Remembering Jerusalem: Imagination, Memory, and the City

DPhil Candidate, Art Theory

University of Oxford

anita.paz@wadh.ox.ac.uk

On the occasion of dOCUMENTA (13) held in Kassel, Germany in 2012, Palestinian artist Emily Jacir (born 1970) created Ex libris (2010–2012), a white-cube floor-to-ceiling shelf installation consisting of cell phone digitally generated photographs of looted Palestinian books that were catalogued and archived at the Jewish National Library in West Jerusalem. Varying in size, disposition and level of detail, the colour reproductions of the faded book pages denote a complex relation between memory, community and the archive. In my paper I explore these relations, observing, in particular, the nature of this memory and its relation to the photographic reproduction. Understanding Jerusalem as a metonymic indication of the land upon which the city is built, this paper explores the topic of remembering Jerusalem by analysing the institutional space in which the books are deposited vis-à-vis the medium through which they are communicated by Jacir, posing the question around the ontological status of the place in this constructed narrative, and its role in the shaping of the Palestinian memory of Jerusalem. Drawing on the writings of Ariella Azoulay (The Civil Contract of Photography, 2008), as well as the philosophical thought of René Descartes, Gaston Bachelard, and Douwe Draaisma, my work focuses on the identity of he or she who is the remembering agent; the place – physical or mental – where this – material or immaterial – memory is stored; and the identity of he or she who is allowed to access, retrieve, contemplate, and employ the memory.

PhD Candidate, History of Art

Hebrew University of Jerusalem

lotem.pinchover@mail.huji.ac.il

This paper will present several case studies and would focus on a certain repeated pattern of where chapels commemorating the Holy Sepulchre were located inside the monastic complex.

PhD Candidate, Centre for Cultural, Literary and Postcolonial Studies

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

529313@soas.ac.uk

‘I am Jerusalem’: the engendered body as city, memory and site of resistance

My paper will explore the connections between the engendered body and the city of Jerusalem in dramatic representation. Theatrical space is a site for the representation and re-negotiation of identity and, as such, is also a hub for meaning construction. The staging of Jerusalem offers the possibility of opening a multi-layered space in which multiple stories related with the city’s memory can be built one upon the other.

I will analyse the play ‘I am Jerusalem’ presented by Ashtar Theatre within the ‘Arab Capital of Culture’ programme, organized by UNESCO and the Arab League, which took place in Jerusalem in 2009. In the play, the history of Jerusalem is presented as the embodied biography of the main character.

The actress, Iman Aoun, ‘is’ Jerusalem and, as such, she presents a cross-period performance in which she -her female body- is object of emotional, sexual and spiritual brutality. Her biography is related to the place, and the place creates her biography. The city’s memories become a woman’s memory; the traumas of the city become human traumas, or more concretely, woman’s traumas which relate to her emotions and expectations.

Regimes of power are reconstructed as the different conquerors/lovers appear as if they were ghosts –from the ghost of Canaan to the Israeli occupation. In this sense, her embodied presence represents a site of struggle and contestation. As stated by Wickstrom, the play deconstructs Jerusalem as an idea and creates a new space which ‘was made possible by evacuating from the stage any signs of Jerusalem-as-is, and instead returning the Canaanite trinity, in visual forms of the triangle, as a kind of unconquerable idea’ (Wickstrom 2011, 117)

My paper will analyse the play from a phenomenological point of view, understanding the production as a happening in which actually the actress becomes Jerusalem to the eyes of the audience. I will draw upon different theories within the disciplines of Cultural Studies and Cultural Geography to analyse issues related to space, body and identity in connection to performance.

Among the numerous types of pilgrimage souvenirs that were produced for and bought by pilgrims in Jerusalem through the ages there are two inter-related groups of objects that were popular among Orthodox pilgrims between the 17^th and 19^th century. Both were known as Proskynetaria (single – Proskynetarion), a Greek term for pilgrimage memento.

The first group of objects includes large icons usually painted on canvas. The common design is composed in the form of a triptych, with the image of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the centre, Jesus on its right and Mary to its left. Around these images numerous scenes from the lives of the saints and the Holy Places in and around Jerusalem were depicted. A special sub-group of these icons portrays the holy places in a map-like fashion with Jerusalem in the centre and sites from the Mediterranean in the west to the Jordan in the east and from Bethlehem in the south to Mt. Tabor in the north around it.

The second group of souvenirs includes illuminated manuscripts that describe the holy places in Jerusalem and the Holy Land through text and images. These illuminated manuscripts were bound as small booklets, and are found today in many collections and libraries throughout Europe. Some were written and illustrated by highly talented calligraphists while others were rather rough copies. All the signed copies were produced in Jerusalem and in the Mar-Saba Monastery.

The fact that there are two different types of objects that bear the same name, reflect the same tradition and were made in the same place, calls for inquiry. This paper will first describe these two groups of objects, study the contents of each of them, analyze the Orthodox narrative that was encoded into them, and shed light on the common features and roots that tie them to each other.

Dr Kendra Salois

Visiting Assistant Professor in Ethnomusicology

University of Maryland

School of Music

ksalois@umd.edu
Representations of al-Quds in North African Hip Hop: Loss, Longing, and Translocality

In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, Moroccan fusion ensembles such as Nass el-Ghiwane and Jil Jilala brought songs about Palestine, al-Quds, and the first intifada to adoring audiences across North Africa and in European capitals. These groups combined audibly Moroccan instruments, rhythms, and dialect with approaches gleaned from trans-Atlantic rock and folk, yet they also reached out to the Mashreq through lyrics in solidarity with Palestinians and the broader umma. Today, hip hop artists from Morocco and Tunisia perform similar moves with different Afro‐diasporic musical materials, simultaneously placing themselves in relation to Palestine and Palestinians, to Arab identity, and to the transnational hip hop tradition. This paper considers the lyrical and musical imagery surrounding references to al-Quds in North African hip hop songs. I situate pre- and post‐2011 examples from Tunis, Tangiers, and Meknes in historical perspective, analyze the invocation of al-Quds in relation to national and international themes, and explore the interplay between sounds and lyrics. In this reading, al-Quds becomes a capacious metonym for an Arabophone discursive and political space that, as always, Maghrebians are both within and outside. I argue that, instead of reading Maghrebian hip hop artists as re-performing their fusion predecessors’ anxieties over their distance from a center of Arab cultural and political life, we can hear them performing that distance productively, at once establishing a distinctively Maghrebi hip hop and using their rhetorical solidarity to provoke discussion of local issues amongst local publics.

MA Programme in Policy and Theory in the Arts

Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Israel

havatour@gmail.com

The paper discusses the landscape surrounding the Old City of Jerusalem created by the "Jerusalem Walls National Park", as memorial landscape. Extensive research has shown the role that nature reserves, national parks and JNF forests have had in shaping the Israeli landscape and forming Israeli identity and consciousness. The shaping of "Jerusalem Walls National Park" with its environs stands out in this context, not only because of the political implications inherent to urban planning within a city of national conflict, but also because of the linkage created between landscape, Jewish history and memory, and theological meaning, and the tying together of all of these by government authorities. The National Park and the landscape it creates, gains new meaning in the framework of a narrative that bears political, religious and national aspects. This landscape stands in relation to the Palestinian neighbourhoods – emphasising contradicting aesthetic values - and at the same time rivals Moslem monuments and Christian pilgrimage routes that have dominated the historic landscape, overshadowing the Jewish sites.

The national parks surrounding the Old City, weave together historic Jewish sites, such as the cemetery on the Mount of Olives (which connects up the National Park), and archaeological excavations that play a role in reinforcing a specific form of Israeli nationalism and identity. The shaping of the national parks therefore represent an attempt to harmoniously but artificially unify the segmented, intertwined and often conflicting fragments of histories, cultures and realities into a whole. Moreover, the attempt to engrave visualized Jewish memory into the Jerusalem landscape, represents a new position regarding the relationship between Judaism and space, Jewish culture and aesthetics.

The National Park as a visual unit and as a basis for the development of collective narrative, suggests a shift from secular Zionism to a religious nationalism, reinforced by the power of aesthetic "truth". This becomes apparent when examining the visual link between the National Parks as a Jewish-Israeli symbol, and the Temple Mount. This visual linkage, together with the rise of a rhetoric centered round the building of the Third Temple, suggests a shift in the view of the Temple Mount as a traditional symbol and focal point of Jewish poetic memory, to the view of the Temple Mount as part of an uncompromising national symbolic.

PhD Candidate, Institute of European History

Mainz, Germany

serapioni@ieg-mainz.de

The aim of this paper is to analyze from an historical perspective the construction of a “collective memory” of Jerusalem in the international arena, by observing the processes and the debates standing behind the inclusion of the Old City of Jerusalem in the UNESCO World Heritage Program in 1981. The concepts of memory and heritage are intimately interconnected within this paper. In fact, heritage is intended here as that part of an imagined past (artefacts, mythologies and traditions) which we select according to the demands of the present in order to construct a specific memory.

Focusing on UNESCO, this paper will question in what terms the “collective memory of Jerusalem” was discussed on this international stage and to what extent looking for an “inclusive” definition of heritage for this divided city became, eventually, a mean of exclusion of competing historical narratives and memories of this site. On the UNESCO stage the “global imagination” of Jerusalem was portrayed mainly as the locus of holiness for the Christian, Muslim and Jewish communities. However, since 1967, the city became increasingly the hub of many overlapping layers of struggles, whose nature is ethno--‐national, inter--‐communal and intra--‐communal, and different interpretations of heritage proved to be a powerful means to reinforce competing narratives and provide historical justification for present claims. Therefore, this paper will analyze how different competing memories of Jerusalem have been discussed and elaborated in the international real of UNESCO and to what extent these converging interpretations of heritage have influenced the construction of UNESCO World Heritage “imagination” of this city. For this paper, I will make use of archival materials collected in several archives, among which the UNESCO archive in Paris, the Israeli State Archive in Jerusalem, and the Jordan National Library and Archive in Amman.

Shimrit Shriki

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

shimritshriki@hotmail.com
Jerusalem Remembers: The Role of Jerusalem in Secular Commemorative Practice

Shimrit Shriki’s paper is dedicated to a different use of the Kreuzweg (Via Dolorosa). This paper will present Jerusalem sites in Germany and Austria, in which religious memory is intertwined with secular commemoration of modern conflicts, namely the two World Wars. The paper will explore the motivation to place secular commemoration within the (religious) context of Jerusalem sites, the importance of the Way of the Cross within rituals of secular commemoration, and of setting of commemoration of non-Christian victim groups within the terms of Christian belief.

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

History of Art, University of York

laura.slater@york.ac.uk

Laura Slater’s paper examines the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton which dates to the early twelfth century. Built in imitation of the Anastasis Rotunda, it has been attributed with some confidence to the newly established Norman Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, Simon I de Senlis, a keen crusader who completed one successful journey to Jerusalem and died when attempting a second.

The paper will argue that by recreating Jerusalem at the centre of his new estates, Simon evoked recent as well as ancient Christian history. He commemorated his time on crusade, laying public claim to the glamour and prestige attached to the First Crusaders as chivalric Christian heroes. He also followed in the footsteps of exemplars of Christian imperial virtue such as Constantine and Heraclius. Communicating to the locality the imperial power of his new position as Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, in addition to stressing his Christian virtue and so his moral right to hold such authority, the Holy Sepulchre Church at Northampton mobilised collective memories of Jerusalem to support the political identity of an arriviste landowner.

In addition, the paper will explore some of the local memories that might also have influenced the building of the Holy Sepulchre Church. It will suggest that Simon’s wife Matilda may have played a greater role in the construction of the church than has been previously considered. Discussing its potential significance in relation to the activities of her mother Judith, founder of a nunnery dedicated to St Mary and St Helena, It will examine the Holy Sepulchre Church of Northampton as a site of penitential memory.

Associate Professor

Department of English

North Carolina State University

tlstinson@gmail.com
Confession, Vengeance, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

Following the Edict of Expulsion of 1290, Jews and Judaism continued to be targeted by English poets, preachers, and chroniclers via retellings of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD by Roman forces. These narratives anachronistically imagined the destruction of Jerusalem as retribution for the Crucifixion, when in fact the siege occurred centuries before the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity. Examples of such works include the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem, chronicle histories of John of Tynemouth and Ranulf Higden, and theatrical versions performed as late as 1622, when a play entitled Titus and Vespatian was recorded at the court of James I.

The goal of this paper is twofold. I will first demonstrate how a single 15^th-century manuscript, Cleveland Public Library MS W q091.92C468, interweaves the history of Jerusalem with the history of England itself. The manuscript opens with a brief geographical text surveying Biblical lands and begins “Iosephus of Iewis the noble was the first auctour of the book of policronica.” This is followed by an abridged version of the prose Brut, a comprehensive history of England, and the brief poem Cur mundus militat. The manuscript closes with the sole surviving Middle English prose translation of Roger D’Argenteuil’s Bible en François, which details the fall of Jerusalem. As such, English history is bracketed by Josephan history, and the reader is invited to understand it through this lens.

My second goal is to show that this positioning of texts is emblematic of the significant place that Jerusalem occupied in late medieval English memory. I will pay particular attention to 1) the role that ‘curated memory’ played in the sacrament of confession and in medieval sermons, which often urged a mindfulness of past transgressions, and 2) the purpose of narratives featuring ‘successful’ conquests of Jerusalem in an era of failed crusades to recapture the city.

Research Associate, Department of Languages and Cultures of the Near and Middle East

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

ys3@soas.ac.uk

The proposed paper follows on my recently published monograph, Defenders and Enemies of the True Cross on the religio-political ramifications of the Byzantine-Persian/Sasanian confrontation in Jerusalem and the Holy Land in the first 3 decades of the seventh century. It intends to explore the nachleben of the principal notions generated originally in seventh-century Byzantine and East Christian literature, iconography and ritual during the later crusading era and onward when these notions acquired an immediate topicality and were understandably revived and subjected to a series of transmutations and periodic updates. Notions chosen for this memorialisation and invocation process were drawn, for example, from the dramatic reports of the devastation of Christian holy sites and sacral architecture (whose reality has been now challenged by progressing archaeological investigations in Jerusalem), the poignant accounts of massacres of the city’s Christian population and exile of the “Church of Jerusalem”. The most influential notions, however, remained those related to Heraclius’ entry in Jerusalem and his restitution of the True Cross, with all its ever-topical repercussions in the sphere of eschatology and Jerusalem-focused political theologies. Sources to be discussed in the paper as highlighting the techniques of memorialisation and reworking of these notions include historical and literary narratives from the crusading era and onward, West and East Christian iconographic traditions as well as modern popular, derivative and apologetic historiography.

jesper.svartvik@teol.lu.se

For millennia the city of Jerusalem has evoked feelings of radical amazement, spiritual attachment, and also political ambitions. This has been surveyed by, e.g., James Carroll In his book Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which focuses in the mnemohistorical Jerusalem in the hearts and minds of people all over the world. Some of those who constantly bore Jerusalem in mind actually also shaped this city. When describing the transformation of Jerusalem in the nineteenth century from a town within walls to the city that it is today, the importance of the architects and archaeologist Conrad Schick cannot be overemphasized. Born in Germany in 1822, Schick moved to Jerusalem when he was only 24 yours old. When he died in 1901 he was buried on Mount Zion. Schick planned some of the first neighbourhoods outside the walls of the Old City; he also designed schools, hospitals, chapels and other buildings; and his own residence built in 1882, Beit Tavor (Hebrew: “House of Tabor”), which today houses the Swedish Theological Institute, has been called the most beautiful building in Jerusalem. This paper seeks to explore the Jerusalem of Conrad Schick, in the sense of, on the one hand, a physical space that he together with other influential 19^th century architects created and, on the other hand, a site of memory that formed him and therefore all those hundreds of thousands who live and work in Jerusalem today, one of whom is the author of this paper who teaches at the Swedish Theological Institute in Beit Tavor, and therefore constantly is reminded of the enormous impact of Conrad Schick. We see his architectural fingerprints all over Jerusalem today. What do we know about his imaginative Jerusalem?

Fellow, British School of Rome

lau20@cantab.net
Jerusalem, Rome and England: the appropriation of memories of Jerusalem by English Catholics after 1558

Jerusalem's past has been appropriated many times and by many different groups, through competing narratives and through imitation or acquisition of its physical monuments; it has also been used as a lens through which the past of other places, people and causes can be viewed. This paper considers how early modern English Catholics used memories of Jerusalem, mainly derived from biblical texts, to 'remember' England's past, and construct a history which expressed their aspirations for England's future. In the Renaissance era, the architects of renewed Catholicism also appropriated memories of Jerusalem, largely by a narrative of supersession: Rome was imagined as the 'New Jerusalem'. This included the re-location of (alleged) monumental remains from Jerusalem - physical memories - in Roman churches. In the context of their use of Jerusalem to 'remember' Catholic England, I will consider how English Catholics encountered and deployed this Roman appropriation of Jerusalem's 'memory' in order to challenge rival Protestant narratives of England and her relation to both Jerusalem and Rome.

Texts such as the Psalms and Book of Lamentations, in which Jerusalem and her destruction are 'remembered', were re-deployed to imagine England in texts such as Ralph Buckland's Seven sparks of the enkindled soul; other literary works such as Anthony Copley's A fig for fortune adopt the Roman appropriation of Jerusalem. Homiletic texts also engage with the memory of Jerusalem as early modern Christians understood it from New Testament sources. This paper combines texts of various genres to explore how English Catholics remembered Jerusalem in relation to their own imagined past, present and future.