Who’s Buried at the Jaffa Gate?
Executed architects? A pair of warriors? Star-crossed lovers? Or someone else?
Just inside Jerusalem’s Jaffa Gate are a famous pair of tombs. Many guides today claim that these belong to two architects who were allegedly executed for not including Mount Zion within the Old City walls (which were built during the reign of the Ottoman Suleiman the Magnificent between 1535 and 1542), either to steal money or because they were incompetent. Sitting on an exposed, uneven stone base, the graves are slightly above street level. Each grave has one course of stone and two ‘crowns,’ one on each end of the grave, similar in size but with different shapes. The eastern tomb has a western crown of a ‘turban’ on a stone base embellished with decorations forming a small mihrab. These ornaments, which suggest that the deceased were important, are common in Turkey but relatively rare in Israel. Another interesting detail is that, unlike most of the city’s Muslim tombs, the graves are located at some distance from the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif.
I always found the idea that two traitors would be given such a prestigious burial spot unconvincing. Now, with the help of Yusef Said al-Natsheh’s article ‘Un-inventing the Bab al-Khalil [the Arabic name for Jaffa Gate] tombs: Between the magic of legend and historical fact’ (Jerusalem Quarterly 22/23), we can uncover the truth. Through a process of elimination, we know that the tombs were built after 1495, the year Mujir al-Din al-Hanbali ended his comprehensive book about the history of Jerusalem and Hebron during the Mamluk period, in which he never mentions them. Nearly a century later, according to the records of the Jerusalem Islamic Court, in May 1590 Haj Muhammad al-Safuti, who lived nearby, made an endowment for his children of three adjoining homes and a bakery on the site of the tombs.
The endowment included living quarters, open spaces, water cisterns, and utilities. Next to one of the houses there was a small vegetable garden with a cave. At some point, the vegetable garden was transformed into a burial area. It seems the graves were constructed in the garden and the deceased interned in the cave, rather than a burial chamber underneath (this seems to be reminiscent of the Second Temple-era Jewish practice of family burial caves).
Before revealing the next clue, what about the story of the architects? Just as the Golden Gate myth reflected popular ideas about the messianic role of the Mount of Olives and the Kidron Valley, so the myth of the executed architects is also based on some kernels of truth. Prior to the Ottoman period, Mount Zion hadn’t been included in the city’s fortifications. This is because it slopes sharply to the south and southwest, offering defensive protection even without a wall. Leaving Mount Zion on the outside, then, can’t have been a problem for the Sultan.
We do know, though, that the construction of the southern part of the wall was delayed due to a lack of building materials. The Ottomans appear to have dealt with this problem by demolishing a room in the Franciscan Monastery to use the stones (soon afterwards, incidentally, the building on Mount Zion housing the Room of the Last Supper and the Tomb of King David was converted into a mosque); afterwards the Jerusalem Islamic Court ruled that the room be rebuilt. Documents record that Muhammad Celebi al-Naqqash, the administrative and financial supervisor of the project, was accused of failing to complete the wall by the agreed date. He was cleared of the charge, though, when his assistant, Darwish al-Halabi, testified that he had done everything he could to finish on time.
From these kernels, the popular myth was born, and first seems to have been published in J.E. Hanauer’s The Holy Land: Myths and Legends in 1907, before being taken up by Zev Vilnay in his Legends of Jerusalem. Some locals are angered by the perceived orientalist depiction of Islamic brutality – as a freshman tour guide, I was once taken to task by a Palestinian Jerusalemite for telling the story to my tourists – but it’s not only a popular myth among Jews. The author of ‘Un-inventing the Bab al-Khalil tombs,’ al-Natsheh, writes himself that as a young boy he was told that, upon completion of the Old City walls, Suleiman gazed into a clear glass cup and saw that Mount Zion was not within the fortifications, leading him to furiously order the architects’ execution.
Our next clue dates to 1656. By chance, al-Natsheh discovered a Jerusalem Islamic Court document from that year recording the appointment of an employee to a water basin next to the “al-Safadiyya tombs,” which is clearly referencing Haj Ibrahim’s property. This proves that the ‘Safadiyya’ tombs were built on his property, and, like several other medieval Islamic tombs, they included a water basin. The tombs were religiously endowed and provided an income that was used to pay the salary of the water-basin caretaker, one Ibrahim Bashe.
We can thus state with confidence that the tombs were constructed between May 1590 (Haj Ibrahim’s endowment) and October 1656 (the appointment of Ibrahim Bashe). ‘Safadiyya’ is clearly a reference to the Galilean city of Safed (Tzfat in Hebrew); the tombs are believed to belong to emirs or scholars from there; today there is a well-known Jerusalemite Palestinian family called the Safadis.
This, I admit, is still rather unsatisfying. Who were these scholars from Safad and why were they buried next to the Jaffa Gate and not in more traditional Islamic burial areas? How did they die and why were they buried together? What was their connection to Haj Ibrahim’s family? As is common here in the land, we are once again left with more questions than answers. Barring any more dramatic finds from the Jerusalem Islamic Court records, we will have to make do with our imaginations.