Jerusalem

Jerusalem is at once a place in the world, a historic city in the Holy Land, and an image, an idea, a symbol. Jerusalem’s multiple facets are present in the biblical accounts of the city – the Davidic royal capital, the site of the Temple, the most beautiful of cities, a ‘sweet and comely’ place (Canticles 6:3), ‘built as a city that is bound firmly together’ (Psalm 122.3), the site of Jesus’s death and burial, and the mystical apocalyptic city of the future described in Isaiah, Ezekiel and Apocalypse, ‘prepared as a bride adorned for her husband’, coming down out of heaven (Apocalypse 21:2). It is ‘the city of truth’ and ‘the sanctified mountain’ (Zacharias 8.3), ‘Full of clamour, a populous city, a joyous city’ (Isaiah 22.2), the ‘dwelling of righteousness’ (Jeremiah 31:22), ‘a city sought after, and not forsaken’ (Isaiah 62:12). The Psalmist promises, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten’ (Psalms 136:5), foreseeing and affirming the crucial, precious, and instinctual role the city would take in the Judeo-Christian consciousness. Perhaps more than any other place or space on the planet, Jerusalem has been represented in writing and culture, at least since the biblical period. Encounters with the earthly Jerusalem and attempts to apprehend the heavenly Jerusalem are a mainstay of the western Christian tradition of travel writing, as well as of Jewish and Muslim literary and devotional traditions. In this essay I alight on some of key representations of Jerusalem but make no claim to completeness. Rather, in this essay I focus on Jerusalem’s status within the medieval Christian tradition of place pilgrimage, especially with regard to the dominant role Jerusalem has played in global geography, popular pilgrimage, and mnemonic retention.