“No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectation than Palestine—particularly Jerusalem,” Herman Melville wrote in his journal in 1857. “To some the disappointment is heart sickening.” Like Melville, many American travelers in the nineteenth century were sorely disappointed when they were struck by the conflict between their imagined city and its material reality. Throughout the history of the Christian West, the actual, often disappointing city was the site for the production of the idea of Jerusalem, the embodiment of ultimate religious expectations. In Selling Jerusalem, Annabel Jane Wharton historicizes the relationship between symbolic meanings and materiality in a remarkable fashion. She is an art historian, author of Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and past editor of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the range of her work underscores how she approaches Jerusalem from several directions and disciplines—art history, medieval studies, political economy, cultural studies—in order to interpret the breadth of symbolic constructions through which Western Christianity has come to possess the Holy City. Selling Jerusalem argues that “the ascendancy of each of the distinct invocations of Jerusalem—fragment, replica, fabrication, reproduction, spectacle—was conditioned by its peculiar embodiment of contemporary economic practice” (235). Wharton teases out how structures of feeling have evolved through their spatial and material, as well as religious, components, examining “selected simulations of the Holy Land as a means of better understanding the reception of the historical city and its power in the West” (1).

To understand her project is to read “the changing representations of Jerusalem against shifts in the Western economy … to chart the ways in which markets mediate the relationship between the human subject and the spiritual landscape” (235). Wharton first examines “the primary source for the numinous gift, the relic,” such as pieces of the true cross, then considers how the relationship between the Knights Templar, as both a military order and as “protobankers,” created replicas of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in London and Paris, operating as records of “the savage force of monetization and its attendant anxieties” (2). From there, she discusses the replicas of Jerusalem in the sacri monti, the Way of the Cross, created by the Franciscans in northern Italy that parallel the order's development of monte di pieta, a pious pile of money, that is, a public pawnshop. The Franciscans, as the protectors of the holy sites after the fall of the Templars, deployed their control as cultural capital, creating the conditions for them to become “the great economists of the late Middle Ages and early modernity” (2), despite (even because of) their vows of poverty. She then moves on to discuss various ways to possess Jerusalem as representation in the nineteenth century, such as lithographic prints, panoramas, and staged photographs of the Holy City, forms of abstraction that paralleled the ways wealth became increasingly abstracted in the form of paper money. Finally, she interprets the ways Jerusalem has today become a site for spectacle, whether as a stage for suicide bombers as part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or for Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ (2004), describing how spectacle parallels the increasing abstraction of economic relations. This analysis ranged from the Holy Land theme park in Orlando, Florida, to the way the contemporary city itself has oddly taken on the quality of a theme park, restored to a past that erases or limits what appears to be Islamic clutter, returning to an invented authenticity, the post-modern construction of its past.

As these different symbolic representations developed, they became increasingly divorced from the concrete or material city. Wharton describes a curious correlation: that the “Western expressions of Jerusalem” correspond “to the progressive dematerialization of expressions of exchange” (235). When early feudal economies gave way to ones based on money, the symbolic systems for Jerusalem, and religion in general, took on parallel forms from “gift and barter in the early Middle Ages through monetization and primitive accumulation in the later Middle Ages to capitalism and globalization in modernity” (235). And as this transformation took place, the Jerusalems with which they are associated became, like the market, increasingly immaterial, even virtual. All of this follows a trajectory of loss or even mourning, so to speak, in which “a participatory space that encouraged a haptic engagement with the sacred” shifted “to a distant view of a historic space available for an admission fee” (237–238). She traces how the increasing commodification of reality took the form of “the escalating abstraction of the economy and the progressive illusionism in visual culture,” which in turn led to “an increasing suspension of disbelief bordering on the gullible” (238). Melville would still be disappointed in a cleaned-up, socially constructed Jerusalem.

Wharton is particularly adept at delineating semiotic operations, elucidating distinctions between relic, souvenir, replica, reproduction, and so forth. For example, she discusses the Temple churches in London and Paris, and the ways each building became “a volatile fusion of abstract ideas of spiritual power with physical presence” (88), connecting with the “dramatic expansion of the European economy, the thorough monetization of Europe, and the invention of capital” (93). Her imaginative sweep allows her to draw into her discussion otherwise unlikely subjects—the Dome of the Rock and Disneyland, the codes of the Templars and the redacted FBI files on Andy Warhol—and she does this persuasively and not as gratuitous virtuosity.

As is often the case with a tour de force, the flash of insight shines against a somewhat schematic background. Wharton extends a tradition that includes Karl Marx, Karl Kautsky, and Max Weber of grounding spiritual flight in economic materiality; however, her approach, while schematic, is not reductionist. She sets the stage to further investigate the Holy City, including the representations for Judaism and Islam (I think, for example, of the ubiquitous posters and embroideries of the Dome of the Rock on every Palestinian's wall). Selling Jerusalem is also a welcome addition to other discussions of history, religion, and the material basis for social consciousness.