The Fragile Boundaries of Paradise: The Paradise Inn Resort at the Former Jerusalem Leprosarium

Abstract

The utopia that Boris Schatz described in his novella The Rebuilt Jerusalem: A Daydream, written in 1918 during his exile in Safed, is supposed to be realized in the year 2018. Schatz envisioned a paradisiacal Jerusalem. The Jews will coexist in harmony with nature and with the Arab residents of the city, and, with the consent of the Arab minority, they will build the Third Temple, which will serve as a museum for Jewish art and Jewish science. In this futuristic, utopian vision, the Land of Israel is a Biblical paradise where Jewish inhabitants wear Middle Eastern garb and have biblical names but lead modern lives. In July 2015, a group of Jerusalem-based artists decided to conduct a dialogue with Schatz’s novella, contextualizing and materializing his utopian and paradisiac Jerusalem.1 They chose to do so not on the Temple Mount, where some traditions situate paradise2 but in the Talbiyeh neighborhood, inside the walls of the former leper’s home of Jerusalem, a nineteenth century hospital established outside the Old City’s limits and surrounded, like the city of Jerusalem, by its own walls.