How the Four Quarters Came to be.
While watching Jerusalem, a 2013 documentary about the city of Jerusalem, its culture, and its history, many questions crossed my mind. The film spent a lot of time covering the old city of Jerusalem, and the different cultures of the four quarters. It made me wonder, why is the old city of Jerusalem divided into four quarters, and how did they come to be?
The old city is a small walled area in East Jerusalem, smaller than a square mile(Jerusalem Movie). Today, it is divided into four quarters, each occupied by different groups, Armenians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The first mention of these quarters “was produced by British lieutenants Edward Aldrich and Julian Simmonds in 1841”(Deutsch 6), but mentions of these quarters go back as far as 1806. The quarters seemed to form naturally over time, as more and more of a community moved to the same area. This means that the quarters do not designate “exclusive rights to an area; rather, they provided a convenient way to refer to different sections of the city”(Deutsch 8). Each group has claims to its quarter because each quarter contains focal points significant to its religion. While the populations of the quarters varied greatly over time, as did the borders, today the quarters are cemented around the religious centers.
The Muslim quarter is centered around the Temple Mount, which houses the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque. Christians cemented themselves at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the location where Jesus Christ was believed to be crucified and buried. The Armenians have the Church of St. James, which is an important building for Armenian Christians. The Jewish Quarter’s boundaries can be hard to define for various reasons, but many believe spanned from the “Street of the Jews” (Rechov haYehudim) eastward to the Western Wall(Deutsch 15). Why the Jews chose this location is also not universally agreed upon, however, its proximity to the Mount of Olives, an important religious site for Jews, and a nearby ancient synagogue are thought to be likely explanations.
Despite taking up less than a square mile, the Old City is a unique and culturally rich place divided among four religious groups who all have valid claims for their quarters. The divisions into quarters came due to the location of different religious sites important to the groups, and have been developing for likely hundreds of years.
The old city is a small walled area in East Jerusalem, smaller than a square mile(Jerusalem Movie). Today, it is divided into four quarters, each occupied by different groups, Armenians, Christians, Muslims, and Jews. The first mention of these quarters “was produced by British lieutenants Edward Aldrich and Julian Simmonds in 1841”(Deutsch 6), but mentions of these quarters go back as far as 1806. The quarters seemed to form naturally over time, as more and more of a community moved to the same area. This means that the quarters do not designate “exclusive rights to an area; rather, they provided a convenient way to refer to different sections of the city”(Deutsch 8). Each group has claims to its quarter because each quarter contains focal points significant to its religion. While the populations of the quarters varied greatly over time, as did the borders, today the quarters are cemented around the religious centers.
The Muslim quarter is centered around the Temple Mount, which houses the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque. Christians cemented themselves at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the location where Jesus Christ was believed to be crucified and buried. The Armenians have the Church of St. James, which is an important building for Armenian Christians. The Jewish Quarter’s boundaries can be hard to define for various reasons, but many believe spanned from the “Street of the Jews” (Rechov haYehudim) eastward to the Western Wall(Deutsch 15). Why the Jews chose this location is also not universally agreed upon, however, its proximity to the Mount of Olives, an important religious site for Jews, and a nearby ancient synagogue are thought to be likely explanations.
Despite taking up less than a square mile, the Old City is a unique and culturally rich place divided among four religious groups who all have valid claims for their quarters. The divisions into quarters came due to the location of different religious sites important to the groups, and have been developing for likely hundreds of years.
Nice post about divisions within the four quarters of the old city. You do a nice job of bringing in an outside article to help with your discussion of the different quarters.
ReplyDeleteA couple of suggestions for future posts: 1) you might want to choose a larger—higher resolution—image (there is a feature in Google Search that allows you to limit results to "large" size); 2) the instructions didn't include this, but in you should include the full bibliographic citation at the end (and not just the URL); otherwise, readers have to go to the articles to determine which one you are referring to in the parenthetical citations (in this case there was only one article, but if there were more it would have been difficult to determine which one was written by Deutsch).