Jerusalem of (Fool’s) Gold

Edward Rothstein opens his essay on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven, with a well-deserved tribute to the gorgeousness of the objects on display and the splendidly illustrated catalogue. He then goes on to query whether the exhibition and catalogue really reflect the political, economic, artistic, and religious realities of medieval Jerusalem. Having read the catalogue and Rothstein’s criticisms of it, I am in broad agreement with him, and I found his analysis more interesting and more persuasive than the catalogue’s Pollyannaish presentation of medieval realities.

Today the stress on relevance and diversity is the bane of pop-history writing. Popular historians, historical novelists—and museum curators?—are reluctant to acknowledge how nasty things could be in the Middle Ages. The Met’s exhibition presented Jerusalem under the rule of the Fatimids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mamluks as home to “multiple competitive and complementary religious traditions.” The place was allegedly a cultural melting pot and a perfect example of the convivencia in which Christians, Muslims, and Jews all benefited and Jerusalem’s local economy thrived, something that might be suggested by the marvelous artefacts on display: illuminated manuscripts, astrolabes, enameled glassware, and so forth.

But, as Rothstein points out, most of the things on display were produced elsewhere—in Cairo, Damascus, France, Spain, Germany—and some were never available in Palestine. Having consulted written sources for the period, I think that what should have been displayed as local produce was soap, olive oil, crude glassware, maybe leatherwork, and not much else. There were three arcaded markets in Jerusalem; the central one bore the unenticing name, “The Street of Evil Cooking.”