Figuring Jerusalem

Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780226787633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Figuring Jerusalem explores how Hebrew writers have imagined Jerusalem, both from the distance of exile and from within its sacred walls. For two thousand years, Hebrew writers used their exile from the Holy Land as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did these writers bring their imagination "home" in the Zionist century? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic conventions that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained throughout the first half of the twentieth century. And even after 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. It was only in the aftermath of the Six Day War that the temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred would become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Figuring Jerusalem ranges from classical texts, biblical and medieval, to the post-1967 writings of S. Y. Agnon and Yehuda Amichai. Ultimately, DeKoven Ezrahi shows that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of exile, as inscribed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of Jerusalem are to coexist.

PART ONE

Literary Archaeologies

1

“Yes, you did laugh!”: The Secret of the Akeda

Why do lines of poetry and aggadah stick to this landscape, to this city? Ancient, decorated with distant memories and death, she carries within her the first layers, the foundation stones of poetry, of literature.

LEAH GOLDBERG1

The insight that launched this book is anchored in evidence stretching from the rich biblical record and scant archaeological traces of the ancient world to modern forms of recall and reincarnation of that world: that stories compete with stones and that human acts of nomination, appellation, and imagination soften or even undermine the presumption of physical proximity to a defined and confined divine presence. Furthermore, where the holiest site in Jerusalem is concerned, the nomenclature, interpretative postures, and iconography reveal an ongoing dialectic among (and within) the three monotheistic traditions: between synchrony or homage and supersession or effacement. These currents, in their periodic eruptions, form two thousand years of alternately shared and contested history. And in our time, from a debate over boundaries, a centrifugal movement outward to borders, the conflict between Israel and Palestine has morphed into—or reverted to—a religious war, a centripetal thrust into the vortex of sacrifice. At the center of this vortex are a rock and a story.

The Rock

The great feature of the Mosque of Omar is the prodigious rock in the centre of its rotunda. It was upon this rock that Abraham came so near offering up his son Isaac—this, at least, is authentic—it is very much more to be relied on than most of the traditions, at any rate. On this rock, also, the angel stood and threatened Jerusalem, and David persuaded him to spare the city. Mahomet was well acquainted with this stone. From it he ascended to heaven. The stone tried to follow him, and if the angel Gabriel had not happened by the merest good luck to be there to seize it, it would have done it. Very few people have a grip like Gabriel—the prints of his monstrous fingers, two inches deep, are to be seen in that rock to-day . . . along with [Mahomet’s] foot-prints . . . I should judge that he wore about eighteens. But what I was going to say, when I spoke of the rock being suspended, was, that in the floor of the cavern under it they showed us a slab which they said covered a hole which was a thing of extraordinary interest to all Mohammedans, because that hole leads down to perdition, and every soul that is transferred from thence to Heaven must pass through this orifice. Mahomet stands there and lifts them out by the hair. All Mohammedans shave their heads, but they are careful to leave a lock of hair for the Prophet to take hold of. Our guide observed that a good Mohammedan would consider himself doomed to stay with the damned forever if he were to lose his scalp-lock and die before it grew again.

MARK TWAIN, Innocents Abroad2

The rock is the fundament of the world in the three monotheistic traditions—and it takes a large dose of humor to pry proprietary fingers from this site. The designation har ha-bayit, Mountain of the House, or Temple Mount, the site where Abraham nearly sacrificed his son—“this, at least, is authentic”!!!—dates from the rabbinic period, the first centuries of the Common Era, when all but a few physical traces of the (so-called) Second Temple had been eradicated.3 The area was renamed Aelia Capitolina by the Romans after Hadrian restored the site, at first as tribute and then, after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–36, as triumphant appropriation replete with pagan temples and statues of the emperor.4

During the Byzantine period under Constantine and his successors, Jerusalem, now devoid of its Jewish inhabitants, was renamed Aelia;5 the Temple Mount lay in ruins and was virtually effaced from official memory—as reflected in the famous Madaba mosaic map from the sixth century, which features the Church of the Holy Sepulchre but not the Temple Mount.6

Shortly after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the seventh century, however, a shrine—the Qubbat Al-Sakhrah (Dome of the Rock)—and the Al Aqsa mosque were constructed on the site explicitly identified with Solomon’s Temple and its successors (Masjid Al Aqsa, also called Masjid Bayt al-Maqdis, resonates with the Hebrew term for the Temple, beit ha-mikdash). The Mount itself has been referred to in Muslim sources since the seventh century as Al Haram al Sharif or The Noble Sanctuary.7

As the pendulum swings between acts of homage and acts of conquest, the early Muslim tributes to the destroyed Temples give way to the Crusaders’ bloody conquest of the area in 1099, which will result in tens of thousands of Muslim and many Jewish casualties. The Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa will undergo only minor physical changes, most saliently some internal additions and, presumably, the replacement of the crescent on the roof with a cross (or at least that is the way it is represented in the illustrated manuscripts and maps of the time)—but they will be renamed and broadcast in Christendom as Templum Domini and Palatium Salomonis, respectively—attesting to the power of visual iconography and verbal representation.8

Less than a hundred years after the Crusader conquest, a letter attributed to Maimonides testifies to the selective permission granted to prominent Jews during this period to visit their ruined shrine: “I entered the Great and Holy House and I prayed in it on Thursday, the sixth day of Marheshvan” (corresponding to October 14, 1165).9 There is lively discussion among scholars as to what Maimonides would have meant by “the Great and Holy House,” given the ancient Jewish prohibition against “unclean persons” unknowingly trespassing on the site of the Holy of Holies. What would have been a contentious issue for the Rambam’s interlocutors and followers in the twelfth century is no less urgent in twenty-first-century Jerusalem.

Twenty-some years after Maimonides’s putative visit, in 1187, Saladin conquered Jerusalem and reinstated Muslim rule; he replaced the cross finial on the Dome of the Rock with the Islamic crescent, and some version of that emblem has remained to this day, not only in the physical site, but in most representations of the site.

It is clear even from the most cursory sketch that, on the whole, Jews fared better under the various Muslim rulers than they did under Christian rule. Jews began to return to Jerusalem in the twelfth–thirteenth centuries under the Ayyubids, followed by the Mamluks and the Turks—though access to the Temple Mount was restricted.10 Even the Jewish iconography of the Sacred Center represented the Dome of the Rock with its mosque and finial crescent, as mekom ha-mikdash (Place of the Temple) throughout the medieval and early modern period and as late as the 1920s, creating a fused, layered, or (relatively) peaceful coexistence of symbolic languages.11

Additionally—reflecting centrifugal impulses that had evolved during the Babylonian exile—there was, possibly as early as Second Temple times, and continuing through the Byzantine and early Muslim periods, another physical site in Jerusalem that competed with or complemented the Temple Mount. Buttressed by a talmudic text reflecting a practice that had expanded in the first centuries after the destruction of the Second Temple, the Mount of Olives—located on a mountain ridge directly facing the Temple Mount—was designated as the site to which the shekhina, the female presence or emanation of the Divine, had migrated.12 As powerful as the dialogue with Islam would become in its focus on the Temple Mount, another, subtler, dialogue with Christianity would evolve between the two mountains. The Mount of Olives and the adjacent mountain ridge would come to function as portal to a more pluralistic approach to the locus and emanation of holiness and would continue to animate the messianic as well as the poetic imagination. It is likely that Maimonides’s own pilgrimage would have begun on the Mount of Olives and proceeded as far as the Wailing Wall.

Even if Jews have a less plastic imagination than Christians for the details of eschatology, a rich Jewish mythology grew up around the cemetery on the Mount of Olives, where privileged souls have been buried over the centuries and where the Resurrection is scheduled to be launched. Stories and local folk practices from many diasporic communities testify to the belief that a grave there (or proof of purchase of such a plot in absentia) will expedite the process; when the Messiah arrives and a cosmic traffic jam ensues as the dispersed dead make their way through underground tunnels to the Holy Land, these privileged souls will already have reserved places. The Jews of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for example, prepared to meet their Redeemer by buying one grave in the local cemetery and another plot on the Mount of Olives. It was, by all accounts, a “valid legal transaction, with a bill of purchase placed in the hands of the deceased and buried with him or her.”13 The same impulse animates the eponymous character in S. Y. Agnon’s story “Tehila,” who periodically renews her “contract” with the burial society on the Mount of Olives until it is time, at the age of 104, to claim her plot (in both senses of the term).14

It may not be self-evident that having a “second” sacred center allows for a more expansive and inclusive imagination of the locus of holiness.15 On the other hand, that centripetal fantasies of proximity to and exclusive control over the Temple Mount breed only tragedy based on sacrificial impulses can be corroborated by a glance at the daily news headlines at almost any time over the past two millennia. Each successive clerical regime, when empowered and radicalized, has spawned its own culture of vengeance centered on the Temple Mount. When tolerance and coexistence give way to Holy War, there is room only for the Self in its most engorged form. Today, long after the swords of the Crusaders have rusted into artifacts and the blood of their victims irrigated the poetry of martyrdom, it is the turn of the Jews and the Muslims.

Actually, pilgrimage to an absent temple was hardly what the biblical redactors had in mind when they legislated the three holidays centered on the Temple of Solomon (Ex. 23:17; Deut. 16:17)—and, indeed, as we have already noted, later rabbinic injunction explicitly forbids ascent to the Temple Mount for risk of entering the space of the Holy of Holies in a ritually impure state. As we can see even in the ambiguity surrounding Maimonides’s “ascent” to the “House of God” in the twelfth century, most Jews over the centuries found substitutes for cults that had been suspended after the Temple was destroyed in 70 CE; only a handful of the Karaite “mourners of Zion” persisted in visiting the ruined shrine in sackcloth and ashes on the anniversary of the destruction of both Temples.16

Yet these words are being written during a time of ongoing violence sparked by religious Jewish zealots ready to kill and die for their exclusive claims to proximity to and sovereignty over those thirty-seven acres of real estate.17 The delicate status quo—in which the Waqf18 has authority over the mosques on the Haram al Sharif, Moslems are allowed to pray at the Dome of the Rock/Al Aqsa after rigid security checks, and Jews are generally barred from such access except as occasional tourists or by special permission—was reconfirmed after Israel conquered East Jerusalem, but is periodically challenged by Jewish messianists.

For the past few decades, beginning with Ariel Sharon’s provocative visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000—which sparked the violent “Second Intifada”—tensions have tended to mount in late fall, around the time of the pilgr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Note on Hebrew Transliteration
• Prologue   “Why Jerusalem?” The Politics of Poetry
• Introduction   “This House, which is called by My Name”
• part i   Literary Archaeologies
• part ii   Agnon’s Dilemma
• part iii   Amichai in the Breach
• Acknowledgments: Ancient Debts and Ongoing Gratitude
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Biblical Citations