Culture Mosaic Marks Eternally Divided City : Jerusalem: The national and religious groupings of the Old City cling jealously and often violently to their exclusive sectors.

In the middle of the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City stand the ruins of a 12th-Century church named for St. Mary of the German Knights.

When the ruins were uncovered, in the early 1970s, a sign was posted identifying the structure as a church, but the sign was defaced, and the authorities then classified the place as merely an archeological garden.

Now, it is identified as St. Mary’s German Hospice, though there has been an effort to scratch out those words.

In his book “Jerusalem: City of Mirrors,” Amos Elon attributes this to the religious atmosphere of the quarter, which is occupied largely by strictly Orthodox Jewish residents. But it might also be seen as part of a problem bedeviling the Old City and its fragile mosaic of cultures.

The diverse national and religious groupings of the Old City cling jealously and often violently to their exclusive sectors. Outsiders, even those who live only a doorstep away, enter at their own risk.

The most recent example is the conflict over the takeover, by Jewish nationalists, of the old Hospice of Saint John in the Christian Quarter. This has developed into a dispute involving the law, ideology and tradition.

The headlines are today’s, but the dilemma is perhaps as old as the Walled City itself.

In the last decades of the Ottoman Empire, partition of the 200-acre Old City was maintained by international accord. For three decades starting in 1917, the British maintained the system--and continued the Ottoman practice of dealing with ethnic and religious groups through their patriarchal leaders.

After Israeli independence in 1948, Jordan ruled over the eastern half of Jerusalem from 1948 to 1967. Jordan continued the practice, although Jews complained that the Western Wall, the last remnant of their ancient temple complex, was often desecrated by Muslims who drove cattle into the area and otherwise harassed worshipers. Israel captured Jerusalem in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War.

Israel, and especially Jerusalem under Mayor Teddy Kollek, promised to support the status quo and to keep open access to all holy places. But as shown by the conflict over the Hospice of St. John, there are forces that threaten to destroy the informal accord that has kept the peace and preserved sectoral integrity.

“It’s not the time to encourage mixed neighborhoods,” Aharon Sarig, a lawyer and longtime adviser to the mayor, said the other day. “Jerusalem was almost always divided into different quarters. This is the idea of how to run the city.”

Sarig admits that there is no formal basis in law for continuing the status quo among the Old City communities--Muslim, Jewish, Christian and Armenian.

“Technically,” he said, “everything is run on the basis of equality. If someone wants to buy property anywhere, they have the right to do that. In practice, the passions and traditions of the communities must be taken into account. This is not the United States, where the ideal at least is for everyone to mix.”

Most of the time, the tension between law and tradition in the Old City has been kept under control. Few members of any religious group--50,000 Muslims, 7,000 Christians and Armenians, 4,000 Jews--are tempted to move onto someone else’s turf. But clashing ideologies have entered the equation.

At St. John’s Hospice, which is owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, the nationalist Jewish seminarians who have taken over the building see themselves as classical Zionists, and Zionism mandates a return of all Jews to Zion.

“This is the fulfillment of the desire of every Jew,” a spokesman for the occupiers of the hospice told reporters. “This is a Jewish cause, a test case.”

There are signs that the hospice takeover will not be the last land battle in the Old City. The Housing Ministry, headed by David Levy, a proponent of expansion in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, has been canvassing the Armenian Quarter looking for houses to buy. The government has set aside at least $7.5 million for further purchases in the Old City.

The Greek Church is fighting the Jewish group on grounds of ownership as well as tradition. Church officials say the lease bought by the Israelis from a middleman is illegal.

Moreover, there is a strong current of nationalism among Greek Church supporters in the Palestinian community. Two leaders of the Arab uprising, Faisal Husseini and Sari Nusseibeh, took part in the Holy Thursday demonstration that was led by the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Diodorus I, and that was broken up by Israeli police using tear gas.

Palestinians regard the effort to end the status quo in Jerusalem as part of an Israeli campaign to deprive Arabs of their land. And not a few observers find that there is little new in this, that land disputes tinged with religious fire are not exceptional.

The oldest of the status quo disputes involves the Temple Mount, which Muslims call the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Enclosure. Today, the Dome of the Rock stands on the site, covering the spot from which the Prophet Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven. For the Jews, it is the home of their ancient Temple and Holy of Holies, the mystical center of Jewish worship.

Over the centuries, almost every conqueror of Jerusalem has established a shrine to his particular deity on the mount, usually after destroying what was there.

An altar to a Canaanite god is believed to have stood there before the Jews arrived. Greeks put up a temple to Zeus; the Romans, a temple to Jupiter. Crusaders erected a church; Muslims, the golden-dome mosque.

After Israel wrested Jerusalem from Jordan in the 1967 war, a campaign was undertaken by nationalists to at least restore Jewish worship on the site, but it never succeeded.

“The Israeli government prevents Jews from praying on the Temple Mount so as not to upset the Arabs,” said Sarig, the municipal adviser.

The clamor to retake the mount goes on. One nationalist-religious organization tried to lay a cornerstone last year but was turned back by police. On Passover, the same group attempted to carry on a harvest ritual atop the mount but again was frustrated by the police.

A Jewish terror group once tried to blow up the mosque atop the mount, but it too was frustrated.

Although the government has resisted Jewish demands to be allowed to worship on the Temple Mount, it did restore the traditional Jewish Quarter, which abuts the Western Wall. This move--many Muslim families were bought out or forcibly displaced--was carried out on the grounds that Jordan had expelled many Jews and destroyed much of the quarter and that Jews should reclaim their traditional sector of the Holy City.

Few Arabs left willingly and, in one celebrated case, homeowner Mohammed Burkan went to court to reclaim his house. Rebuffed, he tried to purchase the structure when it was renovated, but the government placed restrictions on purchases that limited buyers to Jewish citizens.

The decision to bar Burkan, which, in part, was based on the policy of giving the Jewish Quarter back to the Jews, is now being used by Christian Quarter residents to resist the Jewish encroachment. If Jews were given the Jewish Quarter, they ask, why is the Christian Quarter not protected for Christians?

Battles over pieces of Jerusalem are not confined to indigenous populations or to the area within the Old City’s walls. Throughout Jerusalem’s long history of conquest and counter-conquest, powers from near and far have built monuments to their faiths, considering it important to put their places of worship near--in some cases on--the source.

The Holy Trinity Cathedral, near Jaffa Road, and the Church of Mary Magdalene, in the pastoral Garden of Gethsemane, are both Russian Orthodox structures.

Views of the buildings are stunning, even disconcerting, because of the distinctive Russian architecture that in a flash can transport a passer-by from the Judean Hills to the banks of the Moscow River.

But the two churches are separated by several miles of traffic and jumbled neighborhoods. Holy Trinity is owned by the state-controlled Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow, Mary Magdalene by the exiled Russian Orthodox Church, headquartered in New York.

The split dates to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which toppled the czar and put the Communists in power. In Jerusalem, Mary Magdalene is called the White Church; Holy Trinity is the Red Church.

Last August, a representative of the Moscow-based church visited Gethsemane and, according to press reports, discussed perestroika (restructuring) with the White Russian clergy.