Sites & Sources: Jerusalem

Jerusalem is built over tehom – the abyss – where, according to a Muslim legend, the souls of the dead are stranded. It is a city of peace to the poets, of war to the soldiers. All sorts of tombs cover it, the vestiges of a homicidal history. Its most morbid zealots do not permit relieving it of its dead, even if it is to house the living in their places. And as soon as an archeologist or a mason touches a tomb, the cries of pain and of mourning of its guardians, who see themselves as the watchmen of memory and eternity, reverberate. It is, nevertheless, the city most dug up, most excavated, and most subjected to violence: “Ruins everywhere”, noted Flaubert in the mid-19th century, “it breathes sepulchers.” The sacred texts relate that its rocks would preserve the memory of kings, prophets, pilgrims, perhaps even of a God. Guides say that its sites are nothing less than the vestiges of divine settings decimated by absurd human disputes. Its relation to death is even more disturbing and more disconcerting. Built upon cemeteries, it does not tolerate death within its walls overnight, demanding that human remains be buried the same day that the person dies. But above all, it houses the tomb of a God, accused of his death for a long time and considered to be a city of deicide by some Christian descendants. The sky is covered with the dust to which it has been reduced as punishment for one of the most serious and most unpardonable crimes ever committed against the divinity. Chateaubriand stated: “This punishment, so prolonged and almost supernatural, bespeaks an unparalleled crime that no chastisement can expiate.” Then there is its proximity to a Dead Sea… Sites and Sources offers a wide audience the sources, narratives and legends in which the sites in the land of Israel are stepped.

Sari Klein est enseignante et mène des recherches sur les débuts du sionisme et de la recolonisation hébraïque de la Palestine. Elle a publié nombre de nouvelles et publie régulièrement des poèmes dans les principaux sites et revues poétiques. Ses recherches doctorales portent sur les motivations messianiques des pionniers d'Israël. Génésareth est son premier livre.