4. Jerusalem
Jerusalem deserves separate mention for two reasons. Firstly,
despite its belonging in a sub-section of the larger subject
of land, its position on the scale of myth and reality
is differs from the rest of the country. Secondly, it
has provided a host of artists of different kinds with
tremendous inspiration.
It may not be common knowledge today that many of the early
pioneers who came to Palestine had distinctly ambivalent
feelings about Jerusalem. Many associated it with the
old image of the Torah Jew who – as they perceived
– wished to continue to weigh down the Jews in mourning
for a lost past and praying for a Messianic future. They
felt that they should rather try to transform the present,
as Zionism demanded. Consequently, many pioneers developed
a deep antipathy toward the city, spending many years
in the country before visiting it and even then, with
some trepidation.
With time, however, a new Jerusalem came into being alongside
the old one. This was a new political and cultural center,
based in the new suburbs that sprang up from the 1920s
on the initiative of the Zionist movement. While the approach
to life in the new city was very unlike that of the old
town, its rhythm still differed substantially from that
of the rest of the country, and especially the newly-developing
Tel Aviv. The latter was seen as more lively and dynamic:
Jerusalem walked to a slower beat. It was a center of
culture in the European sense, however: the establishment
there of the Hebrew University in 1925 assured its primacy
of place in the country for many years.
Both cities produced a literary geography of their own.
It may be claimed that the two great writers who, above
all others, celebrated the distinctiveness of Jerusalem
were Shai Agnon and Yehuda Amihai, albeit in very different
ways. Ostensibly a writer of the ‘old school,’
Agnon celebrated the older Jewish communities of the city.
Steeped in the language of religious tradition, his writing
followed almost completely a line of tension between the
shtetl in Europe (represented by his Galician hometown
of Buczacz whose community was destroyed in the Holocaust)
and his ‘new’ home of Jerusalem. Although
critics perceive clear assessments of the traditional
way of life in his writing, on the surface, his treatment
of Jerusalem was one of celebration and nostalgia for
a way of life that was passing from the world. Amihai,
on the other hand, was fiercely secular and critical of
the burden of history and myth that Jerusalem carried,
even as he wrote passionate love songs about the city
and its people.
In 1967, as the Old City came under Israeli control, Amihai
was one of the few writers whose poetry spoke of longing
for the old Jerusalem, meaning the city before the war.
In this, however, he was out of step with his generation:
the majority of Israeli Jews and writers spoke with great
enthusiasm about the newly-accessible places in Jerusalem.
They visited these sectors with intense excitement, Agnon
included. Prose, poetry and songs of the most emotional
kind were written about the city. Most famous of all the
songs was Naomi Shemer’s Yerushalayim shel Zahav
(Jerusalem of Gold), which drew upon Biblical and
Rabbinic imagery and expressed the lure of the old, mythical
Jerusalem for the contemporary secular Israeli. At this
time, during the late 1960s and early 70s, Jerusalem reached
its most consensual position ever in modern Zionist history.
Jerusalem became the center of celebration as countless
literary and musical works were written in its praise.
As time passed, however, the virtual consensus about Jerusalem
lessened as it became a subject of contention. Although
it generally had been kept out of the political debate
that engulfed Israel in discussions of the territories
taken over in 1967, the situation was clearly changing.
The first indication may have been evident in the new,
increasingly vociferous Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) militancy;
perhaps the first Intifada of the 1980s indicated the
beginning of the change. It is possible that it had already
occurred for many people, and it was only now that it
began to become obvious. Jerusalem was now perceived increasingly
in political terms by many in the center and on the left.
They no longer considered it the comforting, inspirational
capital city of old: it carried emotional ties with the
past, but it was a real city with real political problems.
The myth was no longer functioning. The number of celebratory
songs written about the city decreased dramatically compared
to the trend of some thirty years earlier. For many on
the right, however, the inspiration remained. Thus, Jerusalem
remains a different city for different people.