Description
This book is about absence. It studies Jerusalem through the centuries as it appeared in the writings, illustrations and photographs of the European visitors. It argues that despite the thousands of volumes written on Jerusalem, the city remained largely unrepresented and its people were largely absent from most accounts. The book explores the way the three Abrahamic religions constructed an idea of Jerusalem as a holy city. It then discusses how this position of a holy city transformed the city in the minds of its visitors to a timeless place connected with religious history, not with the social reality. This imagination of the holy city contributed to a creating of it, a place that awaits reclaiming by Europe or its clients. In other words, this book is about how Jerusalem was first colonized by imagination before it fell to the control of the colonizers.
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