Is it "the Western
Wall" or "the Wailing Wall"? Jews nowadays make a
point of saying "Western"; non-Jews say both; and the
question, which has hitherto seemed a semantic one tinged with
religious and national overtones, has now become part of the wrangling
over President Clinton's proposed
Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. In the words of the Israeli
political and military analyst Ze'ev Schiff, writing in the Hebrew
daily Ha'aretz:
"What is the length of the Western Wall? Is it
confined to the wall facing the space traditionally used by Jews for prayer,
which is only 58 meters, or does it include the entire western
retaining wall of the Temple
Mount? The Palestinians demand that any diplomatic settlement
adhere to the shorter length, known as "the Wailing Wall."
Israel insists on "the Western Wall"...whose length is 485
meters.
Let us try to shed some philological light on the
matter.
There is no doubt that the Hebrew term ha-kotel
ha-ma'aravi or "Western Wall" is far older than
"Wailing Wall." Thus, for instance, in Shemot Rabba, a midrashic collection of exegeses on the book of Exodus from the seventh or eighth century C.E., we find the saying attributed
to Rabbi Acha (himself a fourth-century scholar) that, even after the
destruction of the Temple,
"the Shekhinah [God's
presence in the world] never leaves the Western Wall."
There is some doubt, though, whether Rabbi Acha was
actually referring to today's Western Wall rather than to the ruined
west wall of the Temple building itself, since there is no mention by
any similarly early source of the custom of praying or mourning at
today's wall. Indeed, in the early centuries after the destruction of
the Temple, Jews were prohibited by the Roman authorities from entering the city of Jerusalem at all, and the customary place for mourning the Temple was the Mount
of Olives, which overlooks the Temple Mount from the east. A
description of this rite is given by the fourth-century Church Father
Jerome, who observed Jews on the Mount of Olives on the Ninth
of Av, the day of mourning for the Temple, wailing and lamenting
while they looked down on its ruins. The earliest clear use of ha-kotel
ha-ma'aravi in the sense of today's "Western Wall" is by
the 11th-century Italian Hebrew poet Ahima'az ben Paltiel. This, too,
though, may predate the actual use of the wall by Jews for prayer,
since it is not until the 16th century that we hear of the wall being
used for that purpose
The English term "Wailing Wall" or its
equivalent in other languages dates from much later. In fact despite
its hoary sound, "Wailing Wall" is a strictly 20th-century
English usage introduced by the British after their conquest of
Jerusalem from the Turks in 1917. In the 19th century, when European
travelers first began visiting Palestine in sufficient numbers to
notice the Jews there at all, the Western Wall was commonly referred
to as "the Wailing Place," as in the following passage from
Samuel Manning's "Those Holy Fields" (1873):
A little further along the western [retaining] wall
we come to the Wailing-place of the Jews.... Here the Jews assemble
every Friday to mourn over their fallen state.... Some press their
lips against crevices in the masonry as though imploring an answer
from some unseen presence within, others utter loud cries of anguish.
The "Wailing-place" was a translation of
El-Mabka, or "the Place of Weeping," the traditional Arabic
term for the wall. Within a short time after the commencement of the
British Mandate, however, "Wailing Wall" became the standard
English term, nor did Jews have any compunctions about using it. Only
after the Six-Day War in
1967 did it become de rigueur in Jewish circles to say
"Western Wall"— a reflection of the feeling, first
expressed by official Israeli usage and then spreading to the
Diaspora, that, with the reunification of Jerusalem under Israeli
sovereignty, there was no longer anything to wail about. Henceforward,
the wall should be a place of celebration.
This happened so quickly that it is difficult to
find a Jewish book written after 1967 in which the term "Wailing
Wall" occurs. Gradually, the non-Jewish world began to fall in
line, so that "Western Wall" predominates in contemporary
non-Jewish usage too, though "Wailing Wall" can still be
found there. Muslims, for
their part, use neither term, "El-Mabka" having fallen out
of favor in the 1920s with growing Arab-Jewish tensions over rights at
the wall. The Palestinians then began calling it "El-Burak,"
after the name of Mohammed's horse that was supposedly tethered there on the prophet's legendary
night ride to Jerusalem and heaven.
But in Hebrew it has always been ha-kotel ha-ma'aravi, at least for the last thousand years. Or rather, this is its full
form, which Israelis rarely use in ordinary conversation. In Israel
one generally hears no more than ha-kotel, "the
Wall," the subject being clear, since the everyday Hebrew word
for "wall" is kir and kotel is used only in
special idioms. Perhaps as part of his carefully prepared package of
compromises, Mr. Clinton could prevail upon both sides to do the same
and drop both "Wailing" and "Western."