Jerusalem. The Biography

been destroyed. The Jewish synagogue in Fustat,Old Cairo, contained one of the key historical resources of the Middle Ages: the Cairo Geniza. In those times, all three Peoples of the Book revered the paper on which holy language was written because words had spiritual life like people. The Jews kept papers received in synagogues in a
geniza
or storehouse for seven years at which point they were buried in a cemetery or stowed in a special attic. For over 900 years, the Cairo Geniza was not emptied, preserving 100,000 papers showing Jewish Egyptian life, its connections with Jerusalem, and the Mediterranean world in all its aspects, sealed and forgotten until 1864 when a Jerusalemite scholar first penetrated it. In the 1890s,Geniza documents started to emerge, bought by English,American and Russian scholars, but it was only in 1896 that two eccentric Scottish ladies showed some Geniza documents to Professor Solomon Schechter, who recognized the earliest Hebrew text of Ben Sira’s Ecclesiasticus. Schechter collected the priceless hoard, which enabled S. D. Goitein to produce his six-volume
Mediterranean Society
.

† In 1095, the Sunni philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazali sought refuge in Jerusalem from the Assassins. ‘I shut myself up in the precinct of the Dome of the Rock,’ he said, in a tiny chamber atop the Golden Gate, to write the
Revivification of the Science of Religion
. This reinvigorated Sunni Islam by separating the logic of philosophy – Greek metaphysics – from the ecstatic revelation of religious truth, while giving each its due. Ultimately his demolition of scientific cause and effect (in his
Incoherence of the Philosophers
) in favour of divine revelation ended the golden age of Arabic learning in Baghdad and helped undermine Arab science and philosophy.

* The round Temple Church in London, consecrated by Heraclius, the Patriarch of Jerusalem, in 1185 and made famous in Dan Brown’s novel
The Da Vinci Code
, is surely modelled on the Temple of the Lord, the Dome of the Rock, which they believed to have been built by Solomon. But there are scholars who assert it is based on the double-domed Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

* At times of crisis the Life-Giving Tree, which was tended in the church by the
scriniarius
, the relic-keeper, in a bejewelled chest, was carried before the king by four bearers.

* The original Crusaders overwhelmingly spoke the northern French dialect
langue d’oie
, totally different from the Provencal
langue d’oc
. But it was
langue d’oc
that became Outremer’s chief dialect.

* The Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela visited Jerusalem just after Maimonides. While he was there, workmen refurbishing the Cenacle on Mount Zion discovered a mysterious cavern that was hailed as King David’s Tomb. The Crusaders added a cenotaph which, in the contagious religious atmosphere of Jerusalem, made this Christian site holy for Jews and Muslims too. Benjamin claimed he travelled on to Iraq. Either way, he recorded the drama playing out in Baghdad where a young Jew named David el-Rey (the King) or Alroy declared himself the Messiah, promising to fly the local Jews on wings ‘to conquer Jerusalem.’ The Jews of Baghdad waited on their rooftops but never achieved lift-off, much to the amusement of their neighbours. Alroy was later murdered. When Benjamin Disraeli visited Jerusalem in the nineteenth century, he started to write his novel,
Alroy
.

* Leprosy was common. Indeed Jerusalem had its own Order of St Lazarus for leprous knights. Leprosy is hard to catch: the child must have had months of contact, perhaps with a wetnurse suffering mild symptoms. The disease is caused by bacteria passed through droplets in sweat and touch. Baldwin’s adolescence triggered lepromatous leprosy. In the film
Kingdom of Heaven
he is shown wearing an iron mask to conceal his utterly ravaged, noseless face, but actually he refused to hide himself as king even as the disease consumed him.

* A fictional version of Balian (played by Orlando Bloom) is the hero of the movie
Kingdom of Heaven
, where he has an affair with Queen Sybilla (Eva Green).

* Saladin was the Crusaders’ shorthand for Salah al-Dunya al-Din (the Goodness of the World and the Faith). Saladin’s brother, known by the Crusaders as Safadin, was born Abu Bakr ibn Ayyub, adopting the honorific Safah al-Din (Sword of the Religion) and later the royal name al-Adil (The Just) by which he is called in most histories. Two of Saladin’s