Christian memories and visions of Jerusalem in a Jewish and Islamic context

The Temple Mount, or, under its Muslim name, the Haram al-Sharif, in Jerusalem, offers a rare example of a sacred site to which several religious traditions refer. It constitutes a very special case for the historian of religions, who can follow the traces of the dialectical relationship, over two millennia, between the intersecting attitudes of Jews, Christians and Muslims towards the holy city. Since the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, its reconstruction became for Jews the epicenter of their eschatological representations. Things were more complex for Christians, who were quick to see the destruction of the Temple as divine punishment for the Jews' crime of deicide. Constantine's construction of the Basilica of the Anastasis (the Holy Sepulchre) to the west of the city, facing the abandoned Temple Mount, underlined the new topography of the sacred from the fourth to the seventh century. But eschatological tensions, which had faded in post-apostolic Christianity as well as in rabbinic Judaism, did not disappear; they resurfaced in the ^sixth century, with the Persian invasion and the taking captive of the Holy Cross (in 614), and above all with the Muslim conquest of Palestine and the capture of Jerusalem (in 638). Despite the paucity of our sources, it is possible to detect, right up to the end of the century, the complex relationships between Jewish and Christian eschatological expectations (the Messiah expected by the former is the Antichrist of the latter), and the crystallization of Muslim conceptions, right up to the construction of the Dome of the Rock and the Al Aqsa mosque. Throughout the Middle Ages and into the early modern era, mystical metaphors for Jerusalem multiplied, often based on the traditional etymology of Jerusalem (in Hebrew Yerushalaim, indicating the visio pacis[yr'eh shalom]). Similarly, the proliferation of churches purporting to reproduce the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the reconstitution of Hierosolymitan topography (e.g. in Bologna), ensured that the echo of Jerusalem continued to resonate in the Christian consciousness.