In “Civilization and Its Discontents,” Freud compared memory and its recovery to the archaeology of Rome. The visitor cannot see the earlier layers of civilization, but the guidebook says where they once were. This allows us to look at the Colosseum and imagine the Golden House of Nero below. But, Freud wrote, a single physical space cannot hold “two different contents.” If it did, then the Palazzo Caffarelli would occupy the same spot as the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and we would see the temple in both its early, Etruscan form and its later, imperial form.
Freud never saw Jerusalem. Not only is its visitor’s imagination incited by the Bible, the guidebook of guidebooks, but Jerusalem’s archaeology also presents the simultaneity that Freud thought impossible. The sacred core of Jerusalem is so great that, like New York, they named it twice: Raise your head as you emerge from the warren of the Old City, and you see the Temple Mount of the Jews and the Noble Sanctuary of the Muslims. Two different contents, two different contexts—not forgetting the Christians, who cannot agree among themselves where their sacred sites should be.
