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REFLECTIONS ON TERRITORIAL IDENTITY
Yosseph Shilhav
Department of Geography and Environment, Bar-Ilan University
This article deals with the territorial attachment between a nation and its land as a fundamental
issue in political geography. This does not concern objective substances but rather subjective
consciousness of bonds and attachments not rooted in judicial or legal formulations. The people’s
bond to their land derives from deep fundamental identities of history, culture, religion and
beliefs that people do share, where sites, locations and landscapes are part of. The attachment of
the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, and preserving it as a vital component of their national
identity, are unique in the sense that they developed not merely as a ‘natural’ bond of people
dwelling on their land, but rather as a sense of destiny and mission regarding a promised land.
The multifaceted consequences of that uniqueness are dealt with in the article.
Keywords
: territorial identity, destiny attachment, sanctity of the land, sovereignty, iconography.
(NON)REPRESENTATION OF THE HUMAN IN THE LANDSCAPE
Orna Blumen
Department of Human Services, University of Haifa
This paper considers the influence of binary thinking in geography on the reading of landscapes.
The landscape, a fundamental geographical concept, is where the physical-human binary is most
apparent. This is further emphasized in reading cultural landscapes as material representations
of ideologies. By focusing on an ordinary urban landscape as a cultural construct, this article
examines the place of
the human
in the comprehension of landscape. The main argument is that
the human
is mostly identified with shaping and interpreting the landscape and hence is located
beyond the landscape scene, while the people who appear inside the landscape are often treated
as solidified into the material shapes and objectified. Relying on non-representational theory it
is suggested that a fuller understanding of landscapes should strive to de-objectify and revive
the people observed inside the landscape scene.
Keywords
: landscape, geography, binary, work, Israeli ultra-orthodox Jews.
JEWISH SCHOLAR MEETS GERMAN SCIENTIST: HOW EASTERN
JEWISH SOCIETY CAME TO KNOW ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT
Ela Bauer
Department of Jewish History University of Haifa; Department of Communication &
Film, Seminar Hakibbutzim College
The name of Alexander von Humboldt was fairly well known to Hebrew readers of the second
half of the 19
th
century. Humboldt, who today is mainly known as the founder of modern