Fig. 17.1: Flowers from Bethany, from Wild Flowers of the Holy Land, Pressed Flower Album, Late Nineteenth Century
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Fig. 17.1: Flowers from Bethany, from Wild Flowers of the Holy Land, pressed flower album, late nineteenth century. Created by Ferdinand Ludwig Vester, Jerusalem; printed by Joseph Schor. Ami Zehavi Collection of Pressed Flowers of the Holy Land, Tel-Aviv. On permanent loan at the American Colony Archive, Jerusalem. Open Access. © 2021 Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110639476-018 Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati Chapter 17 The Green Line of the Jerusalem Code: Trees, Flowers, Science, and Politics This chapter traces what I call the Green Line of the Jerusalem code by focusing on how references to plants, flowers, and trees informed Scandinavian perceptions of the Holy Land from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth century, with repercussions well into the twentieth. This chapter explores how scientific studies in botany and the natu- ral sciences were entangled with literary expressions in novels and travelogues, as well as with political discourses. It also demonstrates a shift in the scientific approach to Palestine: from Linnaean botany to biblical archeology. To me Israel more and more takes shape as the symbol of life. The symbol of life where one would not think that life could be sustained . Early in spring we can often, back home, ex- perience a wonderful sight. In the middle of the deep snow and ice stands a white birch with beautiful, green leaves. Sunlight made the leaves shoot too early. And you say: That tree will die. But it does not die. Miraculously it continues to live and grow. To me Israel resembles these green birch trees, surrounded by cold, icy snow. A great idea as warm as sunshine in the spring brought it forth, after a long, long winter. Some say: That tree will not be able to live. We know better: In its shadows children will play for generations forward, and women and men will rest there after a hard day’s work. You have gone through hard times. Hard times are before you. But Israel will live.1 With these words, the General Secretary of the Norwegian Labour Party, Haakon Lie (1905–2009), addressed the Israeli Workers Organisation, Histadrut,attheir congress in 1956 in Tel Aviv, held approximately one month after Israel emerged victorious from the Six Days’ war in October against its Arab neighbours. The green metaphor – the birch tree, an image of the newly created state of Israel – 1 “For meg tar Israel mer og mer form av symbolet på liv. Symbolet på liv der man ikke skulle tro at liv kunne opprettholdes . Tidlig på våren kan vi ofte, der hjemme, oppleve et fantastisk syn. Midt i den dype snøen og isen står en hvit bjørk med flotte, grønne blader. Solskinn fikk bladene til å sprette ut for tidlig. Og du sier: Det treet vil dø. Men det dør ikke. Mirakuløst fortsetter det å leve og vokse. For meg synes Israel som disse grønne bjørketrærne, omgitt av kald iset snø. En stor ide så varm som solskinn om våren brakte det frem, etter en lang, lang vinter. Noen sier: Det treet vil ikke være i stand til å leve. Vi vet bedre: I skyggene vil barna leke i generasjoner fremover, og kvinner og menn vil hvile der etter en hard dags arbeid. Dere har gått gjennom harde tider. Harde tider ligger foran dere. Men Israel vil leve.” Vebjørn Selbekk, Korset og Davidsstjernen: Norge, jødene og Israel – fra 1814 til i dag (Kjeller: Genesis, 2013), 2; Odd Karsten Tveit, Alt for Israel (Oslo: Cappelen, 1996), 254. Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati, Associate Professor of the Study of Religion, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Norway 330 Ragnhild Johnsrud Zorgati stands out as viable, tenaciously rooted, and with the potential of growing strong, despite the threatening icy surroundings. The image of the tree may play back on the campaign “Let Israel Live,”2 which was launched in 1956 by Norwegian friends of Israel, headed by the Labour Party and General Secretary Lie in collabo- ration with partners in Israel.3 The campaign aimed at showing solidarity with Israel.4 In several Norwegian cities and towns, on May 1, 1956, supporters were marching in the streets with banners and posters depicting a young tree menaced byablood-drippingaxe.ThetreesymbolizedtheyoungstateofIsrael,theaxeits threatening Arab neighbours.5 In Lie’s speech, the tree is specified as a birch; a rhetorically interesting feature as the birch is not common in the Eastern Mediterranean, but rather recalls Nordic forests and landscapes. As such, it evokes recent memories in the Scandinavian imagination: the image of the birch, which shielded the Norwegian King and Crown Prince outside of Oslo, during their flight from the Nazi occupants in April 1940; a scene made immortal by an iconic photograph familiar to every Norwegian school- child.6 Hence, the image of the birch in Lie’s speech contributes to establishing a close link between the two states: While a birch tree shielded Norway, symbolized by the King, from Nazi Germany’s bombers in 1940, the tree has in 1956 become the Israeli nation itself; it will protect its children and let future generations live. In his speech, Lie dichotomises the living tree and the deep ice and snow. It is a familiar dichotomy: life opposes death, fertility trumps barrenness. Still, in the con- text of the Levant, the familiarity acquires a specific meaning. Lie builds, perhaps unconsciously, on recurrent imagery in European depictions of Palestine. In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scandinavian sources, which inform the current chapter, Palestine is described as fertile, rich, and densely populated in biblical times; contemporary Palestine, on the other hand, is portrayed as barren, dry, and sparsely 2 “La Israel leve.” 3 Hilde Henriksen Waage, “How Norway became one of Israel’s Best Friends,” Journal of Peace Research 37, no. 2 (2000): 204. Waage argues that the campaign was the result of “an extremely close relationship [that] had grown up between the Norwegian and the Israeli Labour parties and, importantly, between the Norwegian Labour Party office and the Israeli embassy in Oslo.” 4 The idea of an information campaign, aimed at raising popular support for Israel in Norway got the approval of the leadership of the Norwegian Labour party in February 1956. Shortly after, a delegation of fourteen journalists, editors, andtradeunionofficialstravelledtoIsrael.Theyvisitedindustrialand agricultural sites and saw examples of how the kibbutz system gave Jewish refugees a new future. The Norwegians also met influential members of the Israeli political elite and trade union movement. Once returned to Norway, the press close to the Labour party edited several articles from the trip, in addition to the initial declaration “Let Israel Live” published on March 17, 1956, in Arbeiderbladet [The Labourer’sJournal] and signed by all the delegates. Selbekk, Korset og Davidsstjernen,2. 5 Selbekk, Korset og Davidsstjernen,2. 6 King Haakon VII and Crown Prince Olav were photographed by Per Bratland at Glomstua in Molde, Norway, in April, 1940. The birch is now known as Kongebjørka [The King’s Birch]. See “Kongebjørka,” in Store norske leksikon, https://snl.no/Kongebjørka, accessed August 26, 2019. Chapter 17 The Green Line of the Jerusalem Code 331 inhabited.7 Thebarrennessisoften– as in the “Let Israel Live”-banner – attributed to the wrongdoings of somebody else, be they Turks, Arabs, or Jews. Nevertheless, despite their thorough insistence on the infertility of the land, Scandinavian as well as other European or American nineteenth-century travellers also observed beautiful green val- leys, rich cereal fields, and exotic trees as they rode through the landscapes of Samaria, Galilea, and Judea. In addition, they brought home naturalia – dried flowers, plants and seeds, preserved fishes or living turtles; and, later, the idea that the sterile land could again be cultivated and blossom as during the reign of King Solomon gained momentum. In the present chapter, I trace what I call the green line8 of the Jerusalem code through exploring how plants, trees, and landscapes establish symbolic or material connections between Palestine and Scandinavia. I will highlight the interconnected- ness of three main points: First, I examine the importance of greenness and fertility in the Scandinavian imaginary involving the Holy Land9 as described in literature and 7 The topos of the desolated land was common in most nineteenth-century European and American approaches to Palestine. Se for example C. W. Wilson, “Recent Surveys in Sinai and Palestine,” The JournaloftheRoyalGeographicSocietyofLondon43 (1873): 208, 211. See also Glenda Abramson, “Two Nineteenth-Century Travelers to the Holy Land,” Israel Affairs 8, no. 3 (2000): 72–3, which analyses the EnglishauthorHermanMelville’s harsh representation of the land. While Abramson keeps a critical dis- tance to the nineteenth-century sources, Hanna Margalit, in a publication from the early 1960s, takes the representation of nineteenth-century travelers at face value, reiterating the dichotomy of former abundance in contrast to the waste and neglect that occurred in the Middle Ages and under Ottoman rule: “The purpose of this paper is to attempt a reconstruction of the cultural landscape of Palestine at a critical turning point of its history, namely on the threshold of this period of amelioration, at the stage of utmost decline after the desolation of the Middle Ages and 300 years of Ottoman rule.” Hanna Margalit, “Some Aspects of the Cultural Landscape of Palestine during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Israel Exploration Journal 13, no. 3 (1963): quote on p. 208, see also pp. 212–17, 220, 223. 8 At first a coincidence, it proved indirectly significant for my argument that the armistice border of 1949 between Israel and its Arab neighbours is called “The Green Line.” 9 The term “The Holy Land” needs some specification.