Fake Jerusalems

February 8, 2007

A student in my Hajj class pointed out this site to me. It is a theme park somewhere around Orlando, Florida.. The Holy Land Experience. Note that upon buying a ticket you enter the park through an abridged replica of the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem and then proceed through the "Jerusalem Street Market".. undoubtedly an attempt to replicate a Middle Eastern bazaar. Then you could proceed to "Calvary's Garden Tomb" or push on to a version of the Jewish temple. Along the way you can watch worshipful performances.. Here is a YouTube commercial for the park:

My first response to this was a mixture of horror and humor. If, like me, you are given to worry that Americans grow ever more out of touch with the actual world.. then this is one outstanding piece of evidence. It represents the Main-Streetizing of a world that is messy. The humor comes when I stop moralizing and just feel like laughing at the fakeness of it all..

I also began to wonder what is really so weird about this Jerusalem set up among the green palm trees of Florida. The magnitude of fakeness at the real Jerusalem may even surpass that found in Orlando! In an always fascinating essay on the social construction of Jerusalem, Maurice Halbwachs traces the layers of meaning that have been rebuilt in Jerusalem.. concentrating on the Christian version of the city. He notes about the Crusaders:

They instituted new localizations, guided no doubt by the Gospels, but also by apocryphal writings and legends that had circulated for some time in Christian lands, and even by a kind of inspiration... The Crusaders behaved as if this land and these stones recognized them, as if they had only to stoop down in order to suddenly hear voices that had remained silent... [232]

Considering that Jerusalem was completely destroyed in 70 AD, it is amazing to encounter the confidence with which later Christians identified important sites. In a way the Jerusalem that these earlier Christians constructed was no less a fiction than the Holy Land Experience in Orlando. It is just that the earlier fictional Jerusalem was built on the correct geographical coordinates.. and therefore gained prestige.

The desire to construct a model of Jerusalem did not first leap into the mind of some Floridian businessman.. but can be traced back to the Ethiopians who constructed the holy city of Lalibela in the 12th century AD. There is a rock cut channel known as the Yordanos, and

North of the Yordanos is Debra Zeit (the Mount of Olives) and Bethany; south is Debra Tabor (Mount Tabor, the Mount of Transfiguration). The first group of churches represents Jerusalem; the second Bethlehem. In this way, a new landscape of the Holy Land was constructed in the mountains of Lasta... [Ethiopia: The Unknown Land, Stuart Munro-Hay, pg. 190]

Here again is something we could call the Holy Land Experience.. without the American theme park oddities like a wandering Jesus and musical programs. But still, it was an attempt to re-create sacred Jerusalem. So maybe I should temper my scorn.. and see the Orlando version as simply the latest fiction in a long line of others.