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Shared Opinion

Hugo Rifkind

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

If you had Jerusalem Syndrome, your Solomon hands would fear your Jesus hair

As ever, the great disappointment of Jerusalem is the lack of swivel-eyed loons wandering around believing themselves to be Jesus. Or Solomon or David or Mohammed. Or Elvis, even. You come to Jerusalem, you want to see Jerusalem Syndrome. Isn’t that part of the deal? It’s like Amsterdam without the drugs, or London without the Beefeaters. Where are the portly men from Idaho I was promised, standing on upturned dustbins and preaching hellfire in the nude?

Read up on Jerusalem Syndrome, only a little, and you might start to feel you are going that way yourself. According to an analysis in the British Journal of Psychology, back in 2000, clinical Stage One of Type III Jerusalem Syndrome (discrete, unconfounded by previous psychopathology) is ‘anxiety, agitation, nervousness and tension’. This is worrying news. The first step towards becoming Jesus is becoming Woody Allen.

Remember, this is Jerusalem. This is a city where the pedestrian crossings all operate in two unconnected stages, so that if you glance at the wrong sign, you’ll get mown down by a family of 13 bearded Hassidim in an SUV. Half the population is terrified of the other half, the cats are those really flat-headed, staring ones, and the people in charge of everything are teenage girls with machine guns. And they say that nervousness is the first step towards a mental illness? I’m here for three days. By the time you read this, I could be John the Baptist.

Stage Two is ‘declaration of the desire to split away from the group or the family and to tour Jerusalem alone’. As in me yesterday, saying, ‘It’s fine, you stay by the pool, I’m going to find some naked men from Idaho.’ Stage Three is ‘obsession with taking baths and showers’ and ‘compulsive fingernail and toenail cutting’. I have taken four showers in the last 24 hours, thanks to sweat, chlorine and sun cream, and it’s my first time in flip-flops in about seven months.

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