The Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive and the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative

Are you saying there’s an original sin? True, there is. Deal with it.

– Meron Benvenisti (2013)

Few spaces are more emblematic of Jerusalem today than the Western Wall Plaza, yet few people – including Palestinian and Israeli residents of Jerusalem alike – are aware of the destruction of the old Mughrabi Quarter that literally laid the groundwork for its very creation.

For the longue durée of almost eight centuries, the Mughrabi Quarter of Jerusalem had been home to Arabs from North Africa, Andalusia, and Palestine. However, within two days after the 1967 War (10–12 June 1967), the historic neighborhood, located in the city’s southeast corner near the western wall of the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif), was completely wiped off the physical map by the State of Israel – in flagrant violation of Article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which stipulates:

Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations.1

Two decades prior to the Mughrabi Quarter demolition, Jerusalem’s designation as a “corpus separatum” had been intended to depoliticize the city through internationalization, under a special regime to be administered by the United Nations, as confirmed in UN resolutions 181 (1947) and 194 (1948). Two centuries earlier, the so-called Status Quo arrangement for the Holy Places had been codified by Ottoman decrees to negotiate conflict between and among different religions and religious groups over shared or contested religious sites. These legal obligations guaranteed all faiths access to their holy sites and the right to consent to any change, either in procedure or substance. Although sovereignty over Christian holy sites was of primary concern, the Status Quo embraced the Western Wall (claimed by Jews as the Kotel and by Muslims as al-Buraq), where Jewish challenges to the Status Quo began in the late Ottoman era and continued to escalated during the 1920s, culminating in the deadly riots of 1929.

The Status Quo was breached with the destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter and decisively inaugurated a still ongoing Zionist program to establish illegal “facts on the ground” in East Jerusalem – “facts” that concomitantly stripped the Quarter of communal assets (awqaf) in order to expand the Jewish Quarter to four times its pre-1948 boundaries.2 Recent scholarship has investigated the systematic destruction and appropriation of non-Jewish heritage that the demolition initiated. New documentation and interpretation – of the immediate and the long-term impact of the Mughrabi demolition – are advancing a very vital discussion. This discourse is of critical urgency given Israel’s master plans to further “Judaize” the city, including illegal excavations and tunneling in progress that gravely threaten the structural integrity of the Noble Sanctuary at the heart of Jerusalem. Organized provocations to the Status Quo at al-Aqsa Mosque along with the Israeli government’s construction plans for the area and heated debate about control of the Mughrabi Ascent, which provides access to the Noble Sanctuary for non-Muslims, further exacerbate the tense conflict.3

The Mughrabi Quarter may have been physically obliterated in 1967, but it remains intact – albeit in miniature – as part of the Illés Relief of Jerusalem (1873), an extraordinary topographic simulacrum of the Old City. The model’s creator, Stefan Illés, a Catholic Hungarian bookbinder from Pressburg (today’s Bratislava), resided in Jerusalem for nearly a decade (1864–73). After causing a sensation in the Ottoman Pavilion at the 1873 World’s Fair in Vienna, the Illés Relief traveled through Europe, where it was eventually purchased in 1878 by the Republic of Geneva and placed on display in the city center. In 1984, however, the model was sent on permanent loan from the Maison de la Réformation SA in Geneva to the Tower of David Museum in Jerusalem, where it yet remains. The artifact’s location, deep in an ancient cistern which discourages visitation, and the scant curatorial attention accorded it suggest discordance with the cultural politics of the institution.

Following years of neglect, the Illés Relief will soon be made available online to a global audience – in the form of an interactive digital replica – for unhindered investigation and exploration.4 This photogrammetric recording is of great intrinsic value as it has digitally preserved a rare historical artefact of outstanding universal cultural value.

The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative, that will be fully described later, begins with the digital recovery of the Mughrabi Quarter through a virtual archive. It will be website accessible, thereby enabling visitors to visually explore the destroyed quarter via screen-based visualization. In this way the path toward reimagining the vibrant Mughrabi Quarter involves a detour through the late-nineteenth-century European fad of relief maps – to the Illés Relief, rendered as a virtual replica.

Subsequent to the completion of the Mughrabi Quarter digital reconstruction, a global research initiative will be launched to digitally map the entire three-dimensional Illés Relief. International scholars and computer experts will cooperate to produce a detailed, interactive digital palimpsest of Jerusalem on which multiple versions of events and relevant historical phenomena will be overlaid, including maps, images, videos, texts, and oral narratives. The groundbreaking endeavor to digitally map the Illés Relief virtual facsimile will be collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open source, with the double objective: to encourage fresh enquiries and welcome ongoing contributions alike.

The Mughrabi Quarter under Muslim Rule

Pilgrims from the Maghreb (the northwestern region of Africa that comprised what is now known as Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and sometimes Libya) had an age-old connection with Jerusalem, first recorded during the rule of the Ikhshidids (935–69). Several notable Imazighen (Berbers) had settled in Jerusalem under the Fatimids (909–1171).5 Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217) claimed that every Muslim in Frankish Syria provided a testamentary bequest for the liberation of Mughrabi prisoners held by the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187).6

Following the reconquest of Jerusalem (1187) and the reconsecration of the Haram al-Sharif by Ayyubid Sultan Salah al-Din, his eldest son, al-Malik al-Afdal, established the Mughrabi Quarter about 1193 as a Muslim waqf – an inalienable charitable trust under Islamic law. The endowment was extraordinarily inclusive: “For the benefit of the community of Mughrabi of all description and different occupations, male and female, old and young, the low and the high, to settle in its residences and to benefit from its uses according to their different needs.”7 Every Mughrabi who chose to live in the waqf quarter was guaranteed habitation – “an unprecedented event in Islamic history.”8 Al-Afdal also provided funds for the establishment of the long, narrow Harat al-Sharaf neighborhood (contiguous to the Mughrabi Quarter) and Harat al-Maydan, both of which would be illegally confiscated by the State of Israel, along with more than a dozen other neighborhoods, then incorporated into the greatly expanded Jewish Quarter following the 1967 war.9

Al-Afdal founded al-Madrasa al-Afdaliyya in Jerusalem (1193–96) to disseminate Maliki jurisprudence. The madrasa, often referred to as al-Qubba due to its fine ashlar dome, was a spiritual lodestar for Maliki scholars from the Maghreb and Andalusia. It was also the shrine (maqam) of Shaykh ‘Id, a venerated Sufi with whom the mosque became associated after his death in the seventeenth century. Benjamin Z. Kedar, emeritus professor of history at the Hebrew University and chairman of the board of the Israel Antiquities Authority (2000–12), who established its great architectural significance in collaboration with an Israeli Antiquities Authority team, correctly judged its destruction in 1967 as an “archaeological crime.”10

During the European Middle Ages, Mughrabis traveled to Jerusalem as pilgrims and/or to participate in its vibrant scholarly life. The Mughrabi Quarter was home to a diverse flock of immigrants from the Maghreb (Marinids, Hafsids, Berbers) as well as the Nasrids (the last Muslim dynasty in Iberia, who ruled the Emirate of Granada from 1230–1492). The famous Maliki judge and scholar Abu Bakr ibn al-‘Arabi al-Ishbili compiled the oldest Mughrabi description of a journey to Jerusalem during a three-year sojourn in Jerusalem (1093–96).11 Mughrabis made distinctive contributions to Jerusalem, as renowned Andalusian mystic Muhyi al-Din ibn al-‘Arabi observed while visiting in 1206:

The Moroccans [Mughrabis] are very well remembered in this town because they did wonders in the defense of the Muslims. Their money is found there, and people use that money very often. The Moroccan mats, which are more beautiful than silk, are very well-known to everybody there. The red Moroccan felt is the desire of all savants and dignitaries, and al-Jahiz mentioned that in his book on trade.12

Jean de Tournai, a French textile merchant who visited Jerusalem in 1488 with a keen eye for attire, noted that, “Moors wear white, with head wraps of fine cotton or toile de Hollande.”13

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the population of the Mughrabi Quarter quadrupled. Its spiritual stature was enhanced in the next century due to the advent of notable Sufi shaykhs who joined high government officials already residing in the area. Most Mughrabis adhered to the Maliki doctrine. Among those who advocated for other schools of Islamic jurisprudence was Shaykh Muhammad bin Muhammed al-Tayyib Talafani of Morocco who attained the position of Mufti of Jerusalem in 1777. Rare manuscripts in three private Jerusalem libraries (al-Aqsa, al-Khalidiyya, and al-Budayri) preserve the records of twenty Mughrabi judges who served in Jerusalem, as well as Mughrabi scholars who resided or sojourned in the city.14

Mughrabi pilgrims were hosted upon arrival in two zawiyas at almost opposite corners of the quarter. The Mamluk zawiya (Qantarat Umam al-Banat), a Sufi hospice endowed in 1303 by the scholar ‘Umar bin ‘Abdallah bin ‘Abd al-Nabi al-Masmudi al-Mujarrad, was the first waqf established by a Mughrabi for the benefit of Mughrabis in Jerusalem. His grandson, the mystic Shu‘aib Abu Madyan al-Ghawth, endowed another zawiya near Chain Gate (now Ha-Kotel Street) and assigned the lands of ‘Ayn Karim as waqf to sustain the zawiya and provide assistance to the Mughrabi.15 The top floor of the extant late-Ottoman building (referred to as al-Mughrabi Court in oral histories) preserves small cubicles for pilgrims and a mosque with a maqam. The plaque on the facade commemorates a waqf made by a descendant, Shaykh ‘Umar al-Mujarrad al-Masa‘udi (1901) to finance a soup kitchen for the “poor and needy.” The family waqf holdings formed the most substantial part (70 percent) of the Mughrabi Quarter.16 However, after 1948, ‘Ayn Karim fell on the opposite side of the Green Line, and the waqf was effectively deprived of revenue-generating resources. At this time, the French colonial government stepped in to assume partial financial responsibility for the sustenance of Moroccans, Algerians, and Tunisians, disbursed by the consulate general in Jerusalem.17

Within the urban mosaic of Old City neighborhoods, the Mughrabi Quarter extended to roughly ten thousand square meters. Ottoman municipal archives document the integral role it played in the city’s economic, social, spiritual, and cultural life.18 Mughrabi artisans produced hand-made paper, belts, rugs, and metalwork. The aromas of paprika, pepper, cumin, and harissa sauce wafted through the air. In addition to notable religious edifices and al-Kitab school near the Dung Gate, the Quarter hosted a tribunal, local commercial enterprises, a mill, communal ovens, and numerous fruit trees in family enclaves. Several historic maps demarcate the large Hakurat al-Khatuniyya (Garden of the Noblewomen), located at the Quarter’s southeast corner, cultivated with fruit trees, vegetable plots, and pulse crops. Nineteenth-century photographs show a wild abundance of prickly pear trees brought from Andalusia after 1492. The neighborhood also included extensive archaeological remains from Roman and Byzantine periods and ruins of splendid Umayyad palaces. As French journalist Simon Pierre observed, albeit with a touch of hyperbole: “It was the perfect Moroccan city in the heart of Jerusalem.”19

When Chateaubriand visited Jerusalem in the early-nineteenth century he commended the Mughrabis, who were “sought after on account of their intelligence, and couriers esteemed for their swiftness. What would Saladin and Richard say if, suddenly returning to the world, they were to find the Moorish champions transformed into doorkeepers of the Holy Sepulchre?”20 Mughrabis also guarded markets, public facilities, and city gates, and provided security detail for the wealthy and powerful. They were also chosen as imams of the Mughrabi mosque by the community on the basis of their knowledge, probity, and wisdom.21

Destruction of the Mughrabi Quarter

Fast forward to the second half of the nineteenth century, when the viability of the Mughrabi Quarter began to be severely compromised by the ambitions of the ascendant secular Zionist movement. A handful of wealthy Zionists attempted unsuccessfully to purchase the Western Wall. These included Baron Rothschild, who in 1887 tried to buy the entire Quarter in order to demolish it to create a plaza. Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn and the Zionist Palestine Land Development Company also attempted to purchase the wall in 1895. Then, in 1914, with the Ottoman empire bankrupt and recently entangled in World War I, the Turkish governor of Jerusalem, Zeki Bey, offered unsuccessfully to sell the Mughrabi Quarter for a sum of £20,000. Five years later, in 1919, just after the League of Nations granted the British Mandate for Palestine, Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann sought to raise £75,000 to purchase the Mughrabi Quarter, demolish it, and relocate its residents, but the British upheld the Status Quo. Further Zionist challenges to the Status Quo continued to exacerbate tensions in the 1920s. A 1926 proposal by American Jewish millionaire Nathan Straus to initially lease and subsequently purchase the quarter was also rejected by the British, who again upheld the status quo ante. Three years later, in August 1929, deadly riots erupted between Jews and Muslims over access to the Western Wall after a cohort of Jews raised the Zionist flag and sang the Zionist anthem.22 In defiance of official prohibition by Mandatory authorities, militant Zionist rallies continued though the 1930s and 1940s.

Long-thwarted efforts to destroy the Mughrabi Quarter in order to appropriate the entire area finally fell into place following Israel’s victory in the 1967 war and belligerent occupation of East Jerusalem. On 8 June 1967, David Ben-Gurion firmly declared sur place to Teddy Kollek, mayor of West Jerusalem, who was accompanied by a National Parks Authority official: “The area must be cleared to reveal the wall.”23

Forcible clearing began just two days later. At ten o’clock on Saturday, 10 June 1967, a volunteer demolition crew of private contractors, recruited by Zalman Broshi at the behest of Kollek, arrived in convoy through Zion Gate; they had been ordered to cloak their wreckage operation under cover of night. Broshi’s crew followed a rather sketchy hand-drawn plan conceived earlier in the day by architect Arieh Sharon, president of the Association of Architects and Engineers, and an employee of the National Parks Authority. A handful of key officials signed off on the main instructions: “Destroy blocks A and B except for the enclosure walls and buildings marked as C and D.”24 The destruction, commanded by IDF Captain Eitan Ben-Moshe, would exceed the demarcated areas of the sketch.

Loudspeakers ordered residents of the Mughrabi Quarter to evacuate their homes. Former residents recall hastily gathering whatever possessions they could within several hours. Oral histories recount personal and collective experience of trauma. Destruction continued for two consecutive nights; excavators and bulldozers worked relentlessly under floodlights to flatten the mainly one-and two-story stone and brick-domed residences clustered densely along narrow alleyways. A security perimeter impeded residents from returning to retrieve documents and memorabilia – memorabilia subsequently buried or ground into rubble. It was organized ethnic cleansing, as exiled Mughrabi resident Ahmad Jaridi recounts in an oral history: “The Israelis had buses waiting at Damascus Gate for those who wanted to go to the bridge that leads to Amman. They gave chocolate to people who got on the bus.”25

Figure 4. Mughrabi Quarter Destruction Plan, Photo: Israel State Archives GL - 3847/4

By dawn of 12 June 1967, the historic neighborhood had been leveled. Eyewitnesses reported that homes seemed to have collapsed onto each other like a house of cards. One elderly woman was found dead in her bed; there were reportedly other corpses plowed over in the wreckage, but this is now impossible to confirm officially. The entire neighborhood was gone. Historic monuments, among them two mosques and numerous properties belonging to the waqf, had been razed. Approximately 650 residents were evicted from 138 homes. At the end of July, Kollek wrote Broshi to thank him for leading such an efficient enterprise “to restore the glory of Jerusalem.”26 Broshi’s contractors, who had founded a faux knighthood, the “Order of the Kotel,” during a three in the morning break from their demolition machines, would go on to meet annually to commemorate what they saw as a “heroic deed” of liberation and purification.27

The ad hoc coalition of at least eighty military and civil officials shared a more fundamental motivation that Teddy Kollek later justified as “an act of war.”28 Misinformation was deliberately circulated that the Mughrabi Quarter had been destroyed in the 1948 war. The local press abetted the dissimulation campaign. An article in the Jewish Herald (13 June 1967) claimed that, “Before the area was opened to the Jewish civilian population [in 1948], Israel sappers had blasted the Arab guardhouse and some other buildings to open up a wide square before the Wailing Wall – an area great enough to hold 100,000.”29

Top decision-makers were extremely cautious to avoid personal culpability in the face of Article 53 of the Geneva Conventions. Their nexus of collusion left a deliberately thin paper trail. Major General Uzi Narkiss, head of the IDF’s Central Command, was the most senior authority to give the demolition order, according to Shmuel Bahat.30 “Practical considerations were the determining factor in the demolition of the buildings of the Arab Quarter,” as Meron Benvenisti, Kollek’s deputy mayor (of Jewish Moroccan heritage), flatly stated.31

In riposte to this bald expression of ethno-nationalist ideology – cloaked as pragmatism – expressed by Israeli officials, Ruhi al-Khatib, then mayor of East Jerusalem, poignantly conveyed the human tragedy in a memorandum delivered to Dr. Ernesto Thalmann, UN envoy in Jerusalem, on 26 August 1967:

One hundred and thirty-five houses in the Mughrabi Quarter adjoining the Wailing Wall and adjacent to the two Mosques of Omar and Aksa, which are Muslim Holy Places, have been dynamited and razed by bulldozers. Because of this, 650 Muslim, all of them poor and pious persons living near the Muslim Holy Place, were removed from their homes and driven away, after having been allowed no more than three hours to evacuate their homes, which they had to do while the curfew was in effect. One can easily imagine the consternation of these families, who had to see to the removal of their property and take care of their children and their aged. One part of these buildings, comprising some houses and two small mosques, belongs to the Muslim Waqf. The other part was private property over which the Jews had no rights.32

“The works undertaken on this site of the Old City [ . . . ] have given it the appearance of a gaping wound in the flesh of the City,” lamented René Maheu, sixth director-general of UNESCO, a few years later.33 A broad esplanade of twenty thousand stone blocks laid over the ruins of the Mughrabi Quarter conceals that wound. However, psychic scars caused by forced displacement have not healed.

Scars of Destruction

In the immediate aftermath of the neighborhood’s destruction, the desperate Mughrabi diaspora sought emergency shelter with family and friends in the Old City, the Mount of Olives, Silwan, and other localities. Subsequently, some went to Morocco, others to Jordan or the West Bank. Many settled in refugee camps in Jerusalem, in Shu‘fat, and south of Qalandiya (al-Ram). Jerusalem’s Mughrabi community was scattered to the winds.34

Kollek’s patently disingenuous remark that Mughrabi residents “had no special feeling for the place” is jarringly discordant with lived reality and memory.35 The pain of exile resonates in video testimonies included in the Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive. Nawal Qasem al-Daraji, wife of Mughrabi mukhtar Mahmoud Ahmed al-Maslouhi, who was pregnant with her first child at the time of the quarter’s destruction, expresses melancholy for the “old life, for the company of neighbors, especially the celebratory occasions, as well as the protection of people in need” – like the mukhtar’s sister who suffered from epilepsy. “It was a very close-knit community – like one big family.”36 Aisha Ahmad al-Maslouhi recalls special preparation by the elderly women of traditional Moroccan couscous, and the “strong relations that don’t exist anymore and that we miss.”

Muhammad ‘Abd al-Jalil ‘Abid al-Mawludi al-Mughrabi (b. 1933) often visits the family flat, on the top floor of the Zawiya ‘Umar al-Mujarrad al-Masa‘udi (al-Mughrabi Court) on Ha-Kotel Street, which originally belonged to his grandfather. The intimate vaulted chamber hosts a small museum of memory dedicated to the Mughrabi Quarter: its walls are lined with family documents, old photos of the quarter and its residents, historical books on Arab Jerusalem. Muhammad proudly dubs himself the “best historian of the Mughrabi Quarter” thanks to a remarkable recollection of many neighbors.37 They all merit recognition, he affirms, citing each by name, due to the unjust fate inflicted upon them by the occupying state.38

The Mughrabi Quarter’s demolition caused grave structural damage to what Dame Kathleen Kenyon described as “the finest medieval Muslim architecture outside Cairo.”39 In 1968, Hasan Tahbub, director of the Muslim Waqf, wrote an official letter to Mayor Kollek to protest against breaches of waqf authority: experts had been denied access to inspect the condition of vaults and arches under the Tankaziyya school to prepare a technical report on the damages the site had sustained. Moreover, ongoing demolition and excavation work were being carried out without any notification, “in spite of the fact that the waqf department is the proprietor of all those properties and buildings.”40

Just a year later, in 1969, Israeli authorities destroyed a unique architectural complex located adjacent to the historic Mughrabi Ascent, which comprised fourteen structures of great cultural and historical significance.41 The site, known as the Abu al-Sa‘ud complex (after the family that had resided there for centuries in service to al-Aqsa Mosque), included the Mamluk Jami ‘al-Maghariba, as well as the Sufi al-Zawiya al-Fakhriyya, attached to al-Aqsa Mosque, that had been endowed sometime before 1332 by Qadi Fakhr al-Din Abu ‘Abdallah, a profoundly religious Coptic convert to Islam.42 It had also been home to Yasir Arafat during early childhood (1933–36), following the premature death of his mother.43

Those who are knowledgeable about the venerability and vitality of the Mughrabi Quarter and its illegal eradication surely experience intense cognitive dissonance upon entering the Western Wall Plaza through one of three Israeli checkpoints. Signs enjoin visitors to respect the place where the “Divine Presence always rests.” They are reminded – by way of large posters around the periphery depicting religious symbols and citing scriptural quotations from the Hebrew Bible – of the eternal bond of the Jewish people to the site.

Kollek’s deputy mayor Benvenisti, who actively participated in the destruction of the eight-hundred-year-old neighborhood which had been established as an inalienable waqf, engaged in casuistry when he later stated that this bond justified the grave transgression that had taken place there. When a young Israeli filmmaker who interviewed him in the plaza in 2013 alleged his moral responsibility for the demolition, Benvenisti retorted, “Are you saying there’s an original sin? True, there is. Deal with it.”44

Many Jerusalemites – including Palestinian and Israeli residents of Jerusalem alike – do not know that a veteran Israeli politician, a Moroccan Jew, judged the forced expulsion of the Mughrabi from their old neighborhood as “original sin.” Palestinians born after 1967 have little or no knowledge of the catastrophe that occurred there, even though Mughrabi diaspora continue to live in their midst. Although the Mughrabi Ascent is a highly contested site, the link between its name and the existence of an eight-hundred-year-old Quarter of Jerusalem, is not readily made by many – a great loss to Palestinian collective memory and shared identity.

When the old earthen ascent to the Noble Sanctuary collapsed during the harsh winter of 2004, a wooden pathway was built. It is the only entrance route for non-Muslims and is highly securitized. The Mughrabi Ascent was one of five highly contested sites included in the exhibition Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, held in the Israeli Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale. The exhibition viewed these sites through the larger filter of the Status Quo agreements Israel is obligated to uphold. However, it gave concentrated focus to the critical use of architecture both as a system of daily organizational management and as a means of hegemony. Several models of the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter were included in the exhibition, which was viewed by one critic as, “the most concrete expression of the demolition of the quarter ever created by Israeli architects or academics, on a topic about which much has been written.”45

Construction by the Israeli government of a temporary ramp adjacent to the Mughrabi Ascent that began in August 2014 intensified political and religious tensions both in Jerusalem and regionally as a potential violation of the Status Quo at the al-Aqsa Mosque. Although it was soon dismantled under international pressure, the pathway remains one of the most politically charged and contested sites in the Old City and well beyond due to recurrent efforts by Israeli occupation forces to alter the Status Quo and provocative raids by settlers. The Statu Quo curators stated that, “The wooden bridge in its ‘permanent temporariness’ renders a postponed political solution and showcases monuments as active agents in the territorial conflict.”

In the face of what is seen as a permanent state of political stagnation, the Mughrabi Quarter Virtual Archive enables former residents, both those interviewed for oral histories, and the entire diaspora community, to regain active agency in defense of the Mughrabi Ascent. Historical documentation confirms their right to participate in a timely political solution in the face of hegemonic plans for the former neighborhood that they once occupied.

Figure 7. Model of Moroccan Quarter, In Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, Israeli Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2018. Photo courtesy: Mary Pelletier

History of the Illés Relief, 1873–78

It is our great fortune that a miniature representation of the Mughrabi Quarter was preserved in the Illés Relief, a marvel of craftsmanship and a primary source artifact of enormous documentary value.46 Like an analog version of Google Earth, the model provides a view – albeit an extruded, three-dimensional one – of what was then the regional seat of the Ottoman administrative district, known as the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem, commonly referred to as Palestine, an independent province since 1872.47

The eighteen square-meter, 1:500 scale model is named for its creator, Stefan Illés, who arrived in Jerusalem in 1864. He first worked as a bookbinder at the Franciscan Monastery of St. Saviour before establishing an independent atelier. He embodied enormous passion for the city by way of a meticulous eye, an effort to obtain verisimilitude, and meticulous craftsmanship. The Relief is an intricately detailed miniature rendering of the stony hill fortress of Jerusalem, set on a promontory, bordered by mountains and enveloped by deep valleys.

Figure 8. Illés Relief, Tower of David Museum. Photo: ARCH Jerusalem

The Illés Relief is emplaced on a wooden framework divided into eight sections. Illés and two assistants painstakingly cut, melted, and shaped thousands of pieces of zinc; they then soldered, glued, and painted simulacra. The model is color-coded: ancient Jerusalem limestone was painted gray, modern buildings straw yellow, and natural areas green. Roads outside the walls were marked white; important roofs red and metal domes black.

Illés used the Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem undertaken by British surveyor Major General Charles Wilson (1836–1905) in eight months over 1864–65 as the topographic base-map for his model. He mirrored the natural topography, surface area, and built environment with its interpenetrating harat (neighborhoods), mirroring shared communal identity, be it shared place of origin, religion, or ethnicity. Although the city was predominantly Arab in its social landscape, confessional boundaries were porous and were only later demarcated by the British under the colonial pretense of creating a modern sectarian balance.

The model represents Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives (which is almost unconstructed except for the Church of the Ascension) in the east to the Russian Compound in the west; from the spring of Ein-Rogel in the southeast to Damascus Gate in the north. Two gates (Herod’s and New Gate) had yet to be built. (These and many subsequent alterations that have been made since 1873 will be digitally mapped).

Illés represented in loving detail the extraordinary urban fabric and built heritage of the Old City, interconnected via an ancient network of one hundred forty streets, lanes, and ascents. His aerial view extends beyond the Ottoman walls to encompass the modernizing European suburbs. National flags identify newly established consulates and foreign residences that were connected to the world by recently installed telegraph poles (1865) outside Jaffa Gate. He also includes Mishkenot Sha’ananim – the first Jewish neighborhood established by British banker and philanthropist, Moses Montefiore, with funds bequeathed by New Orleanian tycoon, Judah Touro.

For six months the Illés Relief of Jerusalem was the star attraction of the Ottoman Pavilion at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair.48 Relief models of cities were very fashionable in late nineteenth-century Europe, and Illés’ eight-section model had been cleverly designed to facilitate transportation and display during a five-year European tour. From 1873 to 1878, viewers in London, Munich, and Cologne flocked, like avian pilgrims, to marvel at the panorama of the Holy City. It was especially well-received in major Swiss cities (Zurich, Luzern, and Bâle), where reliefs had become a popular way to inspire patriotism – uniting the country’s ethnicities, religions, and language groups – after the federal constitution came into force in 1848.49 Neuchâtel Pastor Félix Bovet, a distinguished Swiss professor of theology, educator, and bibliophile, wrote on 14 February 1878, “We do not believe it an exaggeration to state that – given the religious and poetic emotions [elicited] . . . the spectacle of this relief replaces a journey to Jerusalem.”50

The booklet printed in Bâle in 1878 for the Swiss tour of the Illés Relief advertised its special claim to fame: “The first accurate model of Jerusalem seen with a bird’s eye view from the West.” Its documentary and artistic value was further underscored: “The topographic relief gives a precise and detailed representation of Jerusalem and its surroundings; other works of this type have the major shortcoming of not having been created with the artist’s eye, and consequently cannot give an exact and detailed representation of Jerusalem as it is today.”51

A team of experts who verified the accuracy of the Relief in the Bâle booklet also stressed its very faithful scale model of Jerusalem at the time. Father Marie-Alphonse Ratisbonne, who enjoyed a “spectacular view of the Old City” from the terrace of his residence at the Monastery of the Religious of Notre Dame of Zion (located at the Ecce Home Arch on Via Dolorosa), praised the “astonishing exactitude of the ensemble even to the smallest detail,” judging it a “prodigious work [ . . . ] a relief photograph of Jerusalem.”52 Dr. Titus Tobler, the Swiss-German physician whose scholarly publications, fruit of four sojourns in the Holy Land (1835, 1845–46, 1857, 1865) which later earned him the epithet “Father of German Exploration in Palestine,” had advised Illés during its creation, as he attested:

The relief map of the city of Jerusalem and its environs executed by M. Illés is recommended for its scrupulous exactitude, in the measurement of the topography as well as the streets and buildings [ . . . ] I hope that others will take pleasure in it with the same degree as I have done, each time that I have examined it in detail, and I express the sincere desire that a great number of people will be interested in a work of art that is also instructive.53

Tobler was part of a coterie of European Christians who traveled to Jerusalem in the second half of the nineteenth century to identify archaeological sites, using the Bible as their sole frame of reference for field research. Only French archaeologist Charles-Jean-Melchior de Vogüé (1829–1916) had formal training in archaeology. However, others transformed themselves into specialists on the ground in Palestine; by dint of hard work and practical know-how, they gained deep knowledge of topography and the histories of architecture. Tobler was well-acquainted with other autodidacts, such as Conrad Schick (1822–1901), the German missionary who settled permanently in Jerusalem in 1846. As Nazmi al-Jubeh has observed, “Conrad Schick embodied the sum of imminent European concerns in Jerusalem in the second half of the nineteenth century, typifying the different historical and social sciences in combination with an unequivocally unique personality.”54 Schick’s aptitude for model-making took on mature form in several exceedingly valuable exempla. Afforded unusual permission from the Islamic waqf to explore the Noble Sanctuary from the inside, Schick produced a rare wooden model that was exhibited, alongside the Illés Relief, in the Ottoman Pavilion of the famous Vienna World’s Fair.55

Schick’s expertise as a model-maker stood out from the start. In 1859, he was asked to raise the standard of a geomorphic plaster relief map by H. W. Altmüller. His name figures boldly for having “improved and corrected” both quality and accuracy.56 Fortunately, he did not remove the marking for the “Coffe [sic] House” near St. George’s Greek Monastery, which must have been a local meeting place for foreigners in Jerusalem, of which Altmüller seems to have been a habitué. Schick, Illés, and Wilson may have met there to exchange expertise during Wilson’s eight-month sojourn as leader of the British Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem.57 Wilson’s biography describes the archaeological excavations, especially the “rough and difficult” explorations underneath the Noble Sanctuary (“rewarded by several discoveries”), as well as field research in Palestine in which he was simultaneously engaged.58 Five months before Schick died in 1901, he wrote Wilson to claim payment for work completed and pre-payment for architectural drawings of Jeremiah’s Grotto (the Garden Tomb).59 Evidence that the Europeans were a highly collaborative group is provided by the useful corrections and new discoveries appended to the 1876 edition of the British Ordnance Survey.60 The Wilson Ordnance Survey enterprise merits serious study, along with the Arabic nomenclature for places and street names selected by Carl Sandreczki.61

Figure 10: Wilson Ordnance Survey, 1865. Photo: The British Library

The Illés Relief, from Geneva to Jerusalem

After its peripatetic journey through Europe, the Illés Relief finally found a permanent home in the Republic of Geneva. Gustave Moynier, president of the International Red Cross and major proponent of the humanitarian “Spirit of Geneva,” spearheaded the initiative for its purchase. Two appeals were launched in April 1878. Money flowed in from more than a hundred private donors, many from the city’s most distinguished families. The citizens of Geneva, from a wide social spectrum, also responded generously. Six thousand Swiss francs had been raised within a month, much by public subscription. The administrative council of the Société de la Rive Gauche contributed an additional 4,600 francs, thereby permitting the purchase of the model for CHF 9,500 on 26 October 1878 (estimated to be equivalent to at least CHF 220,000 in today’s economy). The remainder was designated for its installation in the Calvin Library of the Maison de la Réformation SA, a private evangelical association in Geneva that had assumed legal ownership. On 16 January 1879, the solemn installation of the Relief took place.

For forty years (1879–1919) the Illés Relief could be viewed two days a week. Then in 1920 it was removed to accommodate delegates to the inaugural meeting of the League of Nations. Henceforth, finding a suitable display venue became a challenge. Following a brief exhibition at Geneva’s Art and History Museum in 1963, it was relocated to several venues and eventually ended up in a locked depot of the Palais Wilson. On 6 April 1984, a University of Geneva art history professor unlocked the storage room for David G. Littman, accompanied by his wife and daughter. There they found the artefact for which Littman, a student at Hebrew University, had been searching.62

On 20 September 1984, a convention was signed before a Geneva notary between two officials of the Maison de la Réformation SA and Littman, who represented the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. However, the lenders expressed their civic obligation to protect the inalienable property of the citizens of Geneva. The permanent loan contract stipulated an initial ten-year loan to the Municipality of Jerusalem, after which renewal would be automatic every five years – unless specified to the contrary, or if the conditions of the contract were not met.63 The next renewal is scheduled for 20 September 2024.

The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative

Global audiences will soon be able to explore and inspect Illés’ Jerusalem, beginning with the destroyed Mughrabi Quarter, thanks to the recent digitization of the Relief as part of a groundbreaking project – The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative. The Initiative consists of three parts: first, the Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive, a content-dense website currently underway that aims to recover the Quarter’s past; second, the extensive digital mapping of the entire virtual Illés Relief in order to create an interactive, annotated model housed online; third, a digital museology exhibition enabling visitors to interact with the Relief through Augmented and/or Virtual Reality.64

The Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive will be launched in the spring of 2020 on the internet. A website will offer a navigable 3D model of the Quarter as it stood in 1873, an orthographic map as well as a media-rich archive, that includes a series of video diaries from witnesses and survivors of the 1967 destruction.

Following this first phase, a global research campaign will initially focus on the histories of Jerusalem during the Ottoman era (1517–1917) by gathering then analyzing data to digitally map the entire virtual Illés Relief. Users will be able to navigate the Old City according to both place and time, excavating layers of geo-referenced data in the city’s built topography and exploring its transformation over four centuries. This interactive web platform will incorporate data that showcases the living city, inhabited by Jerusalemites who shared a communitarian ethos and multiple identities.

After the completion of the initial phase, the virtual Relief will be transformed into an experiential, spatial immersion installation, allowing viewers to experience the intricate, interwoven histories of Jerusalem thanks to a range of virtual and visualization technologies. Debuting in Switzerland, the interactive installation will be designed for portability in order to travel around the world to audiences far and wide. In conjunction with the digital museology exhibition, a unique VR film will transport viewers on a narrated time-travel tour of the Old City.

As a legacy project, the Virtual Illés Relief Initiative will be developed in various chronological phases over the course of a prospective ten-year period. The interactive platform will be regularly updated to reflect and incorporate ongoing contributions from scholars spanning myriad academic disciplines.

It is hoped that The Mughrabi Quarter Digital Archive and The Virtual Illés Relief Initiative will catalyze vital new discourses, especially vis-à-vis contested sites in Jerusalem, reinvigorating a commitment by the international community to uphold its legally designated status as “corpus separatum.” By making cultural heritage of outstanding universal value accessible to a global audience, especially when this heritage is increasingly under threat, it is also hoped that this Initiative will actively engage the global community in crucial debates about the very urgent role heritage plays in shaping the precarious future of Jerusalem.