Was Jerusalem ever the capital of any other state?

Jerusalem has been the capital of a sovereign state exactly when that state was Jewish: under David and Solomon and the kingdom of Judah, under the Hasmoneans, under Herod’s client kingdom, and since 1948. In thirteen centuries of intermittent Muslim rule, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman, no Muslim polity ever made Jerusalem the capital of anything, not a state, not even a province. The district was governed from Ramla, then from Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo and Istanbul. The one non-Jewish exception is Christian: the Crusaders made it the capital of their Kingdom of Jerusalem for 88 years. That is the entire list. The claim that al-Quds is an eternal Arab capital is not history; it is a talking point invented after 1967 against a record that runs the other way.

Three Jewish capitals, one hill

Around 1000 BCE, King David made Jerusalem the capital of the united Israelite kingdom, and his son Solomon built the First Temple on the hill above it. When the kingdom split, Jerusalem remained the capital of Judah for over three centuries, until Babylon burned the Temple and the city in 586 BCE. The exiles returned within fifty years and rebuilt; the Second Temple stood from 516 BCE until Rome burned it in 70 CE.

Sovereignty returned twice more before Rome ended it. The Hasmonean dynasty, born of the Maccabee revolt, ruled an independent Judea from Jerusalem from 142 BCE until Pompey’s arrival in 63 BCE, and Herod’s Judean client kingdom kept its seat there until Rome converted Judea into a directly ruled province. Even then the point holds in reverse: Rome did not govern the province from Jerusalem either. The Roman and Byzantine capital of Palestine was Caesarea, on the coast, for six centuries. After the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, Hadrian renamed the city Aelia Capitolina and barred Jews from it, an erasure by decree that the Temple Mount itself outlasted. The city’s own name history is its own article.

Thirteen centuries of Muslim rule, governed from somewhere else

The Arab conquest reached Jerusalem in 638 CE. What followed is the part the modern narrative depends on your not checking:

The Umayyads (661 to 750) ruled from Damascus. They built the Dome of the Rock in 691 on Herod’s platform, but their administrative capital for the district of Filastin was a new town they founded around 715: Ramla, the one city in the land Arabs actually founded, built to be the seat of government that Jerusalem was not.
The Abbasids (750 to 969) ruled from Baghdad. The Fatimids (969 to 1099) ruled from Cairo.
The Ayyubids and Mamluks (1187 to 1516) ruled from Damascus and Cairo. Under the Mamluks, Jerusalem was a provincial backwater, at times literally a place where out-of-favor emirs were sent into exile.
The Ottomans (1516 to 1917) ruled from Istanbul. Jerusalem was a sanjak, a sub-district, under the province of Damascus for most of the period; in 1872 it became an independent mutasarrifate answering directly to Istanbul. A district seat, never a capital.

Even the Arabic name concedes the older claim: al-Quds, “the Holy,” is a shortening of Bayt al-Maqdis, which is the Hebrew Beit HaMikdash, the Temple. The city is named, in Arabic, after the Jewish Temple whose existence today’s Temple denial rejects. Jerusalem appears in the Hebrew Bible more than 600 times and in the Quran not once by name; the tradition tying the Night Journey to Jerusalem is later interpretation, not the text.

The honest exception: the Crusaders

One non-Jewish polity did make Jerusalem a capital. The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem kept its throne in the city from 1099 until Saladin took it in 1187; after that the rump kingdom governed from Acre until 1291. It was a Christian state, it lasted 88 years in the city, and an honest article says so plainly, because the exception proves the actual rule: in three thousand years, everyone who made Jerusalem a capital did it for religious reasons pointing at the same hill, and no Muslim ruler, with that same hill in hand for centuries, ever did.

Whose city it was, by the count

The capital question is about states; the city itself has an answer too. By 1844, the first reliable Ottoman-era count, Jews were already the largest community in Jerusalem: 7,120 Jews to 5,000 Muslims and 3,390 Christians. By the 1860s they were an absolute majority, decades before Herzl wrote a word. Jews have prayed toward this one city three times a day from anywhere on earth for well over two millennia. This is the deepest documented tie any people has to any city, and it never lapsed.

Jordan’s nineteen years, and what Israel did after

The only modern test of what non-Jewish rule of the Old City looks like ran from 1948 to 1967, when Jordan’s Arab Legion held East Jerusalem. Jordan expelled every Jew from the Jewish Quarter, destroyed or desecrated the Old City’s synagogues including the historic Hurva, tore up tens of thousands of Jewish graves on the Mount of Olives and paved roads and latrines with the headstones, and barred all Jews from the Western Wall for the entire period, in defiance of Article VIII of the 1949 armistice, which promised free access to the holy places. Notably, Jordan did not move its capital to the city it annexed; it governed from Amman and let Jerusalem stagnate.

Israel took the Old City in the Six-Day War in June 1967, and then did the opposite of what the “Judaization” libel predicts: Moshe Dayan handed day-to-day control of the Temple Mount to the Islamic Waqf, and Israel guaranteed access for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. That arrangement, the status quo, still stands.

The modern legal dispute, honestly

The legal status is genuinely contested, and the contest should be stated straight. The 1947 partition plan proposed Jerusalem as a corpus separatum under UN administration; the Arab states rejected the plan and invaded, and the corpus separatum never existed. Israel declared West Jerusalem its capital in 1950 and extended its law to East Jerusalem after 1967, formalized in the 1980 Basic Law. Most states declined to recognize this and kept embassies in Tel Aviv. The United States legislated recognition in the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995 and moved its embassy in May 2018, with a handful of countries following. So the borders and recognition of Israel’s capital are disputed at the UN; what is not disputed by any serious historian is the record above. No state other than Jewish ones and the Crusader kingdom ever ruled from Jerusalem, and the polity now claiming it as an eternal capital never governed it at all: on that question, see was Palestine ever a country.

Was Jerusalem always an Arab city? · What was Jerusalem called before al-Quds? · Temple Mount · Was Palestine ever a country? · East Jerusalem · Jerusalem & the Temple Mount on the main site

Sources

From Asked & answered on the main site.