Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

Church History, Dec, 2000 by Eric M. Meyers

Jerusalem: Its Sanctity and Centrality to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Edited by Lee I. Levine. New York: Continuum, 1999. xxx 516 pp. n.p.

The present volume is a collection of thirty-three papers presented in 1996 at an international congress in Jerusalem. The book bears the title of that meeting. The unique role of Jerusalem in the three religions of the book cannot be overstated, and the various essays explore the dynamics that enabled Jerusalem to leave its imprint on each of these three traditions, in both a material way and in the spiritual legacy that emerged from each.

It is interesting to observe that fewer than half the papers deal with Jewish topics or themes, and only five explicitly concern themselves with matters pertaining to Islam. The majority of essays therefore are concerned with exploring the ways Christians understand the place of Jerusalem in their tradition, beginning with the New Testament (E. P. Sanders) and continuing on to the concerns of the Greek Orthodox community in the contemporary era (S. Roussos). By far and away the most prominent theme of the essays on the Christian tradition is the place of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage center. The wide array of titles of the essays reflects both the enormity of the topic and the variety of ways the subject can be studied, from the Byzantine era to modern times.

Somewhat surprising is the treatment of Jerusalem in the Hebrew Bible. Limited to only three essays, their combined force hardly does justice to the emergence of the city as a sacred center; the absence of any treatment of Zion theology, so major a motif in the Hebrew Bible, is also striking. The treatment of Jerusalem in Second Temple literature is much more successful, especially the essays by L. Levine and M. Goodman.

The treatment of early Islam in essays by Graham, Lazarus-Yafeh, Elad, Neuwirth, and Rosen-Ayalon is superb but leaves out the rest of medieval and early modern times--periods that receive coverage for Christianity and Judaism.

All this is to say that this collection of essays does not deliver all it promises, but it delivers a great deal. Some of the papers are very short, the participants obviously not choosing to expand their original oral presentations. But there is much to be found in the footnotes in every essay, examination of which takes the serious reader one further step.

This may not be the best collection of essays on Jerusalem, but it is surely a very important one that will stand as an accurate reflection of scholarship on the holy city at the end of the twentieth century. The organizers and sponsors of the conference are to be congratulated for sparking such an important discussion among scholars representing the three great religious traditions.

Eric M. Meyers Duke University