s Temple, torched by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, or the Second Temple amplified by Herod and burned to the ground by the Romans in 70 CE. Sought-after objects included the “shew tables” that held Temple offerings, the menorah, the curtain hanging before the Holy of Holies, and the Ark of the Covenant with or without its stone tablets. Some sought the sepulcher of Christ; others engaged in a new crusade to wrest the Temple Mount—Noble Sanctuary, in Arabic—from the minds of the Muslims; others simply hoped to establish a definitive material chronology of civilizations that had held hegemony over Jerusalem.

Part I of Lawler’s narrative follows the vertical digging and horizontal tunneling, boldly by day or stealthily by night, of the intrepid explorers who burrowed within Jerusalem’s belly for a century, ranging from the French Louis-Felicien Joseph de Saulcy (1807-1880) to the British Kathleen Kenyon (1906-1978). From the 1860s to the 1960s, these and many other individuals pushed their Sisyphean ambitions uphill as humanity expanded and imploded—experiencing industrial and scientific greatness, fin de siècle malaise and a horrifying taste for increasingly brutal wars. Meanwhile, the old walled city of Jerusalem itself moved from Ottoman to British to Jordanian to Israeli political control.

Lawler’s fast-paced adventure-story account of what they did, what they found—and, more often, what they failed to find—yields to more recent stories of equally colorful characters. Israeli archaeologists, right-wing Israeli politicians and American entrepreneurs are among those who have broadened and
deepened—pun intended—the topographical parameters of this enterprise.

Complications included the more-than-occasional crises that arose from interaction with the local Muslim-Arab population, fearful and suspicious since 1863 as to what exactly these outsiders are really up to down there, digging around, potentially tunneling under the vast platform of the Noble Sanctuary. Part II, accordingly, takes up the politics of religion and the religion of politics, the topography of history and the history of topography, and another, even longer list of professional and amateur archaeologists.

After the Six-Day War in 1967, the former Temple platform and what lies beneath its surface became central to the larger discussion of Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors, in particular the Palestinians. Lawler recounts how at one point—as negotiators after the 1993 Oslo Accords struggled to push past the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin and to birth a positive conclusion before the Clinton presidency ended—Dennis Ross, the lead U.S. negotiator, floated a proposal to offer the PLO authority for the surface structures on the Temple Mount/Noble Sanctuary (most notably, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque) while granting Israelis authority beneath its surface, so that further archaeological exploration might proceed. (Alas, this suggestion yielded no result.)

The life-and-death struggle for a lasting peace for earthbound Jerusalem (and its extended environs) transpires against the backdrop of persistent underground transformation. The Israelis extend the tunnel along the Western Wall of the Temple platform to exit along the Via Dolorosa; the Palestinians semi-clandestinely reshape “Solomon’s Stables” near the southeast corner of the platform as a mosque. Most notably, the murkily funded Elad organization sponsors the digging of a complex south of the platform—deep into areas thought to include the site of David’s small capital city and of the Siloam Pool, where Jesus supposedly healed a blind
man—transforming it into an underground biblical Disneyland.

Throughout the book, public dramas intertwine with the private ones for which Jerusalem is renowned. An owner casually excavates the basement in his house or the back wall of his shop, which then yields some unpredictable archaeological, religious, legal or political complication—most often, all four. Lawler sees a deeper layer of meaning in another feature for which aboveground Jerusalem is renowned: “Jerusalem syndrome,” the local form of madness, in which an individual, usually a tourist, imagines himself a biblical prophet. The syndrome increased in frequency as the millennium approached; Lawler puts the surge into context, locating it within the larger madness of 160 years of lusting to possess and redirect the rivers of history flowing through this small hill town. Whatever their aim, seekers must wrestle with gravel and sludge, finding the occasional gold coins and the inevitable sewage.

I do have two minor complaints. One: In an otherwise nuanced and even-handed narrative, I think that the appropriately painful account of the destruction by the Israelis of the Mughrabi Quarter after 1967 should be preceded by a more than merely passing reference to the wholesale destruction of synagogues in the Jewish quarter by the Jordanians in 1949-67. Two: Given an Author’s Note in which Lawler demonstrates his awareness of language and its importance, it is distressing that he is not more careful to distinguish “Israelite” from “Judaean” from “Jew(ish)” and “Arab” from “Muslim”—both of which failures help perpetuate misconceptions regarding history and religion. But these complaints are minor compared to the overall power of his narrative. This is a spellbinding book—and a reminder that, just when one might have imagined that nothing new could be written about Jerusalem, there is still more to be found beneath its surface.

Ori Z. Soltes teaches across disciplines in the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. He is the author of Untangling the Middle East: A Guide to the Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Chaotic Region and teaches a course on “Jerusalem: City and Symbol.”

Link to Review

This book deals with the thorny issue of how archaeology has been and is conducted in Jerusalem, home to the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and the monuments sacred to them, and the city at the heart of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. It explores the motivations of those doing the excavating, the effects their actions have had, both intentional and unintentional, and the effects on our understanding of Jerusalem’s past. It also explores how cultural heritage has been hijacked and manipulated by various political and ideological factions, each wanting to control Jerusalem’s narrative, and how the inhabitants of the city have been excluded from participating in the discovery of the history and heritage of their home. It is an extremely important book, and I am very glad it was written by someone who knows how to write and who has a wide readership.

The book begins with a schematic map of the Middle East, with an insert close-up of the southern Levant. After a brief Author’s Note comes the Introduction, which is announced with a map of the Old City of Jerusalem, the platform of the Haram ash-Sharif / Temple Mount / Har HaBayit and its environs, with the main sites of interest marked. This is a very necessary and detailed introduction in which Lawler sets out his stall, and describes the conventions he has settled on for place and site names. He also explains that for the greater part of the book, because of an enduring historical imbalance in representation, the vast majority of voices are those of outsiders—British, French, Ottoman, as well as European and American immigrants to the region, rather than the voices of the Jewish, Armenian, or Arab residents of Jerusalem and its environs.

The book is then divided into three parts, covering the last 160 or so years of exploration in Jerusalem. The first part deals with the largest time span, beginning in the Ottoman period in 1850 and ending with the Six Day War in 1967. It opens with the French senator Louis-Félicien Joseph Caignart de Saulcy’s exploration of the Tombs of the Kings outside the Old City, before exploring in some detail Charles Warren’s work for the Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) around the Haram ash-Sharif and the Ophel Ridge, Bliss and Dickie’s continuation of that exploration in the 1890s, and the notorious Parker expedition of 1909–1911, which trespassed within the walls of the Haram itself and nearly caused a war. Lawler then looks at archaeology during the British Mandate period from 1919 to 1948 and examines in particular the professional structures and organisations that emerged to control archaeological exploration and to encourage scholarship in the region. These include the establishment of the Department of Antiquities, the Rockefeller Museum, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the British School of Archaeology at Jerusalem. Kathleen Kenyon and Père de Vaux’s excavations in and around the Old City are a particular focus.

Parts 2 and 3 investigate archaeology in the city under Israeli control, starting with the destruction of the historic Maghrebi Quarter to open up the Western Wall Plaza, and Benjamin Mazar’s excavations around the Temple Mount, and continuing to include the Tunnel Project along the Western Wall, the City of David and Givati Parking Lot excavations run by ELAD in Silwan south of the Old City, the Waqf’s controversial rehabilitation of the Marwani prayer space within Solomon’s Stables on the Haram ash-Sharif, and the subsequent controversial Sifting Project that arose out of it. As the story progresses, the entanglement

PALESTINE EXPLORATION QUARTERLY with politics and ideologies grows ever greater. The three parts are further subdivided into several chapters, each of which explores a particular project, or sites of investigation, and is furnished with a map of the Old City, showing the location of the sites in question. These recurring maps are one of my favourite features of the book. They help to orientate the reader and keep them focused on the particular story the chapter concerns itself with.

Familiar names to the student of the history of Jerusalem’s exploration appear throughout: de Saulcy, Charles Warren, Conrad Schick, the Palestine Exploration Fund, the École Biblique, Père Vincent, Kathleen Kenyon, and Israeli archaeologists such as Benjamin and Eilat Mazar, Gabriel Barkay, Dan Bahat, Israel Finkelstein, Ronnie Reich, and Rafi Greenberg.

Then there are religious leaders like Rabbis Getz, Yosef, and Goren, and the members of the Waqf, the custodians of the Haram ash-Sharif and the Islamic holy places contained within. And of course, there are political figures such as Yitzak Rabin, Yasser Arafat, Bill Clinton, Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. What is significant is the way that Lawler tells these stories together, demonstrating how the actions, beliefs and opinions of the early explorers have influenced later practitioners, to create an enduring narrative which, never mind what really lies beneath, has been manipulated and exploited for various goals.

Palestinian and Arab voices are rare, not by design but because of the imbalance the author describes in the introduction. As time progresses, they play an increasingly important role, and we hear not just from the Waqf and the PLO, but from Palestinian archaeologists Namzi Jubeh, Ehab Jallab, and Hani Nur el-Din, as well as residents including Abdek Salam Hirbawi, (whose cellar near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City was the cause of a major argument between his family and the monks of the Church in the 1980s), and Miriam Bashir, whose house in Silwan is, like so many others, slowly becoming uninhabitable due to subsidence.

Jerusalem’s story is immensely complex, but Lawler deftly weaves the numerous threads together to present us with a very comprehensive tapestry. What he reveals is that despite the momentous changes which have taken place over the last 160 or so years covered here, there is a surprising continuity of several themes which reveal themselves as the book progresses. Altogether, these themes present an unflattering portrait of archaeological practice in Jerusalem from the early work of former colonial powers, the French, Ottomans, and the British up to 1914, through the new era of colonial rule of the British Mandate (1918– 1948), and finally into the modern era of Israeli control and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Tunnelling is a method of revealing Jerusalem’s past out of sight of its residents. Introduced by Warren in the 19th century, it has been continued by successive excavators ever since. It is not regarded today as good archaeological practice, and would not be countenanced elsewhere. But in Jerusalem, the desire to reveal its biblical past at any cost and by any means overrides other concerns. The same could be said of the use of bulldozers—not the most delicate item in the archaeologist’s toolbox, but apparently fine in Jerusalem, if used with care (pp. 142–46).

Religious belief has been a huge feature of most activities from the outset. All of the various agencies have, to varying degrees, favoured biblical eras over those earlier and, especially, later, an imbalance which exists even now. It has undoubtedly resulted in the destruction of a huge amount of Late Antiquity and Medieval archaeology. These religious beliefs have also been harnessed by political agendas, whether Christian colonialist, or Jewish Zionist.

Both are linked, and both have resulted in the local population having been side-lined from the exploration and explanation of Jerusalem’s past, in favour of producing a particular narrative that supports a political or ideological interpretation.

This is perhaps the saddest theme that Lawler draws out. In all periods, the local population has been systematically ignored and cut out of the archaeological conversation happening on its doorstep. This has resulted in and enduring mistrust of archaeology and archaeologists, and a flourishing illicit antiquities trade, which today the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), through its lax antiquities laws, cannot hope to effectively control. This exclusive approach began as a feature of a colonial world view, where local residents were seen as a source of labour, and as facilitators, but as little else. Here, de Saulcy, Warren, and others are guilty as charged. Despite the political changes of the 20th century this approach has been sustained, and continues today, with Arab labour supplying much of the muscle for the excavations taking place around and beneath Jerusalem. Whilst this model offers employment and involvement, it is not agency, and these workers and residents have little say in the interpretation, or the narrative produced, or indeed in the economic benefits of the tourism resulting from the archaeology. Hopefully, with the emergence of professional Palestinian archaeologists in recent years, and archaeological courses gaining traction at universities such as Al Quds and Birzeit, this will change to some extent at least.

Lawler investigates the fissures in the various Christian and Jewish communities that have a bearing on the archaeology of Jerusalem, which the outsider may be less aware of. He skilfully brings out some of the profound differences of opinion that have existed within different sectors of Jewish and Israeli communities: fears that archaeology might ‘uncover the truth’ and demolish religion-based claims to Jerusalem, fears that archaeologists might, through their work, desecrate Jewish graves, as well as a secular Zionist desire to use archaeology to uncover proof of the city’s ‘Jewish past’.

As the book approaches the near past and present, Lawler plots the growing power of extreme right-wing Zionism characterised by Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, which began to ‘flex its muscles’ in the 1990s, just as an attempt at bringing about peace was made with the Oslo Accords. With the right-wing taking charge in Israel, settler organisations such as ELAD, with funding support from outside Israel, also began to take a far more active—and controversial—role in the politics and the archaeology of Jerusalem whereby archaeology is used to change the city’s demographic and to control the narrative of its past. This can be seen particularly clearly in ELAD’s City of David project, which presents the visitor with a clear and compelling, but ultimately fictitious, vision of a Jerusalem where Judaism is the primary cultural influence of significance, and dominates, unfettered with the complex realities of a multi-religious and multi-ethnic past and present.

At the same time, Arab leaders have sought to counteract a ‘Jewish identity’ in Jerusalem by claiming that—despite very compelling evidence to the contrary—the Temple was not where the Haram ash-Sharif now stands, but was located elsewhere, perhaps even outside Jerusalem altogether. Whilst this idea has not attracted as much traction in the wider world as the agenda of the settler movement, it is important to realise that propaganda is not the exclusive tool of one side or the other.

Under numerous international laws and rules (the Hague Convention and its two protocols; 1970 UNESCO; 1995 UNIDROIT), it is considered illegal to excavate in any territory that is in dispute. Archaeological projects did not, however, stop in 1967: if anything, they have increased in frequency and ambition. Because of the hectic pace of activity, and the increasing involvement of the Israel Antiquities Authority, even in areas it would have previously steered clear of, it is easy to forget that all this work, where it takes place in areas under occupation, remains illegal under International Law. These are laws and conventions that the State of Israel does not recognise, and instead it sees the jurisdiction of the IAA as sovereign throughout, except on the Haram ash-Sharif itself where the Waqf is in control. It is important to understand that this does not mean that these laws do not exist; they are just continually broken in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

This issue of International Law as applied to excavation in occupied territories is brought up only once in the book. Perhaps the author felt it should be handled with a light touch, but personally, I feel it could have been given more weight, as it is so pertinent, if not critical to the subject.

The power of Lawler’s account increases as we get closer to the present day. He is a journalist, and his talent for journalism is on display, especially in the latter part of the book. His text is full of first-hand accounts from those involved—the archaeologists, sometimes those connected with the political power-players in Jerusalem and in Washington, and occasionally those who are directly affected by the archaeology and the politics being carried out both above and below them. These first-hand accounts give the book an immediacy and honesty which is quite gripping. Lawler has spent a great deal of time cultivating relationships with those people who are central to the story, and the book is all the better for it.

The book is not without its flaws: there is very little mention of the American, French and German interests in Jerusalem in the Ottoman period, beyond occasional references to the wider political jostling of the so-called ‘Great Game’, and whilst we occasionally hear of the involvement of the École Biblique, there is hardly mention beyond acknowledgement of the American Schools of Oriental Research which exist today as the Albright Institute in Sheikh Jarrah, north of the Old City. Granted, their involvement in the archaeology of Jerusalem has not been so direct, but they were, and remain, a part of the archaeological community resident in the city.

There are also errors in the characterisation of some organisations, such as the American Colony of the Spafford family, which Lawler describes as a group of missionaries, whereas, in reality, the family had not come to Jerusalem to proselytise, but rather to heal through work in the aftermath of terrible tragedies. The PEF is almost a character in its own right in Lawler’s book and is portrayed as an organisation, the committee and membership of which were entirely motivated and driven by an exclusive interest in the Bible, through which it might serve colonial interests. It is true that biblical concerns featured heavily in the PEF’s early days; yet, it seems this was much more to do with how the founders understood the means by which they could attract funding and support than anything else. The PEF’s interests were far broader, as a look at the pages of the PEF Quarterly Statement (today’s PEQ) will show, and it always walked something of a tightrope between balancing its own, broad, scholarship-driven agenda with the expectations of its membership, which, by and large, was more biblically orientated than its core committee. At the PEF’s inaugural meeting in June 1865, the Rev. H. B. Tristram (very much a Darwinian) was at pains to promote the study of the region’s natural history for its own sake, because it was interesting (Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund 1865, p. 15), and G. Gilbert Scott Esq., R.A., included the architecture of Classical, Byzantine and Islamic periods in his discussion, and called for excavators to take account of the debris in which the architecture was embedded (Proceedings and Notes, p. 22). The PEF also employed William Flinders Petrie to excavate on its behalf Tell el-Hesi in the 1890s which Lawler refers to, and at which Palestine’s pre-classical past was first given some structure. Indeed, it was the scientific methodology employed by Petrie at Hesi that laid the stratigraphic foundations for all subsequent, competent excavation work in Palestine and beyond.

When, later, the British School of Archaeology (BSAJ) was founded at the beginning of the British Mandate in 1919, Lawler describes it thus: ‘Unlike the Palestinian [sic] Exploration Fund, the organisation [the BSAJ] would seek more than biblical remains’ (p. 120–21). Then, he goes on to list its interest in ‘Canaanite, Graeco-Roman, Byzantine, Arab, and Medieval periods’ and its characteristic as a non-religious and non-political body. However, he could almost be quoting, in slightly modernised language, from the 1865 prospectus of the PEF! This of course makes perfect sense, as the PEF was very much behind the establishment of the BSAJ in Jerusalem. Both organisations seem to have been unrealistically naïve about steering clear of controversy and politics and their academic motivations were very similar. At the time of its establishment, the only difference was that the BSAJ had no covert colonial role because, at this point, Britain had colonised Palestine. The BSAJ did not need to keep its supporters interested with biblical material because it was funded directly by the British government. Lawler’s representation of the PEF through this narrow, ‘biblically infected’ viewfinder is irritating, but does it matter? Well, yes, because the PEF plays such a large part in the narrative of the book particularly in the first part, but throughout as its influence endures.

The challenge to the biblical interpretation of Jerusalem’s past, and in particular the period relating to the ‘United Monarchy’ of David and Solomon is discussed. In Lawler’s account, the main challenge is laid down by Israel Finkelstein. It is inaccurate to suggest that it was Finkelstein alone who made others question the chronology based on the biblical narratives. There have been many who have, more generally, questioned the relationship between biblical history and archaeological reality. To mention just two: Kenyon’s excavations at Jericho in the 1950s made a new scepticism possible, as did the publication of Thomas Thompson’s Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives in the 1970s. I think the significant point is that Finkelstein was the first Israeli archaeologist to openly question biblical chronology, and by so doing made it harder for the inconsistencies to be ignored by Israeli archaeology.

Finally, right at the beginning of the book, in the introduction, Lawler makes a distinction between the archaeology of an inhabited city like Jerusalem and abandoned tells like that of Jericho. He is right, of course. Excavating any currently inhabited site comes with added complexity, and Jerusalem is as complex as it gets, but to describe Middle Eastern tells as ‘high mounds resembling layer cakes, with the old neatly stacked beneath the more recent’ (p. xxvi) is over-simplifying to say the least. I can almost hear a collective sharp intake of breath from the excavators of such sites.

These criticisms aside, Andrew Lawler has written an extremely powerful, honest, and important book. With great clarity and skill, he takes the reader on a tour through Jerusalem’s labyrinthine subterranean world, and amazingly, despite the almost unbelievable complexities of the story, he never loses his way. This book should be read by every person interested in the cultural heritage of Jerusalem and the region, its past, present, and future.

References

Kenyon, K., & Holland, T. A., 1960–1983. Excavations at Jericho 1952–58, Vols. 1–5. BSAJ.

Palestine Exploration Fund, 1865. Proceedings and Notes of the Palestine Exploration Fund, Vol. 1. Thompson, T. L., 1975. The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives. De Gruyter.

Felicity Cobbing

Link to review

New books from Israel for this month of Yom Ha’atzmaut

Our roundtable is a bit less well-rounded as we say farewell to our colleague and friend, Irene Afek, who has co-written this column with us, sharing her insights and knowledge. We wish Irene all the best, and we know that she will continue to be held in high regard by everyone who has the good fortune to know her!

This month brings us the important Israeli holidays of Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel Independence Day) and Yom Yerushalayim (Jerusalem Day). Several new books, both fiction and non-fiction, are especially appropriate as we celebrate Israel.

AMY: We’ll begin with Israeli non-fiction. The first archaeological dig in Jerusalem was conducted in 1863, and since then, archaeologists and adventurers of many religions and nationalities have searched beneath the holy city seeking treasure, fame, and proof of the events chronicled in religious texts. “Under Jerusalem” by Andrew Lawler tells the history of efforts to dig up secrets buried beneath the city. The author delves into thorny political and religious controversies created when people dig into the many layers under Jerusalem. Extensive notes, maps, and other materials underscore the scholarly nature of Lawler’s work, yet the book reads like an exciting adventure story.

AMY: “The Israeli Century: How the Zionist Revolution Changed History and Reinvented Judaism” by Yossi Shain is sure to spark discussion. Shain’s premise is that the Diaspora is shrinking in size and influence, and in the future, Israel will define Jewish identity and life. The author explains the historical developments, as far back as ancient times, that have led to this conclusion, focusing on the development of Reform Judaism in Europe and America, and the tension between Reform and Zionism.

MINNA: Matti Friedman’s newest book, “Who By Fire,” subtitled “Leonard Cohen in the Sinai,” brings together the traumatic events of the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 with the musician suffering a career crisis. Partly based on a 45-page manuscript Leonard Cohen wrote shortly after the war that the author used with the permission of Cohen’s estate, Friedman expands upon that with his own investigative journalism to describe the weeks Cohen spent giving concerts in the Sinai to small groups of soldiers and to analyze what that meant for both Leonard Cohen’s subsequent life and career and the country of Israel.

AMY: Let’s turn now to Israeli fiction. Fans of mysteries may well be familiar with Jonathan Dunsky’s Adam Lapid series. This series is set in the early days of the State of Israel, and Adam is a Holocaust survivor as well as a private detective. The newest series entry is “A Death in Jerusalem,” set at a time when the Israeli government was considering negotiating with Germany for Holocaust reparations and many viewed such negotiations as an abomination. On January 7, 1952, protestors stormed the Knesset after an anti-reparations demonstration, and Dunsky uses consequences of this actual historic moment to bring a wealthy industrialist into the novel; this man wants Adam to solve the mystery surrounding his daughter’s suicide. Plot turns and twists keep readers turning the pages.

MINNA: A debut collection of 11 short stories by a young Israeli author now living in New York, “The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land” by Omer Friedlander is whimsical and imaginative, with most stories set in Israel both past and present. The various stories take place in diverse locations from Jerusalem to the Negev to Tsfat. The title story, for example, is about a father and daughter who sell bottles of “holy air” to tourists on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. The author himself grew up in Tel Aviv, although he spent two childhood years living in Princeton,

New Jersey, and holds degrees from Cambridge and Boston University. Friedlander is currently at work on his first full-length novel.

MINNA: “Jerusalem Beach” by Iddo Gefen is another debut collection of 13 short stories, this one written in Hebrew and translated into English by Daniella Zamir. These stories, set in contemporary Israel, combine humor with an interest in technology and the brain, relating to the author’s background in neurocognitive research. The title story concerns a woman with Alzheimer’s who has a “memory” of snow on the beach in Jerusalem. Rights to several of the stories have already been sold to TV and film production companies in Hollywood. Gefen’s debut novel will be published next year.

ANDREW LAWLER

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

ANDREW LAWLER

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

REVIEWS

RELATED READING

ANDREW LAWLER

ANDREW LAWLER

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an excit­ing adven­ture sto­ry.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an excit­ing adven­ture sto­ry.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

ANDREW LAWLER

2024 recipient of the Felicia A. Holton Book Award.

Told with a historian’s penchant for detail and a journalist’s flair for narration.

In a city where the winner takes all, Mr. Lawler does an admirable job.

Richly detailed, sensitively argued, and entertainingly written.

Comprehensive, even-handed, clear-headed.

The book is nearly as fun to read as exploring the underground passages it describes.

His account read(s) like an excit­ing adven­ture sto­ry.

A terrific story, bursting at the seams with dubiously legal digs and eccentric personalities.

Clear and engaging.

Order Under Jerusalem at these booksellers, or visit your local bookstore!

REVIEWS

Advance Praise for Under Jerusalem

The Washington Post

The New Yorker

The Wall Street Journal

The New York Times

Publishers Weekly : Starred Review

Boing Boing

Science Magazine

Jewish Book Council

New York Journal of Books

Booklist

Moment Magazine

Kirkus

Jewish Insider

Palestine Exploration Quarterly

Jewish Community Voice

Haaretz

Chatham News and Record

The Jewish News of Northern California

The Laurel Of Asheville

Lincoln Journal Star

Longview News-Journal

WRAL.com

Greek Reporter

AudioFile

The Jerusalem Post

Library Journal

Virginian Pilot

Bowling Green Daily News

Jewish Journal

Jewish Review of Books

Approaching Jerusalem

RELATED READING

ANDREW LAWLER

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.

His account read(s) like an exciting adventure story.