The concept of a status quo of religious sites in the Holy Land stemmed from an 18th-century decree issued by the Ottoman Sultan Osman III.
Disputes over the right of preeminence at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been ongoing for two centuries between the Latin (Catholic) and Greek Orthodox communities. Those disputes were not always verbal.
Greek and Franciscan monks went at each other in 1757 with candlesticks on Palm Sunday. The Franciscans claimed Orthodox monks had conducted a violent raid on the rotunda of the church and occupied it. The Sultan had had enough and issued that decree, preferring the Greek Orthodox.
In 1852 and 1856, the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Mejid froze all claims at nine religious sites in Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Any new customs or structural alterations were prevented except if all Christian communities consented. His firmans were recognized in the 1856 Treaty of Paris with the term “status quo” first appearing in the 1878 Treaty of Berlin.
Christians merited the status quo arrangement simply because their ecclesiastical institutions were backed by very powerful temporal forces. France was behind the Franciscans, Greece backed the Eastern Orthodox. England and Germany the Protestants. Italy the Latin Catholics. Russia the Orthodox.
The immediate cause of the 1853 Crimea War, we should recall, was Emperor Napoleon III’s assertion of France’s “sovereign authority” over the Christian population of Palestine. According to Russian history, the “provocation that started the war was the act of passing the keys of [the] Bethlehem Church of the Nativity to Catholic clergy.” It was “an insult [to the] Russian emperor.”
And the Jews? No one really cared about Jewish claims.
Jews were excluded both from the Temple Mount and the Cave of the Patriarchs under Muslim rule over the Land of Israel with few exceptions. In Jerusalem, since the late ninth century, Jews would approach the walls of the Temple Mount to pray and also to encircle the site and recite Psalms at various gates.
No status quo existed for Jews until 1967
No official status quo existed for them. None, that is, until 1967.
The Western Wall became the main location for Jewish prayer some 700 years ago. In 1488, Ovadia of Bartenura left the first written testimony to the practice. Suleiman the Magnificent asked an architect to prepare for a Jewish prayer location there.
Beginning in the late 18th century and with acceleration from the mid-19th century, Jews began returning en masse to their homeland. By 1870, Jews were the majority population in Jerusalem. Moreover, tourism and pilgrimages, of Jews and non-Jews, increased. The Western Wall alleyway was becoming crowded with Jews.
They instituted normative Jewish synagogal practices. Holy arks, benches and chairs, tables, lanterns and bookcases. Prayer partitions were just too much for the Muslim authorities of the city, however. For the most part, a nonofficial status quo of customary practice set in.
Until 1911, that is
On Monday, April 13, during Passover, the Parker Expedition Affair, the search for “Solomon’s treasures,” exploded. The guardian of the Haram al-Sharif was bribed to let the British adventurers in to the Dome of the Rock. Their digging was discovered. Riots broke out in Jerusalem. At the Wall, the Sephardi custodian was set upon and beaten. Benches were broken.
It is unclear whether there is a direct connection, but in early November that year the status quo came to an end. Jews were informed that no benches or stools would be permitted at the Western Wall. The complaint of the locals was that Jews bringing chairs would allow them in the future to assert ownership. Chairs, tables, and separation screens now were deemed “innovations.” Appeals went out to the sultan in Turkey.
A British official was to later testify that if chairs were allowed, next would come benches, then permanent seating, “and before long, the Jews would have established a legal claim to the site.”
The July 26, 1912, issue of the Chicago Sentinel, a Jewish weekly, reported, a bit garbled, that an order from Constantinople “announces that the recent interdict prohibiting the Jews from worshiping on Friday evenings at the Western Wall in Jerusalem has been removed.” What the editor couldn’t have known as he went to press was that on July 22, the night of Tisha B’Av, the Western Wall had been smeared with feces. And not for the first or last time.
It was from this period that the struggle over the rights of Jews at the Western Wall became a central political element in the relations between Jews and Muslims in the early years of the Mandate. Chaim Weizmann tried solving the matter by purchasing the neighborhood, as did others before him.
In May 1920, a month after the riots, the Wakf unilaterally attempted to fix the upper layers of the Wall. Benches were removed by the Wakf in early 1922 and Yom Kippur 1925. In 1923, the approach to the Wall was closed to Jewish worshipers on the first day of Passover, as the British feared disturbances.
Following the violent incident of the removal of a partition on Yom Kippur, September 29, 1928, Mufti Amin al-Husseini organized actions that would highlight the Muslims’ exclusive claims to the Temple Mount and its environs. He ordered new construction in proximity to the Western Wall.
Eventually, on November 19, 1928, a white paper was issued. Quoting the 1911 prohibition, Leopold Amery, secretary of state for the colonies, pronounced there had been an infraction of the status quo, which the government was unable to permit.
As a result of the ensuing 1929 riots, an international commission was appointed. On December 1, 1930, it declared a prohibition on bringing “benches, carpets, mattings, chairs, curtains, and screens” to the Wall and “to blow the ram’s horn” at the Wall, all in force until 1948.
That situation continued throughout the Jordanian occupation.
No full Jewish rights. No Jewish privileges. No more previous status quo. That is, until 1967, when full Jewish sovereignty was renewed.
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.