Zweig’s protagonist saw Jerusalem’s sacred sites as historically unstable overlays.

Evidence

In De Vriendt Goes Home, Zweig has his protagonist contemplate the disjunction between Jerusalem as known to its inhabitants and pilgrims, and the actual historical geography of the city: “He knew that Joseph’s grave is not Joseph’s grave, that the grave of the Prophet Samuel probably lies in the neighbourhood of Mizpah, but not necessarily where the guides point it out, and that all the buildings and inscriptions are but the transitory work of human hands. Do not the streets of the true Jerusalem, the sacred city, lie fifty feet deep under the wreckage of destruction, spanned by the stone pavements of today?” — Ivan Davidson Kalmar, Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews, 444

Categorization

• XREF: The palimpsest view of Jerusalem — sacred city fifty feet deep under wreckage — resonates with the palimpsest-of-infrastructure theme in ‘Grafting & Growth: On Trees as Infrastructure’, and with the layered-history trope in many orientalist travel accounts.