Roundel with Entry into Jerusalem, 10th century, German, on view at The Met Cloisters, Gallery 10
This semester, I had grand plans of taking my class to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art / Cloisters to learn about art and artifacts from and about the city of Jerusalem. We would analyze Crusader church remains that depict Jesus’ entry to Jerusalem with the same imagery found on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and examine a censer, used for burning incense during church services, intricately crafted in the shape of Jerusalem’s city walls and iconic buildings. We would view early Qur’anic manuscripts narrating Muhammad’s Night Journey, and astrolabes that include Jerusalem among the locations to which one could navigate with such a device. We would explore ancient Jewish oil lamps with imagery of utensils used in the temple that once stood in Jerusalem, and compare manuscripts of Passover Haggadot, looking closely at the elaborate pages that hopefully declare “Next Year in Jerusalem!”
The world, now in the throes of a global pandemic, had other plans for us. Alas. With universities and museums closed, and faculty, students, and staff working and studying from home, visiting a museum together in person would not be possible.
But all was not lost. Instead of a physical pilgrimage up the hill of Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights to the Cloisters, or down Fifth Avenue to the Met’s main collection, I decided that we would tour the (web)sites of some of the world’s best art collections.
Usually, when I take my students on a tour of a museum, I first spend a day at the museum on my own, reacquainting myself with the pieces, the flow from room to room, the story I want to construct through our wanderings. I write notes on index cards – one for each work of art – with questions to ask, background to share, details to highlight, passages from class readings to reference. When we go together as a class, I serve as the guide. But when I imagined the possibilities of a virtual tour, I was most excited about the chance of flipping the experience: asking students to serve as the guides, teaching each other and teaching me.
Therefore, instead of designing the online tour myself, I invited students to explore any museum, archive, or library collection in the world on their own. The time they took to browse online collections would allow them to discover new visual and material sources related to the subject of our course, to understand what kinds of objects different museums and institutions hold (including why a single city’s artifacts are found all over the world), and to learn how to access such online resources and make good use of them. It would also encourage them to think beyond the parameters of the course itself, expanding the curriculum rather than staying within in, a practice that I encourage throughout the semester in all of my courses.
In order to guide students, I provided them with links to select museums that I know have extensive holdings related to Jerusalem, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Israel Museum, the Vatican Museum, and the Getty. I also linked to local collections (in my case in New York City) that would have unique contributions, such as the Jewish Museum of New York and the Morgan Library. In addition to museums, I also introduced students to manuscript libraries and map collections, such as the British Library’s Digitized Manuscripts, the Chester Beatty, and the National Library of Israel’s Laor Collection of Maps about Jerusalem; digital archives, such as the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive and the Friedburg Geniza Project; art and numismatic databases, such as the Princeton Index of Medieval Art and the many coin collections listed with the International Numismatic Council; and online galleries, such as Artsy.net. Doing so allowed students to expand their idea of what art and material culture includes, and thus to incorporate medieval manuscripts, illuminations, documentary sources, photographs, coins, archaeological remains, ritual objects, and contemporary art into our museum tour. I reminded students that they need not limit themselves to the resources I included in my guidelines – they were welcome, even encouraged, to search far and wide. I also encouraged students to feature ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary pieces – whatever struck their fancy.
I designed the process of browsing and searching through these collections itself to serve as an educational experience. I told students that in order to find interesting artifacts related to Jerusalem, they could search various key terms, beyond simply “Jerusalem.” Searching terms such as “pilgrimage,” “Crusades,” “Qur’an,” “Temple,” “True Cross,” “Aaron,” or “menorah,” might reveal dimensions of how people imagined and depicted Jerusalem in various contexts. In other words, discovering art and artifacts related to Jerusalem itself takes patience, creativity, and deep knowledge of the city’s history. They were encouraged to use their background about the history of Jerusalem, from a semester of learning about the city, to locate items.
In order to translate their online explorations into a collaborative project, I asked each student, as part of their pre-class preparations, to identify three objects that they could contribute to our virtual museum tour. They were able to choose any three pieces they wished, as long as those pieces had not already been chosen by another one of their classmates. In order to facilitate this process, I shared a Google Doc with my students, on which they “registered” their objects; they could see the objects that had already been “registered,” so as to avoid duplication. Asking each of them to contribute unique objects ensured that the tour would encompass a diverse group of artifacts, including some artifacts off the beaten path.
Once students had registered their pieces, I asked them to create one slide for each of their chosen objects or works of art on Google Slides. Google Slides allows students to work on their own slides within a shared file. Each slide needed to include the following information:
a. A photograph of the image (which they could copy and paste from the museum website);
b. The title (if applicable), date or approximate date, location, materials, and brief description of the work of art;
c. A passage from our primary source readings, with proper citation, to complement or supplement in some way the chosen work of art;
d. The url for the object from the museum’s website, for citation purposes, along with the name of the museum or collection of which it is a part.
I asked students to include not only an image and basic identifying information, but also a passage from our course’s readings, to ensure that they thought carefully about how their objects fit within the history of Jerusalem and to make creative connections between texts and objects. It also meant that students returned to our course readings to review them, in their search for a fitting quote. Moreover, these selected passages would allow us, later on, to make unexpected connections between objects that were quite different from one another because they were associated, in the students’ slides, with the same text or passage.
Once all students finished designing their slides, I rearranged them so that the slides appeared in chronological order. I could easily have arranged them in a different way, for example according to themes, geographical regions, or religious traditions, but I chose chronology as the ordering principle because doing so allowed me to put different types of art and artifacts, from distinct traditions and regions, into conversation with one another, and to illuminate how depictions of Jerusalem developed over time. By doing so I noticed, for example, trends in medieval European paintings of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, and a change in how the Wailing Wall was depicted in the 19th century, at the very time when the site gained more prominence as a place of pious Jewish worship and devotion.
Everyone Who Mourns Jerusalem Reaps Its Joy (At the Wailing Wall), 1905, Hermann Struck, Jewish Museum NY
Speakers Standing on the Balcony of the Arab Club in Jerusalem, 1920, Sa‘id al-Husseiny Collection, The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive
With the objects chosen, the slides created, and the slideshow ordered, we were ready for our museum tour. I chose to conduct the tour itself on Zoom, as a synchronous class session, but I also could have orchestrated an asynchronous tour. I’ll explain both options below.
For those planning a synchronous class meeting, here is what I did. Following a brief introduction in which I outlined my rationale for this project, we jumped right into our museum tour. I screen-shared the Google Slides file, so that everyone was able to see the exhibit at the same time. Student took turns speaking about the art, artifacts, and objects that they chose – that is, they served as the “tour guide” through their slides – slide by slide. They described their objects, why they chose the related quote, and how the object related to our explorations of Jerusalem’s history. There were opportunities for questions and observations throughout.
For those teaching asynchronously, students can add narration to their Google Slides (this can be done by adding an audio file to any given slide), or working on a shared Powerpoint, which also allows for recorded narrations. The instructor can then add words of introduction and conclusion. Once the audio files have been added, each student can take the museum tour on their own time.
I did not grade this assignment; it functioned simply as a class meeting, and the preparation the students did in advance of our class meeting stood in lieu of course readings for that session. Even though there was no grade, students enthusiastically prepared and participated. I can imagine, however, that a virtual museum tour could also turn into a more significant semester-long project. Rather than simply exploring online and sharing their preliminary findings, students could spend an entire semester researching a work of art, an object, or a document in far more depth; write a research paper about it; create a virtual museum slide with a brief overview of the piece; and produce a podcast in which they tell the story of the work of art. In that case, each part of the assignment would provide students with an opportunity to practice a different skill – research, academic writing, visual presentation, podcasting – and at the end of the semester students would have a chance to share their work with classmates through the virtual museum tour, set with accompanying podcasts that narrate each piece of the exhibit. The project could be even further developed so that students work collaboratively in groups, on interrelated themes, such that each group contributes one “room” or “gallery” of the larger museum tour, and the class more deliberately curates the exhibition.
Because each student has different interests and chose different objects, our tour was wonderfully diverse in time periods, religious traditions, media, and geographical origin. One student chose to include Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an to remind students that Islam and Islamic traditions, including those about Jerusalem, have long been a part of American culture, dating back to the origins of the country, rather than being ideas associated only with faraway places or more recent histories. Another student found a sixteenth-century Seder plate from Granada, noting that Passover is a pilgrimage festival that brought and still brings Jews to Jerusalem for the holiday each year. Several students chose images that depict narratives we read together in class, for example, an illuminated Bible that features a painting of Queen Athaliah being dragged out of the temple to her death, depictions of Jeremiah mourning the temple’s destruction, and reliquaries pictorially narrating Helena finding the true cross. Others included pilgrim artifacts, including Byzantine pilgrim jars and souvenir crosses, jewelry hoards and signet rings, and photographs of places such as the Mosque of Umar, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Jaffa Gate, all from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the most modern works – “Jerusalem” (1982) by David Suter – came from the National Portrait Gallery. It depicts Jerusalem as a city built on a hill, with its walls constructed in the shape of a Star of David, with a cross and a crescent within it, symbolizing the complicated political situation but also the hope that somehow these three faiths can find a way of living together upon that hill. The image brought us right back to the start of our semester when we discussed Jerusalem’s topography and geography, and to its conclusion, when we explored the role of Jerusalem in contemporary politics. Seeing which objects the students chose also gave me a window into what spoke most to each of them.
“Jerusalem,” by David Suter, 1982, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
To wrap up our tour, I included my own set of slides. Rather than choosing art about Jerusalem, I chose to share street art from Jerusalem. This brought us right to the present (Jerusalem street art, photographs by Sarit Kattan Gribetz):
Through this assignment, each student served as a guide on a global museum tour, and together as a class we discovered some of the world’s many Jerusalem treasures and the varied representations of Jerusalem throughout history. And they didn’t even need to leave their bedrooms to do so.
Dr. Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Assistant Professor of Classical Judaism at Fordham University.