Ein Tempel verschwindet
Das Faktum der jüdischen Präsenz in der ältesten Geschichte Jerusalems findet bekanntlich nicht viele Verteidiger in der palästinensischen Gesellschaft. Die Existenz des jüdischen Tempels wird systematisch geleugnet und wider alle Evidenz im Jemen verortet. Ein überaus lesenswerter Beitrag im “American Interest”[1] geht der Geschichte dieser Leugnung nach.
On September 25, 2003 a delegation of Arab leaders from northern Israel visited Arafat at his Muqata‘a compound in Ramallah to show solidarity with the Palestinian Al-Aqsa Intifada (the second Palestinian uprising), which started in September 2000. The guests were surprised when Arafat lectured them on al-Aqsa, insisting that no Jewish Temple had existed in either Jerusalem or Nablus; rather, he claimed it had been in Yemen. Arafat said that he himself had visited Yemen and been shown the site upon which Solomon’s Temple had stood. A year earlier, another Palestinian public figure, Haj Zaki al-Ghul (Jerusalem’s “shadow” mayor from Amman), voiced a similar claim. In a 2002 lecture at the annual al-Quds conference in Jordan, al-Ghul stated that King Solomon had ruled over the Arabian Peninsula, and that it was there, not in Jerusalem, that he built his Temple.
Woher kommt die Behauptung, der jüdische Tempel habe tatsächlich im Jemen gestanden?
It was not al-Ghul, however, who introduced Yasir Arafat to this Palestinian version of invented history and it was not even another Palestinian. The honor belongs to Kamal Salibi, professor emeritus at the American University of Beirut and subsequently Director of the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies in Amman. By any Middle Eastern measure, Salibi is an unusual person. Born in Beirut a Protestant Christian, he earned his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London under the direction of Bernard Lewis. Many years distant from Lewis’s mentorship, in 1985 Salibi published The Bible Came from Arabia, in which he claimed that the Children of Israel originated in the western Arabian Peninsula. This strange theory, which is largely based on the discovery and interpretation of an obscure sundial, lacks support from any other scholar. Salibi claimed that Biblical Jerusalem was located in the Arabian Nimas highlands, halfway from Mecca to Yemen. This is an instructive example of how a single book, however esoteric its theory, can have significant influence when one side of a polemical discourse finds it useful.
Fachleuten ist der Name Kamal al-Salibi vor allem als renommierter Historiker der libanesischen Geschichte bekannt. Auch wenn die Geschichte der Tempel-Leugnung älter ist, so hat erst Salibi dieser Abstrusität einen wissenschaftlichen Anstrich verliehen und sich selbst als Wissenschaftler schwer korrumpiert (und das unter dem Deckmantel von “inter faith studies”!).
Hier zeigt sich auch das ganze Elend der Wissenschaft in der Arabischen Welt: Um die Behauptung aufrechtzuerhalten, in Jerusalem habe nie ein jüdischer Tempel existiert, müssen sämtliche Funde der Archäologie verleumdet werden.
- Yitzhak Reiter: King Solomon’s Vanishing Temple, The American Interest, Vol. 6, Number 4, March – April 2011. ⇧
