A Patch of Land Called Holy: How Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Learned to Live Outside Any Specific Territory Stefan Ecks & Eva Keller

Introduction: One Tiny Patch of the Earth

The territory at the center of the modern conflict is small. Measured against the surface of the earth, against the size of the states and empires that have fought over it, against almost any other contested territory in the world, the Holy Land is a sliver: a strip of coastline, a highland ridge, a scatter of hills, at its densest point a single walled city perhaps one square kilometer across. The entire territory west of the Jordan River could be set down inside many single American counties with room to spare. And yet this small patch of the earth carries claims of a magnitude entirely out of proportion to its size: religious necessity, national completion, historical justice, bodily security, and divine promise, all pressed onto the same few acres at once.

Living Value Theory draws a distinction that clarifies what is actually being claimed when a claim of this kind is made. Territorial land, the specific soil, coastline, hills, and climate of a place, belongs to multiversal dwelling: the mediation through which coordination is structured by the non-human-created conditions within which life is situated, land and terrain, mountains and valleys, rivers and coastline, altitude and climate, the daily and seasonal rhythms of sun and season that no human community made and that every human community must live within. Buildings, walls, settlements, shrines, roads, and borders are multimaterial: the constructed and physical forms through which communities occupy and organize a place. Maps, scriptures, legal titles, and national narratives are multisymbolic: the meanings, categories, and claims through which a place is named, remembered, and justified. Communities and their historical enemies belong to being-with. Injury, fear, pilgrimage, and worship are embodied. The conflict over the Holy Land is fully multimediated in this sense; every one of these modes of coordination is active in it at once. But its distinctive and defining feature is narrower than that general observation: the elevation of one small territorial portion of found, non-human-made ground into what is treated, by multiple parties simultaneously, as an indispensable condition of religious continuity, national existence, or both.

There is a name for what this pattern reflects, and it is not a new one: all three traditions have long been called religions of the book. The phrase is usually treated as comparativereligion shorthand, gesturing loosely at the importance of scripture in each tradition, and Islamic tradition itself uses a version of it, ahl al-kitab, people of the book, to name Jews and Christians as fellow recipients of prior revelation. Taken seriously rather than as a passing figure of speech, the phrase names something more specific and, for the argument of this article, more consequential: in each of the three traditions, the primary anchor of continuity between the human community and God is a portable, symbolic deposit, a scripture, capable of traveling across absence, distance, and death, rather than an immovable, non-human-made patch of ground. A scroll, a gospel, a recitation can be carried, copied, translated, memorized, and studied anywhere a community happens to find itself. A mountain, a valley, a specific stretch of coastline cannot. That each of the three traditions organized its most durable continuity around the first kind of anchor rather than the second is not an incidental fact about them. It is close to their defining architecture, and it supplies this article’s central argument: a tradition whose own foundational continuity runs through a portable text rather than an immovable territory has, on its own terms, already answered the question of whether that territory’s permanent political possession is a condition of its survival.

This is not primarily an article about geopolitics, and it does not propose new borders, new security arrangements, or a new peace framework. Its method is older and, in a sense, more patient. It asks what the three religious traditions that actually claim this land have themselves said and done, across the whole of their own long histories, about whether the land’s possession is a condition of their continued relationship with God. The traditions have answered this question before, repeatedly, under circumstances of far greater duress than any diplomatic summit has ever had to consider, and their answer has consistently been more measured than the modern political argument built in their name would suggest. Recovering that answer is this article’s task, and the question it asks directly, without evasion, is this: is this specific territory actually necessary for the continuation of a living relationship between human communities and God? The sections that follow examine Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in turn, each on its own historical terms rather than through the lens the modern conflict now supplies, before turning to the political transformation that reopened a question these traditions had already, at great cost, answered. They will also suggest something stronger than historical description alone: that any claim, within any of the three traditions, that a necessary return to the Holy Land and total political control over it are now required by the faith itself sits in direct tension with that faith’s own foundational identity as a religion of the book rather than a religion of the land.

Judaism After the Temple: Continuity Without Territorial Control

No historical case puts the question more starkly than the Judaism that emerged from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Before that catastrophe, an enormous share of Israelite and early Jewish religious life had been organized around a specific territorial and institutional configuration centered on Jerusalem: the Temple, its priesthood, its sacrificial system, and the political sovereignty, however limited under Roman overlordship, that had made continuous access to all of this possible. The destruction, carried out by Titus’s legions at the end of the First Jewish-Roman War, removed the institution, the sacrificial system, and, within a further two generations, effective Jewish access to the city itself.

The scale of the crisis is easy to understate from a modern vantage point. For a tradition in which the Temple had functioned as the sole legitimate site of sacrificial worship, the sole dwelling place of the divine presence in any architecturally concentrated sense, and the institutional center around which the priestly and Levitical class organized its entire social function, the loss was not comparable to the closing of an important building. It was closer to the removal of the mechanism through which the covenant itself had, for centuries, been enacted. The Mishnah and later rabbinic literature preserve, in their sustained and repeated attention to Temple law long after the Temple had ceased to exist, some sense of how total this severance felt to those who lived through it and to their immediate successors.

Rabbinic tradition dates the beginning of an alternative institutional response to this crisis to Yavneh, a coastal town where, according to the tradition preserved in the Babylonian Talmud, the sage Yohanan ben Zakkai is said to have escaped the besieged city of Jerusalem and secured Roman permission to establish a school. Whatever the precise historical accuracy of this specific narrative, which later scholarship has treated with appropriate caution, the pattern it captures is not in dispute: rabbinic authority, and with it the practical governance of Jewish religious life, relocated in the immediate aftermath of the destruction from a Temple-centered priestly institution to a text-centered and communitycentered network of teachers, courts, and academies that required no specific territorial center to function.

This first crisis was not the last. The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132 to 135 CE, itself in part an attempt to reverse the original catastrophe and restore Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem, ended not merely in defeat but in a Roman response designed specifically to sever the coordinative link between the people and the city altogether. The emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as a pagan colony, Aelia Capitolina, barred Jews from entering it on pain of death, and renamed the province itself Syria Palaestina, an act many historians read as a deliberate attempt to erase the very name of the connection between people and place from official use. If the redistribution of Jewish religious life traced above had been fragile, this second and more absolute severance should have completed the collapse the first crisis had only begun. It did not. The infrastructure the tradition had already built in the six decades since the Temple’s destruction proved robust enough to sustain continuous religious vitality through many subsequent centuries in which not merely the Temple but the city itself was, for long stretches, physically inaccessible to the great majority of Jews.

What continued without interruption across this compounding crisis was the remediation between the community and God, and that remediation had never depended on dwelling alone. It had always been sustained jointly across multiple mediations at once: embodied practice, in circumcision, in prayer postures, in the physical disciplines of Sabbath observance and communal fasting; relational coordination, in family transmission, in congregational life, in the unbroken chain of teacher and student through which the oral tradition was preserved and eventually committed to writing in the Mishnah and Talmud; material sedimentation, in the physical Torah scroll, in the synagogue building wherever it happened to be raised, structures that were themselves made things, deposits of coordination, not dwelling in the strict sense; and symbolic sedimentation, in liturgy, in law, and in the calendar, a made segmentation of the found astronomical regularities the tradition had never stopped coordinating around, wherever in the world its adherents happened to live. None of these became dwelling, and none of them substituted for the Holy Land in the sense of replacing its specific territorial uniqueness. Diaspora communities continued to dwell, in the full and proper sense of that mediation: they had their own soil, their own climate, their own seasons, their own specific situatedness, in Babylonia and later in Spain, in the Rhineland, in Poland, in North Africa, and eventually across every populated continent, just not in the Holy Land.

Diaspora Judaism, sustained this way across roughly two thousand years, became one of history’s most sustained demonstrations that a living covenantal relationship with God does not require political control of, or even physical access to, the Holy Land. This claim has to be stated with precision, because a careless version of it collapses the very distinction the argument depends on. Jerusalem did not become unimportant during this period. It remained central in prayer, invoked at the close of the Passover meal with the words “next year in Jerusalem,” oriented toward in the direction of daily worship regardless of where in the world that worship occurred, mourned in the annual fast of the ninth of Av, held as the object of hope in an eschatological future that liturgy rehearsed continuously across the generations. Its uniqueness within Jewish religious life was never questioned and was never diminished by any of this. What the long history of diaspora Judaism demonstrates is a narrower and more precise claim: Jerusalem remained unique without remaining a practical, daily condition of Jewish remediation with God. That is the empirical core of this section, and it is the pattern the two sections that follow will find repeated, by different routes and under different pressures, in Christianity and in Islam.

This is why Judaism has always been comfortable, more than comfortable, describing itself through the article rather than through the land. The Torah scroll, not the Temple Mount, is the object a synagogue treats with the greatest ritual reverence, dressed, crowned, and kissed in nearly every diaspora community that has ever existed, the overwhelming majority of them never within reach of the Mount itself. Rabbinic Judaism is, definitionally, a Judaism organized around the interpretation of a portable text, and the tradition’s own greatest intellectual monument, the Babylonian Talmud, was compiled not in the land at all but in Mesopotamia, by generations of scholars who had never lived under Jewish sovereignty and did not consider that fact any obstacle to producing the most authoritative legal and theological work their tradition would ever produce.

Christianity: A Religion Whose Divine Remediation Did Not Depend on Jerusalem

Christianity’s relationship to the same question developed along a different historical path but arrived at a structurally similar place, and arrived there more quickly, since the movement’s geographic dispersion began within a single generation of its founding events rather than being forced by external catastrophe. Paul’s mission, carrying the movement across the eastern Mediterranean and eventually to Rome itself, broke any practical dependence between ordinary Christian religious life and residence in or near the Holy Land almost from the outset. Christian communities took root and flourished across a widening geography with no plausible route back to Jerusalem for the great majority of their members, most of whom, within two or three generations, had never been Jewish and had no ancestral claim on the land at all. The earliest surviving Christian documents are, tellingly, not descriptions of the Holy Land but letters, Paul’s own correspondence with communities in Corinth, Galatia, Philippi, and Rome, texts composed specifically to travel, to be read aloud to congregations their author might never see again, carrying his authority across exactly the distances that made continuous residence in Judea impossible for the communities receiving them. A tradition whose foundational documents were, from its literal first decades, portable letters to scattered congregations was already organized around text rather than territory before it had time to become anything else.

Rome became central to Christian life. So, in the east, did Constantinople, once Constantine’s fourth-century reorganization of the empire made it the seat of eastern Christian authority. Neither city was ever declared a replacement Holy Land, and this article does not claim that either was. What is true, and what matters here, is that for the greater part of Christian history, including many centuries in which most Christians had no realistic prospect of ever visiting Jerusalem and long stretches in which no Christian power held any political authority over it at all, ordinary Christian religious life proceeded through churches, monasteries, the sacraments, scripture, the liturgical calendar, ecclesiastical authority, and communal worship, all of it sustained without political possession of the city where the tradition’s founding events had taken place.

The redundancy this sustained continuity depended on is visible with unusual clarity in the geography of Christian monasticism, a set of new, genuinely unique made anchors that absorbed enormous coordinative weight without ever being offered, by the tradition itself, as competing with or replacing Jerusalem’s own uniqueness. Iona, a small island off the western coast of Scotland, became from the sixth century a major center of Christian coordination for an entire region with no plausible route to the Holy Land at all. Mount Athos developed, from the tenth century onward, into a coordinating site so intensively organized around continuous prayer that Eastern Christian tradition came to treat it as itself a kind of sacred territory, a garden set apart, without this status ever displacing Jerusalem’s own claim. Countless cathedral cities across medieval Europe, Chartres, Canterbury, Santiago de Compostela, developed their own pilgrimage economies, their own accumulated sanctity, their own capacity to organize the religious life of populations for whom Jerusalem itself would remain, for an entire lifetime, an object of longing rather than of travel. Each of these sites is unique in exactly the sense this article has been using the term. None of them was ever offered as recursively indispensable in the way Jerusalem is sometimes now treated as being. The redundancy did not require inventing a substitute Jerusalem. It required only that enough other made anchors, each unique on its own terms, exist within Christian religious life to absorb the coordinative weight that continuous physical access to the one most unique site could not, for most of the Christian population across most of Christian history, provide.

Jerusalem mattered throughout this history, and pilgrimage to it, when it was possible, carried enormous devotional weight, intensifying rather than replacing the ordinary religious coordination sustained elsewhere. The sites associated with the life of Christ retained, and retain, genuine sacred significance within Christian practice. But nothing essential to the continuation of Christian remediation with God required sovereign control of those sites. This is what makes the Crusades a historical exception rather than the natural expression of an underlying theological necessity. Beginning with Urban II’s call at Clermont in 1095 and continuing through nearly two centuries of intermittent campaigns, the Crusading movement was not the fulfillment of an uninterrupted Christian territorial requirement; it was a dramatic and, in the end, unsuccessful attempt to reassert political control over a place Christianity had already spent many centuries demonstrating it could live without possessing. Fair to say plainly: the claim that continuous Christian faith required reconquering and permanently holding the land by force sat in real tension with a tradition that had, by 1095, already organized eleven centuries of its own continuity around a portable text and a placeless church rather than around any territorial possession at all, which is one reason the claim could never be sustained even at the height of Crusader military success. The eventual and permanent loss of Crusader rule, culminating in the fall of Acre in 1291, confirms the point rather than complicating it: Christian religious life did not collapse when Jerusalem was lost again, because it had never structurally depended on holding it in the first place. If anything, the theological and institutional life of Western Christendom in the centuries immediately following 1291, the rise of the mendicant orders, the flowering of scholastic theology, the construction of the great Gothic cathedrals across a Europe that held no political stake in Jerusalem at all, shows a tradition whose coordinative center of gravity had never actually required the city it had fought so hard, and so unsuccessfully, to hold.

Islam: Sacred Orientation Without Necessary Territorial Residence

The Islamic case requires distinguishing carefully between Mecca and Jerusalem, because Islam preserves stronger and more explicit territorial orientations than either of the two preceding traditions, and the argument of this section has to hold that strength and the underlying point together rather than softening one to fit the other. Mecca is the qibla, the fixed direction toward which every Muslim, everywhere in the world, orients daily prayer. The Hajj, pilgrimage to Mecca and its surrounding sites, is a religious obligation for those able to undertake it, one of the small number of practices foundational to the tradition. Jerusalem carries its own deep sanctity, tied to the account of the Prophet’s Night Journey and to the Haram al-Sharif, the sacred compound at the city’s heart, home to the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque.

One episode from the tradition’s founding period demonstrates, with unusual explicitness, that this territorial specificity was never treated by the tradition itself as fixed beyond revision, and it is worth recounting in some detail. For roughly the first year and a half after the migration to Medina in 622 CE, the direction of prayer was oriented toward Jerusalem, not Mecca. In the second year after the migration, a Qur’anic revelation records a change: the direction of prayer was reoriented to the Sacred Mosque in Mecca, where it has remained ever since. The theological reasoning the tradition itself offers for the change is a separate question this article does not attempt to adjudicate, but the structural fact is unambiguous: the earliest Muslim community demonstrated, at the very outset of its own history, that the specific site toward which its most frequently repeated act of worship was oriented could itself be redistributed without any disruption to the underlying practice that daily prayer sustains. If the direction of prayer could move once, from Jerusalem to Mecca, without dissolving the coordination prayer sustains, the tradition had, from its very first years, built-in evidence against treating any single geographic orientation as an indispensable condition of the practice itself, even as Mecca, the direction ultimately settled upon, has retained a centrality within the tradition that has never subsequently been revisited.

None of this territorial specificity, however strong, makes ordinary Muslim religious life dependent on residence in Mecca, Medina, or Jerusalem. The overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims have, across the tradition’s entire history, lived their religious lives somewhere else, dwelling, in the strict and proper sense of that term, in whatever land they actually inhabited, while sustaining continuous remediation with God through prayer performed in that place, through fasting, through the recitation and study of the Qur’an, through law and scholarship developed in cities as distant from Arabia as Baghdad, Cordoba, Cairo, Timbuktu, and Samarkand, and through the ordinary communal life of the mosque, built wherever a community happened to gather. Islamic legal and theological scholarship reached some of its most sophisticated and enduring development not in the Hijaz but in these distant centers: the great law schools took shape and matured in Iraq, in Egypt, in the Maghreb, and later across South and Southeast Asia, each center fully capable of sustaining the tradition’s ongoing coordinative and interpretive life without any need for proximity to Mecca.

The very name of Islam’s central text encodes this same architecture. Qur’an means recitation, not monument and not territory; the tradition’s founding miracle is a portable, memorizable, endlessly reproducible act of speech rather than a place, carried in the bodies and voices of believers rather than fixed to any single stretch of ground. Islamic tradition itself names Jews and Christians, precisely because of their own scriptural foundations, ahl al-kitab, people of the book, extending to both of the other Abrahamic traditions the same recognition this article has been arguing for throughout: that what anchors these three communities across time and distance is a text carried in memory and in writing, not a plot of ground held by force.

The point of this section is not that sacred territory is dispensable to every specific ritual obligation Islam recognizes. The Hajj plainly requires actual presence in a specific place, and this article does not claim otherwise; nor does it minimize the depth of longing that has, across many centuries, drawn believers unable to make the journey to describe their absence from it as one of life’s genuine sorrows. The point is narrower and more precise: continuous Muslim life with God, the daily and lifelong practice of the overwhelming majority of Muslims across the tradition’s history, has never required permanent residence in or political sovereignty over Mecca, Medina, or Jerusalem. Islam therefore demonstrates, by its own distinct route, the same underlying pattern this article has already traced in Judaism and in Christianity: a uniquely and irreplaceably sacred territory need not become the exclusive territorial foundation on which the whole of a tradition’s religious existence depends.

It follows from this same architecture that any modern claim, whether framed in nationalist or religious terms, that the entire land must be held under exclusive political and religious control because Islamic law itself requires it, a position articulated at various points across twentieth and twenty-first century Islamist political thought, sits in the same tension with the tradition’s own history that this article has already identified in Christian and Jewish maximalism. A tradition whose ordinary religious life has, for fourteen centuries, been sustained by portable prayer, portable text, and portable scholarship, with no requirement of residence in or political control over any of its three most sacred sites, does not straightforwardly derive a requirement of exclusive political sovereignty over an entire further territory from its own foundational architecture. The claim may be politically potent.

It is not, on the tradition’s own terms, theologically necessary.

The Shared Abrahamic Achievement

Only once the three cases have been examined on their own historical terms does the shared pattern between them become visible, and it is worth naming plainly. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam disagree, often sharply, about revelation, covenant, prophecy, incarnation, law, and the path to salvation. On the specific question this article has been asking, however, all three traditions arrive, by three different historical routes, at the same practical result: God remains remediable beyond the Holy Land.

This is not a claim about deterritorialization, and it is not a claim that dwelling ceases to matter to religious life. Every believer in every one of these traditions continues to dwell somewhere, in a real place, under a real sky, and the mediation of dwelling continues to do its own irreducible work wherever that place happens to be. Nor is it a claim that texts, prayer, or communal life substitute for territory; that would confuse mediations Living Value Theory holds to be genuinely distinct, treating a made anchor as though it had become the found ground it was built upon. The claim is narrower and, this article wants to suggest, considerably more consequential: one small, uniquely sacred territorial condition is not necessary for the continuation of divine-human relations across any of the three traditions. That is the shared achievement, arrived at independently, by a tradition responding to sudden catastrophe, by a tradition whose geographic dispersion began from its earliest years, and by a tradition that built the redundancy into its architecture of daily practice from the outset.

The convergence is not doctrinal. The three traditions do not share a theology of land, and this article has made no attempt to suggest they do. Nor is it the result of historical borrowing between them; the Jewish response to the destruction of the Temple, the Christian response to geographic dispersion, and the Islamic architecture of orientation and obligation each developed from within each tradition’s own resources, on its own timeline, largely independent of the others. The convergence is structural, existing at a level of comparison ordinary comparative religious scholarship, focused on doctrine, ritual, and historical contact between traditions, does not typically examine. Each tradition, working from within its own resources, discovered or built the same underlying pattern with respect to the same underlying question: whether continuous coordination between a religious community and God depends on the unbroken availability of one small, uniquely sacred stretch of found, non-human-made ground. Asked this way rather than through the vocabulary of doctrine, three traditions that would ordinarily be treated as radically incommensurable, one built on covenant and law, one built on incarnation and universal mission, one built on revelation and submission, turn out to have organized an identical structural relationship between a uniquely sacred place and the ordinary, dispersed, geographically unconstrained coordination of everyday religious life. That pattern was available to be seen only once the comparison stopped asking what each tradition believes about its holy land and started asking how each tradition actually organizes its ongoing life around it.

This is why religions of the book is not merely a polite comparative label for these three traditions but an accurate description of their actual architecture of continuity, and why the label matters here specifically rather than as a passing observation. A religion of the book is, by the logic this article has traced, a religion whose primary durable anchor is symbolic and portable, a scroll, a gospel, a recitation, rather than territorial and fixed. Each of the three built its capacity to survive exile, dispersion, conquest, and the outright loss of its most sacred site around exactly this kind of anchor, and none of the three, examined across the whole of its own history rather than through the lens of its most maximalist modern advocates, ever organized its actual continuity the other way around. It follows, with more force than is usually acknowledged in public argument about this conflict, that any claim within Judaism, Christianity, or Islam holding that a necessary return to the Holy Land, coupled with total and exclusive political control over it, is now required for the faith’s own continuation, sits in direct tension with what each tradition’s own history shows it actually is. Such claims are not simply politically difficult, historically unusual, or strategically costly, though they are often all three. They are, on each tradition’s own foundational terms, theologically incoherent: they ask a portable-text tradition to behave, at the level of ultimate necessity, like a religion of immovable ground, which none of the three, across the whole of the history this article has traced, has ever actually been.

A clarification belongs here, because the claim just made is easy to overextend into one it does not support. Theological coherence and lived political passion are different registers, and closing the gap between them is a different, harder project than the one this article is attempting. Showing that a tradition’s own history does not require exclusive possession of the land is an argument about what that tradition’s textual and historical resources actually support; it is not, and cannot by itself be, an argument that will move someone whose attachment to the land is carried by grief, fear, memory of loss, or eschatological hope rather than by textual reasoning in the first place. A believer who feels the land’s possession as existentially necessary will not, in general, be argued out of that feeling by being shown a historical pattern their own tradition exhibits; feelings of this depth are not reliably downstream of argument, and this article does not assume otherwise. What the argument can do, more modestly, is remove one particular claim, that the tradition’s own textual and historical foundations demand exclusive possession, from the arsenal available to political maximalism, forcing that maximalism to stand on its actual grounds, national security, historical grievance, communal survival, rather than borrowing the appearance of textual or doctrinal necessity it has not earned. That is a real but limited contribution, and this article does not present it as more than that.

The Nineteenth-Century Return of Territorial Necessity

If this were the whole story, the modern conflict would be difficult to explain. What changed was not a theological development internal to any of the three traditions but an external transformation in how political security itself came to be organized. The modern nationstate, consolidating across nineteenth-century Europe, increasingly tied security, citizenship, collective recognition, political agency, legal protection, and national survival to one specific mechanism: sovereign control over a bounded national territory. Belonging to a state, on this newly dominant model, meant belonging to a territory that state controlled and that other states recognized it as controlling. A people without such a territory increasingly found itself, under this new international grammar, without a reliable claim to any of the protections the system otherwise offered.

For European Jews, this transformation arrived alongside an escalating and increasingly racialized antisemitism that made the promise of civic emancipation, extended across much of Western and Central Europe over the course of the nineteenth century, look badly broken by its final decades. The pogroms across the Russian Empire, beginning in earnest after 1881 and recurring with terrible regularity over the following decades, displaced hundreds of thousands and killed thousands more. The Dreyfus Affair in France, in which a Jewish army officer was falsely convicted of treason in 1894 amid a public campaign of open antisemitic agitation, shook Jewish confidence in the promise of assimilation into even the most apparently liberal and secular of European states; Theodor Herzl, then a Paris correspondent covering the trial, would later describe the affair as decisive in his own turn toward political Zionism. The wider currents of racial antisemitism that culminated, in the following century, in catastrophe gave the demand for a sovereign territorial refuge an urgency that this article treats as entirely historically intelligible. Political Zionism should be understood in this light and presented sympathetically: not as a lapse into theological error, but as a historically situated response to a specifically modern and specifically dangerous form of vulnerability, one that two thousand years of the redundancy traced in the preceding sections had never been designed to address, because that redundancy had evolved to sustain religious continuity under conditions of dispersion, not to secure physical safety within an international order that increasingly treated statelessness itself as a source of danger.

The question this section wants to isolate is not why European Jews wanted safety. It is why safety became thinkable, in this period and in this specific political order, primarily as sovereignty over national territory, and why the particular territory eventually settled upon was the historic Land of Israel rather than any of the alternative sites briefly considered in the same period. It is worth recalling that the early Zionist movement did briefly entertain alternatives: the British government’s 1903 offer of territory in East Africa, in what is now Kenya, the so-called Uganda Plan, was seriously debated at the Sixth Zionist Congress and came close to acceptance before being decisively rejected two years later, precisely because a growing majority within the movement insisted that only the historic land itself, rather than any territory that could satisfy the same abstract requirement of sovereign refuge, would answer the demand being made. That rejection is itself evidence of how quickly, once the territorial-nationalist framework had been adopted, it became fused with the specific historic land rather than remaining a general demand for safety that any suitable territory could have met.

The 1898 meeting between Theodor Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm II in Jerusalem captures the wider convergence this section has been describing with unusual clarity. Herzl was a largely secular political thinker; his motivating concern was closer to the specifically modern anxiety this section has been describing than to any renewed theological claim about the land’s indispensability, and his own diaries record a man far more interested in charters, guarantees, and great-power patronage than in scripture. That he sought the political backing of a Protestant European emperor for a state in the biblical land shows the political imagination of the moment already operating in fully territorial, fully modern, state-centered terms, terms that happened, in this specific case, to converge with a much older sacred geography without being generated by it.

Zionism and the Reopening of an Overcome Theological Problem

Political Zionism did not initially arise because Jewish remediation with God had become impossible in the diaspora. The section on Judaism has already shown why that claim would be historically false. It arose because Jewish bodily safety, political agency, and collective recognition appeared, under the specific conditions of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, increasingly impossible without sovereign territory of their own.

But once the territorial project settled specifically on the historic Holy Land, rather than remaining a general demand any suitable territory could in principle have satisfied, political necessity drew theological significance back into the territory in a way it had not carried, as a practical requirement, for the better part of two thousand years. It is worth noting that the movement’s early cultural wing, associated above all with Ahad Ha’am, resisted this fusion from within secular Zionism itself, arguing that the Jewish state should serve as a spiritual and cultural center for a people that would remain substantially diasporic, rather than as the site of a total in-gathering; this current lost the argument to the more territorially maximalist political Zionism that Herzl’s line represented, but its very existence shows that the reopening this section describes was contested from the start, not a single, unanimous development.

A distinct and more explicitly religious current went considerably further than either of these secular positions. Associated above all with Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, and developed further by his son Rav Zvi Yehuda Kook and by successive generations of religious Zionist thought, this current made the theological return explicit, arguing from within the tradition’s own resources that settlement and sovereignty over the land were themselves stages in an unfolding process of redemption rather than merely a pragmatic response to persecution. This matters for the argument of this section, because it shows the reopening being described here was not simply an external secular pressure imposed on a tradition that would otherwise have remained content with the redundancy the earlier section traced. It also proceeded, in part, through an internal theological argument that reversed that tradition’s own long-settled discovery, and did so using the tradition’s own interpretive resources rather than borrowing from outside them.

A question the tradition had already answered was thereby reopened: is possession of this particular land necessary for the fulfillment of Jewish existence? The modern political answer, for growing numbers of people across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, increasingly became yes, even though the long history examined earlier in this article had already demonstrated that the answer to the older and narrower theological question was no. To insist otherwise, that Jewish continuity now requires not merely a state but total and exclusive political control of the entire historic land, is to ask a religion of the book to reason as though it had always been a religion of the land, which its own two-thousand-year practice, carried forward through the Torah scroll rather than the Temple Mount, through Babylon’s academies rather than Jerusalem’s ruins, shows it was not.

Palestinian Dwelling and the Danger of False Symmetry

An honest account of the conflict cannot stop at the theological point made so far, because the sacralization of the whole Holy Land is not the only thing at stake in it, and treating it as though it were would produce a false symmetry this section wants to name and reject directly.

Palestinian claims to the land are not, in the main, claims about an abstract sacred geography requiring exclusive national possession in the way this article has been discussing Jerusalem or the Temple Mount. They are, in overwhelming measure, claims about homes, villages, agricultural fields, neighborhoods, cemeteries, roads, and the ordinary, concrete, generationally accumulated fabric of actual habitation: multimaterial structures and interrecursive communities built and sustained within a specific stretch of territorial dwelling, in the plain and literal sense of that mediation. A family displaced in 1948, during the war that Palestinians call the Nakba, from a specific house, a specific olive grove, a specific village whose name and layout are held in living memory and passed to grandchildren who have never seen it, is not making a claim of the same kind as a claim that the whole of the historic land must belong exclusively to one nation for religious or national destiny to be fulfilled. It is making a claim about the concrete continuity of an actual, inhabited world, a claim of exactly the kind the earlier sections of this article have shown the three religious traditions never required in their most sacred form, but that no tradition, and no political theory, has ever treated as dispensable.

This distinction is not a theoretical nicety. It is politically load-bearing, and collapsing it does real damage in both directions. Treating the displacement of Palestinian communities as merely another instance of the general point this article has been making, that territorial indispensability is a modern reopening of an old theological problem, would wrongly flatten a concrete, ongoing harm into an abstract symbolic dispute, as though a family’s exile from a specific house were the same order of claim as a nation’s assertion of sovereign title to an entire historic land. And treating Palestinian attachment to the land as though it mirrored, symmetrically, a maximalist sacred-national claim to the whole territory would misdescribe what is actually being defended in most Palestinian claims, which is not exclusive possession of a promised whole but continuity of an inhabited part, the right to remain in, return to, or be compensated for a specific home rather than a theological entitlement to the entirety of the land.

The distinction cuts the other way as well, and honesty requires stating this side of it too. Jewish residents of the land, both before and after 1948, are not merely bearers of an abstract sacred claim either; many trace continuous or repeatedly renewed habitation in specific cities, including Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed, and Tiberias, across centuries in which Jewish communities persisted there under a long succession of ruling powers, and the modern state’s citizens overwhelmingly relate to their own homes, neighborhoods, and towns in the same concrete, multimaterial, generationally accumulating way this section has just described for Palestinian communities. The point of this section is not that one people’s attachment to the land is concrete and the other’s is merely symbolic. It is that both concrete, inhabited attachment and abstract, maximalist sacred-national claim exist on both sides of the conflict, in different proportions and different forms, and that Living Value Theory’s distinction between multiversal dwelling in the strict, territorial sense and the multimaterial, interrecursive worlds built within it is precisely what allows these different kinds of claim, wherever they arise and for whomever they are made, to be told apart rather than collapsed into a single undifferentiated story of two peoples equally and identically attached to one land. Exclusive sacred-national possession of the entire territory is one kind of claim. The right not to be dispossessed of one’s actual home and lived environment is another. This article treats them as distinct because they are, and because the failure to distinguish them, in either direction, has done real harm to the possibility of resolving what can be resolved.

Why the Conflict Becomes So Intractable

Bring the preceding sections together and the conflict’s peculiar intractability becomes considerably less mysterious than a purely territorial account can make it. What has happened is that a great many distinct stakes, bodily safety, divine covenant, national identity, historical justice, political sovereignty, ordinary habitation, international recognition, and control of specific sacred sites, have all been made to run through a single, tiny territorial channel. One small strip of land is being asked to carry, and to resolve, all of them simultaneously.

No territory can do this work, regardless of how it is eventually divided or governed. It cannot, by itself, guarantee Jewish safety, secure Palestinian freedom, sustain divine continuity, repair historical injury, confer national recognition, establish political equality, and settle access to sacred sites, all at once, through the single mechanism of exclusive sovereign possession. Because so many distinct and genuinely important stakes have been fused onto the same small territorial demand, every proposed concession appears to threaten all of them at once rather than trading one stake for another in the ordinary way political compromise usually proceeds.

There is a further diagnostic point worth making explicit here. Sovereignty, in the modern territorial sense this article has been describing, functions as what Living Value Theory calls a disguised abstraction: a category developed within a specific and historically recent international legal and political order that presents itself as though it were simply naming a direct, immediate, self-evident requirement of the underlying religious coordination, rather than what it actually is, a portable administrative and legal category imported from the state system and applied to a domain, the interrecursive relationship between a people and a sacred place, whose own coordinative architecture had never previously required it. Applying a category built for nonrecursive governance, precise boundaries, exclusive jurisdiction, defined legal title, to a coordination that is, at its core, interrecursive and sedimented over centuries in prayer, memory, and practice, produces exactly the kind of misfit this article’s framework is built to diagnose. The category does not merely fail to describe the underlying coordination particularly well. It actively reorganizes the coordination around itself, converting a relationship that had for centuries been sustained through redundancy into one that can only be resolved, on the category’s own terms, through exclusive possession. This is not an argument against sovereignty as a political mechanism, which serves real and legitimate security functions this article has already acknowledged. It is an argument that mistaking sovereignty for the form the underlying religious coordination has always required, rather than recognizing it as one recent, historically contingent, and in this specific domain poorly fitting mechanism among others, is precisely the confusion of uniqueness with indispensability this article has been trying to dissolve throughout.

This is the article’s diagnosis, and it is worth stating precisely what it does and does not claim. It does not say that people care too much, or irrationally, about this land. It says that the land has been made structurally responsible for satisfying stakes that properly belong across many distinct dimensions of life at once, a task no single territorial arrangement, however sovereignty over it is finally distributed, can perform.

It is worth adding why this particular fusion produces intractability rather than merely difficulty, since many negotiations involve competing stakes without becoming permanently unresolvable. Ordinary territorial disputes, even bitter ones, typically allow stakes to be traded against one another: a security guarantee exchanged for a land concession, a resource-sharing agreement exchanged for a border adjustment, one party’s economic interest weighed against another’s strategic concern. Trading of this kind requires that the stakes involved be commensurable enough to be weighed against each other on some shared scale, even an imperfect one. Divine covenant and municipal water rights are not commensurable in this sense, and neither are historical justice for a displaced people and a security perimeter for a besieged one. When incommensurable stakes are forced through the same narrow territorial channel, no trade is available that does not look, to at least one party, like the sacrifice of something that cannot be sacrificed at any price. This is the specific mechanism by which fusion becomes intractability rather than mere difficulty, and it is why negotiations over Jerusalem in particular have so often collapsed at exactly the point where every other outstanding issue had been provisionally settled: the incommensurable stakes were saved, deliberately or not, for last, because no framework existed for trading them against anything at all.

The Way Out: Removing Theological Necessity From Territorial Sovereignty

This article does not end by proposing that the Holy Land cease to be sacred, and it does not ask anyone to abandon attachment, memory, pilgrimage, or religious orientation toward it. The intervention this final section proposes is considerably narrower than that, and it follows directly from the historical argument already made: stop treating exclusive sovereign possession of the Holy Land as a necessary condition of remediation with God. The three traditions themselves, examined on their own long historical terms in the earlier sections, supply the theological warrant for exactly this move; it is not being imported from outside them.

Loosening the fusion this article has been describing opens a set of political distinctions that the current framing of the conflict tends to collapse into a single, undifferentiable demand for possession: access to sacred places, custodianship of them, residence in a territory, citizenship within a state, property rights over specific land, municipal administration of a city, national self-determination for a people, and sovereignty in the full, exclusive, internationally recognized sense. These do not have to be fused together, and the histories this article has traced show that, for most of the span of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim history, they were not.

History and current diplomatic practice both offer working models for exactly this kind of unbundling, even if none has yet been applied successfully to Jerusalem itself. The 1947 United Nations partition plan proposed treating Jerusalem as a corpus separatum, a separate body under international administration, belonging exclusively to no single sovereign state while remaining open to all three traditions’ access and custodianship; the proposal was never implemented, but it stands as evidence that serious international diplomacy has already conceived of sacred custodianship and exclusive national sovereignty as separable questions rather than a single indivisible demand. Vatican City offers a working, if very small-scale, example of a sacred site governed under a sovereignty specifically tailored to its religious character rather than folded into the ordinary national sovereignty of the state that surrounds it. Andorra’s centuries-old co-principality, jointly and continuously overseen by the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell, shows that shared, formally divided sovereignty over a single small territory is not merely a theoretical possibility but a durable, functioning arrangement that has outlasted the individual monarchies and republics that have held its two seats. None of these models transfers directly onto Jerusalem’s far more contested and far more layered situation, and this article does not propose that any of them simply be copied. What they demonstrate, collectively, is that the categories this section has just distinguished, access, custodianship, residence, citizenship, administration, self-determination, sovereignty, have in fact been separated from one another before, successfully and durably, in cases where the parties involved were willing to treat sacred significance and exclusive national possession as two different questions rather than one.

It would be dishonest to leave these analogies standing without qualification, because the disanalogies matter as much as the analogy itself. Vatican City’s unbundling was negotiated between a single sovereign state and a single religious institution with no rival territorial claimant, no history of mass displacement on either side, and no armed non-state actors with a stake in the outcome; the Lateran Treaty of 1929 settled a dispute that, however bitter its long prehistory, involved nothing resembling the intergenerational trauma, the asymmetric military power, or the accumulated distrust that separate the parties to the Holy Land conflict. Andorra’s co-principality was never contested by force between its two overseeing powers, and neither France nor the Bishop of Urgell has ever needed to trust the other’s security guarantees in the way any workable arrangement for Jerusalem would require multiple parties, at least one of which controls the only army in the territory, to trust each other’s forbearance. Raw power asymmetry, decades of accumulated distrust, and the presence of actors on more than one side willing to use violence to prevent exactly this kind of unbundling are not incidental complications to be addressed once the institutional design is settled. They are the reason no institutional design, however carefully unbundled, can substitute for the political trust it presupposes rather than produces. This article’s contribution is theological and diagnostic, not a plan for building that trust, and it does not claim to be more than that; identifying that the theological obstacle to compromise is smaller than it appears does not make the political and security obstacles, which remain very large, appear any smaller than they actually are.

A place can be sacred without being exclusively possessed. A community can sustain covenantal or religious continuity without ruling the whole of the territory its tradition holds sacred. Shared or differentiated custodianship of specific sites need not register, theologically, as defeat. Political compromise over sovereignty need not mean, and historically has not usually meant, abandonment of God.

None of this is offered as though it were easy, and none of it resolves the concrete, unfinished business this article has already insisted must be kept separate from the theological argument: the specific homes, villages, and lives displaced and disputed since 1948, and the specific security threats that have shaped, and continue to shape, how safety is pursued by people on every side of this conflict. Unbundling sacredness from sovereignty does not by itself return a single house to a single family, and it does not by itself guarantee a single border crossing. What it does is remove one obstacle that has made every other, more concrete negotiation harder than it would otherwise be: the sense, on more than one side at once, that any territorial compromise is automatically a theological or existential defeat. Removing that obstacle does not solve the conflict. It returns the conflict to the more ordinary, more tractable register of competing concrete claims that political negotiation, however difficult, actually knows how to address.

Conclusion

The Holy Land is a tiny and genuinely unique portion of the earth’s territorial dwelling. Its hills, its climate, its particular coastline and highland geography cannot be reproduced anywhere else, and nothing in this article has argued otherwise. But the long histories of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, examined on their own terms rather than through the lens of the present conflict, all point to the same conclusion: continuous remediation between human communities and God has never depended on inhabiting or politically controlling this specific stretch of land. All three are, and have always been, religions of the book rather than religions of the land, traditions whose continuity runs through a portable scripture carried across exile and dispersion rather than through permanent possession of any single territory, however sacred. The rise of the modern territorial nation-state made sovereignty over it appear necessary to safety, recognition, and collective survival, and in doing so pulled a theological question that these traditions had already, at great historical cost, learned to answer back into a territorial form they had long since exceeded. The conflict becomes as intractable as it now is precisely because one small patch of land has been asked to guarantee, simultaneously and through the single mechanism of exclusive possession, divine continuity, national existence, historical repair, and bodily security for more than one people at once. A way beyond that impasse does not require desacralizing the Holy Land. It requires only refusing the claim, which none of the traditions’ own histories support, that a necessary return to it and total political control over it are what their sacredness demands.