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.
Nonfiction
Figuring Jerusalem: Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center
January 3, 2022
Discussion Questions
Jerusalem, “the most longed-for and fought-for city,” may also be the most written-about city in the world. In this brilliant study, Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi sets out to examine and illuminate descriptions of the city by re-reading classical texts ranging from the Bible via medieval Jewish thought (Maimonides’ Guide) to Modern Hebrew literature (Agnon and Amichai). In the last few decades, scholars have raised our awareness of political theology and the role it plays not only in pre-Modern societies but also in what we may call Modern secular society and its political sphere. Ezrahi’s Figuring Jerusalem propels our understanding of the connection between the sacred and the “here and now” and the ways it is constructed by tracing and valorizing the poetic and political posture of the texts.
The contribution of this study, or better to say, literary archaeology, is manifold; first and foremost, it presents key literary moments of the Jewish imagination as they construct their “Jerusalem.” It presents a rigorous and highly creative method of reading “canonic Jewish text,” seamlessly moving between several disciplines including literary interpretation, sociology of religion, history, and political philosophy. It challenges and expands the conventions of the “Jewish canon” as it equally examines Maimonides and Agnon, Song of Solomon, and the poetry of the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. Ezrahi’s insightful presentation is also a delight to read.
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