Kimberly Katz. Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. xvi + 150 pp. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8130-2844-6.

Reviewed by Michael Fischbach (Department of History, Randolph-Macon College)
Published on H-Levant (October, 2007)

The Sacred and the Profane

One of the topics that has generated considerable scholarly interest in the past decade, within the various disciplines dealing with modern Middle Eastern history, is the question of how national identity is created. Various factors, from socio-economic to cultural and spatial, have been analyzed by those seeking to discover how national communities--what Benedict Anderson's seminal 1991 book calls "imagined communities"--are formed. Despite the fact that all the modern-day states of the Fertile Crescent were creations of Western imperialism, Jordan has been the subject of particular focus in regard to this issue. What factors have gone into the creation of a Jordanian national consciousness and identity? What defines "Jordanianness?" How did this identity deal with others, particularly Palestinian identity, and how did it negotiate between and among other forces current in the Arab world, including pan-Arab nationalism?

The Hashemite rulers, who have ruled the country since the British created Transjordan in 1921, always have struggled to articulate a vision of Jordanianness (which in fact has changed over time) as well as to maintain these changing identities in the face of powerful regional currents, forces, events, and neighbors that often (if not usually) have militated against these efforts. For example, the fact that Jordan's Hashemite monarchs have embraced and celebrated the Hashemite family's traditionalist and pro-Western Arab nationalist credentials frequently has collided with the anti-Western, anti-colonial sentiments so often found among Arabs in the twentieth century, including those living in Jordan itself. This was particularly true in the mid-twentieth century, when so many of the traditional values upon which Hashemite Jordanian identity rested had become distinctly out of fashion in the Arab world, enamored as it was with the secular, "revolutionary," and anti-Western pan-Arab nationalism espoused by the likes of the Ba'th Party and Egypt's President Jamal Abd al-Nasir (Gamal Abdel Nasser). Jordanian national identity thus had to contend with the albatross of its imperial parentage and its continued ties with its former colonial master, and the fact that, with the notable exception of Lebanon, it was alone among the Arab states of the Fertile Crescent and North Africa in not rising in armed rebellion against its European overlords during the period between the world wars.

Another fact crucial to understanding modern Jordanian national identity has been the country's complicated and conflicted relationship with the Palestinians, and with that people's own rival sense of national identity. From its birth at the Cairo Conference in 1921, Transjordan became linked with the fate of the Palestinians when it was subsumed within the rubric of the British Mandate for Palestine. After Jordanian independence in 1946, the wider regional ambitions of Emir (later King) Abdullah I were partially realized when Jordan's Arab Legion managed to control the portions of Palestine later called the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948. While some Palestinian elites heralded Jordanian rule as preferable to Israeli rule, many of the country's hundreds of thousands of new Palestinian citizens were opposed to Abdullah's rule and his policies--as demonstrated by his assassination at the hands of a disgruntled Palestinian in Jerusalem in 1951.

Jordanian national identity, particularly the legitimacy of this identity in the eyes of its own citizens, was thus hobbled by several serious problems by the early 1950s. Yet the country's annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem--the portion of the holy city containing the important Muslim and Christian (and Jewish) shrines--afforded the Hashemite regime the opportunity to exploit the national and religious sentiments that the city evoked for Palestinians, and indeed the entire Arab world, to construct a new national identity that could help refurbish and improve Jordan's image at home, in the Arab world, and in the wider world.

Kimberly Katz (Towson University) has produced a fine study of the role Jerusalem played in the construction of modern Jordanian national identity during the period of Jordanian rule in the city (1948-67) and thereafter. She discusses "the meeting place of religion and nationalism" and the ways that "just as nations and religious groups are imagined communities, holy places are also imagined spaces" (p. 1). Her case study analyzes the way that Jordanian political elites tried to legitimize the regime by using the holy city and its shrines to shape the country's religious and material culture, and in the process change and ennoble Jordan's national identity. The end result is a book that makes an important contribution to the fields of Jordanian and Palestinian history, as well as to the ongoing scholarly discussion about national identities. Furthermore, Katz's book is the first to examine Jerusalem during the period that it was under Jordanian rule, a welcome development on a field that has hitherto displayed inordinate focus on the periods of Ottoman and Israeli rule.

Jordanian Jerusalem begins by looking at the origins of Jordan, from its beginnings in 1921 as Emirate of Transjordan, through independence as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in 1946, and its control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1948. Katz spends several chapters examining the nature of Jordanian rule in Jerusalem, in particular its involvement in religious affairs in the holy city. She then discusses the ways that Jerusalem literally began to appear as part of Jordan's new self-created image as "the Holy Land" through displays of Muslim and Christian shrines on postage stamps and currency notes, and through tourist campaigns aimed at encouraging visits by religious pilgrims from abroad. She ends the book by analyzing how the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 impacted Jordan's carefully self-generated image of the Hashemites as the custodians of the city the Palestinians called their capital, as well as how Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem in 1967 affected Jordan's entire relationship with the city. Although the book's theses are presented in the introduction and reinforced throughout, its lack of a conclusion, which would have summarized and clarified the above, is a notable flaw.

Throughout this short book, Katz does well in charting the various material and ideological factors that went into the changing nature of Jordanian national identity as it was consciously articulated by the Hashemite monarchy. A refreshing aspect of Katz's book is not just her use of postage stamps, tourist brochures, currency notes, and other aspects of material culture, but also her reliance on archival and other Arabic-language primary source materials. This leads to a rare convergence of the methodologies of materialist scholars with those of post-modernists.

This is one of the best and most innovative books on Jordan to have emerged in recent years. Its examination of material culture in particular adds a new dimension to some of the perennial issues about the country that scholars long have explored (e.g., Jordanian identity, and the nature of Palestinian-Jordanian relations), and at the same time fills the yawning gap that exists in the literature on Jerusalem, which until now has focused almost exclusively on the periods of Ottoman and Israeli rule.

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Citation: Michael Fischbach. Review of Katz, Kimberly, Jordanian Jerusalem: Holy Places and National Spaces. H-Levant, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13746

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