Report: Crossing Borders in Jerusalem

Report Crossing Borders in Jerusalem MILETTE SHAMIR Tel Aviv University Milette Shamir. Photo courtesy of John Bryant E ven before it opened, the “Melville and the Mediterranean” conference put me in a distinct state of mind. As I walked past the bustling shoe market at Damascus Gate and into the serenity of the arched, limestone building of the conference’s venue, the École Biblique, I felt that uncanny mixture of the familiar and the strange, of homecoming and trespassing, that accompanies each of my infrequent visits to East Jerusalem. Jerusalem of my birth was a partitioned city. A cement barrier, demarcated by the 1949 armistice agreement between Israel and Jordan, separated C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 72 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S C R O S S I N G B O R D E R S I N J E R U S A L E M the Arab eastern part of the city from the Jewish western part. I cannot really remember this wall; I was a baby when, in the aftermath of the 1967 war, Jerusalem was reunified. In the next few years, many Israeli families, like mine, made frequent visits to the newly-accessible Dome of the Rock, the Wailing Wall, and East Jerusalem. Euphoric over the crossing of former borders, we would follow the route of many nineteenth-century pilgrims and tourists (Melville among them), who visited the Judean desert and Mar Saba, Bethlehem, and Jericho. But protracted Israeli occupation and Palestinian resistance ended this brief (and myopic) euphoria. For over twenty years, and particularly since the breakdown of the 1993 Oslo accords, only a handful of Jewish Israelis can be seen in the vicinity of the École Biblique, and hardly any Arabs visit the neighborhoods of west Jerusalem. The partition wall, like a phantom limb, is reasserting its presence. For Palestinians, of course, walls are all too palpable: the separation barrier erected by the Israeli government in recent years makes entrance to Jerusalem difficult, occasionally impossible, for those living in the surrounding Arab towns and villages. As tension in Jerusalem escalates—while I am writing this in October, 2009, there are violent clashes at the Dome of the Rock—both Muslims and Jews are apt to experience Jerusalem as Das Unheimliche, where the familiar and home-like blend with the foreign and forbidden. The fact that similar feelings were shared by many nineteenth-century American visitors to the “Holy Land” is one reason why I found the Jerusalem conference on Melville so apropos. American pilgrims and tourists, who envisaged their trip to Palestine in terms of a spiritual homecoming, were apt to encounter instead strangeness and otherness. “No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem,” Melville wrote in his travel journal; “To some the disappointment is heart sickening . &c.”1 Several of the papers in the conference unpacked the range of nineteenth-century reactions (left unspecified by Melville’s “&c.”) to the Holy Land. Molly Robey’s presentation, for example, suggested that this range included appropriation. She showed that late-nineteenth-century women writers, such as Elizabeth Champney, responded to the dissonances of the Holy Land by domesticating and Americanizing it. Melville’s response, by contrast, was that of negation: he found little to embrace in the biblical landscape he described as utterly barren and desolate. In the beginning of Clarel, he imagined his hero’s failure to find comfort in 1 Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, ed. Howard C. Horsford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), 154. A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 73 M I L E T T E S H A M I R the “blank walls” of Jerusalem, as “The strangeness haunted him and grew.”2 Carolyn Karcher’s paper opened with the suggestion that Melville projected his inner hopelessness and spiritual disillusionment onto Palestine...