BiblioVault - Books about Jerusalem

Athens and Jerusalem

Lev Shestov

Ohio University Press, 2016

For more than two thousand years, philosophers and theologians have wrestled with the irreconcilable opposition between Greek rationality (Athens) and biblical revelation (Jerusalem). In Athens and Jersusalem, Lev Shestov—an inspiration for the French existentialists and the foremost interlocutor of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber during the interwar years—makes the gripping confrontation between these symbolic poles of ancient wisdom his philosophical testament, an argumentative and stylistic tour de force.

Although the Russian-born Shestov is little known in the Anglophone world today, his writings influenced many twentieth-century European thinkers, such as Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov’s final, groundbreaking work on the philosophy of religion from an existential perspective. This new, annotated edition of Bernard Martin’s classic translation adds references to the cited works as well as glosses of passages from the original Greek, Latin, German, and French. Athens and Jerusalem is Shestov at his most profound and most eloquent and is the clearest expression of his thought that shaped the evolution of continental philosophy and European literature in the twentieth century.

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Be Not Conformed

Rene Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley

Luke Burgis

Catholic University of America Press, 2026

René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the most influential interdisciplinary thinkers of the 20th century. His mimetic theory—which argues that human desire is fundamentally imitative and that rivalry and conflict arise from this imitation—cuts across philosophy, anthropology, history, literary criticism, theology, and more. To manage the destructive potential of mimetic rivalry, societies resort to violence, often in the form of what he called the scapegoat mechanism. The implications of his theory for today’s world are profound. This volume brings together essays that place Girard in conversation with other major thinkers, including Dietrich von Hildebrand, Luigi Giussani, and Marshall McLuhan, while exploring his insights on technology, education, and race. Though Girard spent most of his career as a professor at Stanford, his influence extends beyond academia. His thought has shaped Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, who recognized the impact of mimetic dynamics on innovation, competition, and value creation. Many of the essays in Be Not Conformed originated from the NOVITĀTE Conference at The Catholic University of America held in November 2023 to mark the centennial of Girard’s birth. The book’s subtitle—René Girard at the Nexus of Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley—reflects his synthesis of classical philosophy, theological depth, and modern technological discourse. Bishop Robert Barron has called Girard a potential future “father of the Church,” underscoring the lasting significance of his work. This volume offers an exploration of Girard’s legacy, revealing why his ideas remain essential for understanding today’s cultural and intellectual landscape. You will find in the pages of Be Not Conformed a glimpse of the width, breadth, depth, and grandeur of this singular thinker.

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Belmont Castle

The Excavation of a Crusader Stronghold in the Kingdom of Jerusalem

Richard Harper

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2000

This is the final publication of excavations conducted by the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem on the Crusader castle of Belmont (Suba) between 1986 and 1989. The account of the excavation is accompanied by specialist reports and concludes with a discussion of the castle's architecture, its military functions, and its economic role.

Library of Congress subject headings for this publication:
Belmont Castle Site (West Bank)
Excavations (Archaeology) -- West Bank.
West Bank -- Antiquities.
Jerusalem -- History -- Latin Kingdom, 1099-1244.

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The Best School in Jerusalem

Annie Landau’s School for Girls, 1900–1960

Laura S. Schor

Brandeis University Press, 2013

Annie Edith (Hannah Judith) Landau (1873–1945), born in London to immigrant parents and educated as a teacher, moved to Jerusalem in 1899 to teach English at the Anglo-Jewish Association’s Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. A year later she became its principal, a post she held for forty-five years. As a member of Jerusalem’s educated elite, Landau had considerable influence on the city’s cultural and social life, often hosting parties that included British Mandatory officials, Jewish dignitaries, Arab leaders, and important visitors. Her school, which provided girls of different backgrounds with both a Jewish and a secular education, was immensely popular and often had to reject candidates, for lack of space. A biography of both an extraordinary woman and a thriving institution, this book offers a lens through which to view the struggles of the nascent Zionist movement, World War I, poverty and unemployment in the Yishuv, and the relations between the religious and secular sectors and between Arabs and Jews, as well as Landau’s own dual loyalties to the British and to the evolving Jewish community.

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Bulletins and Supplementary Papers of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1922–1931

Jessica Holland

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2023

Bulletins and Supplementary Papers of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, 1922–1931 has been republished by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) in 2023, with a newly commissioned introductory text. CBRL was formed as a merger from the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, and the British Institute at Amman for Archaeology and History in 1998. 100 years after their original publication, the republication of these bulletins and newsletters from the founding years of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem offers important insights into the history of the institution, and also into the discipline of archaeology in the period of the British Mandate in Palestine.

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Chasing the Shadow

Mickey Marcus's 200 Days of Destiny

Steven L. Ossad

University of Missouri Press, 2024

The life of David “Mickey” Marcus has become the stuff of legends and myths (even fantasy), conspiracy, wild exaggeration, and untethered embellishment. The image of Marcus cast by the character portrayed by Kirk Douglas in the film version of his life still dominates most evocations of the man, for good or ill. And these days, reactions to the book or film rest mostly on the current headlines rather than the historical context of the struggle in which Marcus died, or the events that cast him as a real-life player in an event marked by destiny.

Chasing the Shadow: Mickey Marcus’s 200 Days of Destiny is the first comprehensive and balanced biography of David Daniel “Mickey” Marcus, a founder of American Civil Affairs and Military Government doctrine and practice and a seminal figure in early Israeli military history. Far from merely a tribute to Mickey Marcus's legacy, Ossad’s work serves as a critical tool for understanding the realities of mid-20th-century warfare in a Postwar colonial struggle and the dynamics of U.S.-Israeli military and political relations in 1948, the critical year for Israel’s struggle for independence. Indeed, Chasing the Shadow is a valuable read for those interested in Middle East history, Jewish military history, and a fascinating character whose story is told in an engaging, informative, and insightful narrative.

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Daughter Zion

Her Portrait, Her Response

Mark J. Boda

SBL Press, 2012

This volume showcases recent exploration of the portrait of Daughter Zion as “she” appears in biblical Hebrew poetry. Using Carleen Mandolfo’s Daughter Zion Talks Back to the Prophets (Society of Biblical Literature, 2007) as a point of departure, the contributors to this volume explore the image of Daughter Zion in its many dimensions in various texts in the Hebrew Bible. Approaches used range from poetic, rhetorical, and linguistic to sociological and ideological. To bring the conversation full circle, Carleen Mandolfo engages in a dialogic response with her interlocutors. The contributors are Mark J. Boda, Mary L. Conway, Stephen L. Cook, Carol J. Dempsey, LeAnn Snow Flesher, Michael H. Floyd, Barbara Green, John F. Hobbins, Mignon R. Jacobs, Brittany Kim, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Christl M. Maier, Carleen Mandolfo, Jill Middlemas, Kim Lan Nguyen, and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer.

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An Epitaph for German Judaism

From Halle to Jerusalem

Emil Fackenheim

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Emil Fackenheim’s life work was to call upon the world at large—and on philosophers, Christians, Jews, and Germans in particular—to confront the Holocaust as an unprecedented assault on the Jewish people, Judaism, and all humanity. In this memoir, to which he was making final revisions at the time of his death, Fackenheim looks back on his life, at the profound and painful circumstances that shaped him as a philosopher and a committed Jewish thinker.

Interned for three months in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp after Kristallnacht, Fackenheim was released and escaped to Scotland and then to Canada, where he lived in a refugee internment camp before eventually becoming a congregational rabbi and then, for thirty-five years, a professor of philosophy. He recalls here what it meant to be a German Jew in North America, the desperate need to respond to the crisis in Europe and to cope with its overwhelming implications for Jewish identity and community. His second great turning point came in 1967, as he saw Jews threatened with another Holocaust, this time in Israel. This crisis led him on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and ultimately back to Germany, where he continued to grapple with the question, How can the Jewish faith—and the Christian faith—exist after the Holocaust?

“An ‘epoch-making’ autobiography.”—Arnold Ages, Jewish Tribune

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Figuring Jerusalem

Politics and Poetics in the Sacred Center

Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi

University of Chicago Press, 2022

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.

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Gershom Scholem

From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back

Noam Zadoff

Brandeis University Press, 2017

German-born Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem (1897–1982), the preeminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, delved into the historical analysis of kabbalistic literature from late antiquity to the twentieth century. His writings traverse Jewish historiography, Zionism, the phenomenology of mystical religion, and the spiritual and political condition of contemporary Judaism and Jewish civilization. Scholem famously recounted rejecting his parents’ assimilationist liberalism in favor of Zionism and immigrating to Palestine in 1923, where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation’s intellectual landscape in Mandatory Palestine. Despite Scholem’s public renunciation of Germany for Israel, Zadoff explores how the life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins.

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A Historical Archaeology of Jerusalem

Bronze and Iron Ages

Yuval Gadot

SBL Press, 2026

In the first book to examine Jerusalem’s archaeological remains in detail since Kathleen M. Kenyon’s Digging Up Jerusalem (1974), Yuval Gadot reexamines the results of more than one hundred years of excavations and incorporates findings from recent research based on the most up-to-date scientific methods. The book covers six pivotal periods of Jerusalem’s development and correlates those with historical texts, including those from the Hebrew Bible, for the purpose of portraying a nuanced and detailed reconstruction of Jerusalem during the Bronze and Iron Ages. More than one hundred color illustrations and maps supplement Gadot’s analysis of the archaeological data and reconstruction of Jerusalem’s history. This volume presents the most complete picture of Jerusalem’s history for scholars and students interested in the city’s role as a royal seat and a religious center.

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Jerusalem 1900

The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities

Vincent Lemire

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Perhaps the most contested patch of earth in the world, Jerusalem’s Old City experiences consistent violent unrest between Israeli and Palestinian residents, with seemingly no end in sight. Today, Jerusalem’s endless cycle of riots and arrests appears intractable—even unavoidable—and it looks unlikely that harmony will ever be achieved in the city. But with Jerusalem 1900, historian Vincent Lemire shows us that it wasn’t always that way, undoing the familiar notion of Jerusalem as a lost cause and revealing a unique moment in history when a more peaceful future seemed possible.

In this masterly history, Lemire uses newly opened archives to explore how Jerusalem’s elite residents of differing faiths cooperated through an intercommunity municipal council they created in the mid-1860s to administer the affairs of all inhabitants and improve their shared city. These residents embraced a spirit of modern urbanism and cultivated a civic identity that transcended religion and reflected the relatively secular and cosmopolitan way of life of Jerusalem at the time. These few years would turn out to be a tipping point in the city’s history—a pivotal moment when the horizon of possibility was still open, before the council broke up in 1934, under British rule, into separate Jewish and Arab factions. Uncovering this often overlooked diplomatic period, Lemire reveals that the struggle over Jerusalem was not historically inevitable—and therefore is not necessarily intractable. Jerusalem 1900 sheds light on how the Holy City once functioned peacefully and illustrates how it might one day do so again.

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Jerusalem Besieged

From Ancient Canaan to Modern Israel

Eric H. Cline

University of Michigan Press, 2005

"Jerusalem Besieged is a fascinating account of how and why a baffling array of peoples, ideologies, and religions have fought for some four thousand years over a city without either great wealth, size, or strategic importance. Cline guides us through the baffling, but always bloody, array of Jewish, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, Ottoman, Western, Arab, and Israeli fights for possession of such a symbolic prize in a manner that is both scholarly and engaging."
-Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture

"A beautifully lucid presentation of four thousand years of history in a single volume. Cline writes primarily as an archaeologist-avoiding polemic and offering evidence for any religious claims-yet he has also incorporated much journalistic material into this study. Jerusalem Besieged will enlighten anyone interested in the history of military conflict in and around Jerusalem."
-Col. Rose Mary Sheldon, Virginia Military Institute

"This groundbreaking study offers a fascinating synthesis of Jerusalem's military history from its first occupation into the modern era. Cline amply deploys primary source material to investigate assaults on Jerusalem of every sort, starting at the dawn of recorded history. Jerusalem Besieged is invaluable for framing the contemporary situation in the Middle East in the context of a very long and pertinent history."
-Baruch Halpern, Pennsylvania State University

A sweeping history of four thousand years of struggle for control of one city

"[An] absorbing account of archaeological history, from the ancient Israelites' first conquest to today's second intifada. Cline clearly lays out the fascinating history behind the conflicts."
-USA Today

"A pleasure to read, this work makes this important but complicated subject fascinating."
-Jewish Book World

"Jerusalem Besieged is a fascinating account of how and why a baffling array of peoples, ideologies, and religions have fought for some four thousand years over a city without either great wealth, size, or strategic importance. Cline guides us through the baffling, but always bloody, array of Jewish, Roman, Moslem, Crusader, Ottoman, Western, Arab, and Israeli fights for possession of such a symbolic prize in a manner that is both scholarly and engaging."
-Victor Davis Hanson, Stanford University; author of The Other Greeks and Carnage and Culture

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Jerusalem of Lithuania

A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History

Jerold C. Frakes

The Ohio State University Press, 2011

Yerusholayim d’lite: di yidishe kultur in der lite (Jerusalem of Lithuania: A Reader in Yiddish Cultural History) by Jerold C. Frakes contains cultural, literary, and historical readings in Yiddish that vividly chronicle the central role Vilnius (Lithuania) played in Jewish culture throughout the past five centuries. It includes many examples of Yiddish literature, historiography, sociology, and linguistics written by and about Litvaks and includes work by prominent Yiddish poets, novelists, raconteurs, journalists, and scholars. In addition, Frakes has supplemented the primary texts with many short essays that contextualize Yiddish cultural figures, movements, and historical events.

Designed especially for intermediate and advanced readers of Yiddish (from the second-year of instruction), each text is individually glossed, including not only English definitions, but also basic grammatical information that will enable intermediate readers to progress to an advanced reading ability.

Because of its unique content, Yerusholayim d’lite will be of interest not only to university students of Yiddish language, literature, and culture, but it will be an invaluable resource for scholars and Yiddish reading groups and clubs worldwide, as well as for all general readers interested in Yiddish-language culture.

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Jerusalem

Or on Religious Power and Judaism

Moses Mendelssohn

Brandeis University Press, 1983

A classic text of enduring significance, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) stands as a powerful plea for the separation of church and state and also as the first attempt to present Judaism as a religion eminently compatible with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Allan Arkush’s new translation, drawing upon the great strides made by Mendelssohn research in recent decades, does full justice to contemporary insights into the subject while authentically reflecting a distinguished eighteenth-century text. Alexander Altmann’s learned introduction opens up the complex structure and background of Mendelssohn’s ideas. His detailed commentary, keyed to the text, provides references to literary sources and interpretations of the philosopher’s intent.

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Jerusalem, Take One!

Memoirs of a Jewish Filmmaker

Alan Rosenthal

Southern Illinois University Press, 2000

Jerusalem, Take One! Memoirs of a Jewish Filmmaker is a behind-the-scenes look at the life of documentary filmmaker Alan Rosenthal, the maker of over sixty films including Day of Peace, Out of the Ashes, A Nation Is Born, and On the Brink of Peace. As a witness to so much recent Israeli history through a camera’s viewfinder, Rosenthal himself makes as much of an interesting subject as the events he documents.

Born in London in 1936, Rosenthal studied law at Oxford before beginning his work in television directing in Israel and the United States. By the 1960s he was an established young filmmaker who had participated in the filming of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. He returned in 1968, initially for just one year, as part of a team invited by the Israeli government to set up the first television network; that year turned into the thirty-plus years that inspired this book.

The Eichmann trial, the development of Israel Television, the Oslo agreement, the search for the menorah from the Second Temple, the history of Zionism on the television screen, and the Yom Kippur War and Project Renewal are but a few of the recent moments in Israeli history that Rosenthal and his camera have witnessed. As he recalls these events with humor and wit, Rosenthal’s words recapture the emotions and feel of those times as vividly as his lens recorded their passing.

This is a memoir, not a history textbook, and Rosenthal himself is the true subject of the book’s most intensely personal and introspective moments, stories of growth and learning, of England and family, of love and loss, of ideological disappointment and renewed hope. Rosenthal’s tale is one of progress toward the man he wishes to be, the films he feels he must make, and the cultural identity he seeks to develop for himself and all Jewish people.

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Jerusalem the Center of the Universe

Its Archaeology and History (1800–100 BCE)

Israel Finkelstein

SBL Press, 2024

Jerusalem is the center of the universe, the hub of the three great monotheistic religions, yet how did a city located on the desert fringe, in the semi-arid southern highlands of Israel with little tillable land achieve such dominance? To provide answers to this enduring riddle, Israel Finkelstein has collected twenty-four of his best articles and essays covering the Middle Bronze Age to the late Hellenistic period. With critical and well-informed care, he analyzes archaeological evidence that often stands in tension with the biblical text. Topics of particular interest include the archaeology of the tenth century BCE; Saul, David, and Solomon in the Bible and archaeology; the first expansion of the city in the ninth century; its full growth in the late eighth to seventh centuries; Jerusalem and Judah under the Assyrian Empire; the days of King Josiah; and transformations in the Persian-Hellenistic era. Short addenda update the reader on recent developments.

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"Like the Hajis of Meccah and Jerusalem"

Orientalism and the Mormon Experience

Richard Francaviglia

Utah State University Press, 2012

The series, established by one of the twentieth-century West's most distinguished historians, Leonard Arrington, has become a leading forum for prominent historians to address topics related to Mormon history. The first lecturer was Arrington himself. He was followed by Richard Lyman Bushman, Richard E. Bennett, Howard R. Lamar, Claudia L. Bushman, Kenneth W. Godfrey, Jan Shipps, Donald Worster, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and F. Ross Peterson. Utah State University hosts the Leonard J. Arrington Mormon History Lecture Series. The University Libraries' Special Collections and Archives houses the Arrington collection. The state's land grant university began collecting records very early, and in the 1960s became a major depository for Utah and Mormon records. Leonard and his wife Grace joined the USU faculty and family in 1946, and the Arringtons and their colleagues worked to collect original diaries, journals, letters, and photographs.

Although trained as an economist at the University of North Carolina, Arrington became a Mormon historian of international repute. Working with numerous colleagues, the Twin Falls, Idaho, native produced the classic Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints in 1958. Utilizing available collections at USU, Arrington embarked on a prolific publishing and editing career. He and his close ally, Dr. S. George Ellsworth helped organize the Western History Association, and they created the Western Historical Quarterly as the scholarly voice of the WHA. While serving with Ellsworth as editor of the new journal, Arr ington also helped both the Mormon History Association and the independent journal Dialogue get established.

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Medieval Jerusalem

Forging an Islamic City in Spaces Sacred to Christians and Jews

Jacob Lassner

University of Michigan Press, 2017

Medieval Jerusalem examines an old question that has recently surfaced and given rise to spirited discussion among Islamic historians and archeologists: what role did a city revered for its holiness play in the unfolding politics of the early Islamic period? Was there an historic moment when the city, holy to Jews, Christians, and Muslims, may have been considered as the administrative center of a vast Islamic world, as some scholars on early Islam have recently claimed? Medieval Jerusalem also emphasizes the city’s evolution as a revered Islamic religious site comparable to the holy cities Mecca and Medina.

Examining Muslim historiography and religious lore in light of Jewish traditions about the city, Jacob Lassner points out how these reworked Jewish traditions and the imposing monumental Islamic architecture of the city were meant to demonstrate that Islam had superseded Judaism and Christianity as the religion for all monotheists. He interrogates the literary sources of medieval Islamic historiography and their modern interpreters as if they were witnesses in a court of law, and applies the same method for the arguments about the monuments of the city’s material culture, including the great archaeological discoveries along the south wall of the ancient Temple Mount.

This book will be of interest to a broad range of readers given the significance of the city in the current politics of the Near East. It will in part serve as a corrective to narratives of Jerusalem’s past that are currently popular for scholarly and political reasons.

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Ottoman Jerusalem

The Living City: 1517-1917 Part 1 & 2

Sylvia Auld

Council for British Research in the Levant, 2000

A survey of Ottoman architecture in the Old City of Jerusalem, carried out by Yusuf Natsheh, and scholarship about this period co-edited by Robert Hillenbrand and Sylvia Auld, which began in 1991. In Part 1 of Ottoman Jerusalem, contributions from 33 academics present valuable research about life and culture in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period. Part 2 provides a detailed survey of the Ottoman architecture in the Old City of Jerusalem conducted by Yusuf Natsheh with the support of The Administration of Auqaf and Islamic Affairs, Jerusalem. The publication is published on behalf of the BSAJ by the World of Islam Festival Trust (now Al Tajir Trust).

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Palestinian Rituals of Identity

The Prophet Moses Festival in Jerusalem, 1850-1948

Awad Halabi

University of Texas Press, 2023

Members of Palestine’s Muslim community have long honored al-Nabi Musa, or the Prophet Moses. Since the thirteenth century, they have celebrated at a shrine near Jericho believed to be the location of Moses’s tomb; in the mid-nineteenth century, they organized a civic festival in Jerusalem to honor this prophet. Considered one of the most important occasions for Muslim pilgrims in Palestine, the Prophet Moses festival yearly attracted thousands of people who assembled to pray, conduct mystical forms of worship, and hold folk celebrations.

Palestinian Rituals of Identity takes an innovative approach to the study of Palestine’s modern history by focusing on the Prophet Moses festival from the late Ottoman period through the era of British rule. Halabi explores how the festival served as an arena of competing discourses, with various social groups attempting to control its symbols. Tackling questions about modernity, colonialism, gender relations, and identity, Halabi recounts how peasants, Bedouins, rural women, and Sufis sought to influence the festival even as Ottoman authorities, British colonists, Muslim clerics, and Palestinian national leaders did the same. Drawing on extensive research in Arabic newspapers and Islamic and colonial archives, Halabi reveals how the festival has encapsulated Palestinians’ responses to modernity, colonialism, and the nation’s growing national identity.

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The Politics of Planting

Israeli-Palestinian Competition for Control of Land in the Jerusalem Periphery

Shaul Ephraim Cohen

University of Chicago Press, 1993

On the open landscape of Israel and the West Bank, where pine and cypress forests grow alongside olive groves, tree planting has become symbolic of conflicting claims to the land. Palestinians cultivate olive groves as a vital agricultural resource, while the Israeli government has made restoration of mixed-growth forests a national priority. Although both sides plant for a variety of purposes, both have used tree planting to assert their presence on—and claim to—disputed land.

Shaul Ephraim Cohen has conducted an unprecedented study of planting in the region and the control of land it signifies. In The Politics of Planting, he provides historical background and examines both the politics behind Israel's afforestation policy its consequences. Focusing on the open land surrounding Jerusalem and four Palestinian villages outside the city, this study offers a new perspective on the conflict over land use in a region where planting has become a political tool.

For the valuable data it presents—collected from field work, previously unpublished documents, and interviews—and the insight it provides into this political struggle, this will be an important book for anyone studying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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The Politics of the Trail

Reflexive Mountain Biking along the Frontier of Jerusalem

Oded Löwenheim

University of Michigan Press, 2014

Each day, as Oded Löwenheim commutes by mountain bike along dirt trails and wadis in the hills of Jerusalem to Hebrew University, he feels a strong emotional connection to his surroundings. But for him this connection also generates, paradoxically, feelings and emotions of confusion and estrangement.

In The Politics of the Trail, Löwenheim confronts this tension by focusing on his encounters with three places along the trail: the separation fence between Israel and the Palestinians; the ruins of the Palestinian village Qalunya, demolished in 1948; and the trail connecting the largest 9/11 memorial site outside of the U.S. with a top-secret nuclear-proof bunker for the Israeli cabinet. He shares the stories of the people he meets along the way and considers how his own subjectivity is shaped by the landscape and culture of conflict. Moreover, he deconstructs, challenges, and resists the concepts and institutions that constitute such a culture and invites conversation about the idea of conflict as a culture.

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The Religion of Empire

Political Theology in Blake's Prophetic Symbolism

G. A. Rosso

The Ohio State University Press, 2016

The Religion of Empire: Political Theology in Blake’s Prophetic Symbolism is the first full-length study devoted to interpreting Blake’s three long poems, showing the ways in which the Bible, myth, and politics merge in his prophetic symbolism. In this book, G. A. Rosso examines the themes of empire and religion through the lens of one of Blake’s most distinctive and puzzling images, Rahab, a figure that anchors an account of the development of Blake’s political theology in the latter half of his career. Through the Rahab figure, Rosso argues, Blake interweaves the histories of religion and empire in a wide-ranging attack on the conceptual bases of British globalism in the long eighteenth century. This approach reveals the vast potential that the question of religion offers to a reconsideration of Blake’s attitude to empire.

The Religion of Empire also reevaluates Blake’s relationship with Milton, whose influence Blake both affirms and contests in a unique appropriation of Milton’s prophetic legacy. In this context, Rosso challenges recent views of Blake as complicit with the nationalism and sexism of his time, expanding the religion-empire nexus to include Blake’s esoteric understanding of gender. Foregrounding the role of female characters in the longer prophecies, Rosso discloses the variegated and progressive nature of Blake’s apocalyptic humanism.

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Retelling the Siege of Jerusalem in Early Modern England

Vanita Neelakanta

University of Delaware Press, 2019

This compelling book explores sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English retellings of the Roman siege of Jerusalem and the way they informed and were informed by religious and political developments. The siege featured prominently in many early modern English sermons, ballads, plays, histories, and pamphlets, functioning as a touchstone for writers who sought to locate their own national drama of civil and religious tumult within a larger biblical and post-biblical context. Reformed England identified with besieged Jerusalem, establishing an equivalency between the Protestant church and the ancient Jewish nation but exposing fears that a displeased God could destroy his beloved nation. As print culture grew, secular interpretations of the siege ran alongside once-dominant providentialist narratives and spoke to the political anxieties in England as it was beginning to fashion a conception of itself as a nation.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

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Selling Jerusalem

Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks

Annabel Jane Wharton

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Jerusalem currently stands at the center of a violent controversy that threatens the stability of both the Middle East and the world. This volatility, observes Annabel Jane Wharton, is only the most recent manifestation of a centuries-old obsession with the control of the Holy City—military occupation and pilgrimage being two familiar forms of “ownership.” Wharton makes the innovative argument here that the West has also sought to possess Jerusalem by acquiring its representations.

From relics of the True Cross and Templar replicas of the Holy Sepulchre to Franciscan recreations of the Passion to nineteenth-century mass-produced prints and contemporary theme parks, Wharton describes the evolving forms by which the city has been possessed in the West. She also maps those changing embodiments of the Holy City against shifts in the western market. From the gift-and-barter economy of the early Middle Ages to contemporary globalization, both money and the representations of Jerusalem have become progressively incorporeal, abstract, illusionistic, and virtual.

Selling Jerusalem offers a penetrating introduction to the explosive combination of piety and capital at work in religious objects and global politics. It is sure to interest students and scholars of art history, economic history, popular culture, religion, and architecture, as well as those who want to better understand Jerusalem’s problematic place in history.

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To Come to the Land

Immigration and Settlement in 16th-Century Eretz-Israel

Abraham David, translated by Dena Ordan

University of Alabama Press, 1999

To Come to the Land makes available in English a vast body of research,
previously available only in Hebrew, on the early history of the land now
known as Israel.

Abraham David here focuses on the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled
the Iberian Peninsula during the 16th century, tracing the beginnings of
Sephardic influence in the land of Israel.

After the Ottoman Turks conquered Syria, Palestine, and Egypt in 1516,
the Ottoman regime, unlike their Mamluk predecessors, encouraged economic
development and settlement throughout the region. This openness to immigration
offered a solution to the crisis Iberian Jews were undergoing as a result
of their expulsion from Spain and the forced conversions in Portugal. Within
a few years of the Ottoman conquest, Jews of Spanish extraction, many of
them clustered in urban areas, dominated the Jewish communities of Eretz-Israel.

In this carefully researched study, David examines the lasting impression
made by these enterprising Jewish settlers on the commercial, social, and
intellectual life of the area under early Ottoman rule. Of particular interest
is his examination of the cities of Jerusalem and Safed and David's succinct
biographies of leading Jewish personalities throughout the region.

This first English translation of a ground-breaking Hebrew work provides
a comprehensive overview of a significant chapter in the history of Israel
and explores some of the factors that brought to it the best minds of the
age. Essential for scholars of late Medieval Jewish history, To Come to
the Land will also be an important resource for scholars of intellectual
history, as it provides background crucial to an understanding of the intellectual
flourishing of the period.

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Trauma and the Failure of History

Kings, Lamentations, and the Destruction of Jerusalem

David Janzen

SBL Press, 2019

A theoretical and exegetical exploration of trauma in the Hebrew Bible

David Janzen discusses the concepts of history and trauma and contrasts the ways historians and trauma survivors grapple with traumatic events, a contrast embodied in the very different ways the books of Kings and Lamentations react to the destruction of Jerusalem. Janzen’s study warns that explanations in histories will tend to silence the voices of trauma survivors, and it challenges traditional approaches that sometimes portray the explanations of traumatic events in biblical literature as therapeutic for victims.

Features:

Exploration of history as a narrative explanation that creates a past readers can recognize to be true
Examination of how trauma results in a failure of victims to fully experience or remember traumatic events.
A case for why the past is a construction of cultures and historians

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What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?

Timaeus and Genesis in Counterpoint

Jaroslav Pelikan

University of Michigan Press, 1997

The debate about evolution and creationism is striking evidence of the tensions between biblical and philosophical-scientific explanations of the origins of the universe. For most of the past twenty centuries, important historical context for the debate has been supplied by the relation (or "counterpoint") between two monumental texts: Plato's Timaeus and the Book of Genesis.

In What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem?, Jaroslav Pelikan examines the origins of this counterpoint. He reviews the central philosophical issues of origins as posed in classical Rome by Lucretius, and he then proceeds to an examination of Timaeus and Genesis, with Timaeus' Plato representing Athens and Genesis' Moses representing Jerusalem. He then follows the three most important case studies of the counterpoint--in the Jewish philosophical theology of Alexandria, in the Christian thought of Constantinople, and in the intellectual foundations of the Western Middles Ages represented by Catholic Rome, where Timaeus would be the only Platonic dialogue in general circulation.

Whatever Plato may have intended originally in writing Timaeus, it has for most of the intervening period been read in the light of Genesis. Conversely, Genesis has been known, not in the original Hebrew, but in Greek and Latin translations that were seen to bear a distinct resemblance to one another and to the Latin version of Timaeus. Pelikan's study leads to original findings that deal with Christian doctrine in the period of the church fathers, including the Three Cappadocians (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa) in the East, and in the West, Ambrose, Augustine, and Boethius. All of these vitally important authors addressed the problem of the "counterpoint," and neither they nor these primary texts can become fully intelligible without attention to the central issues being explored here.

What Has Athens to Do with Jerusalem? will be of interest to historians, theologians, and philosophers and to anyone with interest in any of the religious traditions addressed herein.

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A Young Palestinian's Diary, 1941–1945

The Life of Sami 'Amr

Translated, annotated, and with an introduction by Kimberly Katz

University of Texas Press, 2009

Writing in his late teens and early twenties, Sāmī ‘Amr gave his diary an apt subtitle: The Battle of Life, encapsulating both the political climate of Palestine in the waning years of the British Mandate as well as the contrasting joys and troubles of family life. Now translated from the Arabic, Sāmī's diary represents a rare artifact of turbulent change in the Middle East.

Written over four years, these ruminations of a young man from Hebron brim with revelations about daily life against a backdrop of tremendous transition. Describing the public and the private, the modern and the traditional, Sāmī muses on relationships, his station in life, and other universal experiences while sharing numerous details about a pivotal moment in Palestine's modern history. Making these never-before-published reflections available in translation, Kimberly Katz also provides illuminating context for Sāmī's words, laying out biographical details of Sāmī, who kept his diary private for close to sixty years. One of a limited number of Palestinian diaries available to English-language readers, the diary of Sāmī ‘Amr bridges significant chasms in our understanding of Middle Eastern, and particularly Palestinian, history.

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