Jerusalem. The Biography

Mount, where they encountered both the insularity and cosmopolitanism of their Frankish hosts.
    USAMAH BIN MUNQIDH AND JUDAH HALEVI: MUSLIMS, JEWS AND FRANKS
     
    Usamah had become friends with some of the Templars whom he had met in war and peace. Now they escorted him and Atabeg Unur on to the sacred esplanade, the thoroughly Christianized headquarters of the Templars.
    Some Crusaders now spoke Arabic and built houses with courtyards and fountains like Muslim potentates; some even ate Arabic food. Usamah met Franks who did not eat pork and ‘presented a very fine table, extremely clean and delicious’. Most Franks disapproved of anyone going too native: ‘God has transformed the Occident into the Orient’, wrote Fulcher. ‘He who was a Roman or a Frank has in this land been made into a Galilean or a Palestinian.’ Similarly, there were limits to Usamah’s friendship with the Templars and to their open-mindedness. When one Templar was returning home, he cheerfully invited Usamah to send his son to be educated in Europe so that ‘when he returns he will be a truly rational man’. Usamah could scarcely contain his disdain.
    As they prayed in the Dome of the Rock, one of the Franks approached the atabeg to ask: ‘Would you like to see God when he was young?’
    ‘Why yes,’ said Unur, at which the Frank led him and Usamah to an icon of Mary and the boy Jesus.
    ‘This is God when he was young,’ said the Frank, much to Usamah’s amused contempt.
    Usamah then walked over to pray in the Temple of Solomon, formerly al-Aqsa, welcomed by his Templar friends, even though he was openly reciting ‘Allahu Akhbar – God is Greatest’. But then there was an unsettling incident when ‘a Frank rushed up to me and grabbed me and turned my face towards the east, “Pray like this!”’ The ‘Templars hurried towards him and took him away from me. “This man is a stranger,”the Templars explained, apologetically, “and has just arrived from the Frankish lands.”’ Usamah realized that ‘anyone recently arrived’ is ‘rougher in character than those who have become acclimatized and frequented the company of Muslims’. These new arrivals remained ‘an accursed race that will not become accustomed to anyone not of their own race’.
    It was not only Muslim leaders who visited Melisende’s Jerusalem. Muslim peasants came into town daily to sell their fruit and left in the evening. By the 1140s, the rules banning Muslims and Jews from Christ’s city had been relaxed – hence the travel writer Ali al-Harawi said, ‘I lived long enough in Jerusalem at the time of the Franks to know how the trick of the Holy Fire was achieved.’ There were already a few Jews in Jerusalem, but pilgrimage was still dangerous.
    Just at this time, in 1141, Judah Halevi, a Spanish poet, philosopher and doctor, is said to have arrived from Spain. In his love songs and religious poetry, he craved ‘Zion perfect in beauty’ while suffering because ‘Edom [Islam] and Ishmael [Christianity] riot in the Holy City’. The Jew in exile was ‘the dove in a strange land.’ All his life, Halevi, who wrote poetry in Hebrew but spoke Arabic, believed in the return of the Jews to Zion:
     
O city of the world, most chastely fair,
    In the far West, behold I sigh for thee.
    Oh! had I eagles’ wings, I’d fly to thee,
    And with my falling tears make moist thine earth.
     
    Halevi, whose poems are still part of the synagogue liturgy, wrote as poignantly as anyone has ever written about Jerusalem: ‘When I dream of the return of thy captivity, I am a harp for thy songs.’ It is not clear if he actually made it to Jerusalem, but according to legend, as he walked through the gates, he was ridden down by a horseman, probably a Frank, and killed, a fate perhaps foreseen in his words: ‘I would fall with my face upon thine earth, and take delight in thy stones and be tender to thy dust. ’
    This death would not have surprised Usamah, who studied the violence of Frankish laws. On his way to Jerusalem he had watched two Franks solving a legal question by combat – one smashed in the skull of another. ‘That was but a taste of their jurisprudence and their legal procedure.’ When a man was accused of murdering pilgrims, his trial was to be trussed up and dipped in a pool of water. If he sank he was innocent, but since he floated he was found guilty and, as Usamah put it, ‘they applied some kohl to his eyes’ – he was blinded.
    As for