'Jerusalem on Earth': A veteran journalist captures Jerusalem's Golden Age - review

Now, 36 years later, Rabinovich republishes Jerusalem on Earth in a revised edition lavishly illustrated with photographs. The passage of time and changing circumstances provide today’s reader with a totally new perspective on what Rabinovich wrote in the 1980s. With the benefit of hindsight, the reader can now see the seeds of the future in so many of the episodes that Rabinovich recounts so vividly. For example, how many times in the past few decades has Muslim opinion been raised to fever pitch by stories that the al-Aqsa compound has somehow been violated by Israeli action?

Rabinovich relates an early example. Just two years after the city’s reunification, an arsonist sets fire to al-Aqsa Mosque, sparking anti-Israel riots across the Muslim world. Passions cool when it transpires that the arsonist was not an Israeli but a psychotic Christian sheep shearer from Australia who wanted to be anointed king of Judea. The incident was the most extreme example of what would come to be known as Jerusalem syndrome. Year after year, a number of tourists are affected psychologically by the powerful spiritual atmosphere that pervades Jerusalem, and they start believing they are figures from the Bible. 

In writing about the maverick architect Art Kutcher from Sioux City, Iowa, who found employment in the municipality’s planning office, Rabinovich foreshadows the escalation of construction in Jerusalem. He tells how Kutcher, stopping off in Jerusalem with a backpack and a sketch book, derails massive building projects and saves the city’s skyline before moving on. The chapter on legendary orchestra conductor Daniel Barenboim breaking the taboo of performing Wagner in Jerusalem is a classic (see excerpt titled “The conductor”).

Although the rise of Yasser Arafat and the First Intifada foreshadowed much trouble to follow, the world Rabinovich portrays is in some ways Israel’s – and Jerusalem’s – Golden Age. The nation had decisively beaten off the massed armies of its enemies; it had regained not only the whole of Jerusalem but also the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and a vast tract of Egypt’s desert. Now it could turn its attention to building for the future. Yet between the lines, Jerusalem on Earth contains indications of some of the problems that were to arise later on. Read today, Rabinovich’s book provides a fascinating historical perspective, offering clues as to how and why Israel is the nation it has become.■

• Jerusalem on Earth – Clamoring at Heaven’s Gate: Post-Six Day War Jerusalem
• Independently published, 2024
• Abraham Rabinovich
• 276 pages; $19.99

The conductor: An excerpt by Abraham Rabinovich

The concert was over and the audience was clamoring for more. Conductor Daniel Barenboim turned on the podium and raised his hand. “I want to ask something of you.” When they bought their tickets, he told the audience, they had entered into a contract with him. With the conclusion of the concert, the last to be played at Jerusalem’s annual music festival, the contract was terminated. He wished now to propose a new contract unconnected with the festival. If the audience signaled its assent, the orchestra would play a piece by Richard Wagner. If the audience disapproved, it would not be played.

There was an audible rustle in Jerusalem’s Binyenei Ha’uma auditorium. Half a century had passed since the Second World War, and refusal by the Israeli public to buy Volkswagens and other German products had virtually petered out. But the ban on public performances of music by Wagner, a rabid antisemite admired by Hitler, remained virtually the last taboo. There was nothing to prevent Israelis from buying recordings of Wagner’s music in local music stores and listening at home. Many did, including some who forcefully opposed its performance in public. It had not been performed publicly since the founding of the state. 

As the audience well knew, the festival organizers had rejected a request by Barenboim to include the 19th-century composer’s music in his program. An Argentinian-born Israeli, Barenboim was now asking an audience in Israel’s capital to conspire with him in breaking the Wagner boycott. The audience consisted of classical music lovers who had risked a night out at the peak of the intifada suicide bombings in 2001 to hear Barenboim and the Berlin Staatskapelle interpret Stravinsky and Schumann. The performance had been memorable and the applause exuberant. Barenboim had already conducted an encore before turning to the audience to make his offer.

Anything that happened next would be an undertaking between him and them, said Barenboim, not with the festival organizers, since the festival was over. Great music was above politics and it was important to him, he said, that Wagner’s music be performed in Israel. Would the audience agree to remain and listen?

First, stormy applause. Then voices of dissent. A man in the balcony rose and introduced himself as a government lawyer. “Mr. Barenboim,” he said, “you’re letting Wagner in through the back door.” 

Other objections followed, and the tone began to turn strident. Words like “hutzpa” directed at the conductor could be heard. But the vast majority of the audience – 90 percent or more – remained seated and approved Barenboim’s proposal with spontaneous bursts of applause. Some shouted to the protesters, “Go home if you don’t want to listen.” But the protesters didn’t go home because this was not a matter of personal predilection but of principle – the permissible limits of distancing from the Holocaust. The audience had come to be transported from the furies of the day on the wings of ethereal music. But they were now being confronted with a moral question linked to an even darker time than the present, and their moral sensibilities were fully engaged.

A middle-aged man rose and walked to the front of the hall, where he turned to face the audience. He might have been a professor from Hebrew University across town or an official from one of the government ministries. In an authoritative voice that could be heard clearly in the balcony, he said that he had been opposed to playing Wagner in the context of the festival, a state-sponsored event, and had supported the festival organizers’ rejection of Barenboim’s request to do so. 

It was not for the State of Israel to promote music by a vicious antisemite like Wagner. But Barenboim had made it clear, he said, that the piece he wished to conduct would not be part of the official festival. A distinction was being made between Richard Wagner the antisemite and his music. Therefore, said the speaker, he for one accepted the conductor’s proposal.

Audience members around the hall began to rise spontaneously to speak. Barenboim went to the front of the stage, the better to hear distant voices. It was as if he was listening to a new chorale, alert to every nuance. One sensed that if opposition was substantial, he would desist. Individual members of the audience began to go to the foot of the stage to talk to him. First two or three, then a score. Barenboim bent down to hear them, then finally sat down on the podium, his knees drawn up.

It was “reality” theater of a kind rarely seen, the drama being played out in the large hall rather than on the stage. For perhaps 20 minutes, members of the audience engaged in an extraordinary dialogue with each other and with Barenboim. As the crowd at the front grew, Barenboim moved to the edge of the stage and sat, his legs dangling over the side. The sight of a world-class conductor discussing with his audience at close range whether, on moral grounds, he should or should not perform a piece of music was an image that would remain with all who were present. The German musicians who had performed the evening’s concert sat frozen in their seats. They did not understand the Hebrew being spoken and shouted, but the passions reverberating in the hall, which had turned into an Athenian-like forum, were absolutely clear.

Almost 40 years before, Jascha Heifetz, the most famous violinist of his time, was struck on his arm with an iron bar outside the King David Hotel in Jerusalem as he returned from a performance. The attacker had been angered by Heifetz’s inclusion in his program of a sonata by Richard Strauss, who had had open links with the Nazi regime. Israeli officials had begged Heifetz to drop Strauss from the program to avoid possible violence. “Music is above these factors,” he had replied. He was not permanently injured by the attack, but many in Barenboim’s audience were now thinking about that episode.

When Barenboim finally rose to his feet, it was with the air of a man who had made up his mind. But he hadn’t, quite. Mounting the podium, he signaled to the musicians who had been mesmerized by the scene unfolding before them. Then he raised his baton. For several moments, each longer than any musical beat, he remained with uplifted arms, his body facing the orchestra but his head half-turned as if trying to gauge the mood of the audience he could not see.

The weight of what he intended to do was clearly upon him. He was aware of the offense it would cause, particularly to Holocaust survivors, particularly to any of them in the hall. He was almost certainly aware of how close to trickery he was skating in order to circumvent the Wagner ban. He must have been aware too of the attacks – at least verbal – that would follow.

Shouts of protest rose from scattered members of the audience and from a small number who had left the hall but remained in the corridors outside. These sounds were drowned out by the hush of those who remained in their seats. People began to wonder if Barenboim’s downbeat would ever come. Then the baton descended and music began to soar. Someone in the corridor banged on a door. A single shout from the balcony. Then just Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde filling the hall.