The bearded figure clad in white robes and wandering barefoot through the streets of Jerusalem is not, in fact, the messiah. But neither is he a very naughty boy. Rather, he is a middle-aged man from Texas in need of a shower who, like the German across the street claiming to be Saint Paul, is caught in the grip of Jerusalem Syndrome — first clinically described in 1937. The afflicted are visitors so struck by their encounter with the city they become convinced they are ‘prophets, messiahs or redeemers. They can no longer distinguish between reality and fevered imagination.’
These are extreme cases, but they might be better thought of as extreme symptoms of a gentler, everyday blurring of reality and imagination that occurs when exploring Jerusalem, a city built from scripts and mortar. T.E. Lawrence in 1917 caught the feeling well: the ‘forces of the past and the future were so strong that the city almost failed to have a present’. Almost, but not quite; for it is from such a blurred present that the historian Merav Mack and the critically acclaimed writer Benjamin Balint explore the history of Jerusalem’s libraries and map the terrain between the real Jerusalem and the one dreamed of by the countless communities of the city bound through time by a ‘reverence for the written word’.
Part of the charm of their book is the fact that, as the authors travel from archive to archive, they try to ‘experience Jerusalem like a Jerusalemite’. This is not a city you experience chronologically, but chaotically: ‘It involves discovering the ways that overlapping layers of memory, joined and jumbled with imagination… often overwhelm the present.’ This approach gives the prose both a reverential quality and a hectic, gleeful energy.
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