Joint Jewish and Muslim Holy Places, Religious Beliefs and Festivals in Jerusalem between the Late 19th Century and 1948 (original) (raw)
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From shared Muslim−Jewish holy sites and feasts to exclusivity claims, the case of Jerusalem
The Religious Studies Review, 2023
Below I discuss two models of Jerusalem's holy sites and religious costumes: joint Jewish-Muslim shrines and the divided one. The joint model emerged in the late 19 th century in direct relation to endorsing modernization and developing local patriotism. The escalating Zionist-Palestinian conflict since the late 1920s produced the separated holy sites model. Jerusalem is the arena where the two models expressed forcefully due to its high religious status and national centrality.
The changing identity of Muslim Jewish holy places in the State of Israel 1948 2018
Middle Eastern Studies, 2023
Over the past seven decades, dozens of Muslim holy places in Israel have undergone a process of Judaization, becoming an integral part of the Israeli-Jewish sacred landscape. The current paper compares three waves of Judaization that followed the 1948 and 1967 wars, emphasizing the institutional and popular character of this process. The appropriation of Muslim holy places and their conversion is tied to the political, social, and religious changes that Israeli society underwent during its seventy years of existence. During these decades, Jewish holy spaces gained social, cultural, and religious importance; visiting them became a popular pastime. As the demand for holy places grew, former Muslim sites were converted and became part of Jewish sacred space. The process of transformation took place in parallel on two planes – the institutional and the popular – as both Israeli governmental bodies and worshipers converted Muslim holy places into Jewish sacred sites. The outcome of the process was the expansion of sacred space in the State of Israel and the inclusion of the periphery, which in many cases contained former Muslim holy places, as an integral part of the Jewish map of holy places.
Religion Compass Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 69–78, March 2013
A long history of intercommunal relations around local holy places in historic Palestine (a history which sadly seems to be coming to a close in the current day) draws attention to what precisely is the character of the attachment felt by local residents to sacred sites. Muslim-Christian ‘sharing’ of holy places (maqam, plural maqamat) can be seen to express a dependency on powers perceived of as resident in a site, and the nominal affiliation of these powers to one religion or another is often not a matter of great concern to those frequenting the shrines. It is, however, a focal concern of the officiants of the respective religions who lay claim to the sites and who seek to expunge heterodox practices and traces of ambiguous affiliation (cf. Hayden 2002 and 2011). I here investigate records of local usages of religious sites, largely rural, in Palestine up through the Mandate Period in order to argue that shared shrines, as opposed to those which appear to be communally homogeneous, foreground issues of agency obscured in those sites under the control of religious authorities.
Jerusalem at the intersection of Zionism and Palestinian Nationalism. Updated Febr 2020
For thirteen hundred years, from the time of the Arab conquest until 1948, Jerusalem was dominated by states that governed the holy city on the principle of plural rights to presence and access to a plurality of holy places. There are many reasons for this millennial peace. The relative tranquility of the city and of the larger political order had many fathers, including mutual fear and suspicion between the local population and distant imperial centers, the significance for many centuries of the Levant for international trade, and the relative stability of Ottoman rule, at least until the 19th century. There were harbingers of ethnic and religious conflict from the moment European Christian powers began to assert greater presence and gain rights of representation in the holy land through the system of “capitulations,” but those sporadic incidents of violence cannot compare with the systemic changes in the communal balance of power heralded by the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917. The first post-Balfour-clashes in Jerusalem occurred in 1920, during the annual pilgrimage festival of Nebi Musa, and the Western Wall riots of 1929 were significant enough to disrupt British and Zionist confidence in a peaceful implementation of Balfour, as enshrined in the official documents of the League of Nations mandate for Palestine. The holy places of Jerusalem have remained flashpoints of a conflict that, since Balfour, has been between two competing aspirations for national sovereignty and self-determination in the holy land and the holy city. The civilian unification of the city under Israeli rule, following the June 1967 war, came with assurances of the Israeli government that guaranteed freedom of access to the holy places to members of all religions. Nevertheless, the city has become ever more divided along sectarian as well as national, historical, and linguistic lines, a division that unification under Israeli rule has been unable to overcome. In the following, I will review the narratives of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, ideologies that have inevitably clashed in Jerusalem. The centenary of the Balfour Declaration is a timely reminder of the fundamental changes in the character of the holy land and the holy city that have occurred since the First World War and the reorganization of the Middle East that followed the demise of the Ottoman Empire.
The paper intends to explore some insufficiently studied but increasingly important patterns of the interaction between traditional Palestinian Christian identities and new local religious and religio-poltical developments, ranging from the impact of Russian Christian immigration in Israel to recently ideologized sacral heritage policies and politics and archaeological and pseudo-archaeological ventures in the Holy Land. While mostly under the radar of current scholarly and theological exploration, these interactions betray some novel types of religious dynamics on both elite and popular levels which deserve closer attention. The fluctuating and sometimes unpredictable outcomes of these processes have a direct impact on Palestinian Christian educational concepts and practices and new initiatives in this sphere such as those introduced through Russian ecclesiastical channels. These processes also affect a variety of Palestinian Christian attitudes (general, idiosyncratic and reformist-leaning) to ancient and medieval Christian heritage and continuities in the Holy Land against the background of latest shifts on the religious arena in Israel, Palestine and the Middle East.
'Reconstructing the Past: The Creation of Jewish Sacred Space in the State of Israel
The outcome of Israel's War of Independence was the main catalyst for the creation of a new map of Jewish pilgrimage sites. Places of only secondary importance before the war now turned into central cult centers. Several categories of the sacred sites are discussed herein: sites in the possession of Jews before the 1948 war that were developed during the 1950s as central cult centers; sacred sites owned by Muslims prior to the war, which were "converted" into Jewish sacred sites during the 1950s; and new Jewish pilgrimage sites created only after the establishment of the State of Israel, whose importance relied exclusively on newly created sacred traditions. The research demonstrates how various official, semi-official, and popular powers took part in the shaping of the Jewish sacred space. Veneration of saints is a universal phenomenon in both monotheistic and polytheistic creeds.³ e saints were perceived as intermediaries between a petitioner and god-and in this sense Judaism was not different. From at least the Crusader period until today, Jewish pilgrims venerated the different sacred sites, most of them tombs of Jewish saints. e graves functioned as cairns, claim stakes to assert Judaism's historical presence in this region. ey were also perceived as tangible evidence that Judaism once flourished in this holy landscape.
This essay examines the Christian and Muslim Palestinian uses of two West Bank Christian holy places - the Greek Orthodox Monastery of Mar Elyas (The Prophet Elijah) located on the Hebron Road between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and the municipal shrine of Bîr es-Sayideh (The Well of the Lady) in Beit Sahour, a mile to the east of Bethlehem. It showshow Palestinians of different religious affiliations interpret the significance of a holy place and define their relationship to it. The investigation of the activities taking place around theshrine of Mar Elyas on the prophet's feast day in 1984 shows that the place had verydifferent meanings to the various groups of people who attended the feast. My analysis willshow how the members of these groups interpreted the site and their engagement with it.This multivocality of place raises the issue of the politics involved in "fixing" its meaning.
Territories and identities in Jerusalem
2001
Jerusalem is a city of many contrasts. It is a historical-symbolic city, revered by Muslims, Christians and Jews. However, its citizens segregate ethno-nationally, culturally and socially, into different identity groups: Jews and Arabs, Haredi ('ultra-Orthodox') and secular Jews, and lower and upper class socioeconomic groups. This essay focuses on how political and social struggles over territories reshape the nature of the identities of four distinct groups in Jerusalem. These are ethnonational groups (Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs), cultural groups (ultra-Orthodox Jews, in Hebrew Haredim (zealots), and non-Orthodox Jews), ethno-social groups (disadvantaged groups mainly of oriental descent, in Hebrew Mizrahim and advantaged groups) and economic and ecological groups (the business sector and inhabitants of private residential areas of the city). Thus, long-term historical processes have produced distinct ethno-national, cultural and social identity groups, which occupy specific territories within Jerusalem. The different groups have endowed their territory with dissimilar geopolitical, cultural, and economic meanings and played a major role in the reconstruction of national, cultural, social and ecological identities in the city. The city of Jerusalem is not only a spiritual centre associated with age-long dreams for peace and justice, it is also a violent city, rife with tensions and conflicts, a symbol of national, cultural, economic and ecological struggles. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing all those concerned about its future is whether Jerusalem's universal image of a spiritual, tolerant and just city can overcome its current, particularistic and conflict ridden image.