Religion in the Commons: Seasonal Solidarity in Jerusalem’s Old City

As cities around the world struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing climate, ancient urban centers have become sites of particular distress while also producing new forms of solidarity. Drawing on fieldwork among Palestinian Christians in the Old City of Jerusalem, this talk explores how space is shared in a context where different national, religious, and ethnic communities live together in a very small, very contested built environment.

In the Old City, Jerusalemites avoid the heat in the summer and seek out the sun in the winter through collective trips to “take the air” beyond the city walls and in the courtyards of convents and large families. In the process, privately owned domestic or religious spaces transform into the shared domain of kin, neighbors, friends, and strangers, but only at certain times of the year. The paper suggests that this dynamic represents a form of commons that is obscured in academic theories which view domestic and religious idioms of sharing space as incompatible with true political solidarity. The search for a “true” commons, however, may overlook already existing pathways of collaboration and mobilization, including the partial ways in which the publicness of “green” spaces can expand and contract as social and environmental conditions change.

Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music