333 CE. The Christian Bordeaux Pilgrim and Jewish Mourning at the Mount

JEWISH MOMENTS IN THE LAND OF ISRAEL

333 CE

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.

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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 Temple Mount in Jerusalem. What he recorded in his Itinerarium Burdigalense, the earliest surviving Christian travel account from the Holy Land, is among the most arresting passages in the entire source record for Jewish presence in the Land of Israel in this period. He described the Temple Mount as a desolate place, dominated by two statues of Hadrian. Then he wrote: “There is also not far off from the statues a pierced stone, to which the Jews come every year, and they anoint it, and they cry out with a groan, and they tear their own garments, and in this way they withdraw.”

This “pierced stone” is identified with the Even HaShetiyah, the Foundation Stone, and it carries layers of meaning. Jewish tradition teaches that it was from this stone that God began the creation of the world; that it was the site of the binding of Isaac; that the Ark of the Covenant rested upon it in Solomon’s Temple; and that it is the point through which the Divine Presence most closely touches the earth. The perfectly round hole that pierces the stone, which survives today beneath the Dome of the Rock, is described as the entrance to a cavern, the Well of Souls, adding a dimension of depth and mystery to the already numinous site. That the mourning Jews of 333 CE would anoint precisely this stone suggests not a generalized lamentation but a highly focused rite, directed at the most theologically charged point in their entire sacred geography.

Indeed, what the Christian Bordeaux Pilgrim witnessed was Jews performing an ancient mourning rite on the most sacred object in Judaism, on the one day of the year they were permitted to enter the city that had been closed to them for two centuries. The description of the Jewish mourning rite is terse but specific. The Jews anoint the stone, cry out with a groan, tear their garments, and then withdraw. Each element connects to ancient Jewish mourning practice. The tearing of garments is a biblically rooted sign of grief, performed upon hearing devastating news and upon seeing the ruins of Jerusalem or the Temple. Anointing a stone with oil recalls both the patriarchal tradition and the priestly ceremonies of the Temple itself. Groaning evokes the laments of Jeremiah and the book of Lamentations the biblical texts read on Tisha B’Av.

The pilgrim’s description places the mourning scene in deliberate spatial relationship to the two statues of Hadrian on the Temple Mount. This detail is more than topographical. Hadrian is the emperor who destroyed the Jewish city, renamed it, and expelled its people. His statues stand on the hill where the Temple once rose, an imperial visual assertion of conquest and replacement. Against this backdrop, the Jews anoint the Foundation Stone in grief. The juxtaposition is a stunning image: the conqueror’s bronze image looking down on the descendants of the conquered, performing their rite of mourning in the shadow of the empire’s victory monument.

The particular power of this story is that the same moment can be seen from two perspectives simultaneously. The Bordeaux Pilgrim sees Jews as living proof of divine judgment, their grief confirming Christian theology. The Jews themselves, through the lens of Tisha b’Av liturgy and rabbinic lament are performing an act of profound communal memory.

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Selected Sources and Further Reading

Eliav, Yaron Z. God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.

Jacobs, Andrew S. Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Stemberger, Günter. Jews and Christians in the Holy Land: Palestine in the Fourth Century. Translated by Ruth Tuschling. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000.

Wilken, Robert L. The Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Wilkinson, John, ed. and trans. Jerusalem Pilgrims before the Crusades. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 2002.