Cultural Migrations of a Hanukkah Pilgrimage (original) (raw)
Pilgrimage in Turbulent Contexts: One Hundred Years of Pilgrimage to the Holy Land
ID: International Dialogue, 2012
In this paper, I review select developments in the last one hundred years of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic pilgrimage to sites found today in Israel and the Occupied Territories. I argue that only by viewing the pilgrimages under analysis as dissipative systems, is one able to explain historical change in this most turbulent of contexts. When combined with an understanding of pilgrimage as social action, this approach enables historians of religions to account for not only the restructuring of pilgrimages over time but also to understand dynamics surrounding ritual birth and death. Furthermore, the political strategies of traditionalists and revivalists who attempt to authenticate contemporary ritual behavior by linking it up to purportedly longstanding, unchanged practices are undermined. After initially focusing upon changes in pilgrimage catalyzed by socio-political events, I discuss the birth of distinctively new pilgrimages associated with the rise of the State of Israel as well as the demise of several other pilgrimages in the years since 1948.
2020
The history of Jewish peoplehood is one of constant migration, of moving from place to place by choice or force, and building a home on new grounds. This class will chart the trajectories of Jews throughout history, from biblical times to modernity. We will trace this movement around the globe by sampling the fiction, poetry, and essays left in its wake. Through surveying cultural expressions across time and geographies, the class presents Jewish identity and its many iterations, exploring lineages such as Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi heritage and intersections of gender and sexuality. The class syllabus contains three sections. The first introduces canonical sacred texts of Judaism, covering relevant narratives from the Tanakh, the Talmud, Midrash, and the Passover Haggadah. The second section explores the cosmopolitan transformation of Jewish culture through poetry, travelogues, and philosophy from medieval Iraq, Iran, and Andalusia (Southern Spain). The third section jumps forward to the 20th century, presenting the literature of Jewish immigrants before and after WWII, as they travel back and forth among Europe, North-Africa, Mandatory Palestine, Israel, and the US.
What are the connections between Judaism and tourism? Indeed, one may question the very idea of wedding these two concepts. One may wonder if Judaism, as a creed and a religious frame of reference, holds any particular understanding that serves and guides its adherents’ “touristic” approach. In this chapter, we explore the connections and dramatic changes in pilgrimage and religious tourism in Judaism and among Jewish pilgrims and tourists within a longue durée. We embark on a survey of pilgrimage in Judaism in history and end with contemporary manifestations of a variety of religious tourism phenomena. Thus, the chapter consists of three sections: pilgrimage in Judaism from its origins to the late 19th century, Jewish pilgrimage tourism in modernity, and current manifestations of Jewish heritage tourism. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of our main argument that Jewish tourism is not a thing but rather a process, which continues to change as the 21st century progresses and as the conceptual boundaries between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ are becoming more fluid, indeed with the sacred increasingly coming to encompass practices and sites that are not necessarily religious (e.g. tourism, war memorials, and sites of tragic death). Rigid dichotomies between pilgrimage and tourism no longer appear tenable in the shifting world of postmodern travel.
Christian Hajjis—the Other Orthodox Pilgrims to Jerusalem
In this article, Valentina Izmirlieva identifies the Christian “Hajj” to Jerusalem as an important Ottoman socio-cultural phenomenon. She argues that, by the nineteenth century, the Balkan Eastern Orthodox communities in the Ottoman Empire had restructured and reinterpreted their Holy Land pilgrimages to mirror the Muslim Hajj to Mecca. As a result, the ritual trip to Jerusalem was transformed into a mechanism for upward social mobility and communal empowerment. By exploring the structural and functional similarities between the Muslim and the Christian Hajj, this article contributes to studies of Muslim-Christian interactions outside “the clash of civilizations” paradigm. It also reveals striking distinctions between the Balkan Christian hajjis and the Russian palomniki, calling into question the influential scholarly assumption about homogeneity of Eastern Orthodox practices, an assumption that stands largely uncontested in the Slavic field.
Religions
Whereas the conflict over Palestine’s’ holy places and their role in forming Israeli or Palestinian national identity is well studied, this article brings to the fore an absent perspective. It shows that in the first half of the 20th century Muslims and Jews in Jerusalem shared holy sites, religious beliefs and feasts. Jewish–Muslim encounters of that period went much beyond pre-modern practices of cohabitation, to the extent of developing joint local patriotism. On the other hand, religious and other holy sites were instrumental in the Jewish and Palestinian exclusive nation building process rather than an inclusive one, thus contributing to escalate the national conflict.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent significant transformations in its political conduct, the cultural and religious life of its subjects, and material culture and consumption of goods, as well as important demographic changes (mainly fluctuating numbers, movement and migration of population). The urban landscape, economy, social hierarchies, religious life, culture and patterns of consumption all underwent dramatic change, not necessarily voluntary or resulting from the will of the authorities. Naturally, all these also had their effect upon the Jewish minority that resided in the cities.
2023
In Jewish memory, the notion of diaspora is as old as known history. The patriarchs themselves spent significant periods of their lives in Mesopotamia and Egypt and dispersion, often combined with a life as a minority, has been part of Jewish existence ever since. It is thus necessary to limit oneself to a clearly defined point of view when discussing this complex topic. In this paper I examine the notion of diaspora from the point of view of Classical and Hebrew studies, with a methodology and perspective necessary for, and shaped by, the interpretation of Hebrew and Greek, Jewish and non-Jewish sources, primarily from antiquity. Philologists take texts, terms and concepts as their points of departure, analysing and evaluating them and placing them in appropriate contexts in order to discover relevant aspects of their meaning and significance, employing the methods of scholarship. It is in this sense that I will take the term 'diaspora' here as my starting point. I will examine this term analytically from a number of angles in order to shed light on its layers of meaning as well as on some of its important contexts. I will proceed by discussing categories and dichotomies, including some dilemmas, taking my examples mostly from antiquity. The dichotomies I will discuss are the following: 'diaspora' and 'galut'; Judaism in the sense of a people and as a religion; centre and periphery or boundary; and the two major types of diaspora environment: pagan and Christian. The Jewish exegete Philo of Alexandria was among the first to articulate the idea that a sacred (authoritative) text may have several layers of meaning simultaneously. 36 These layers do not always agree with, and may sometimes even contradict, one another, but they all rest on a common foundation: the simple, concrete and everyday meaning of the text. The vesture of the high priest may symbolise the cosmos and therefore, his activity may have universal significance, yet his garment also exists as palpable reality. 37 In rabbinical hermeneutics, this layer of meaning is called pshat ,)פשט( to be distinguished from drash ,)דרש( i.e. the sense derived-literally, 'explored'-from the pshat, as well as further, more abstract, allegorical, philosophical or mystical levels of meaning. 38 One may observe a similar hermeneutical structure in Christian interpretations of the Scriptures.