The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
Behold an allegorical layer superimposed on the ancient urban fabric. The “dish veil” looks like a foreign fashion. But if you walk the narrow streets facing the facades you will hardly see it. The “dish veil” is easily and quickly removable. To clean the dirty dishes off the table slate grab the four corners of a magical tablecloth…abracadabra there is no trace of the feast for the senses, the buildings appear au naturel circa 18th century – naked, pure and innocent like Adam and Eve. Yet there is the claustrophobic, choking, uneasy apprehension that all the gadgets are permanently anchored, dialed directly into the brains of the inhabitants, the tubes of the information life support IV dripping into the blood stream of imagination. You can picture the wires snaking down the soft, apple rotten crevasses of the pale, pinkish limestone, plugged and soldered into the human conscience circuit. A reversal along the metaphorical vertical access, the flip of the modernity flop played out on the most stubborn of stages. Traditionally the submerged dark mystery is below ground in the proverbial basement, the hidden foundation, while the persona emerges above ground lit by the sun. Here the captured sun energy descents from the soaked with revelation firmament to energize and illuminate the concealed subterranean layer of dreams and desires. The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb. The Jerusalem of Gold glistening with shadows of the parabolic reflections.
Peter the Hermit shows the crusaders the way to Jerusalem. French illumination
So what was happening in the world almost exactly 1,000 years ago? As a rule one will find an intersection of pivotal conflicts at the center of a superpower of the time. In those days it was the Byzantium during the rule of the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1056-1118). Alexios certainly a contender for political genius award. I call it Judo politics because Alexios managed a declining empire and he could only win the chess matches with his enemies or friends by using their own power against them, he was breathtakingly scheming. The half hour podcast by Lars Brownworth is simply superb. He describers Alexios struggles with the Normans, the Turks and the First Crusade (via 12byzantinerulers.com).
Caravaggio, David 1606-07. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Todd Bolen points to the contradictory passage in 1 Samuel 17:53-54 – Where Did Goliath’s Head Go?
“And the people of Israel came back from chasing the Philistines, and they plundered their camp. And David took the head of the Philistine and brought it to Jerusalem, but he put his armor in his tent.”
The fight between David and Goliath was when David was a teen. The triumphant entry to Jerusalem was years later when David became a King. Perhaps he just kept and carried the head around. Even more confusing is the reference to Goliath’s armor that was “put in his tent” separately from the head? The Transcriber was getting really tired when he wrote that one.
Caravaggio, Boy with a Basket of Fruit (self portrait), c. 1593. Galleria Borghese, Rome
By the way on the subject of Caravaggio and his paining. Caravaggio was a notorious brawler and he eventually murdered a man during a fight in Rome. His patrons could no longer protect him and he fled to Naples. Later someone attacked Caravaggio in Milano and disfigured his face. All along Caravaggio was begging for a pardon asking for permission to return to Rome and he died from a fever on his way there. In any case the gory biblical scenes are a common subject in Caravaggio paintings (like the Sacrifice of Issac I published here). In the painting above Caravaggio was offering his own head as that of the slaughtered Goliath. I find it interesting that the young David there resembles some of the self portraits Caravaggio painted when he was young. So perhaps this painting is Caravaggio the slaughterer and Caravaggio being slaughtered (they do look alike). Uncle Freud missed that one… ►►►read more
As far as pashkevils go this has to be a classic. The collision of the modern images with the ornate and layered language is beautiful and poetic.
By the way of subtitles the article by Hanoch Daum who speaks with authority only allowed to people who know the subject first hand: Ynet – Bored out of their minds:
“The truth must be told: The fundamental motivation behind ultra-Orthodox protests on Shabbat, regardless of whether they are directed against Intel, the Karta parking lot, or anything else is deep boredom, incredible emptiness, and the great frustration of haredi youngsters. These protests are not about love for the Shabbat. Hundreds of energized young haredim are looking for something to do; looking for something interesting. They have no e-mail, no Facebook, and no place where they can play soccer. They don’t join the army and most of them will never work. Long years at the yeshiva, from a very young age, where studies begin early in the morning and end very late at night, prompt great frustration among many of them – and especially those unfit for such a demanding course of study. They have no real interaction with the world that rages around them, and this impossible reality coupled with their archaic and unrealistic way of life, along with the strict modesty limits, leads to protests that are sometimes wild and reckless; the type of protests that even haredi leaders don’t know how to stop.
And this pretty much sums it up:
“After all, these young haredim are not really committed to the Shabbat. Had they been truly devoted to it, they would not be holding protests that prompt hundreds of police officers to desecrate the Shabbat. They would also not be assaulting reporters and media personnel with such crude violence. However, the young protestors from the haredi neighborhoods have no commitment to the Shabbat. In fact, they have no commitment or obligation to anything. They do not need to make a living or support anyone, they do not need to join the army, and they do not need to take entry exams for university. All they need to do is pass the time in the great darkness surrounding them.”
The Pashkevil via israeltech.net
Is this Jerusalem in 1487, five years before the expulsion from Spain? Bibliodyssey published this manuscript: ‘Beschreibung der Reise von Konstanz nach Jerusalem’ (Description of a journey from Konstanz to Jerusalem] records in diary form the pilgrimage undertaken by the German knight (as well as town mayor and architect), Konrad von Grünenberg. Can you tell the Temple Mount there?
by Ben Atlas on 10.1.2009.10:49pm · 1 comment
Old Jewish Cemetery, Wrocław
Interesting review of Martin Goodman’s recent book, Rome and Jerusalem in Arion. Temple’s booty funded Temple of Peace and perhaps even Colosseum?!
“Vespasian and Titus celebrated a spectacular triumph parading Jewish spoils through the streets of Rome, including the lavish remnants of the Temple. The captured booty helped to fund Vespasian’s magnificent Temple of Peace, fitted out with gold vessels from Jerusalem, and very possibly the Colosseum itself. Not only was the Temple destroyed; it would stay destroyed. Vespasian imposed a tax on all Jews everywhere: the annual contribution that they had previously made to the Temple would now revert every year to Rome, there to support the cult of Jupiter Capitolinus, the city’s principal deity. The symbolic value was potent. Traditional Jewish homage to Yahweh became transmogrified into an image of subjugation to Rome. Worse still, Roman dictate prohibited the rebuilding of the Temple, thereby eradicating indefinitely the central emblem of Jewish identity. What engendered such fury and ferocity? Goodman’s answer rings true: the need felt by a new Roman dynasty, the Flavians, the family of Vespasian, to establish its credentials and entrench its authority. Lacking, as they did, the pedigree of their predecessors, the heirs of Augustus, they sought to magnify the victory in Judaea, to present the conquest of the Jews as the toppling of a fearsome foe, to fill the city with tokens of the triumph, and to underscore the enduring nature of that achievement.”
flickr/ciaron/Old Jewish Cemetery, Wrocław
Tyler Cowen skeptically quotes in Marginal Revolution from the new book by Chris Wickham – “The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000”:
“The other important feature of the Great Mosque was that, as a space, it was closed off to the outside. Roman cities were structured by wide streets leading to central forum areas, to which processions led and where public participation could be considerable, as continued to be the case in Constantinople for centuries. Amphitheatres (in the West), theatres and racetracks were other major venues for public activity, and the Hippodrome of Constantinople carried on this tradition for a long time. In the Islamic world, the mosque courtyard took over from all of these; major political events, like collective oaths of loyalty, took place there, not in any secular location. And the Arab states did not use processions as a major part of their political legitimization; the assembly in the mosque courtyard was sufficient for that. The need for wide boulevards ended; pre-Islamic Syrian and Palestinian colonnades were quite quickly filled in with shops in the eighth century, some of them commissioned as public amenities by caliphs. The narrow streets of Islamic cities resulted directly from this, for there was no public interest involved in keeping them clear from obstructions like vendors’ stalls, beyond a certain minimum (enough for two loaded pack animals to pass each other, later jurists said). Public display came to be focused on the mosque, and secondarily, rulers’ palaces and city gates, rather on the cityscape as a whole…The caliph and his advisers were nonetheless making a set of conscious symbolic and political points by organizing the Great Mosque as they did; and the way the public space in Islamic cities change, to focus so exclusively on mosques…would have seemed to them auspicious and fitting.”
I don’t know much about urban history of Rome or Greece. Someone in the comments there mentioned chariots, an interesting point worth looking into. But I can say with certainty that historic European capitals were as dense as the cities in the Middle East. Many European cities where build predominantly with wood and burned down. European cities were developed over the old dense grid. For example for military and aesthetic reasons Napoleon III commissioned Baron Haussmann to cut the famous boulevards through the historic maze of Paris. Many “modern” cities copied French boulevards rather literally. For example Commonwealth Ave. in Boston or Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, the latter comes complete with an arch.
It might as well be true that the classical Roman parades where not part of the Arabic culture but it would hardly excuse or explain the density. More interesting question is if Islam’s Mosque plagiarized from Judaism were designed to mirror the traditional urban role of the Jerusalem Temple?
There have been so much interest in the 1948 archive, so I decided to publish another installment. Pictures do speak better than words. The following are the photos taken by John Phillips, all in June of 1948.
The Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem after Jews left
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I continue to research the vast collection of the photos from the LIFE Magazine archive. I sort the photos by a photographer or an event. In these three posts I curate the 1948 photos from Israel.
Jewish girl, Rachel Levy, 7, fleeing from street w. burning bldgs. as the Arabs sack Jerusalem after its surrender. May 28, 1948. John Phillips
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Israeli soldier aiming his weapon. May 1948. Frank Scherschel
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As a Jew I am jealous about the uprising in Iran. It’s inevitable; they are going to take down the mullahs, if not now than in four years. They will do what Catholics learned form the Protestants, how to shove the oppressive hypocrisy into the irrelevant corner of society (with luck, before they manage to rape all the boys). Alas Iran is a closed system; they never developed the “letting off steam” mechanism perfected by the Jews throughout history. Jews have this down pat; the natural attrition is allowed and often encouraged, if not from the outside then from the inside. They want you to leave. If you still stubbornly insist on the internal change, don’t like indoctrination in lieu of education and challenge the hierarchy, the tribal culture makes sure you life is unbearable. Just ask Uriel Da Costa and thousands like him. Hey, you are suffocating and want to split into a new movement, no problem, chose as you like – the conservative, reform, modern, postmodern, whatever. You are on your way out, unrecognized by the world governed by the black robed fundamentalism. Hey Jew, you want to die for the Russian or any other revolution – have lots of mazal! The tradition is pervasive, and if you don’t like the Zionist experiment – b’seder. No wonder I can’t get a cup of coffee in Brookline without hearing Ivrit. And so it goes, on the same week that Teheran youth is fighting for the Persian civilization, Jerusalem is shut down because of a parking lot fight. It’s hopeless for the Jews.
The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
