Temple Mount
Temple MountCourtesy

1. Why does a perfectly straight line run through the Holy Sepulchre, the Golden Gate and the Gethsemane?

2. Why did 300 rabbis from France and England - with their families and students - suddenly make aliyah in 1211?


3. Who was the interpreter between St Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil at the Fifth Crusade, in September 1219?

4. How did the Rambam react to the news of the fall of Constantinople to the Venetians, eight months before his death?

5. Why did the Templar knights, after nine years of digging under the Temple Mount, begin to blackmail the Roman Church?

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In 1219, St Francis of Assisi crossed the lines of the Fifth Crusade, in the Nile Delta, reached the war-tent of Sultan al-Malik al-Kamil, a nephew of the Saladin, and preached Christianity to him for three days. Al-Kamil graciously heard him out, but decided to remain a Mohammedan. Realizing that the meeting would have needed an interpreter, and guessing that in those days chances were it was a Jew, Tuvia Fogel decided to tell the story of that Jew - and of how he ended up in that tent.

In The Jerusalem Parchment A Kabbalist’s Search for an Esoteric Map in the Time of the Crusades, Fogel has written a novel that is, at first sight, a medieval adventure with a 'Dan Brown-like' mystery, but there are levels to the book that go beyond mere adventure and romance. The research into life around the early-thirteenth-century Mediterranean, for one, is worthy of a Jewish Umberto Eco. The figure of St Francis of Assisi has sparked enthusiasm from some Christian readers, like this reviewer from GoodReads:

"I think how the author portrayed Francesco is the best part of the book. I was really awed by how he captured the soul of the saint in his pages. It was like the saint's essence is tangible. Like I can feel it in my bones. It's one of the strengths of this book".

What is fascinating here is that almost every word that Fogel put into St Francis' mouth comes from Buber's Tales of the Chassidim, i.e. from the great Tzaddikim of the first century of Chassidism. Few readers will recognize the mystical sleight-of-hand, but even those who do will conclude that mystics, even five centuries apart, say more or less the same things - while the real import is that Judaism, between 1750 and 1850, produced at least fifty St Francises.

Another embedded intellectual game in the novel is when the rabbi whom the protagonists meet in Heraklion, on the island of Crete, tells them he supports Jewish-Christian dialogue, and boasts of the local bishop coming into his synagogue and declaring that Jews are the elder brothers of Christians. Once out of the rabbi's house, the protagonist vents his anger and disdain for an assimilated jew who doesn't even know that God, all through the Tanach, NEVER chooses the elder brother, always the younger one. The bishop in effect told him Christians are really God's chosen and dressed it up as a compliment. The episode is of course exactly what happened when Pope John Paul II said the same thing in Rome's main synagogue, and in case confirmation is needed, the Cretan rabbi's name is Tofefloyà, an anagram of Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome who took it on the chin from the Polish Pope and lived on to over 100.

One last example is the reason for the sudden aliyah of 300 rabbis from France and England - with their families and students - in 1211. Quite simply, it was because Maimonides, despite having forbidden such calculations, predicted that the Messiah would arrive in the year 1212. Here is the Rambam: “The precise date of the arrival of Mashiach cannot be known. But I am in possession of an extraordinary tradition which I received from my father, who in turn received it from his father… According to this tradition there is a covert indication in the prediction of Balaam to the future restoration of prophecy in Israel…”

Many more such embedded nuggets await the reader, but we won't spoil them all.

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