Stories from the Old City: Matthew Teller’s Nine Quarters of Jerusalem

Nine Quarters of Jerusalem: A New Biography of the Old City, by Matthew Teller. London: Profile Books and New York: Other Press, 2022.

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Over the course of more than 330 pages, the author of Nine Quarters of Jerusalem, journalist and filmmaker Matthew Teller, does just that: He introduces us to the people he meets and talks to, who tell him their stories, and to whom he listens with an open heart and an engaged intellect. But the book is also the story of a place: Jerusalem’s Old City—a city regarded as holy and as always on edge, a symbol of peace that is anything but peaceful.

How does one write a biography of a place? And clearly this is not just any place. As Ibn ‘Abbas, cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, reportedly said with delightful exaggeration: “There is not an inch in Jerusalem where a prophet has not prayed or an angel has not stood.”2 Beyond its religious significance, it is also a space marred by division. As Teller points out, every map of the Old City since the second half of the 19th century has shown it as a space consisting of four artificial quadrants, or quarters—Muslim, Christian, Armenian, and Jewish. But Teller rejects this schematic rendition and asks who came up with the idea of neat residential quarters where ethnic and sectarian groups know their place and cluster mindlessly with their own kind.

Teller traces the conceptualization of the Old City in terms of ethnic and sectarian clusters to George Williams, a British chaplain who traveled to Jerusalem in 1841. As Teller remarks, Williams must have been bewildered by the mélange of ethnicities living their lives within the walls of the Old City, and he needed a quick fix on how to wrap his brain around it all. And so he came up with the idea of quarters, which made sense to an outsider but would have been irrelevant to local residents, so accustomed were they to the mix of humanity that defined the walled city. How could a majority Muslim country have a “Muslim Quarter,” one might ask? Would London have an “Anglican Quarter” or Rome a “Catholic Quarter”? On a related matter, what would explain giving a small ethnic minority, the Armenians, their own quarter? Perhaps more to the point, Old City residents were oblivious to the demarcations and lived wherever they chose. Nevertheless, the quarter idea made sense to the colonial mind—it had a certain order and simplicity to it.

Teller points out another simplistic British colonial schematic, that of the “Old City” vs. the “New City” division of Jerusalem. For Teller, “Jerusalem had always been one city, having conversations with itself along multiple axes of influence. [British people’s] inability to imagine its possessing an identity that superceded their own preoccupations of sect and ethnicity led directly to war and the partition that lingers today.”3 Fundamentally, then, Teller locates the sectarian and ethnic tensions and battles that continue to define much of Jerusalem’s modern history since the late 19th century in the colonial, divisive foundations of British rule in the region.

Moving on from colonial legacies in the region, Teller describes Jerusalem as “a city of icebergs.” He elaborates: “What you see here is only ever the ten per cent above the surface, and if you attempt to navigate on the evidence of your eyes alone, you may find yourself holed beneath the waterline and sinking fast.”4 And so he listens and digs below the surface of what is visible.

And he describes what he sees and hears as he enters the Old City through its gates—because how Jerusalem looks to him “depends [on] which gate you walk in through.”5

Teller devotes a chapter to each gate and describes its ambience and the people he meets there; a few are highlighted here.

Bab al-Amud/Damascus Gate, a main entry point to the Old City, is associated with activity. Among the places of interest in its vicinity are the main souk street, Khan al-Zeit; the Spafford Children’s Center, started by the American Colony as a philanthropic project to serve Jerusalem’s children; and Izhiman Coffee.

Bab al-Zahra/Herod’s Gate takes us to Burj al-Luqluq, a community center that offers a safe space for children to play sports, learn skills, and attend programs.

Bab Haret al-Maghariba/The Moroccan Gate, doorway to the al-Aqsa Mosque compound, was once an entry point to the Moroccan Quarter, but a month after Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in June 1967, it razed the quarter’s 137 homes to create a prayer plaza in front of the Western Wall (see The Destruction of Jerusalem’s Moroccan Quarter: From Centuries-Old Maghrebi Community to Western Wall Prayer Plaza). Teller names the families who were made homeless by the bulldozers and introduces us to the daughter of one of those families who recounts the agonizing destruction.

Then, Bab al-Khalil/Jaffa Gate offers a whiff of the city’s “colonial legacy.” It is a disquieting place, made so in part by the Palestinian-owned hotels located just inside the gate that have withstood ongoing threats of Israeli confiscation.

The remaining gates, and the people he meets in their vicinity, are also given their due, in rich and nuanced descriptions.

For Teller, Jerusalem is a place of scents, and cumin evokes it powerfully. Conversely, he conveys the sharply contrasting atmosphere of the Jewish Quarter in this minimalist description:

Even those who are familiar with Israel’s role in making and exporting weapons and high-tech surveillance software to repressive governments across the world may not be aware of the extent to which Israel surveils the walled city and its 35,000 residents—90 percent of whom are Palestinian and 66 percent of whom are younger than age 30.7 Teller tells us: “Israeli police in a remote control centre monitor a network of 400 CCTV cameras, watching every street and alleyway in the Old City 24/7.” He elaborates that Israel uses satellite technology to track “the movement of individual smartphones through the street, while drones monitor activity from the air.”8

One of the things that makes this book so compelling is the author’s ability to take the familiar and make readers see it with new eyes. His description of the Dome of the Rock, whose image is ubiquitous, still manages to convey the awesomeness of the place. He compares it to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, showing how it rejects that aesthetic influence, and continues:

This biography introduces communities that might not be familiar to readers. For instance, I was personally aware that the Old City housed a Sufi community, but the existence of the Dom—whose ancestors settled in northern and western Europe and are referred to as Roma—came as news to me. I was also unaware about the Karaite Jews, a small community whose prayer motions are similar to Muslims’. While they consider themselves to be Jewish, they are not recognized as such by the Chief Rabbinate.

Teller devotes a chapter to remarkable women who either come from Jerusalem or passed through it. These figures range from Rabi‘a al-‘Adawiyya, the Muslim saint and poet buried in Jerusalem and known to all schoolchildren, to the Jerusalem icon Hind al-Husseini, who established an orphanage for the surviving children of the Deir Yassin massacre and spent her life promoting female education.

The female figures less likely to be known to readers are Armenian-born Melisende, who ruled a Crusader kingdom for 30 years until her death in 1161; Roxelana, a Ukrainian girl kidnapped from her town in the 16th century and placed in Sultan Suleiman’s harem as a concubine but who managed to persuade him to marry her and wielded considerable power in her own right; Bayram, a self-taught and authoritative educator who lectured on Islam to Jerusalem’s women in the 15th century; and a few others he names who were living their lives on their own terms centuries ago.