JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

The Christian Bordeaux Pilgrim and Jewish Mourning at the Mount

Under Constantine, Jews were barred from Jerusalem but permitted entry once yearly — on Tisha b’Av — to mourn the Temple’s destruction. The Christian Bordeaux Pilgrim’s 333 CE account of Jews anointing the Foundation Stone on the Temple Mount, surrounded by Hadrian’s statues, captures a moment of layered significance: imperial conquest, theological supersession, and tenacious Jewish communal memory converging in a single, ritually charged act.

Emperor Constantine (reigned: 306–337)’s legislation reinstated and formalized the prohibition on Jewish residence in Jerusalem, while making a significant concession: Jews were permitted to enter the city on one day per year, on Tisha b’Av, the ninth day of the month of Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple. The bitter irony of this permission did not go unnoticed by Jewish sources or by Christian observers. Jews were allowed to mourn their loss at the very site of that loss, and to do so precisely on the anniversary of the catastrophe that had dispossessed them.

In the year 333 CE, an anonymous Christian pilgrim from Bordeaux traveled through the Roman Empire to the newly Christianizing Holy Land and climbed to the........

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