Israel's central educational institution, the Hebrew University, was founded in 1925, long before a state was even thought of.

Their campus was on Mount Scopus, which towers over the old town.

Yfaat Weiss - a historian at the Hebrew University who now heads the Leipzig Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture - describes its exciting development.

“Another Sanctuary” is the title of the first chapter of her book.

On Mount Scopus, Titus stationed the Roman legions that conquered Jerusalem and destroyed its temple.

The Jews had always linked their eschatological hopes of returning from exile to the building of a third temple, but the university was the emblem of a different, secular culture.

In armored convoys

Gershom Scholem, who was part of the faculty from an early age, and many other lecturers belonged to the "Brit Schalom", the "Peace League", which advocated a binational state of Jews and Arabs.

It is also significant that the university's president, Judah L. Magnes, was an American reform rabbi: representative of a modern, cosmopolitan Judaism that later, when political and ideological lines hardened, could no longer gain a foothold in Israel.

The situation worsened in the 1930s.

Many Jews fled to Palestine from Europe, and the British Mandate could hardly contain the tensions between them and the Arabs.

In November 1947, when the extent of the Shoah was already known, the UN ratified the partition plan, and Yfaat Weiss states laconically: The hopes that its founders "had placed in the university as a res publica disappeared with the attainment of political sovereignty". .

Mount Scopus could now only be reached in armored convoys.

A month before the state was proclaimed, in April 1948, 77 people died in an attack on one of these convoys.

The hospital, which was also on the mountain, was closed and the university also had to shut down.

Has history proved the Zionists right?

The day after the founding of the state, the War of Independence began, which Israel had to wage for almost a year against Arab armies, and Mount Scopus became a strategic point of contention.

"The hospital and the Hebrew University," said Yigal Alon, Israel's deputy chief of staff, "must not be evacuated." Doctors and scholars fought for humanity and culture, politicians fought for the mountain: This dividing line runs like a red thread between two perceptions through the book.

In April 1949, Israel and Jordan signed an armistice agreement that partitioned Jerusalem between Jews and Arabs and made Mount Scopus an enclave.

The precise meaning of this term, however, remained controversial.

In 1950, Jordan annexed the West Bank and the mountain was now on its territory.

From a Jordanian point of view, the university and hospital buildings were just the private property of the people and institutions that had once acquired the land.

For the Israelis, on the other hand, the mountain was their national property, temporarily cut off from its motherland.

In 1967 they conquered the entire West Bank, in 1994 King Hussein made peace with Israel and Jordan renounced its territorial claims.

Jerusalem was now considered "reunited," and the university, which had long since built a new campus to the west of the city, returned to the mountain.

So has history proved the Zionists right?

Different parties may answer this question differently, but history is impartial.

She doesn't agree with anyone, she just confirms an old rule: where spirit and power collide, the spirit all too often has to give way.

Yfaat Weiss: "No Man's Land".

Strife at Mount Scopus.

Translated from the Hebrew by Jan Eike Dunkhase.

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlag, Göttingen 2021. 165 p., ill., hardcover, €24.