Did Maimonides really pray on the Temple Mount?
By Meir Loewenberg
During the fall days of 1165, which is the year 4926 according to the Jewish calendar, a small group of travelers approached Jerusalem. Their dress reveals that they are Jews. But what are these Jews doing on the road to Jerusalem when everyone knows that no Jew has been permitted to enter the holy city which has become a Christian bastion since the Crusaders conquered it in 1096?One of the travelers is Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the most prominent Torah scholar and Jewish philosopher of the Middle Ages, who has left his native Spain in order to settle in Egypt. On the way he visited the Holy Land. After his boat docks in Acre, he spends almost six months with that Jewish community. Though he visitsd many of the Jewish holy sites in the Galilee, he really wants to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On Tuesday, the 4th of Heshvan 4926 (19 October 1165), he finally left Acre in order to ascend to Jerusalem. This, as he well, knew was a very dangerous journey. But he succeeded in entering the city and two days later, on Thursday, he prayed at a place that he described in a letter as "the Great and Holy House" (letter cited by R. Elazar Ezkari. Sefer Haredim(Mitzvah 83).
Where was this "Great and Holy House?" Many believe that this place was the synagogue on the Temple Mount, a house of worship that had remained empty and deserted ever since the Crusaders occupied the mountain sixty-six years earlier. Others suggest that he did not pray in the synagogue on the Temple Mount because it had been destroyed by the Crusaders; instead, he prayed on the Temple Mount at a place that was near where the Holy Temple once stood. A third group of scholars have serious doubts whether Maimonides really ascended the Temple Mount. Their reservations are based on one or more of the following issues:
- Jewish law nowadays forbids Jews from entering the entire area of the Temple Mount.
- In rabbinic writings the phrase "The Great and Holy House" does not (necessarily) refer to the Temple Mount.
- The Crusader prohibited Jews from visiting Jerusalem; they certainly did not allow them to ascend the Temple Mount.
- There are questions about the provenance of the letter since the only text of Maimonides's letter is found in a book written more than four hundred years after the event.
Halakha forbids Jews from entering the Temple Mount
There is a general rule that Jews are not allowed to enter any part of the Temple Mount because of its great holiness. Many hold that Maimonides followed this rule in his legal code. However, a careful reading of his major halakhic work does not support this view. He wrote,
The meaning of "The Great and Holy House" in rabbinic writings
"And he burnt the house of the Lord, and the king's house; and all the houses of Jerusalem, even every great house he burnt with fire" (2 Kings 25.9) is a description of how the Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem in 587 BCE, in the final days of the First Temple. When the Talmudic sages discussed the meaning of the various terms of this Biblical verse in Megilah 27a, they offered the following interpretations:
On the other hand, Maimonides, like every observant Jew, recited the Grace after Meals every day. In the third paragraph of this prayer there appears a plea for God's mercy "on his people Israel, on the city of Jerusalem, on Zion the abode of God's glory, on the royal house of David, and on the great and holy house that bears God's name." Here, according to all commentators, "The Great and Holy House" refers to the Holy Temple on Mount Moriah. The Talmudic sages (Berakhot 48b) indicated that King Solomon who built the First Temple was the person who added this phrase here. It is more than likely that when Maimonides used the phrase "The Great and Holy House" he was referring to the idiom that every Jew recognized as meaning the Holy Temple.
Photo Credit: © Meir Loewenberg
Crusaders prohibit Jews from entering Jerusalem
For centuries Jerusalem was a Muslim city, but it again assumed a Christian character during the Crusader occupation. Christian traditions were renewed and churches and monasteries were rebuilt. As was true in Byzantine times, Jews were again prohibited from entering the city, let alone live there. The Temple Mount, after it became the center of religious and civil life in Crusader Jerusalem, was declared off-limits for all non-Christians.
There are, however, indications that Jews did occasionally ascend the Mount during the eighty-seven years that the Crusaders occupied Jerusalem. One of these Jews who did so may have been Maimonides. In the letter mentioned earlier, he spoke about the "very dangerous journey" to Jerusalem. Given the conditions that prevailed at the time and given the fact the Jews were strictly prohibited from entering Jerusalem, this was indeed a very dangerous journey. But Maimonides did undertake it and most probably did reach his goal, to pray at the holiest site of Judaism.
Another Jew who went up to the Temple Mount to pray during the Crusader rule was the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela who visited Jerusalem in these years. Benjamin reported in his travelogue that all the Jews come to pray before the Western Wall, that is in front of the Dome of the Rock. He noted that this is one of the walls remaining from what was once the Holy of Holies. The Western Wall that Benjamin described is not the present Western Wall (which is part of the retaining walls of the Temple Mount and which did not become a site for Jewish prayer until the 16th century) but the ruins of the western wall of the Temple building itself, on the Temple Mount. If it was the practice for Jews to come to pray there, it is entirely possible that Maimonides also availed himself of the opportunity to pray on the Temple Mount.
At the beginning of the 12th century Archbishop William of Tyre wrote that no professing Jew remained in Jerusalem. Fifty years later Benjamin of Tudela counted four Jewish families who lived in the city. The order, prohibiting Jews from living in Jerusalem, may have been enforced less strictly in the latter years of the Crusader occupation when there was need for certain skilled trades, such as dyers. Consequently, the order prohibiting Jews from ascending the Temple Mount may also have been relaxed.
The Spanish Jewish leader R. Abraham bar Hiyya Ha-Nassi (1065-1136) wrote a short time after the Crusaders occupied Jerusalem in 1099 that "the wicked Edom [Crusaders] expelled the Ishmaelites from the [Temple] Mountain and prevented the Jews from praying there .." Possibly the synagogue that was on the Temple Mount, though empty and deserted, perhaps even in ruins, was still standing when Maimonides came to Jerusalem a generation after Abraham b. Hiyya Hanasi died. Maimonides managed to receive permission to come to Jerusalem; he may also have obtained a special permit to pray on the Temple Mount.
The authenticity of Maimonides's letter
The only source for the letter in which Maimonides describes his visit to Jerusalem is Sefer Haredim by R. Elazar Ezkari. The author of this book died in 1600. The book was printed for the first time in Venice in 1601. No manuscripts of the letter are available and there is no information how the text of the letter came to Ezkari. Nevertheless, strong support for the authenticity of Maimonides's letter is provided by one of the most outstanding contemporary Maimonides scholars, Rabbi Yitzhak Shilat, who has examined Maimonides letter manuscripts for many years. He has determined that the letter describing his visit is authentic(Tehumin 7, 1986, 492). Additional evidence of Maimonides's praying on the Temple Mount comes from another letter in which he described how he and three other members of his family went to pray "in the House of God." (Yitzhak Shilat, Iggarot Ha-Rambam [Letters of the Rambam], Jerusalem/Maale Adumim, 1995, vol.1, 230.) The reference here also is to the general area of the Temple Mount and not to the specific place where the Temple once stood.
Summary
Though the language that Maimonides used in his letter to describe his visit to Jerusalem is ambiguous, he used phrases that in other circumstances clearly refer to the Temple Mount. Admittedly, the Jewish presence in Jerusalem and on the Temple Mount during the Crusader period was limited, but, as we have shown, Maimonides was not the only Jew who prayed on the Mount during the Crusader years. It would appear, therefore, that Maimonides did pray on the Temple Mount when he visited Jerusalem.
An Exhibit in the Tower of David: Development of the Alphabet
By Jay Levinson
In today's culture ancient communication seems almost comical. As a user-friendly interactive exhibit in Jerusalem's Tower of David vividly illustrates, a precursor to writing was to send a messenger with a package of items from which the recipient was to deduce the message. Simple? Well, not exactly. Does a fish and a plate mean, "Hearty appetite," or "You are invited to dinner?" The example is simplistic, but it shows it hints at the problem of inexact meaning.
The exhibit starts with one true example recorded by the Greek historian Herodotus (484-425 BCE) Book 4: 131-132 shows a misunderstanding with extremely serious implications. The Scythians,1barbarians living north of the Black Sea in today's Moldova and Ukraine, exchanged "correspondence" with the Persians. Amongst the items sent were a bird, a mouse, a frog, and arrows. What did all this mean? The interpretation seemed to be clear, "The Scythians are giving us the air, the land and the water. The weapons they are surrendering." Well, not exactly. As history would later show, the true meaning was quite different, "If you not know how to fly like the birds in the sky, go hide like mice underground. Jump into the marshes like frogs. If you choose to fight us, we will defeat you with arrows."
Obviously this type of sending messages was extremely problematic. The exhibit poses problems on dating, but suffice it to say that in the fourth millennium BCE (circa 3300) pictograms, or "hieroglyphics," first came into use in Egypt and more or less at the same time but quite independently in Mesopotamia. A practical test --- how clear is a message conveyed by hieroglyphics? The visitor to the exhibit is confronted by a wall with symbols on a card, and he is then challenged to write a message. Needless to say, since hundreds of words had symbols, very few people could read and write. And, meaning was not necessarily clear. Does a mouth and a wall mean, "Go talk to the wall," or "Walls talk too?"
The progression of writing from pictograms to symbols for syllables as in Akkadian is skipped. On the one hand Akkadian was a key language in the Fertile Crescent for centuries, but on the other and the exhibit is a simplified introduction to the alphabet and not an academic study.
Next is the development of the alphabet as we know it, progressing from early alphabetic writing to the Hebrew and Latin scripts as we know the today. The key to the presentation is modern didactic methods, and the curators took care to utilize tools ranging from YouTube skits to Touch-Screen aids. Yes, we think that we know everything about reading and writing, but the exhibit raises new issues.
- The direction of writing can be classified as natural or logical.
- Rashi never wrote in "Rashi script" --- it derives its name from a Tanach printed in 1475 in which the famous commentary appears in what came to be called Rashi Script." Several incunabula printers (Abraham Garton, the Soncino's, and Daniel Bomberg,) continued the tradition.
- Over the centuries there have been changes to the Latin alphabet. The letter "W," for example, is a relatively late orthographic development, as is "U." Other letters such as "
" (runic wynn) and "รพ" (thorn) have fallen into disuse. (Hebrew letters have been more stable, but two systems of vocalization developed - Nikud Elyon and Nikud Tachton.) Yet, the Hebrew letter-set also changed.
- Sometimes we transpose the current pronunciation of letters on older texts. For example, "ye" in "Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe" should be pronounced "the." This is just another example of how our orthography has changed.
Where are we going in writing? The exhibit ends with that very basic question. We know what this picture means -- 
-- even though there is no text.
-- even though there is no text.
A visit to the Tower of David is always worthwhile. Seeing this exhibit (particularly for children) is just another reason to add it to your itinerary.
Footnote:
1 There is a dating problem. The exhibit logically places this exchange of items to the 4thmillennium BCE, but the cited Scythians are much later.
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