Until the second half of the 19thcentury, the boundaries of Jerusalem were limited to the walled city we know today as the Old City. The walls, restored last by the Ottoman Sultan in the 16thcentury, had seven gates that enabled people to go in and out of the city. Facing various directions, the gates of Jerusalem were used by different people depending on the direction of their arrival and the purpose of their entry to the city. If a person was arriving to the city from the north, then the likely entrance would have been Damascus Gate (bab- al-amoud); and if the person was arriving from the east, then the logical destination would have been Lion‘s Gate. Still, not all the gates of the city were equally important in terms of their use

Jaffa Gate (bab al-khalil) was considered the main gate of the city: visitors, dignitaries, and conquerors alike were welcomed into the city from this particular gate. Both Emperor Wilhem II (who visited Jerusalem in 1898) and General Allenby (the British conqueror of the city in 1917) entered the city in grand fashion through Jaffa Gate. The prominence of Jaffa Gate and its adjacent plaza in Jerusalem‘s life at the time of these events was the result of various elements connected both to location and administration.

Jaffa Gate is located in the middle of the western wall of the Old City. It faces the direction of Jaffa to the west and Bethlehem and Hebron to the south and historically served as the city’s main point of arrival and departure. Just outside of the gate, horse carriages and, later on, buses and cars formed Jerusalem‘s central station. And just to the south of Jaffa Gate, the railway station from which trains left for Jaffa and elsewhere was established in the late 1880s.

For centuries, the Citadel inside of Jaffa Gate was the seat of the governor of Jerusalem. Following the Sublime Porte‘s order in 1874 to make the sanjak (district) of Jerusalem a privileged mutasarrafiyya (independent district within the Ottoman Empir), the municipality of Jerusalem was established. The municipality was first housed at the second floor of the Sarai in the Citadel and was later on moved to Mamilla Street outside of the Old City just opposite of Jaffa Gate.

Institute for Palestine Studies