AVI YONAH’S MODEL OF AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF ISRAELI VISUAL CULTURE

Maya Balakirsky Katz Touro College

Before the twentieth century, scale models of the ancient Jerusalem landscape enjoyed three periods of popularity for reasons that con- tinue to resonate in contemporary model-making and reception. Dur- ing the early Renaissance, the desire to establish humanity in a grand scheme singled out ancient Jerusalem as a singular site of synthesis. During the Protestant Reformation, the trend towards scriptural liter- alness gave rise to the fashioning of Bible lands. And in the late nine- teenth century, the development of the field of archaeology prompted the construction of models for analytic use.1 The second half of the twentieth century should be added to these stages in the revitalization of the Jerusalem archaeological model, situated within post-Holocaust conceptions of Jewish patriotism and Jewish statehood in the newly formed State of Israel. As both an ancient, sacred site and modern, scientific space, models of ancient Jerusalem vacillate between inter- pretations of mythic landscapes and empirical materializations of geography and history.2 The most famous of the post-1948 Jerusalem models, known col- loquially as the “Holyland Model,” reconstructs the Second Temple of Jerusalem within its greater urban landscape under the scholarly direction of archaeologist Michael Avi-Yonah. (Figure 1) The effect of Avi-Yonah’s model is far-reaching, exerting influence over subsequent model-making and serving as a graphic element in Free Masonic

1 For an analysis of the relationship between archaeology, theater, and modern tourism, see Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). On page 194, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes that model villages in Plymouth Plantation result in a “shifting locus of authenticity” between archaeological artifacts and the virtuality of re-created space. 2 For a survey and discussion of one of the first such modern scientific model- makers, see Haim Goren and Rehav Rubin, “Jerusalem and Its Monuments,” Palestine Exploration Quarterly, 128 (1996), 103–124. 350 maya balakirsky katz screensavers and Evangelical music CD covers.3 However, I will limit my discussion here to the model’s role as a contested symbol of Jew- ish identity. Scholars have long understood the “ancient” as inevitably political in the modern State of Israel, where land rights debates are often based on historical claims.4 The Temple model both reflects and shapes this historical discourse; while the model aims to reconstruct an ancient world, its contemporary reception simultaneously constructs new meanings that aim to fix, in spatial terms, a post-exilic Jewish State. I will address three stages in the presentation of the model in order to demonstrate the ways that its creators and curators engaged it for a variety of political positions: its commission and location at the Holyland Hotel in a Jerusalem neighborhood, its acquisition and transfer to the , and its graphic use in popular culture and artists’ projects.

1. “The Holyland Model”

The Holyland model engages political, rather than strictly archaeo- logical, concerns, beginning with its construction in 1962–1966 dur- ing a period of Israeli inaccessibility to the Jordanian-controlled site of the Temple Mount. Businessman Hans Kroch commissioned the Jerusalem model in a 1:50 ratio for an archeological-replica-museum located in the lobby of his luxury hotel in Jerusalem’s Bayit Vegan neighborhood in memory of his son who died in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. The war that claimed his son’s life also scarred much of Jerusalem’s —its Jewish communal buildings as well as the Jewish civilian presence—leading to Kroch’s much-quoted sentiment that, “If Jews cannot get to the holy places, the holy places will come

3 For a discussion of the Temple’s bearing on the Christian imagination, see Helen Rosenau, Vision of the Temple: The Image of the Temple of Jerusalem in Judaism and Christianity (London: Oresko Books, 1979). 4 For a discussion on the relationship between Zionism and archaeology in the Mandatory era, see Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–34. For relevant comments in the post-Mandatory era, see Neil Asher Silberman, A Prophet from Amongst You: The Life of Yigael Yadin: Soldier, Scholar, and Mythmaker of Modern Israel (Reading, Mas- sachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1994). For a less sympathetic view of the relationship between archaeological projects in Israel and Israeli national identity, see Nadja Abu El Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).