Messiah Hunt

Collages by Tara Tavi

I had just removed my shoes in the hot sun outside the Dome of the Rock when an elderly man emerged from the shaded interior and shook his head with practiced firmness. “No. Muslims only.” I’d been profiled—religiously, if not racially—but my first thought was that he’d made a simple mistake. I was thinking of the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer visits Jerusalem and winds up addressing a throng inside the Dome of the Rock. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that the show’s writers could have sacrificed facts for laughs.

Before I could reply, a second man, also American, barreled up. He too was greeted with an outstretched hand. “Muslims only,” said the guardian, this time with a bit more authority, as several other men emerged from inside.

“What are you talking about?” the American demanded. “I went inside in nineteen-nine—”

A few of the Muslims laughed and cut him off. “Blame Sharon,” one of them said to the confused tourist. I understood. In 2000, Ariel Sharon visited Al-Aqsa Mosque, adjacent to the Dome of the Rock within the vast plaza of Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. The narrow hill is home to Islam’s third-holiest site. It’s also the locus where Jews believe the Divine Presence rested, the spot where the world and man were first created. Sharon’s visit was a naked display of force by a high-profile Israeli politician who would soon become prime minister. The perceived audacity of his pilgrimage ushered in the second intifada. I knew this—had read it many times—but simply failed to grasp the gravity of its consequences.

Then again, at that particular moment, I was having trouble grasping a lot of things. Later, while attempting to decipher my mental state—a potent combination of jet lag and sunstroke—I thought of Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. His descriptions of high-altitude oxygen deprivation, specifically its symptoms of bad decisions and perilous oversights, seemed strangely familiar. In this altered mind-set, I had two realizations: I could stand here all day, perfectly still in the hot sun, and enjoy the endless procession of tourists attempting to argue their way into the Dome. And, less rationally, if I could just get a word in edgewise and explain The Simpsons episode in enough detail, getting all the jokes right, surely they’d let me in. Superimposed over these competing thoughts was a third, dim awareness: I wasn’t 100 percent myself.

I was whacked out in the land of the whacked out, seeking the even more whacked out. I was on the hunt for casualties of the Jerusalem syndrome, a sudden psychological affliction with messianic overtones that some visitors, primarily Christians, suffer shortly after their arrival to the city. They usually wash up in police custody or emergency rooms, suffering from dehydration and self-neglect of, well, biblical proportions. A handful of patients are treated every year at Jerusalem’s Kfar Shaul Mental Health Center. Many recover from their episodes and resume their lives (sometimes falling right back into their previously scheduled tour itinerary). A select few allegedly do not, winding up on the streets. They live on as case histories, stripped of names and nationalities.

There are several diagnostic types of Jerusalem syndrome. There are the traditional crazies—travelers with profoundly skewed worldviews, acutely religious, who find themselves caught in Jerusalem’s psychic force field. Some come with claims that they have decoded religious secrets, such as the date of the Messiah’s return, the location of Eden or Golgotha, or the exact criteria for heavenly ascension. Others arrive to act out particularly grisly Bible passages. Many of them are practitioners of what the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture terms “psychotic asceticism.” (A 2008 MHR&C study described one lonely pilgrim who was found, emaciated and helpless, on a street bench. God apparently told her to “die of famine on the streets of Jerusalem.” By the time she started to doubt her instructions, she was too weak to ask for help.)

The Jerusalem syndrome’s second, more severe type concerns false messiahs. These are the high-profile cases, people who arrive in Jerusalem and abruptly claim to be Jesus (or John the Baptist, or a variety of other notable biblical figures). Many of these people have strict religious backgrounds and an intimate familiarity with the Bible. Often they have been given a “secret message.”

The third type, “pure” Jerusalem syndrome, follows all the rules of type two, with one crucial exception: These people have no prior psychological problems. They are professionals, students, retirees, and housewives whose long-treasured visions of Jerusalem are shattered by the grime, tension, and commercialization of any other modern city. The result is a long and dramatic detour from reality. And for once the stereotype of a lunatic draped in bedsheets is appropriate; many of the pure raid their hotel’s linen for garments before setting out, reborn, into the streets.

This pious psychosis is by no means a modern phenomenon. Jeremiah 29:26 condemns “every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet,” and specific accounts of the symptoms of the condition date back to the Middle Ages. A surge in reported cases coincided with millennial fever in ’98 and ’99, which is the last time the press paid Jerusalem syndrome any serious attention.

Jerusalem syndrome occupies a gray zone in academia, and religiosity is an unloved subject in mental-health circles. Psychiatrists and psychologists are culturally less religious than their patients, and some (notably Freud) have gone so far as to pathologize mainstream religious belief. Certain subjects—for example, the effects of Orthodox Judaism’s rituals on practitioners’ mental health—are far too controversial and problematic to fund for study. And the private turmoil of the deeply religious, even those who believe in their own mythical status, is a difficult metric to gauge. One could surmise that Jerusalem syndrome exposes the paradox of all organized religion. The American Psychiatric Association classified religion as beyond “tests of falsity.” Simply put, one cannot question whether or not a religious belief is delusional, because there’s no observable evidence to test the validity of any sort of spirituality.

Jerusalem is a great city to get disorientated in. By law, all buildings are white, made from pale, locally quarried limestone that amplifies the heat and glare of the already unrelenting desert sun. From a distance, the skyline looks ancient. Combine this with the brain melt of jet lag and the confusion of a bustling commercial city, and you’ve got the makings of radical culture shock. Anyone arriving with an inner vision of the City of Peace faces certain cynicism.

Nowhere is this nexus between disorientation, religiosity, and insanity more enshrined than at the Temple Mount. This 37-acre plaza is revered by Jews as the site of the Second Temple. The Romans’ razing of the temple in 70 AD was, perhaps, the second-largest political miscalculation, after the Crucifixion, in human history. In the intervening 1,941 years, the destruction of the temple has lived on in the present tense for an entire faith.

Centuries of territorial disputes between various faiths have created an endless source of friction, plots, and delusional thinking. In 1969, the Al-Aqsa Mosque was set ablaze by a deranged Australian evangelical who wished to hasten the Second Coming. According to writer Amos Elon, when the Australian turned himself in, he said, “Good morning, boys. I burned the mosque. I did it to make Jesus come back to Jerusalem and save the people there.” In 1982, a deranged American shot his way into the Dome of the Rock with an M-16. Since his very public trial, more than 20 different extremist groups have plotted violence on the Temple Mount, including several well-developed schemes to explode the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Some Jewish leaders have prophesized that the Third Temple will descend from heaven, squashing all structures on the Temple Mount like a Wile E. Coyote gag (over the centuries, fanatics of both faiths have vouched for a duplicate Jerusalem floating over the earthly city: 18 miles above earth, say the Jews, 12 according to Muslims).

A firm grasp of Jerusalem’s complex history is key to understanding its corresponding syndrome. It’s one of the few ancient cities to have survived through modern times, both in memory and as a functioning municipality. And surely it is the only city in history to have weathered at least 20 full-scale assaults, resulting in at least 11 ruling faiths throughout the ages.

Such a city can be a breeding ground for mass delusion. In 1962, during the protests over the legalization of medical autopsies, outraged Orthodox students decided it would be appropriate to paint swastikas on the doors of fellow Jews. As the Al-Aqsa Mosque burned in 1969, hysterical Muslims convinced themselves that the Jewish firemen on the scene were spraying the flames with gasoline, not water, and wrestled away their hoses. In this city of disinformation, eddies of self-enforced fantasy swirled long before those propagated on the internet. To what degree these factors provide catalysts for mental illness are, of course, unknown.