Searching for Amos Oz in Jerusalem
“The city has been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed, and rebuilt again. Conqueror after conqueror has come, ruled for a while” … and left.
“JERUSALEM SEEMED QUIET and thoughtful that winter,” Amos Oz writes in his final novel, Judas (2016). “From time to time, church bells rang out. A westerly breeze stirred the tops of the cypresses.” It’s a lovely image, but Jerusalem wasn’t at all quiet and thoughtful when I visited this winter. It was noisy and bustling, even hectic. As a disgruntled American exclaimed in the baggage-claim hall of Ben-Gurion Airport, after the carousel broke and people climbed up to get their bags from the conveyor belt: “It’s chaos! There’s no law and order.” But you’d expect Jerusalem to feel more chaotic in the winter of 1959 and 1960, when Judas takes place, because back then the city was split by a hostile border. As Oz continues after the lines above, “Once in a while, a bored Jordanian sniper fired a stray shot toward the minefields and the wasteland that divided the Israeli from the Jordanian city.”
In 1949, when the War of Independence ended with a stunning Jewish victory, Jerusalem was divided in two; the new state of Israel got the western parts, and Jordan occupied everything else, including the Old City. Concrete walls, barbed wire, minefields, observation posts, and snipers separated the Israeli and Jordanian sections for nearly two decades. Then, after the Six-Day War of 1967, the entire city of Jerusalem came under Jewish control for the first time in more than 2,000 years—since the Maccabean revolt and subsequent Hasmonean period, a brief era of independence between 129 and 63 BCE. After the Hasmoneans, Jerusalem was ruled by the Romans, the Byzantines, the Arabs, crusaders, the Turks, and the British. And before the Romans, the Greeks controlled the city, and before them the Persians, and before them the Babylonians, and long ago, way before King David made Jerusalem the capital of a united Jewish kingdom around 1000 BCE, it was
