Jerusalem deserves separate mention for two reasons. Firstly, despite its belonging in a sub-section of the larger subject of land, its position on the scale of myth and reality is differs from the rest of the country. Secondly, it has provided a host of artists of different kinds with tremendous inspiration.

It may not be common knowledge today that many of the early pioneers who came to Palestine had distinctly ambivalent feelings about Jerusalem. Many associated it with the old image of the Torah Jew who – as they perceived – wished to continue to weigh down the Jews in mourning for a lost past and praying for a Messianic future. They felt that they should rather try to transform the present, as Zionism demanded. Consequently, many pioneers developed a deep antipathy toward the city, spending many years in the country before visiting it and even then, with some trepidation.

With time, however, a new Jerusalem came into being alongside the old one. This was a new political and cultural center, based in the new suburbs that sprang up from the 1920s on the initiative of the Zionist movement. While the approach to life in the new city was very unlike that of the old town, its rhythm still differed substantially from that of the rest of the country, and especially the newly-developing Tel Aviv. The latter was seen as more lively and dynamic: Jerusalem walked to a slower beat. It was a center of culture in the European sense, however: the establishment there of the Hebrew University in 1925 assured its primacy of place in the country for many years.

Both cities produced a literary geography of their own. It may be claimed that the two great writers who, above all others, celebrated the distinctiveness of Jerusalem were Shai Agnon and Yehuda Amihai, albeit in very different ways. Ostensibly a writer of the ‘old school,’ Agnon celebrated the older Jewish communities of the city. Steeped in the language of religious tradition, his writing followed almost completely a line of tension between the shtetl in Europe (represented by his Galician hometown of Buczacz whose community was destroyed in the Holocaust) and his ‘new’ home of Jerusalem. Although critics perceive clear assessments of the traditional way of life in his writing, on the surface, his treatment of Jerusalem was one of celebration and nostalgia for a way of life that was passing from the world. Amihai, on the other hand, was fiercely secular and critical of the burden of history and myth that Jerusalem carried, even as he wrote passionate love songs about the city and its people.

In 1967, as the Old City came under Israeli control, Amihai was one of the few writers whose poetry spoke of longing for the old Jerusalem, meaning the city before the war. In this, however, he was out of step with his generation: the majority of Israeli Jews and writers spoke with great enthusiasm about the newly-accessible places in Jerusalem. They visited these sectors with intense excitement, Agnon included. Prose, poetry and songs of the most emotional kind were written about the city. Most famous of all the songs was Naomi Shemer’s Yerushalayim shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), which drew upon Biblical and Rabbinic imagery and expressed the lure of the old, mythical Jerusalem for the contemporary secular Israeli. At this time, during the late 1960s and early 70s, Jerusalem reached its most consensual position ever in modern Zionist history. Jerusalem became the center of celebration as countless literary and musical works were written in its praise.

As time passed, however, the virtual consensus about Jerusalem lessened as it became a subject of contention. Although it generally had been kept out of the political debate that engulfed Israel in discussions of the territories taken over in 1967, the situation was clearly changing. The first indication may have been evident in the new, increasingly vociferous Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) militancy; perhaps the first Intifada of the 1980s indicated the beginning of the change. It is possible that it had already occurred for many people, and it was only now that it began to become obvious. Jerusalem was now perceived increasingly in political terms by many in the center and on the left. They no longer considered it the comforting, inspirational capital city of old: it carried emotional ties with the past, but it was a real city with real political problems. The myth was no longer functioning. The number of celebratory songs written about the city decreased dramatically compared to the trend of some thirty years earlier. For many on the right, however, the inspiration remained. Thus, Jerusalem remains a different city for different people.