By Arieh O'Sullivan Jerusalem is in an awful location. There’s no water. It’s far from any main trade route, surrounded by mountains, and sitting on an earthquake fault. It shouldn’t even exist. Writer Herman Melville described it during his 1856 visit as a “half-ruinous pile of mouldering grottoes that smelled like death.” Some 1,500 years earlier, a lust-filled hermit called Jerome found a city that had become an entrepot of sanctity, networking and sex. “All temptation is collected here…prostitutes, actors and clowns,” wrote the splenetic Roman who would earn sainthood by translating the Greek Bible into Latin in nearby Bethlehem. The melancholic prophet Isaiah bemoaned that the city was once a beautiful woman but now was “behaving like a whore.” (Isaiah 1:21) And yet, this city of King David and Solomon, the place of Muhammad’s ascension to heaven...

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