Remembering Jerusalem: Imagination, Memory, and the City

Postdoctoral Researcher, Program in Cultural Studies

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

nina.fischer@uni-konstanz.de

I argue that these texts portray Jerusalem as a place of lived-in memories of family, community, tradition, and everyday life, a representation that is utterly unlike all transcendental conceptions of the city, especially the Israeli narrative of return after 2000 years, which is anything but based on personal memories of belonging. This paper reads the selected texts closely to show how they convey an Arab memory of Jerusalem as literal rather than mythical home, the Nakba as an experience of displacement and loss, and return as a deeply held longing. The documentation of personal connections and memories of the city are part of a cultural resistance to the increasing “Judaization” of Jerusalem, as much as they are integral and constitutive elements of the Palestinian narrative of belonging, making such personal memories of Jerusalem intrinsically political.

Associate Professor

Dept. Of Religion and Culture

Virginia Tech, United States

mgabriele@vt.edu
The Lived Hermeneutics of Jerusalem: Remembering a New Future of the Holy Sepulcher after the First Crusade

Describing the capture of Jerusalem by the Latin Christians in 1099, the early twelfth--‐century chronicler Robert the Monk invoked Isaiah 11:10, saying that when the Christians made their way to the Holy Sepulcher, wading through pagan blood, on bended knee, and with tears in their eyes, this was the day that the prophet had foretold: “sepulchrum Domini fuit gloriosum.” For modern historians, this citation seems to make sense; the chronicler was placing the events of 1095--‐99 into the arc of sacred history and expressing his unalloyed joy at the taking the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. But there’s a problem with that modern interpretation: Isaiah 11:10 wasn’t supposed to be used like that. The verse’s exegetical tradition, dating back to the Fathers, was Christological, reading the mention of the “root of Jesse” in that verse as foretelling the truth of the resurrection. In that traditional reading, the Holy Sepulcher had already been made “glorious.” Robert did something different though, and said that it had happened again. This paper will argue that the deployment of specific biblical citations in the early twelfth--‐century descriptions of the taking of Jerusalem in 1099 were intended to trigger mental catenae in contemporary readers’ minds, to refigure the memory of Jerusalem in Latin Christendom, to refocus attention from past to future, and signal the meaning of the Holy Sepulchre was changing, as sacred history entered a new phase.

Visiting Lecturer, History of Art

University of Edinburgh

ebgoetsch@gmail.com

By calling on relevant textual and visual material from medieval Iberian sources and from the most popular medieval Iberian manuscript tradition, Beatus of Liébana’s Commentary on the Apocalypse, this paper will argue that these monastic groups began to contextualise their experience in terms of instances of historical struggle and triumph. It will demonstrate that accounts of Jerusalem and its people were particularly prominent points of comparison for Iberian Christians, especially as the city itself was also occupied by Muslims through the end of the eleventh century. More specifically, visual and textual references to the Babylonian Captivity will be examined in depth in order to suggest that those inhabiting the northern Iberian mountains were promoting an ideology of salvation through faith in line with such Jerusalem-centric narratives.

Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures

Tel Aviv University

rafigre@012.net.il

Historically, the extant buildings of Islamic Jerusalem and their inhabitants (whether Muslim, Jewish or Christian) have been viewed as a hindrance to Western visitors seeking the pristine Biblical city. Archaeological authenticity has also fallen short of expectations; its tracts of ruins, progressively less intelligible to the untrained eye as they are followed back to their Bronze and Iron Age origins, afford scant evidence of the beauty memorialized in scripture or of the founding figures of Jerusalem’s mythology, David and Solomon. One remedy for this deficit has been the manufacturing of forgeries; another – tunnelling under ground. The iconic image of Charles Warren’s shafts near the Temple Mount has been appropriated, nearly 150 years later, and expanded by archaeological authorities and ideologically motivated organizations to form an extensive warren of underground passages, rooms and halls in which tourists are invited to escape present reality and to conjure up a vision of a spiritually nourishing past. The ancient function of these passages and spaces is often ignored, with buildings of different and conflicting age and type linked together to form a ‘chain over time’. A sub-species of Disneyfication, the themes promoted in Jerusalem’s old-new tunnels comprise a collective memory of Jerusalem as it never was.

PhD Candidate, Department of Geography

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

malka.greenberg@mail.huji.ac.il

The research is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, including: questionnaires, mental maps, in-depth interviews and tracking technologies (GPS). The sample of this research includes 30 Palestinian-Muslim women residents of Jerusalem.

The study explores the relationship between identity and space by examining the processes of personal and social identity formation in relation to spatial behavioural patterns. It demonstrates how identity can be reconstituted through movement and how gendered understandings and experiences of mobility are intertwined with different meanings of space.

Anna Gutgarts-Weinberger

PhD Candidate, Department of History

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

a_gutgarts@yahoo.com

The conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in July 1099 brought about far reaching alterations in the city’s monumental skyline, as part of the efforts carried out by the city’s new rulers to transform it into a Christian capital. This rapid change, manifested in the construction and renovation of multiple churches and monasteries throughout the city and its surroundings, is typically examined mostly within an architectural context. However, the dynamics of the encounter between the city’s transforming sacred landscape, and its developing urban layout during the 12^th century, were not hitherto systematically explored.

This paper will present a framework for such analysis, based on a comprehensive and systematic collection, collation and juxtaposition of diverse textual and archaeological sources. This database provides important insights regarding the underlying socio-economic mechanisms, responsible for the development of Frankish Jerusalem’s urban setting, and their spatial manifestations. The correlation between urban functions and the forms they assume over time, yields a dynamic image of the city’s so called ‘urban fabric’.

This approach enables establishing and re-defining the correlation between monumental construction, which was responsible for the city’s evolving symbolic image, and urban development in its broader, more everyday, sense. This will be demonstrated through a comparative discussion of central compounds within the city and its environs (for example – the Temple Mount and its surroundings, the Hospital area and the Valley of Jehoshaphat) during the 12^th century. An examination of the city’s shifting ‘centers of gravity’, and their functions in diverse urban spheres (liturgical and mundane alike), sheds light and provides a new outlook on some of the prominent issues in the historiography of Frankish Jerusalem. Among these are urban zoning and its economic as well as religious/symbolic implications; continuity and ruptures of socio-economic mechanisms and their spatial constructs; and the impact of monumental architectural development on everyday life and in a multi-cultural environment.

Dr Nagihan Haliloğlu

Assistant Professor, Fatih Sultan Mehmet University, Istanbul

nagihan.haliloglu@gmail.com
Sacral Lieux de Memoire in Evliya Çelebi’s Account of Jerusalem
The 17^th century Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi’s account of Jerusalem is not one that is widely referred to in discussions of the city’s history partly because of his fanciful narrative style. However his writing still reflects the Ottoman worldview of the time and in this paper I want to explore the ways in which he portrays different communities in Jerusalem as creating and sustaining lieux de memoire, through a system of clearly demarcated jurisdiction. In Evliya Çelebi’s account the discursive and performative nature of the millet system is revealed to give the reader a view of a city that is defined through religious and ethnic boundaries set by the ruling powers’ understanding of scriptural and secular history. Different faiths’ remembrances of prophets’ lives differ and converge and these differences and convergences get reflected in the way lieux de memoire are allocated by the ruling power. The allocation of space, power and even freedom of movement given to different denominations in Jerusalem as related in Evliya Çelebi’s travelogue exposes a very tight economy of space when it comes to these lieux de memoire, particularly inside the Church of the Sepulchre. Although there are references to Muslims and Jews, the central characters Evliya Çelebi’s account of Jerusalem seem to be Christian monks and priests, comprising of the ‘Rum’ (Greek speakers), Armenians and the Frank (Europeans). Çelebi’s language reflects the familiarity of Muslims with the Rum and the Armenians as communities spread throughout the Ottoman Empire, and the tone of his account of Christian Europeans, the ‘kuffar’ differs greatly as he passes judgement on how well the different communities look after Biblical lieux de memoire. The Ottomans granting such administrative power to religions other than Islam in a foundational space of Islamic belief itself also contributes to what Fernand Braudel calls ‘the foundation myths’ of millet system.

Dr Dana Hercbergs

Research Specialist, Guildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies

University of Maryland, United States

hercbergs@yahoo.com
Remembering the Future of the City: the Davidization of Jerusalem
This paper argues for a recent turning point in Jerusalem’s history of iconic representations, which is mobilized by a current synergy of ethno-national (Zionist) and neoliberal economic policies that promote Israeli Jewish demographic and spatial dominance in Jerusalem. For decades, the Muslim structure of the Dome of the Rock and the Jewish holy site of the Western Wall served as a primary (dual) image for the city; although Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, the image of these holy sites acknowledged the history of religious multiplicity, if not coexistence. Since the Second Intifada, there has been a transition to framing Jerusalem as an exclusively Jewish Israeli city with the Tower of David as the new icon, attended by the multiplication of David-related iconicity across the city. The historical association of the Tower—a 17^th century Muslim minaret—with the biblical King David is mobilized to simultaneously create a false memory, and simulation, of a homogenous City of David. The ubiquity of this image throughout the urban landscape comprises what I call the Davidization of Jerusalem, propagating the fiction that the past was free of difference, and perpetuating the fiction-cum-reality of Jerusalem as an exclusively Jewish city.

The paper brings together different data in the shape of (1) recent architectural sites that make reference to the Tower of David or to the biblical King David, and (2) municipal street posters, high-profile real-estate ads, and other ephemera bearing logos of the tower that exemplify this historic and consequential representational shift. While pilgrims’ and tourists’ experiences of Jerusalem have historically been shaped by prior itineraries, travelogues, and souvenirs; what characterizes the present shift is the state’s strong role in the flattening of memory and simulating a new social and political reality.

Postdoctoral Researcher

Department of English and Related Literature

University of York

isabelle.hesse@york.ac.uk
‘A Stubborn Little Slab of Reality’: Remembering Mandate Jerusalem in Boas Yakin and Nick Bertozzi’s Jerusalem: A Family Portrait
Boas Yakin and Nick Bertozzi’s graphic novel Jerusalem: A Family Portrait (2013) focuses on the years leading up to the establishment of Israel in 1948 and traces the relationship of different members of the Halaby family with Jerusalem as a city alongside their political trajectories in Mandate Palestine.

In this paper, I consider how Jerusalem in the Mandate period is remembered through the medium of the graphic novel by paying specific attention to images of the city and the visualisation of sounds. First of all, I examine the type of memory that is mobilised through the pictures of Jerusalem that Bertozzi draws in relation to key events between 1945 and 1948 – the King David Hotel bombing, the siege of Jerusalem, and the evacuation of the British – but also to convey everyday life in the city. These images are often contrasted with graphic interjections, which I argue not only emphasise crucial moments in the narrative but often express violence, fighting, and conflict, foreshadowing the escalation of the conflict during the war of 1947-8.

I contend that the use of sound effects troubles iconic images of Jerusalem circulated in metropolitan culture that do not take into account the city’s role in the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. By combining black and white images with sound effects familiar to a contemporary audience, Yakin and Bertozzi draw parallels between Jerusalem in the 1940s and Jerusalem in the contemporary period, showing a side of the city, and the conflict, that is less familiar to a European and North American reader, thus encouraging them to consider Jerusalem as a geopolitical ‘slab’ of reality and not just an iconic site of tourism and pilgrimage.

Dr Melanie Holcomb

Curator, Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters

New York, United States

Melanie.Holcomb@metmuseum.org

Jerusalem 1000-1400: A Sneak Preview (With Dr Barbara Drake Boehm)
See above for abstract.
Catherine E. Hundley

University of Virginia / Warburg Institute

ceh9hn@virginia.edu
Remembering, Forgetting, Re-Remembering: The Lost Holy Sepulchres of Twelfth-Century England

Looking at selected moments in time, can we discover the reasons why the English built, forgot, and then rediscovered their own local versions of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre? Arguably the most recognizable symbol of medieval Jerusalem, the Anastasis Rotunda had inspired architectural copies in Continental Europe for hundreds of years but did not appear in England until the early twelfth century. Despite their late adoption of the trend, the English went on to create Holy Sepulchre analogues for use as parish churches, military order sites, private chapels, and pilgrimage destinations. Yet, only a quarter of England’s round churches are still in use. The rest range from standing ruins to excavated remains to documented sites. The inconsistent timing of rotunda demolition and the uneven pattern of round church survival show that each worshiping community varied in its need to perpetually commemorate the Holy Sepulchre. Once demolished, many English Holy Sepulchres were lost to collective memory until the modern era. Although only a few examples survive today, congregations have begun to reemphasize the Jerusalem associations of their round churches in different ways, ushering in a new era of remembering. By analyzing the full lifecycle of selected Holy Sepulchre copies, it is possible to understand the changing ways in which the English embraced, rejected, forgot, and then re-remembered these local commemorations of Christianity’s holiest site.

This research represents a portion of my doctoral dissertation on the round churches of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. In my larger project, I consider English Holy Sepulchres in their full architectural, geographical, religious, and political contexts, using the specifics of each local site to understand the broader role that round churches played in medieval English culture. While each Holy Sepulchre served a specific audience of military monks, parishioners, private worshipers and pilgrims, my presentation will examine the place of long-term memory in the history of England’s round church movement.

Robert Jobbins

PhD Candidate, School of Philosophy and Art History

University of Essex

rjobbi@essex.ac.uk

One of the central paradoxes in the depiction of Jerusalem in western religious art in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance is the use of the Islamic monument, the Dome of the Rock, as the most common signifier of the city. A further anomaly is that as artists developed more veristic ways of depicting architectural space, and as more information became available in the West about the city of Jerusalem, portrayals of this key building became increasingly fantastic.

In this paper I will discuss a small number of Northern artists who either visited Jerusalem or who were thought to have done so – and whose work incorporated anachronism (or other forms of multi-temporality), elements of intermediality, and extended metaphor. Precise representations of the Dome, and other monuments in the city, were in wide circulation by the end of the 15^th century, but rather than being adopted as a prototype or template, these “accurate” portrayals were widely rejected in favour of the products of the imagination.

I will discuss the difficulty of trying to distinguish statements that are true of the world from those that are true only of our imaginings. While our imaginings do not have to conform to statements about how the world is, I will address the question of statements about how the world is not. This could be applied to images, used to signify ideas in common currency in the fifteenth century, but which were not in fact true. If images had the potential to become more “real” to the spectator than the truth itself, this might explain the widespread belief that the Dome of the Rock was Solomon’s Temple, and the fact that the Dome was repeatedly used in Western religious paintings as the backdrop to episodes from the life of Christ.

Department of English Literature

Bar-Ilan University

kolbrener@gmail.com

Jerusalem, Memory and Misprision focuses on the work of the rabbi and theologian, Joseph Soloveitchik, whose central work Halakhic Man elaborates a theodicy centering on Jerusalem in order to articulate and justify a conception of Jewish Law that became increasingly dominant in the Jewish world of the 20^th century. By adapting a Talmudic representation of the founding of Jerusalem, Soloveitchik turns to his own re-articulation of their prior founding myth in order to elaborate his particular conception of Jewish Law. In the rabbinic formulation of the Second Temple Period, Jerusalem is the place of the dialectical interaction between law and desire. Though King David is figured, in the mythography of the rabbi as holding the ‘deep’ in place with a shard with the divine name, the ‘waters’ representing forces antithetical to the law are nonetheless summoned, in the rabbinic context, as necessary to the founding of Temple in Jerusalem. Soloveitchik, whose work stands as paradigmatic in contemporary Jewish orthodoxy re-writes the story, focusing only on David as a human figure of the divine Law, who exiles the energies opposing law, thus occluding the dialectic between law and desire present in the rabbinic representation. Soloveitchik’s rendering of Jerusalem, a place of law and not desire, stands as a paradigmatic moment in a work which comes to inform the practices of contemporary Jerusalem. His misprision of the Talmudic text – the occlusion of desire – informs his work, and a sensibility which has turned away from the dialectical tension at the heart of the Talmudic Jerusalem for a Jerusalem tied, however inadvertently, to singularity and the Absolute.