Page 250 - ירושלים: גיליון רפואי

Illness in Jerusalem as Reflected
in Modern Hebrew Literature

Maayan Harel

The connection between the setting of Jerusalem and specific ailments and sickness, and
the city’s transformation into a setting for many fictional characters who are unstable in body
and mind has been a recurrent and prominent theme in Hebrew literature over the years. This
identification becomes more significant in works written and set in the first two decades of the
twentieth century, commonly termed “Second Aliyah literature” in Hebrew literary studies.

From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, fictional and non-fictional texts depict
Jerusalem as an ailing city inhabited by the sick. These descriptions are often accompanied
by bitter disappointment at the difference between the way in which the city is portrayed in
the national perception – as the delight of the world, of exceptional beauty, splendor and
holiness – and the harsh historical reality that is revealed: A wretched, old, crumbling city, filled
with beggars and lunatics who wander its alleys. These descriptions are also accompanied by
numerous references to physical and symbolic sickness. Many of them are based on factual
data – Jerusalem had indeed been a city in which illness was rampant for many years, and
its residents had long suffered the ravages of disease and severe epidemics. Yet beyond
the historical, non-fictional facts, there appears to be considerable symbolic significance in
choosing to describe Jerusalem as an ailing city, precisely against the background of the Zionist
revival and the Hebrew literature it inspired.

It is interesting to discover that in Zionist discourse about building the land and the creation
of a new Zionist individual – laboring on the land, living in agricultural colonies and groups
of young halutzim (pioneers) – Jerusalem continues to be identified with the Diaspora. The
city embodies the return of the “rejected Diaspora” to the land of Eretz Israel in different ways,
including the city’s focus on religion and faith, which contrasts with a Zionist ideology that
prides itself on secularism, but no less important, and perhaps as a result – in its depiction as
an ailing city and a focal center for physical and mental disorders, in a country whose new
inhabitants are struggling to shake off the former Diaspora ills and become healthy. Thus,
against the background of the metaphor of healing and recovery, which is central to the Zionist

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