Page 287 - ירושלים: גיליון רפואי

From the plague of dispute to a vision
of the heavenly Jerusalem

In modern times, Jerusalem was subjected to the crumbling and corrupt Ottoman rule
while many new residents arrived in the city, all requiring medical services. Muslim
medicine was based largely on traditional folk medicine, providing services to the
Muslim residents of Jerusalem and especially to the surrounding villages. Yet inside
the city inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflicts were rife, the harshest of these being
epitomized by the conflicts between the Jewish community and the Protestant Mission
that offered medical services to Jerusalemites of all religious persuasions, ethnicities,
denominations, and sects. The Mission aspired to provide relief to a population with
limited means, troubled by the ills of the holy city, by means of faith, providing its
patients with health, a livelihood, and life. Yet in Jerusalem, greater meaning was
attributed to these activities – inextricably linked with the struggle over the holy sites
– than anywhere else, and this led to numerous bitter and poignant conflicts in the city
during the nineteenth century.

In 1844, the London Society for Promoting Christianity amongst the Jews established the
Anglican Mission Hospital for Poor Jews. It was the city’s first modern hospital. About half a
century later, the hospital moved to a spacious modern building in Hanevi’im Street, in the new
city. Jewish patients in the hospital were offered kosher meals, and the walls and furniture were
embellished with Hebrew verses from the Bible, to create a reassuring atmosphere. However,
the patients using the hospital’s services – many of whom were elderly people who had come
to die in the holy city and be buried on the Mount of Olives – were subjected to the worst
kind of threat, a ban (herem) imposed on them by the rabbis of Jerusalem, who forbade the
burial in a Jewish cemetery of those dying in the Mission hospital. In her novel, Jerusalem, the
Swedish author and Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf, who lived in Jerusalem in 1900, described
a heartbreaking episode that was part of the relentless struggle over the hearts and the health
of Jerusalem’s Jews. The episode begins:

"There is a small hospital located in the Jewish Quarter which has a bad name in the city,
because a patient has never been hospitalized there. Ingmar passed by there several times,
peeked in the window, and saw that all of the beds were always empty. There was only one
plausible reason for this. This hospital was established by a British missionary society which
wanted to receive Jewish patients in order to have the opportunity to convert them to
Christianity. But the Jews feared that they would be forced to eat food that was forbidden,
and they refused to be brought there. And here, a few days ago, they found a patient for
that hospital. She was an old and poverty-stricken Jewish lady who fell in the street right in
front of where the hospital was housed and broke her leg. She was carried to the hospital
and treated there. Two days later, she died"7 (see pp. 158-160).

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