“Yerushalayim shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of Gold) is a popular Israeli song, written by Naomi Shemer in 1967, the year of The Six-Day War in which the State of Israel captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai and East Jerusalem. Its title refers to an expression found frequently in the halachic discourse which described a “golden diadem surrounded by turrets in the shape of the walls of Jerusalem with which women used to adorn themselves.” (http://www.jerusalemofgold.co.il/jewishsources.html)
Whether the laws of Shabbat permitted women to wear such a crown is subject to much debate in the Talmud (i.e. can you trust a woman to simply wear the jewelry or will she almost certainly remove it to show it off to a friend? Rabbi Eliezer’s answer: No, for only classy ladies wear crowns of gold, and classy ladies simply exude class and will feel no need to brag).
Jerusalem of Gold "Kosher Compass"
Beloved Rabbi Akiva was a fan of such jewelry and gave a crown to his wife when he (finally!) grew rich. In the Babylonian Talmud, tractate Nedarim, it is written:
The daughter of Kalba Savu’a betrothed herself to Rabbi Akiva. When her father heard thereof, he vowed that she was not to benefit from any of his property. Then she went and married him in winter. They slept in a straw bin, and he had to pick out the straw from her hair. He said to her: If I had the means, I would give you a Jerusalem of Gold.
Rabbi Akiva's Shitty Tomb in Tiberias (see below)
Anyway, despite the fact that Naomi Shemer stole the title from the Talmud and the tune from Pello Joxepe, a Basque lullaby (for which she felt bad and was forgiven), it is a lovely song and has been performed over the years by numerous artists, Israeli and otherwise (Phish, par example). Here is Ofra Haza, a famous Israeli singer who died of AIDS in 2000, performing a version of the song at Israel’s 50th Anniversary Celebration:
And here is Shuly Natan’s rendition (the original from 1967, I believe, see the long hair)
I’ve pasted the lyrics below. Though their description of pines and mountain air does capture some of Jerusalem’s magic, they also perpetuate a fallacy from early Zionist narratives about the land of Palestine, namely that it was a vacant wasteland, void of human presence and civilization. Herzl summarized the premise of Zionism as “a people without a land for a land without a people.” Note that Ofra Haza performed the piece in a model of the Old City while standing just next to the Al-Aqsa Mosque… Here is a post from The Lede, the NYTimes blog, about how politicians, even today, use Mark Twain’s descriptions of the land of Palestine in the late 1800’s as an empty backwater of the Ottoman Empire when making arguments about the legitimacy of the Palestinian nationalist narrative.
Twain wrote, of Palestine under the Ottomans:
These unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of bareness that never, never, never, do shake the glare from their harsh outlines…; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum: this stupid village* of Tiberias, slumbering under six funereal palms… Jericho the accursed lies a moldering ruin today, even as Joshua’s miracle left it more than three thousand years ago.
I wonder if Naomi Schemer read Twain (or one of the many people who have quoted these ellipsis-heavy passages). I also wonder if Joyce did. He wrote this of the Land of Palestine, in Ulysses:
A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.
Though it is true that the fully-articulated idea of Palestinian Nationalism as such did not exist until the late 1920s or early 1930s, it is certainly not true that the land of Palestine was a wasteland, or that, as Shemer writes, there was no one to visit the Temple Mount (uhhh where did that Big Mosque and Dome come from???). There were, of course, many Arabs living in Jerusalem, and though I imagine that most Jews vacated the city between ‘48 and ‘67, there were plenty of Jews living in the city throughout the 19th century. The way they lived, pulling carts laden with odd foods through narrow winding streets while wearing dirty clothing, was disturbing to the Western Jews who immigrated during the Mandate Period (if you want to learn more about that I am happy to print and bind a copy of my thesis for you), but that they lived there is without question.**
This is Cairo
*Tiberias, based on my experiences, is still stupid, though perhaps less of a village than it was. Its tacky, near-vacant storefronts and the way Akiva and Maimonides’ tombs have crumbled certainly serves to undermine its position as one of the four holy cities. As did the lipstick-kiss covered walls of the hostel room there, in which I struggled to make out the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics on its tiny staticky tv.
** Wikipedia tells me that, as I assumed, the Jews living in the Old City of Jerusalem were expelled when Jordan took control of it in ‘48, and that furthermore, contrary to agreements, Jews (Israelis?) were not allowed access to any of the holy sites in the Old City from ‘48 to ‘67.
Click here to download one of my favorite versions of the song, by The Sabras, who are American.
JERUSALEM OF GOLD
by Naomi Shemer
The mountain air is clear as wine
And the scent of pines
Is carried on the breeze of twilight
With the sound of bells.
And in the slumber of tree and stone
Captured in her dream
The city that sits solitary
And in its midst is a wall.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
How the cisterns have dried
The market-place is empty
And no one frequents the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Winds are howling
And no one descends to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho.
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
But as I come to sing to you today,
And to adorn crowns to you (i.e. to tell your praise)
I am the smallest of the youngest of your children (i.e. the least worthy of doing so)
And of the last poet (i.e. of all the poets born).
For your name scorches the lips
Like the kiss of a seraph
If I forget thee, Jerusalem,
Which is all gold…
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze, and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
We have returned to the cisterns
To the market and to the market-place
A ram’s horn (shofar) calls out (i.e. is being heard) on the Temple Mount
In the Old City.
And in the caves in the mountain
Thousands of suns shine -
We will once again descend to the Dead Sea
By way of Jericho!
Jerusalem of gold, and of bronze and of light
Behold I am a violin for all your songs.
A translation by Chaya Galai
is posted on the official site
of the Israel Ministry
of Foreign Affairs.
