But nonetheless my interest in it was historical, pragmatic. Reuven’s apocalyptic vision was quite the opposite. I wanted to deflate his rhetoric, bring him down to earth, but I couldn’t. It was as if his intoxication and passion had paralysed me. I began to sense that his passion was taking me over too. I refilled his glass and my own and stared into the flames. He pushed his well-shod feet closer to the fire and leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head, then began to intone in a tense, menacing rasp:
‘From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be the blade that was broken;
The crownless again shall be King.’
‘That’s Tolkien, isn’t it?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘from The Fellowship of the Ring. It just seems to catch my mood. Just think: political and religious redemption for the Jewish people. “The crownless again shall be king.” The redemption of Israel will be brought ever closer by the discovery of the Ark. For thousands of years it has been hidden somewhere, probably broken, crushed, worm-eaten. But “renewed shall be the blade that was broken”. I have a strong sentiment that in my lifetime that blade - the Ark - will indeed be renewed. I have a strong sentiment that the final redemption of the Jewish people is not far distant.’
He stopped short and continued in a dry reflective tone, ‘I don’t know why the redemption of my people has taken such a hold on my life. But it has.’
Reuven soon plunged back into his new obsession. He told me how the third-century anti-Christian Roman emperor Julian the Apostate had planned to help the Jews rebuild the Jerusalem Temple but as soon as the work commenced the workers were frightened away because great balls of fire gushed out of the ruins. This was some sort of proof, thought Reuven, that in the third century the Ark was still there.
He told me about the destructive, murderous power of the Ark as it is described so graphically in the Bible. He told me about Templar knights who are known to have thoroughly excavated beneath Temple Mount during the Crusades and according to some unsubstantiated rumours taken the ancient treasures of the Jews back to the Languedoc.
With increased intensity he went on to describe more recent secret excavations to locate the Temple treasures. He told me about an eccentric Finnish scholar and poet Valter Juvelius who had organized a covert dig on Temple Mount in 1910-11. Juvelius claimed to have discovered a secret bible code in a library in Istanbul, then the capital of the Ottoman empire, indicating where the Temple treasure, including the Ark, lay hidden. He raised funds for an expedition and persuaded a captain in the Grenadier Guards, one Montague Parker, the thirty-year-old son of the Earl of Morley, to lead it.
At Juvelius’ insistence, the team was accompanied by a Danish clairvoyant who directed their labours. One night, in April 1911, under cover of darkness, having first bribed the Governor of Jerusalem, Azmi Bey, Parker and his team, disguised as local Arabs, climbed into the compound and started digging directly under the cupola of the Dome of the Rock itself, the holiest place on earth.
The sounds reached the ears of a Muslim attendant and the alarm was raised. Violent riots flared up throughout the city and Parker and his team beat a hasty retreat to their expedition yacht moored off the coast near the port town of Jaffa. When they got back to London the headlines of the London Illustrated News blazed: ‘Have Englishmen discovered the Ark of the Covenant?’
Whether the discovery of the Ark would indeed bring about peace between Israel and the Muslim world I had no idea. In 1992 the political situation throughout the Middle East was far worse than it had ever been previously. The First Gulf War had been fought a year before and Jerusalemites were still recovering from the fear of attack from Iraqi Scuds tipped with biological or chemical warheads. Reuven spoke of this a lot. He was terrified of what might happen to the Jewish people in the future. He thought another holocaust was entirely possible. I often tried to reassure him that this was not really very likely, but he wouldn’t listen. It was this fear and his dread of extreme Islamism that drove him.
In January 1991, just before the scuds started falling on Israel, I had been to see my old friend Lola Singer. I had first met her when I was working in Jerusalem for the British Voluntary Service Overseas in 1963 (it was that year in Israel that had, in fact, originally made me decide to study Hebrew at Oxford a year later). While doing VSO I was assigned to an institution for handicapped children where Lola was a social worker. Some of the children were the offspring of women who had been the subjects of sterility experiment in the concentration camps. They were all grotesquely deformed. Once a week for a year I went with Lola to visit the parents of the various children in different parts of Israel.
It was through endless conversations with Lola and the kids’ parents that I began to understand something of the tragedy of recent Jewish history. Lola’s own story was dreadful enough. A Polish Jewess from Radom, Lola had lost most of her family members during the Holocaust: they were gassed at Auschwitz. In 1939, before the war, she was a beautiful and talented young woman, studying to be a doctor. For a Jew to be admitted to a medical faculty in Poland in the years before the Second World War was virtually impossible. The entrance exams she wrote were literally faultless. They had to admit her. She was a young genius. After the German invasion Lola’s world fell apart. Her young husband, kicked out of Germany as a Jew was shot by the Russians as a German. She managed to escape from Poland via Russia and arrived in Jerusalem in 1943.
The day I visited her she was all alone in her small apartment. Like many Jerusalemites she was afraid that Saddam would launch poisoned gas missiles against the city. Now an old woman she was standing on a chair trying to tape plastic sheets to the window in the vain hope of making them impervious to gas attack. Of all the people I knew she was the last one upon whom I would have wished this futile activity.
As I helped her down from the chair she said between clenched teeth, ‘They gassed my mother and my father, they gassed my aunts and uncles, and cousins. They gassed my friends from school. They gassed my childhood sweetheart from next door. But you know, they are not, they are not going to gas me.’
She slumped into a chair and burst into tears. I finished taping up the plastic sheeting. There were places where it would not stick onto the window frame and you could feel the draft coming straight through. This protection would not keep out a medium-strength breeze let alone a poison gas attack.
By the time I went to Oxford I knew a great deal more about Jewish suffering than most gentiles and like all sane people I wanted to see an end to it. Like Reuven I also passionately wished to see Jews and Arabs reconciled. Maybe, I thought, a crazy idea like Reuven’s was worth considering. Even a lavishly funded worldwide search for the Ark would cost less than even a couple of American smart missiles.
Reuven left at about two o clock. I stayed up for another couple of hours staring into the embers of the olive wood fire, dreaming about my friend’s quest. When, finally, I went to bed I couldn’t sleep. The whole house stank of paraffin. To get some fresh air I pulled on my old brown Arab jalabiyyeh and went on to the roof terrace of my house.
Jerusalem was bathed in cold white moonlight. Looking towards the Temple Mount, I could see the great golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock shimmering in the pale light. On this night, the city was breathlessly beautiful. In the Talmud it is written, ‘God gave ten measures of beauty to the world: nine measures he gave to Jerusalem and one only for all the rest of creation.’ It was here that the Temple had once stood. The rocky outcrop over which the golden cupola of the Dome of the Rock had been constructed once formed part of the Holy of Holies where, according to Jewish mythology, King Solomon had placed the Ark.
It seemed to me that the stories that surrounded the Ark were the stuff of fairy tales. In much of Jewish tradition there was something ineffably improbable about the Ark. The texts