J. Malpas (Univ. of Tasmania, Australia): “Next year in Jerusalem”: Homeland and the orienting of the world 

“Next year in Jerusalem”, L'Shana Haba'ah B'Yerushalayim, is the phrase, first used in the 15th century, that traditionally ends the seder, the Jewish Passover meal. It provides a striking expression of the importance of the Holy City in Jewish religious life and practice, and in Jewish culture more broadly. The phrase has an obvious significance (even if nowadays less so) for a people who have retained a strong sense of religious and cultural identity despite their global dispersion. But just as Jerusalem has an importance that is not exclusive to Judaism, so the mode of orientation that L'Shana Haba'ah expresses—an orientation that orders the world around a single collectively significant place and landscape, a homeland (perhaps even, though it may sound odd in this context, a Heimat)—is not peculiar to its medieval origins nor to Jewish life and culture alone. Indeed, it is a much more pervasive, one might even say, ubiquitous, feature of human existence.  Not being primarily an historian, and having no special expertise in the historical period that is the focus of this meeting, my aim is to explore what is at issue in the idea of homeland that is at issue here, both in a religious and a broader context, to examine some of the other notions with which it is closely associated (especially of place, landscape, identity, memory, narrative and journey), and to set out some of the reasons why the idea has had and continues to have such a central role (notwithstanding the widespread suspicion with which the term is often also viewed). The hope is that in better understanding the idea itself, we can also better understand its more specific historical and cultural instantiations.