Remembering Jerusalem: Imagination, Memory, and the City

laura.varnam@univ.ox.ac.uk

This paper will explore the memory of Jerusalem in the 15^th century Middle English mystical text The Book of Margery Kempe. When Margery Kempe made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, God told her that ‘as oftentimes as you say or think, “worshipped be all those holy places in Jerusalem that Christ suffered bitter pain and passion in,” you shall have the same pardon as if you were there with your bodily presence, both for yourself and for all those that you will give it to’ (ch.30). This paper will situate Kempe’s pilgrimage account in the context of medieval ‘mental’ pilgrimage and argue that the Book’s textual reconstruction of Jerusalem is her ‘gift’ to the reader. The first half of the paper will explore Margery’s affective response to the holy sites of Jerusalem and, drawing on Shelley Hornstein’s formulation, suggest that she creates an ‘architecture of the heart’ which allows her to bring her Jerusalem experience back with her to England, rather like a pilgrimage badge or souvenir, and enables the reader to emulate her devotional practice. In the second part of the paper I will show how Margery maps the events of the Passion onto her parish church through her visions of Christ’s experiences in the holy city, relocating Jerusalem in the symbolic space of the English parish church. Here I will draw on Dylan Trigg’s exploration of the porous nature of place: ‘place is never autonomous in its unity but forever bleeding and seeping into other places, both those of the past and those of the future.’ I will conclude by arguing that the Jerusalem of Kempe’s Book is precisely such a porous place, literally bleeding into present time and local space through her textual re-enactment of Christ’s Passion, her ‘gift’ of Jerusalem for the reader.

Architect, PelegKimelman Architects, Jerusalem

Independent Scholar

yagodm@gmail.com

Jerusalem’s Route 1 has long been viewed as a seam line. The road was partially built on the remnants of the ceasefire line between the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and The State of Israel and constitutes one of the most graphic spatial divide between the city’s East and West. Beyond its role as a mechanism or infrastructure connecting places, Route 1 serves as an independent chronotope epitomizing the fixity of the liminal; its expanse embodies the “border condition,” which recreates, reinforces, and reinterprets the past and present by presenting a concrete reality with its own ambience and atmospherics of memory. Applying an urban temporal spatial analysis of existence in movement, I recast Route 1 as a transhistorical space containing the everyday consciousness of Jerusalem and offering a unique forum for the geo spatial and chrono spatial understandings of the city’s residents and visitors. Long viewed sectionally as a divisive space towards which both East and West Jerusalem turn their backs, I would like to argue that this road serves as a dynamic time space continuum, encompassing a unique ambiance in which conventional binary divisions seem to dissolve in a subtle way for the automobile driver, bus rider, or light rail passenger who actually inhabit the space. I shall present the way in which the designers, planners and users all form this space every day through human practices and design techniques which create one of the most public spaces in the city. While roads, especially thoroughfares are not usually seen as classic public spaces or producers of memory, such as public squares, neighborhood streets and parks, I will argue that we can rethink and learn how to view and analyze essential infrastructure as a producer of improved urbanism, one based on the memory of the present. People transversing Route 1, just as the Foucauldian ship, are a “piece of floating space, a placeless space” which operates between different ports, cultures and religions, all seemingly stable points of identity and memory, which are never really stable and never really fixed. As an artery within a city that is for many both a destination and a destiny, Route 1 serves as an important case study for reimagining the kinetic, agonistic, and creative forces of the modern Middle East.

Associate Professor, Department of Film and Television

Tel Aviv University, Israel

zanger@post.tau.ac.il

"An image," Walter Benjamin noted: "…is that in which the Then encounters the Now and Then." In this paper I would like to trace the affinity between past and present, image and memory, through an analysis of two non-fiction films; the first is Cemetery Club (Tali Shemesh, 2006), and the second is Jerusalem Cuts (Liran Atzmor, 2008).

Each of these films revolves around a specific place and its memory: Cemetery Club takes place on "The Memory Mountain" at Mount Herzl National Cemetery in Jerusalem, though this site serves as an anchor for other places and memories; Jerusalem Cuts focuses on both Israeli and Palestinian archives, and the journeys of their images in the past (a battle for the Old City of Jerusalem) and present (checkpoints and roadblocks).

Thus, while both films are set in Jerusalem, each one proposes its own journey into the "eternal city" and its imagery as it confronts the harsh reality of the present. As I will suggest, these recent films problematize the relation between place, memory and its images, while instead of a history an anamnesis (J. L. Lyotard) is suggested.

Associate Professor, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages

University of Oslo, Norway

r.j.zorgati@ikos.uio.no

During her four month long visit to Palestine, kernel of the “old world”, in 1859, the Swedish author Fredrika Bremer walks through the holy topography of Jerusalem and its surroundings with an historical-critical attitude. Citing recent archeological research, she doubts whether current buildings or graves commemorating events in the life of Jesus Christ actually correspond to the places her “Master” once visited (62, 52). Even the landscape has changed due to ecological transformations: the green, fertile land of her biblical ancestors is history; what Bremer observes is an arid, brown and dry landscape, occasionally coming to life under much awaited spring showers. Still, there exists one natural object that she might accept as authentic, literally binding past and present together, the olive tree. Observing the old trees in a garden moutside the gates of Jerusalem, Bremer finds sufficient evidence to accept that it is question of the Gethsemane: “Some of them [the olive trees] look so advanced in years that one spontaneously asks if they could not be the same as those trees under which Jesus […] prayed in a nightly hour” (49). Spontaneity is strengthened with scientific evidence, though, as Bremer continues by explaining that one significant feature of the olive tree is its immortality; it can be hundred, thousands of years old, and if a tree dies, its root system will survive, producing new sprouts that will give new trees.