Pfoh 2015 Review of K.W. Whitelam (ed.) Holy Land as Homeland? Models for Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2011), RBL 07/2015 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Christian Maps of the Holy Land: Images and Meanings (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020): TOC and Introduction
2020
This book offers a way of reading maps of the Holy Land as visual imagery with religious connotations. Through a corpus of representative examples created between the sixth and the nineteenth centuries, it studies the maps as iconic imagery of an iconic landscape and analyses their strategies to manifest the spiritual quality of the biblical topography, to support religious tenets, and to construct and preserve cultural memory. Maps of the Holy Land have thus far been studied with methodologies such as cartography and historical geography, while the main question addressed was the reliability of the maps as cartographic documents. Through another perspective and using the methodology of visual studies, this book reveals that maps of the Holy Land constructed religious messages and were significant instruments through which different Christian cultures (Byzantine, Catholic, Protestant, and Greek Orthodox) shaped their religious identities. It does not seek to ascertain how the maps delivered geographical information, but rather how they utilized the geographical information in formulating religious and cultural values. Through its examination of maps of the Holy Land, this book thus explores both Christian visual culture and Christian spirituality throughout the centuries. http://www.brepols.net/Pages/ShowProduct.aspx?prod\_id=IS-9782503585260-1
The Modern Image of the Holy Land Through the Manuscripts of Some Christian Missionaries
This article aims to analyse the modern image of the Holy Land as it emerges from the accounts of several missionaries who visited this territory during the 19th century. The article will specifically examine the biography of William Lethaby (1910), who, with his wife, was affiliated with The Wesleyan Methodists, and the manuscripts of Father Jaussen (1908, 1927), a Catholic missionary from France. The experiences of these people, crystallised in the historical texts that portray their lives, tell us about the encounter between two different cultural worlds. The missionaries or travellers immersed themselves in the local field, took possession of it and rebuilt it according to their personal cultural sensibility, making it accessible to a wider Western audience. Thanks to this very act of force based on the written word, they reconstructed the image of the Holy Land, of its heart, Jerusalem, of its inhabitants and of the rights of the three monotheistic religions. They rewrote the local history and suggested the future of this land. The Holy Land and Jerusalem do not exist per se, but they are constructed according to the personal perception of these people through the conviction of their moral and cultural superiority. Firstly, regarding the view of the Holy Land by Orientalists, the analysis of these sources gives an insight into the historical meaning and scope of the cultural acquisition process of the Holy Land and Jerusalem by the West. Secondly, the study of these sources helps to reconfigure some modernist interpretations of the socio-political evolution of this land. Finally, understanding the dynamics behind this encounter between different cultural perspectives explains the complexity of the consequences of Western activities within the Holy Land and Jerusalem, which gave rise to a specific image of this land that is still employed to describe and communicate it.
Contested Narratives of Storied Places – The Holy Lands
Religion and Society: Advances in Research 5, pp. 106-27., 2014
The articles on the Holy Lands provide a wide range of perspectives on the production, practice, and representation of sacred space, as expressions of knowledge and power. The experience of space of the pilgrim and the politically committed tourist is characterized by desire, distance, impermanence, contestation, entextualization, and the entwinement of the spiritual and the material. The wealth of historical Christian and Western narratives/images of the Holy Land, the short duration of pilgrimage, the encounter with otherness, the entextualization of sites, and the semiotic nature of tourism all open a gap between the perceptions of pilgrims and those of ‘natives’. Although the intertwining of symbolic condensation, legitimation and power make these Holy Land sites extremely volatile, many pilgrimages sidestep confrontation with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as inimical to the spirit of pilgrimage.The comparative view of the practices of contemporary Holy Land pilgrims demonstrates how communitas and conflict, openness and isolation are constantly being negotiated.
Quest. Issues in Contemporary Jewish History. Journal of Fondazione CDEC, 2013
Rich in historical details and artistic illustrations of the Near East and the Holy Land, the selected accounts of journeys and pilgrimages written by European and American Christians (Catholic and Protestant) provide numerous and broad sets of views, landscapes, sketches and scenarios. This article analyses them in order to define and point out the structure and the ratio of organizing and cataloguing these “epic” stories, and their relationship and connection with the socio-political dimension of the time. In particular, this article analyses the concept and the image produced by Christian missionaries and travelers of various affiliations, thus identifying similarities and differences between their visions of the Holy Land and pointing out to what extent they contributed to the creation of an univocal “Christian” image of the Holy Land during the 19th century and/or there were perceptible and significant divergences.
An interdisciplinary conference, 26 &27 May 2016 University of Amsterdam. The Holy Land has played an important role in the definition of the identities of the three major Abrahamic religions. Constitutive narratives about the past of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were largely bound to this shared and contested space. As put forward both by Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assmann, memory adheres to what is ‘solid’, stored away in outward symbols. The Holy Land is a focal point around which the shared memories of these different groups formed, and has been crucial for defining their identities. Accordingly, the definition of this shared memory can be traced as a process of elaborating a cultural memory: an ‘artificial’ construction of developed traditions, transmissions and transferences. This process of construction was pursued through different media that cast the past into symbols. The period between the age of Constantine and the late Renaissance was formative for constructing this memory. It saw the valorization of Christian holy places under Constantine, the birth of Islam, the construction of an important Jewish scholarly community in the Holy Land, the Crusades, the massive growth of late medieval pilgrimage involving Jewish, Christian and Islamic groups, as well as other crucial events. The conference aims to bring together scholars who study the memories of the holy places within these religious galaxies from various disciplinary perspectives, in order to achieve a constructive exchange of ideas. This conference is organized by the team of the research project Cultural Memory and Identity in the Late Middle Ages: the Franciscans of Mount Zion in Jerusalem and the Representation of the Holy Land (1333-1516): Michele Campopiano, Valentina Covaci, Guy Geltner and Marianne Ritsema van Eck. The project is funded by the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO).