Few cities in the world pack as much meaning into so little space as Jerusalem. In barely one square kilometre of walled Old City, the three great monotheistic faiths live side by side: Jews pray at the Western Wall, the only remnant of the ancient Temple; Christians follow the Via Dolorosa to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where tradition places the crucifixion and tomb of Jesus; and Muslims revere the Haram al-Sharif, with the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque, from where they believe Muhammad ascended to heaven. Walking its alleys means immersing yourself in three thousand years of history, faith and dispute, all at once.
Jerusalem is also a city of disputed political status. Israel considers it its capital; Palestinians claim its eastern part as the capital of a future state; and most of the international community does not regard sovereignty over the city as settled. You can feel that tension, but it doesn't stop it from being a deeply moving destination. This guide treats its history and present neutrally, without taking sides, and with the greatest respect for the weight the city carries for Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.
Beyond the religious, Jerusalem surprises with its vitality: the bustle of the souks, the scent of spices and freshly baked bread, the Mahane Yehuda market that sells fruit by day and fills with bars by night, first-rate museums such as Yad Vashem and the Israel Museum, and the golden views at sunset from the Mount of Olives. This guide helps you get around practically and respectfully: what to see, how to enter each holy site, how to dress, what everything costs, how Shabbat works and how to stay safe, so your visit is as rich as it is serene.
Jerusalem is one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world, with more than three thousand years of documented history. According to biblical tradition, King David made it the capital of his kingdom around the 10th century BC and his son Solomon built the First Temple there, destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC. Rebuilt and expanded by Herod the Great, the Second Temple was razed by the Romans in 70 AD; from the retaining wall of its esplanade survives the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism. On that same esplanade, Muslims built the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa Mosque in the 7th century, on the spot where Islamic tradition places Muhammad's Night Journey. For Christians, the city is the setting of the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus, commemorated in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Over the centuries, Jerusalem was Jewish, Roman, Byzantine, Muslim, Crusader, Ottoman and British, and since 1948 its status has been the subject of a still-unresolved conflict. All of that history, told neutrally and with sources, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The holy city of the three monotheistic religions and its disputed status: millennia of history packed into a few hundred metres of walled stone.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There are few places on Earth where so much history, faith and dispute are packed into so little space. Within barely one square kilometre of walls, Jerusalem holds the holiest site in Judaism, one of the holiest in Christianity and the third holiest in Islam. It is both a living city of nearly a million people and a symbol over which wars have been fought for three thousand years. Understanding its history means understanding a large part of the history of the West and of the Middle East.
This page tells that history neutrally and with sources, without taking sides in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians over the city today. Jerusalem is claimed as its capital by the State of Israel, which has administered all of it since 1967, and by the Palestinians, who claim its eastern part as the capital of a future state. Most countries and most of the international community do not regard sovereignty over the city as a settled question, and see its final status as something to be resolved through negotiation. We will set out the facts and the different traditions as each community understands them, with the greatest respect for their importance to Judaism, Christianity and Islam alike.
Even the city's name reflects this density: Yerushalayim in Hebrew, Al-Quds ('the Holy') in Arabic. Its sacred geography centres on a hill, the esplanade that Jews call the Temple Mount and Muslims call Haram al-Sharif, the focal point of almost everything that has happened here.
Jerusalem's origins are lost in antiquity. People settled beside the Gihon Spring, in what is now the City of David, more than five thousand years ago, and the city appears as Urusalim in Egyptian documents from the second millennium BCE, when it was a Canaanite stronghold. According to the biblical account, a central source for Judaism and Christianity, around 1000 BCE King David conquered it and made it the capital of a united kingdom of Israel, and his son Solomon built the First Temple there, the sanctuary that housed the Ark of the Covenant. Historians debate how large that kingdom really was, but agree that Jerusalem was an important Israelite centre at the time.
In 586 BCE the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II conquered the city, destroyed Solomon's Temple and deported much of the population to Babylon: the famous Babylonian exile. Decades later, under the Persian Empire, the Jews were able to return and rebuild the sanctuary, known as the Second Temple. Centuries after that, under Roman rule, King Herod the Great enlarged and embellished the Second Temple until it became one of the most imposing buildings of the ancient world, set on a great esplanade held up by huge retaining walls.
In the time of Herod and his successors, Jesus of Nazareth lived, preached and died in Jerusalem; his crucifixion and, according to Christian faith, his resurrection here would make the city the geographical heart of Christianity. A few decades later, in 70 CE, during the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome, the legions of the future emperor Titus took Jerusalem and razed the Second Temple. All that remained of the esplanade was part of its retaining walls; the western stretch is today the Western Wall, or Wailing Wall, the holiest place where Jews are able to pray.
After the Temple was destroyed, and above all after crushing a second major Jewish rebellion (the Bar Kokhba revolt, around 132-135 CE), Emperor Hadrian set out to erase the city's Jewish character. He refounded it as a Roman colony named Aelia Capitolina, banned Jews from living there and built pagan temples. For almost two centuries Jerusalem was just another Roman city, and much of the grid layout of today's Old City comes from that Roman plan.
The big turning point came in the 4th century, when Emperor Constantine embraced Christianity. His mother, Saint Helena, travelled to Jerusalem around 326 and, according to tradition, identified the places where Jesus was crucified and buried; the first Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built over them. Jerusalem then became a great Christian city and a pilgrimage destination for the whole Empire, filled with churches, monasteries and pilgrim hostels. Under the Byzantine Empire (the eastern continuation of Rome), the city enjoyed centuries of Christian splendour, interrupted by a brief and violent Persian conquest in 614.
That world changed for good in 638, when Jerusalem surrendered to Caliph Umar, a few years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. This began the city's long Islamic period. Muslim tradition already revered Jerusalem: according to the Quran and later accounts, it was from the rock on the old Temple esplanade that Muhammad made his 'Night Journey' and ascension to heaven. That is why, at the end of the 7th century, the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik had the Dome of the Rock built over that rock, with its unmistakable golden dome, and shortly afterwards the Al-Aqsa Mosque went up. Jerusalem became one of the holy cities of Islam, a status it holds to this day.
In the Middle Ages, Jerusalem was fiercely contested. In 1099, after a long siege, the knights of the First Crusade took the city and massacred many of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. They founded the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, turned the Dome of the Rock into a church and the Al-Aqsa Mosque into barracks and a palace. Crusader rule lasted less than a century: in 1187 Sultan Saladin, a Muslim leader of Kurdish origin, retook the city, this time without a massacre, and returned the sanctuaries on the esplanade to Islamic worship. There was still some back and forth, including a negotiated handover to the Christians in the 13th century, but Muslim rule eventually took lasting hold.
From the mid-13th century, Jerusalem came under the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, which filled it with Quranic schools (madrasas), fountains and beautifully built buildings, although the city lost political weight to other capitals. In 1517 it passed to the Ottoman Empire, which would rule it for four hundred years. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had the walls that still surround the Old City rebuilt around 1537-1541: the imposing golden-stone walls and their gates (Damascus Gate, Jaffa Gate, Herod's Gate) that you see as you walk around are largely his work.
During the Ottoman centuries, Jerusalem was a fairly small, provincial city, but deeply cosmopolitan in religious terms: Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities of many rites lived side by side, each with its own quarter, holy places and pilgrims. It was in this period that the delicate 'Status Quo' took shape, which still divides the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, chapel by chapel, among six Christian denominations. From the 19th century, with the arrival of European consuls, missionaries, scientists and the first waves of Jewish immigration, the city began to grow beyond its walls and to modernise.
In 1917, during the First World War, British troops under General Allenby took Jerusalem, ending four centuries of Ottoman rule. After the war, the League of Nations gave Britain the Mandate for Palestine. These were decades of growth, but also of rising tension between the Palestinian Arab community and a Jewish population that was growing through immigration (the Zionist movement). In Europe, the backdrop was the rise of Nazism and then the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were murdered.
In 1947, with the aspirations of the two communities proving impossible to reconcile, the UN approved a plan to partition Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem placed under a special international regime because of its sacred character. Jewish leaders accepted the plan and Arab leaders rejected it. When the British withdrew in May 1948, the State of Israel was proclaimed and the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. When it ended, Jerusalem was divided: Israel controlled the western (modern) part and Jordan the eastern part, which includes the Old City and its holy places. A line of barbed wire and minefields, the 'Green Line', split the city in two for nineteen years.
That division ended in June 1967 with the Six-Day War: Israel took East Jerusalem and the Old City, and soon afterwards extended its law and administration to the whole city, a step most of the international community does not recognise. The capture of the Old City allowed Jews to pray again at the Western Wall, from which they had been kept away since 1948, a moment of huge emotional weight. The sacred compound on the esplanade, however, remained under the administration of an Islamic institution (the Waqf), under a status quo that is still in force and is the subject of recurring tensions.
21st-century Jerusalem is a large, modern city with a deeply divided identity. The west is mainly Israeli Jewish, the east mainly Palestinian Arab, and in the Old City the communities of the three religions live side by side, not always without friction. Israel considers all of Jerusalem its 'complete and united' capital, and its parliament, Supreme Court and ministries are there. The Palestinians claim East Jerusalem as the capital of a future State of Palestine.
The city's status is one of the hardest knots in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and in world diplomacy. For decades, almost every country kept its embassy in Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem, precisely so as not to prejudge that status, which the UN considers pending a negotiated solution. In recent years some countries, starting with the United States in 2018, have moved their embassies to Jerusalem, a decision welcomed by Israel and rejected by the Palestinians and by much of the international community. Most states regard the Old City and its surroundings, taken in 1967, as occupied territory. This guide simply describes these positions without endorsing any of them.
Beyond politics, Jerusalem is above all still a holy and living city. Every year millions of pilgrims and travellers from all over the world walk its streets: Jews praying at the Wall, Christians following the Via Dolorosa to the Holy Sepulchre, Muslims heading to Al-Aqsa. Fervour and everyday life, conflict and an ancient coexistence that, despite everything, has not broken all share the same space. For travellers who explore it with respect and open eyes, Jerusalem remains what it has been for three thousand years: one of the most intense and meaningful places on the planet.
