Review: Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People under Heaven

Abstract

Jerusalem 1000–1400: Every People under Heaven Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 26 September 2016–8 January 2017 The much-anticipated exhibition dedicated to medieval Jerusalem at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York surprised its visitors with an unusual approach: portraying “a singularly creative moment in a singularly complex city” during the four centuries in which Jerusalem was shared by and disputed over by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The challenge the curators, Barbara Drake Boehm and Melanie Holcomb, faced was to ignore academic and nationalistic divisions as they approached the history of Jerusalem as a whole while also taking into consideration the city's image among people who are not able to visit it in person. To achieve this goal, they opened the exhibition with a gallery devoted to trade, a shared interest among peoples of different faiths and origins in medieval Jerusalem. A selection of beautiful objects exemplifying the goods traded in medieval Jerusalem were displayed: ceramics and copper bowls, gold jewelry, furnishing and clothing textiles, books, paintings, and reliquaries. The original production sites of these objects—ranging from northern Europe to India and China—demonstrated both the extent of the commercial networks to which Jerusalem was connected and the geographically central role the city played in these networks. The second section of the exhibition explored how the influences of …