I am sure that someone could prepare a lecture, or even a book, on the relationship between the cities of Boston and Jerusalem. But for my purposes, the only connection that is important is that they are both subjects of today’s brief post.

Let’s start with Jerusalem. Yesterday, the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies (I am vice-president) held its first in-person Day of Learning since before the COVID pandemic. Our presenter was Jodi Magness, who is a world renown archeologist, and holds the somewhat strange title of Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She had spoken for Haberman before, most recently in 2018, when she spoke about a current dig in Israel in which she was involved.

This time she gave three lectures about Jerusalem, which I think were part of a course she teaches to undergraduates in Chapel Hill. She recently gave the entire course on-line for the Orange County (CA) Jewish Federation; I listened to several of those lectures.

Jodi Magness is a personable and magnetic speaker, and the crowd yesterday at Kol Shalom in Rockville MD included several Jodi Magness groupies. Her three lectures were very well received.

I know that I can’t do her justice this morning, so I am not going to try. Yes, I am.

Her first lecture was about the early history of Jerusalem, and particularly about how the Old City, as we know it today, was an Ottoman creation, and did not represent the original boundaries of the city, which in fact included a part of today’s Old City, and the land to the south of today’s Old City walls which is now known as the City of David. She spent a long time on the topography of the city, it’s high and low places, how it slopes down from north to south, how the Temple Mount is at a very high point, and the City of David is much lower, but was the original part of Jerusalem because it was built around the water supply, a spring. She explained how, of all old ancient capitals, only Jerusalem was not built on water, nor on a trade route, but at an isolated, yet easy to defend, location.

A thousand years after King David, around the time of Jesus, Herod built a palace to the west of the Temple Mount, in today’s Armenian Quarter of the Old City, which was again on a high ridge, with the area between the Temple Mount and the palace being the region of homes of the wealthiest of the residents of Jerusalem at the time, mainly members of the Saducees, or priestly caste, some of which have been located through digs, and which were designed similar to Roman villas throughout the Roman Empire.

To protect Herod’s palace, a three towered fortress was built just to its north; one of the towers, now known as the Tower of David, remains. And, at the northern end of today’s Old City, near the Damascus Gate if you know the area, was another fortress, parts of which remain, and from the roof of which (if you are lucky enough to gain access), you can watch the comings and goings on the Temple Mount, against showing the need to build on the tops of the hills, and not in the valleys.

She spoke quite a bit about Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built about 300 years after Jesus’ death and after Constantine legalized Christianity. As you follow today the Via Delarosa, supposedly proceeding along the various stations of the cross, she showed again how this route was defined well after the time of Jesus, and that it was very unlikely that it was historically correct. She has concluded that the current path, demarked in the Middle Ages, running from north to south, is incorrect, and that the true path would have started near Herod’s palace and run north to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

She spoke of burial practices of the day, of Herod’s reconstruction of the Second Temple, of the origin of the arched support system under the south end of the Temple Mount known today as Solomon’s Stables (like the Tower of David had nothing to do with David, Solomon’s Stables have nothing to do with either Solomon or horses), and the role of money changers during late Second Temple times.

A terrific day.

Okay, on to Boston for a shout out. Some time ago, Washington Post book editor Michael Dirda wrote that, when you go into a used book store, you should always buy at least one book. That is why, when ladt month we went into the Pamlico Book Store in Wilmington NC I bought A City So Grand; Boston 1850-1900 by Stephen Puleo. A pristine copy, signed by the author.

I didn’t really have any expectations for the book, but it turned out to be extremely well written and organized, and very, very interesting.

Here goes: abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law, Civil War recruitment, the Irish, the infilling of the Back Bay, streetcars, suburbs, universities,  railroads, first American subway, Italians, the invention of the telephone, exhibitions. They are all here.

The book was published in 2010 and was the author’s third book about Boston.. Highly recommended.

Until tomorrow.