As Iran tries to wipe Israel off the map, a museum charts those who first put it on |
In 1483, Bernhard von Breydenbach, a dean from the German city of Mainz, embarked on a months-long pilgrimage to the Holy Land. During the journey, von Breydenbach and his group, which included Dutch artist Erhard Reuwich from Utrecht, visited Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, several sites in the Galilee, and concluded their pilgrimage at the Saint Catherine Monastery in the Sinai desert.
The trip was recorded in a richly illustrated journal published a few years later, marking the first such mass-produced travelogue, and the first to include a largely accurate panoramic map of the Holy Land. Drawn by Reuwich, the illustrated graphic shows much of the area traversed by the group, spanning from Mecca to Damascus, with Jerusalem and the crimson-topped Dome of the Rock at its center.
A sensation when it was first printed, the map is once again in the spotlight, this time at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it is featured prominently in the exhibition “Fact, Faith, and Fantasy — Maps of the Holy Land from the Chinn Collection.” The show opened in January and is once again open to visitors after the museum was closed for several weeks due to the war with Iran.
British philanthropists Sir Trevor and Lady Susan Chinn began collecting ancient maps after receiving one as a wedding gift in 1965. They donated their still-expanding collection to the Israel Museum around 10 years ago.
The Breydenbach/Reuwich map unfurls to the length of several pages to capture the breadth of the region. Jerusalem alone occupies about one-third of the graphic, with the city displayed larger and more detailed than any other location.
“Maps make many manipulations, even modern or topographic maps,” said the exhibition’s curator, Ariel Tishby, who is in charge of the Holy Land Maps section at the museum. “[Maps] are means of communication, and they are also used for propaganda, including religious propaganda.”
The exhibition features dozens of maps spanning from the 15th to the 19th centuries, depicting the land of Israel and the city of Jerusalem.
Though informed by accounts from travelers and rudimentary cartography, many of the artifacts are heavily influenced by stories from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. In the Breydenbach/Reuwich map, the Muslim holy shrine of the Dome of the Rock us labeled “Templum Salomonis,” or Solomon’s Temple.
“This is how the Crusaders called the Dome of the Rock,” Tishby told The Times of Israel during a visit to the exhibition. “Likely the Crusaders did not really think that [the shrine] was the [Jewish] temple, but they saw this beautiful architecture exactly in the place [where the Temple stood].”
On the map, the facade of the Holy Sepulchre is also........