Forgotten Jerusalem

Chapter 2 turns toward modern social memory—via the injunction against forgetting Jerusalem in Judaism (Psalm 137)—during the Yishuv era (1882–1948), when Jerusalem appears to have been all but absent from the “urban ethos” of Jewish cultural production in Palestine. Through an analysis of songs written by figures such as Abraham Broides, Menashe Ravina, and Paul Dessau, along with musical renderings of significant myths in Zionist history—particularly Theodor Herzl’s “Uganda Proposal” and the Tel Hai myth involving Josef Trumpeldor’s martyrdom—the chapter argues that a conceptual Jerusalem was actually adumbrated in Zionist songs about Tel Aviv and rural Palestine, via liberatory tropes associated with Jerusalem in diasporic history. The chapter includes an analysis of the expression of anti-Jerusalem sentiment in the artistic circles identified with the late Yishuv era and the State Generation, revealing how the city was characterized as possessing a female body that is subject to a process of poetic “whoring”—driven by biblical imagery—that served as a vehicle for singers and poets to voice their ideological orientations toward Jerusalem. The chapter concludes with a brief meditation on the meaning of “forgetting” in the context of modern Jerusalem.