The city of Jerusalem stubbornly defies conventional binaries and as an always-extreme case study highlights the problems and deficiencies inherent in standard modes of categorization. This is certainly so as regards 'secularism' and the division between 'religious' and 'secular.' A city of great religious significance to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Jerusalem at the same time became the symbol for nationalisms that defined themselves as definitively secular. In the Late Ottoman period—captured here in a photograph of the Jaffa Gate to the Old City of Jerusalem, ca. 1900 (from the Lenkin Family Collection at CAJSL)—Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together and interacted with one another on a daily basis, though there was a sense, at least among intellectuals, that tensions were rising.

If these were purely 'secular' tensions of modern nationalisms, the language of the encounter maintained a distinctly religious tone. "I had experience with many dragomans during my sojourn in the East," writes Albert Payson Terhune in Syria from the Saddle (1897), and nearly all were "phonographic machines (frequently out of order) with truly civilized proficiency in the arts of laziness and petty theft." Two of the exceptions were the Christian men whose services were advertised on the wall of the Jaffa Gate plaza in this photograph: "Demitrius Domian of Jerusalem, and—head and shoulders above all others—David Jamal." What distinguished Jamal, according to Terhune, was his thorough knowledge of the Bible "in connection with the geography of his own country." Jamal "not only familiarized himself with every mile of ground, but learned every historical or sacred episode connected with it." 'Historical or sacred,' Jerusalem's complexities and contradictions persist.