Delirious Jerusalem: Decoding a Sacred Terrain

The narrative of 17 Strauss Street in Jerusalem’s Western City, known also as Akasha Garden or “the hill,” encapsulates a centuries-old religious and cultural dispute. Through the study of the site’s built-up layers, this paper identifies the interlacement of factors that determined its evolution. Tracing a long chain of struggles, interpretations, mythologies and conflicting narratives––a Muslim tomb dated to the Ayyubid period of the late 12th century AD (turba) and a mosque added later to the sacred compound; the accelerated construction of new Jewish neighborhoods around the place; the large tent erected towards the end of the nineteenth century as a venue for Jewish religious studies following a Kabbalistic tradition; the headquarters of the local socialist-Zionist party, built short after the establishment of the state of Israel; to the playground and its exclusive use by the ultra-Orthodox community nowadays––the paper reveals a multiplication of voices and contributors as well as frictions between diverse spatial experiences within it.

These tensions and evolving interpretations regarding the site are expressed through daily routines as well as various architectures built on the site over the years. Each of these architectures are viewed as emblematic of a relentless imperialist movement. Imperialism in the sense of claiming ownership, defining political, social, ethnic and cultural sovereignty and setting up representations, as suggested by W.J.T Mitchell in his text “Imperial Landscapes” (2022). This cityscape is thus perceived as a collection of archetypes “whose proximity and juxtaposition reinforce their separate meanings.” Each archetype is an agent linked to a different “empire” and, similar to Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York, each provides an alternative image of the Jerusalem that exists.