The Jewish Quarter after 1967

Abstract

The article explores the reconstruction of Jerusalem’s Jewish Quarter after the 1967 war, with an emphasis on the area’s emergence as a symbolic Israeli landscape. The post-1967 Jewish Quarter became a symbol of national renewal and of Jewish control over united Jerusalem. In fact, it was the destruction during the 1948 war and the severe neglect in its aftermath that provided Israel the opportunity to recreate the area’s geography and history, to design and build it anew from both a physical and a symbolic standpoint. After 1967, primarily during the formative years of the 1970s and 1980s, various agents—politicians, planners, contractors, archeologists, clergy, cultural groups, and private people—had their impact on the revival of the Jewish Quarter. Together, they crafted a new landscape whose connection to the pre-1948 neighborhood is extremely vague. By drawing from the quarter’s past in a selective manner, these agents created new forms of historical memory, which helped forge and bolster Israeli identity and pride. At the end of this process, it is doubtful whether the symbolic values of the Jewish Quarter as one can experience them today were developed according to ideas that the government agents had in the beginning of its reconstruction.