RARELY in this fractious holy city do clerics cede rights for which they used to wage holy wars. But from the Abbey of the Dormition to Jesus’s resting place in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the bell-ringers of Jerusalem are abandoning their ropes after a century and a half, and installing automated timers instead.

As a result of the Crimean war that Britain, France and the Ottoman Sultan fought against Russia, a Turkish imperial edict in 1856 lifted a ban on Christian bell-ringing in Jerusalem, then part of the Turkish empire. The British were given the honour of erecting the city’s first outdoor bell since the crusades, next to the Protestant church they had built in 1849. In the decades that followed, European powers jostled to put up the tallest belfry. The Russians and Germans boasted views of the distant Mediterranean or Dead Sea. Only the Armenians modestly kept their gotchnag, a wooden sounding-board they fashioned to circumvent the old Muslim ban. It still hangs in St James’s Chapel, inside the old city’s Armenian Patriarchate; a sacristan beats it with a wooden hammer every day at dawn.

But times and technology change. The churches now compete for the latest mod cons, including manpower-saving bells that chime at the touch of a button. “The old way was kind of a hassle,” sighs Athanasius Macora, a Franciscan friar whose church was the city’s first to automate its bells. “You had to be there on time.” Moreover, with their bells on auto-pilot, the churches can compete with the mosques and the air-siren that Israelis use to call in the Sabbath.

Aesthetes say they can hear a difference between traditional bell-ringing and today’s phoney jingling bells. Eastern ascetics chide the Catholics for committing the original sin of putting convenience before ancient custom. “They’re Europeans,” snoots a Greek Orthodox priest, attributing the decline of old ritual to a Western weakness for ways of the flesh. A Franciscan casuist says there is no theological impediment against an automated bell.

But both he and his Greek Orthodox brother agree that Muslims led the local Christians astray by recording and broadcasting their calls to prayer over loudspeakers. “Muezzins used to be forever catching pneumonia, calling people to prayer in the cold and the rain before dawn,” says George Hintlian, an Armenian historian of the city. “It’s easier now.”