No one will ever be able to pinpoint what makes Jerusalem so special. The mountains, the wind, the extraordinary light may be part of it. Three thousand years ago, King David, the beloved warrior-psalmist of the Bible, made Jerusalem his capital. Perhaps he saw the poetry of the place as it was then. The Gihon Spring flowed through a paradise of gardens nestled at the foot of the Kidron Valley. From there a long narrow ridge rose steeply northward, filled with stone houses perched precariously on its sides. At the top of the ridge, seeming to hang in the heavens, was the threshing floor of Araunah, which David purchased as the site of the Temple his son, Solomon, would one day build. Overlooking everything were the vast groves of the Mount of Olives, an ocean of silver leaves shimmering in the sun and wind, the source of the city’s wealth; over the ridge of the Mount of Olives, the sun rose each day. From its crest, the view opened onto the desert, stretching over barren mountains and down steep wadies eastward to the Dead Sea. Into this wilderness, with great ceremony, the scapegoat was released each year, carrying with it Jerusalem’s sins.

For more than a thousand years after the time of King David, Jerusalem was the physical as well as the spiritual capital of the Jewish world. Jews longed for the splendid Jerusalem of King Solomon, for the Jerusalem of the great prophets, for the ruined Jerusalem of the Babylonian Captivity, for the modest Jerusalem of the early Second Temple period. For the redemption of Jerusalem during the Maccabee Revolt in b.c. 167, Jews fought and died, and were rewarded with a miraculous victory over the Hellenistic Seleucids of Syria. It was in the dazzling and legendary Jerusalem built by King Herod that hundreds of thousands of Jews perished during the great revolt against Rome in A.D. 70. Defending the ruins of Herodian Jerusalem, hundreds of thousands more died during the Bar Kochba Revolt in A.D. 135. To this day, ancient Jerusalem remains the dream at the heart of Jewish civilization; it rests at the center of Western civilization’s consciousness.

Although the physical grandeur of Herodian Jerusalem long ago vanished in the ravages of warfare and time, the city’s mystique has expanded far beyond anything that could have been dreamed of in ancient times. The most awesome holy places of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have come to dot the Old City and its nearby hills. During the centuries of the Crusades, Jerusalem was the ethereal vision that moved the armies of Europe and Islam, but for almost 700 years after the Crusades ended, the actual city of Jerusalem existed as a shadowy, forgotten backwater, slowly falling into ruin and decay. Not until the 19th century did the city again begin to come alive and reemerge from behind its walls.

During the years of the British Mandate (1918-48) the current incarnation of Jerusalem developed as a quiet religious center, tourist attraction, and university town in a remarkably beautiful mountain setting. Nineteen years of division by war, barbed wire, and minefields (1948-67) brought Jerusalem’s gentle renaissance to a temporary halt. With the city’s reunification in 1967, however, Teddy Kollek, the city’s world-renowned mayor, began a 25-year crusade to make sure Jerusalem would not merely exist or even thrive but would absolutely shine!

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