Visualizing History from the Temple to the Six-Day War: Photography and Historical Narrative of Jerusalem in Jewish Encyclopedias

• In Event: Performing and Representing the New Nation

Abstract

Encyclopedias were part of a “profoundly transnational context” aimed at the gentrification of the non-scholarly middle class. But despite their transnational character and interest in disseminating ‘universal’ knowledge, they were a site for group-building. Encyclopedias presented a religious, ethnic, or national group’s concept of its own social self-organization.
Images in Jewish encyclopedias contributed to a Jewish visual culture that intimately connected images of the Holy Land to a sense of Jewish community. This paper considers how visual culture influenced historical narratives, including the ways that Palestine-Israel was depicted as a "geography of identity," as temporal as it was spatial, including new historical methods alongside a timeless, mythic sense of the Holy Land.

The pre-war, pre-state English-language JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA and the German-language ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA visually depicted the earthly Jerusalem and the Jerusalem above, though whether it was depicting one or the other was not always made clear. They assumed the Bible served as a foundational source for history and that the contemporary landscape provided biblical insight. Jerusalem and the Temple area were depicted as the object of desire for each post-Temple movement, and the juxtaposition of photographs of the old city with historical narratives produced a message that all Jews in all times and places have longed for the same sacred spaces in earthly Jerusalem. The images suggest the ongoing antiquity of Jerusalem even as political and religious movements fought to claim it as a or really the authentic portal to the past, thereby asserting their movement as the proper present-day embodiment of the tradition Jerusalem anchors.

Published after the creation of the State of Israel and the Six-Day War, the first edition of the English-language ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA responded to a new political situation and the possibilities for describing earthly Jerusalem and Israel were dramatically different. It does not begin with biblical narrative about the history of Jerusalem but prehistoric archaeological evidence. Though the postwar encyclopedia differs in historical frame and politics and acknowledges various historical controversies, it deploys similar strategies to the prewar encyclopedias such as drawing on biblical text without additional evidence and juxtaposing contemporary photography with biblical history.

author

• Jessica Leigh Carr, Lafayette College