Identifying Conflict: The Temple Mount in Jerusalem as a Lieu de Mémoire and the Production and Nature of Sacred Resources (original) (raw)
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Introduction to the Theme: The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual
AJS Review, 2019
The following group of essays emerged out of a seminar held at the Association for Jewish Studies conference in 2015. As section heads of Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity and Rabbinic Literature and Culture, tasked to think about how to address gaps in our fields, we recognized that despite a large amount of scholarship available on the Jerusalem Temple and its priesthood, there was a dearth of cross-disciplinary scholarly exchange, especially between ancient Jewish historians and those of us who engage in literary analysis of rabbinic sources. As a result, our divisions joined together to create “The Jerusalem Temple in History, Memory, and Ritual,” taking advantage of the “seminar” format at the conference. Twelve scholars, each working with different source material and employing different methodological approaches, participated.
The Temple Mount/al-Aqsa in Zionist and Palestinian National Consciousness A Comparative View
While the Temple Mount/al-Aqsa Mosque constitutes a national and religious focal point for both Israelis and Palestinians, there have been profound differences in the attitudes of the competing national movements to this site. The Zionist movement attempted to create alternative, secular holy places (such as the Jezreel Valley and the Hebrew University) in order to detach itself from blunt messianism, while the Palestinians, from the Mandate period onward, have emphasized their attachment to the holy site in Jerusalem. The revival of suppressed messianic sentiments in Israeli society, however, exposes the religious dimension of the conflict and accentuates the role of the holy sites in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
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.
One of the most intriguing phenomena in the study of sacred space and pilgrimage to holy places is how believers of different faiths may share sanctity. Scholars and historians of religion have not infrequently noticed that the nature of a holy place retains its sanctity when it changes hands. Once a site has been recognized as holy, the sanctity adheres to it, irrespective of political and religious vicissitudes. 1 Nowhere else, perhaps, is this rule more applicable than in the Holy Land. Over the past two thousand years, the country has changed hands repeatedly, generally in major wars of conquest that brought new rulers into power. These wars have also changed the official religion of the country. During the first millennium CE, it passed from Jewish to pagan rule, then becoming Christian and Muslim; in the second millennium it was successively Muslim, Christian, again Muslim, and finally Jewish. The changing religion of the rulers did not necessarily affect the inhabitants' faith; in fact, members of different religions were always living side by side, practicing different degrees of coexistence. While some of their holy places and the sacred traditions associated with them are exclusive to one religion, many others are shared by two of the three faiths or even by all three. Unfortunately, only rarely has the sharing of traditions become a foundation for dialogue and amity. For the most part, it has become a bone of contention; dialectically, in fact, the greater the similarity and the reciprocity, the greater the argument, rivalry, and competition, each group of believers straining to confirm its own exclusivity and prove its absolute right to the tradition and the holy place. Such tensions are particularly prominent in Jerusalem. The city as a whole is sacred to the three religions, and certain areas in it are venerated by all three, sometimes for very similar ideological reasons. The Temple Mount -the site of the Temple -and the Mount of Olives -the site of the resurrection and the Last Judgment -are obvious examples. In addition, several holy places in and around Jerusalem are venerated by members of more than one religion. Prominent examples are David's Tomb on Mount Zion, Samuel's Tomb north of Jerusalem, Rachel's Tomb between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, and the Tomb of the Prophetess Huldah on the Mount of Olives. 2 The
Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, 2006
Abstract Archaeological involvement in the holy places of Jerusalem has become a focus of professional and public concern during recent years. The two sacred areas of the Temple Mount and the Holy Sepulchre combine their role as historical and architectural monuments of supreme importance with their daily use as central religious sites. The connection between scholars, mainly archaeologists and architects, who studied these monuments, and the local religious authorities in charge of the holy sites has accompanied research on Jerusalem since the mid-nineteenth century. The main issues to be analyzed in this paper are related to the ways archaeologists and other scholars are involved with the major holy sites of Jerusalem: how the ‘owners’ of the Temple Mount and the Holy Sepulchre viewed these scholars and their research; to what degree they were prepared to cooperate with them; what their motives were for doing so and how archaeologists and other researchers operated and adhered to scholarly interests in such complex sites. The Jerusalem case study is used to investigate the larger scope of interrelations between the academic world and the religious ‘owners’ of holy sites in other locations. Keywords: Jerusalem, religion and nationalism, holy places, site ownership, public archaeology
The historical hardships of Jerusalem as a holy city
MEPEI Website, 2024
In the context of the 2021 Israeli-Palestine crisis during which civilians were killed or severely wounded on both sides, that reminds the world of past attrocities, Jerusalem remains a central point of contention in scholar, political and public discourse. The dispute related to who and how should own, rule or inhabit the city represents probably one of the oldest unanswered set of questions and the odds to obtain definitive answers in the near future are not at the horizon yet. This article does not aim to provide such answers, but it will reassess the historical trajectory of this place and hardships it had to overcome despite being considered a holy city in the three major monoteistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). The preliminary assesment of major historical accounts and specialist literature on this topic, which is immense, indicates fundamentally different perspectives on this city, its history and particularly the meaning of various historical events. Furthermore, the invocation of religious texts-not accepted in nowadays scientific proceedings as historical accounts-with the purpose of asserting various rights or justifying grave, large-scale, armed aggressions that the world considers a problem of the past, becomes an ambiguous paradigm in the broadly accepted framework of modern international relations. The preliminary assessment has also indicated that the dichotomy between Jerusalem as a geographical location, a concept variable in time, and the religious concepts associated with Jerusalem that have been pursued by certain followers of one of the three monotheistic religions mentioned above has given birth to many conflicts among various groups throughout history.
This article focuses on a tragic event: the destruction of the old synagogue in the Jewish quarter of Damascus by the Muslim authorities, which probably occurred in 1552. The sources for this event are diverse and not entirely in agreement. This article tries, first, to recover the historical details. In so doing, it also seeks to demonstrate that an earlier analysis of one of the main sources on the event, which claims that the destruction took place in Jerusalem in 1542, is wrong. The historical memory of this event in recent centuries took shape among the Damascene Jews in various ways. Even though the event occurred close to the spring holiday of Passover, the community commemorated it on the summer fast day of Tish’ah be’av , to which were ‘attached’ many tragedies throughout Jewish history, in addition to the destruction of the two temples. The Jews of Damascus recalled the destruction of the old synagogue by reciting a lamentation describing the event. This lamentation was preserved in two different versions, in Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic. In addition, popular legendary accounts of the destruction were transmitted from generation to generation. A close examination of these accounts and their motifs illuminates the process of shaping a common memory within the community. Some historical facts were forgotten, while various mythical elements appeared in the legends. These legends, however, along with the lamentations, ensured the transmission of the story to each successive generation. The modes employed by Jews in Islamic countries to preserve and remember their own history sometimes differ from the forms of collective memory employed among the Jews in the Christian world. This article offers a possible starting point for future research on this topic