Political Memes

The Catholic Church, reaching the peak of its political power in the High Middle Ages, called armies from across Europe to a series of Crusades against Islam. The Latin Crusaders occupied Palestine in 1099 and founded the Crusader states in the Levant. Following the great East–West schism of 1054 between the Eastern Orthodox and Latin churches and after the arrival of the first Latin Crusaders in Palestine, the Crusaders appointed a Latin Patriarch in Jerusalem.

The hierarchy of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem and high‑minded elite Frankish crusaders in Palestine, who sought to create a European Latin‑speaking colony in the Holy Land, could not prevent the transformation, within a generation or so, of the outlook of many ordinary Latin settlers in Palestine. Some churchy Latin crusaders were deeply concerned that many ordinary European colonists practically went native in Palestine, adopting ‘Oriental’ styles and local customs.

The local Arab Muslim‒Christian bonds in Jerusalem can be traced to early Islam. Following the elimination of the European Latin Crusaders from the city, indigenous Arab Muslim‒Christian shared traditions of convivencia in Jerusalem were re‑cultivated; symbolically, the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were entrusted to two aristocratic Palestinian Muslim families in the city, the Nuseibeh and Judeh al‑Ghoudia. Created by Salah al‑Din shortly before his death in 1193, this post‑Crusader ceremonial tradition added another widely respected layer of daily rituals to the multi‑layered ancient sacredness of the site. Today the ruins of Crusader sites (churches, hostels and castles) are visible throughout historic Palestine and graf f i ti left by Crusaders can still be seen in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

Furthermore, place‑naming cartography and state‑sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire‑building and settler‑colonisa‑ tion projects, the Zionist enterprise included. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and shared heritage of places and regions. This work uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place‑naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the work shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine: their superimposition of Old Testament and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the local Palestinian and Arab Islamic heritage of the country. In the pre‑Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised 19th century Western explorations of Old Testament ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the ruptures of the Nakba, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide. Continuing into the post‑1967 occupation, these colonial methods continue to threaten the destruction of the diverse cultural and historic heritage of the land.