Jerusalem as the 'omphalos' of the world: on the history of geographical concept

Judaism, Spring, 1997 by Philip S. Alexander

The Hereford map belongs primarily to a tradition of Christian symbolic and mythical geography for which the real world was of little moment. Jerusalem was central to this geography, but this "Jerusalem" was not strongly identified with the physical city in the land of Palestine. In certain Christian sources the physical Jerusalem does indeed stand at the center of the physical world.(14) A widespread Byzantine tradition puts the omphalos in Jerusalem, though significantly, in contrast to Jewish tradition, it locates it precisely in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and not on the Temple Mount. Christian and Jewish geography thus drew quite different maps of the same small geographical space. However, for most Christian writers Jerusalem was a spiritual entity which the Christian could experience anywhere. Other great cities, Rome, Constantinople, Aachen, could become "Jerusalem." "Jerusalem" could even be created in one's local church by the erection of stations of the cross and of "calvaries." Ambivalence towards the Land of Israel goes back to earliest Christianity. The spiritualization of "Jerusalem" is found already in the New Testament: Paul in Galatians 4:25-26 regards the metropolis of the Church as being, not the "present Jerusalem" which is "in slavery with her children," but the "Jerusalem above" which is free. Against this background to find fault with the cartography of the Hereford map is rather misplaced, and involves a misjudgment of its purpose and the nature of its geography.

The ancestor of the Hereford map was probably similar in outline to the Hereford map itself. The roots of this image lie not in Roman "scientific" cartography, but in a symbolic Christian world-map originating in the east. This early Christian map was in turn more or less identical to the Jubilees map and may well have been descended from it. It should be borne in mind that Jubilees circulated in a Greek version in the Greek east and is quoted by a number of Byzantine scholars.(15) I would suggest, then, that a plausible case can be made for the descent of the Hereford map from the Jubilees map. Jubilees represents the fons et origo of an imago mundi which prevailed in Christian Europe almost down to the time of Columbus.

Finally some remarks on later Jewish tradition. Jewish-Greek literature yields a few interesting references to the centrality of Jerusalem. Philo in his Legatio ad Gaium ([section]294), claims that Jerusalem is "situated in the center of the world." Josephus in the Bellum (3:51-52) defines Judea as stretching from the River Jordan to Jaffa and writes, "the city of Jerusalem lies at its very center, and for this reason it has sometimes, not inaptly, been called the 'navel' of the country." A similar tradition is echoed earlier in the Letter of Aristeas (83), where it says that Jerusalem is "situated in the center of the land of Judah on a high and exalted mountain (cf. Isaiah 2:2)."

But the most significant developments of the idea are to be found in Rabbinic texts. The locus classicus is in the Tanhuma to Leviticus (Qedoshim 10, ed. Buber IV, p.78):