Questions & Approach: A Moment of Convergence and Conflict
On April 18, 1933, a remarkable ceremony took place in Jerusalem. American Protestant missionaries, British Mandate administrators, Jewish residents and Zionist returnees, and Arab Christian and Muslim dignitaries assembled to dedicate a striking new building, the Jerusalem YMCA.[1]
At right. The YMCA building in Jerusalem from east, Government Press Office, a British Mandate for Palestine (1923–1948) authority, 17 March 1933.
This moment occurred at a precise hub, a coalescence of history, when the world was radiating along ideological, religious, and imperial spokes. Just months earlier, Adolf Hitler had assumed power in Germany. The British Mandate in Palestine struggled to balance contradictory promises to local Jewish and Arab communities. Meanwhile, American Protestant organizations were experiencing their own crisis, the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, that questioned the very nature of Christian mission work.[2]
The Jerusalem YMCA is, in the present day, a conference center, cultural venue, and restaurant and hotel. Even now, after almost one hundred years, the Jerusalem stone, the architecture, and luxury furnishings are thoroughly syncretic. But did the builders’ dreams come true?
How This Project Approaches the Questions
This project uses Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann’s histoire croisée framework. It was developed in France in the early 2000s to study how histories entangle and intersect. Unlike traditional comparative history, it focuses on crossings that are reciprocal, uneven, and often simultaneous. Histoire croisée helps trace where societies, institutions, and ideas overlapped, clashed, and shaped each other. It departs from traditional, narrative, and documentary analysis. This approach is critical because it refuses to tell the story as if American Protestants, British officials, Jewish residents and Zionist returnees, and Arab Christian leaders were separate. Second, this specific project of the dedication ceremony of the Jerusalem YMCA in 1933 elevates imagined futures to analytical parity with remembered pasts.[3]
Histoire croisée does more than compare separate stories. It traces how peoples, ideas, and cultures intertwine and shape one another. In the traces they left behind, historians glimpse the futures they envisioned and the choices they made to reach them.
The Core Questions
Sources and Evidence
This theoretical framework depends on primary sources that can capture these multiple meanings. The project draws on YMCA archival records from the Kautz Family Archives, which show planning, funding, and institutional aims. Radio and newspapers, the Palestine Post, The New York Times, and Hebrew- and Arabic-language papers, show public reactions. British Mandate files show administrative decisions. Personal papers from Henrietta Szold and Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook reveal Jewish perspectives. Architectural plans and photographs reveal how the building communicated its message. Nazi German Foreign Office records, used with moral caution, reveal political context and the danger of the moment.[4]
At left. Judy Wallace. While at the beginning of my microhistorical investigation of the evidence from this unique time and place, I am well-positioned to study the 1933 Jerusalem YMCA dedication because of a combination of lived experience, professional work, and academic training. I am a PhD student in history based in Israel. This gives me direct access to primary sources and historical sites, which means I can study missions and mission work first-hand as an outsider to missions but an insider to the land and people here. My academic background, combined with my religious experience and professional work, allows me to study this event with historical rigor and to disambiguate clearly between religious and cultural studies. I have been an active member of the Orthodox Jewish community for over twenty years. That experience gives me deep knowledge of Jewish tradition, Torah, and communal life. I pray daily as the Psalmist did, “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem; may they prosper that love thee. Peace be within thy walls, and prosperity within thy palaces.“
The ceremony allows historians to see a geotemporal moment, but also see how otherwise incompatible Middle Eastern worldviews briefly converged, and to probe, following one scholar’s argument, the difficult question of whether such convergence carries any real epistemic significance.[5]
The 1933 dedication reveals something crucial about Jerusalem itself because the city was not a unified place. The YMCA became a physical expression of those overlapping claims. The building contained Islamic, Byzantine, and Gothic architectural elements. Its inscriptions came from the Hebrew Bible, the Christian New Testament, and the Qur’an. But the tower was called The Jesus Tower and the edifice was called, by YMCA leader Archibald Clinton Harte, “a sermon in stone.” Understanding this architectural complexity helps explain what the dedication ceremony actually communicated to different audiences.[6]
Where This Research Fits in History
Building on this insight, the project intersects with transnational religious history. The YMCA was not simply a local building. Rather, it was manufactured sacred space. This transnational character is essential to understanding what happened in April 1933. This observation about the YMCA’s layered symbolism connects directly to larger scholarly conversations. The project fits within Mandate Palestine history and draws on political and diplomatic studies. Additionally, it contributes to architectural and colonial history. The project also speaks to pilgrimage studies. Some groups came to Jerusalem as visitors. Others came as permanent returnees, as in Jewish aliyah, a refuge-and-return pilgrimage that operated differently from Christian or Islamic round-trip journeys. Cecilia González-Andrieu said “the immigrant’s journey is also a pilgrimage.” [7]
At right. Jewish Time Wheel. Limited edition giclée print (12 in. x 12 in.) of the original cover of Misaviv: “Jewish Time Wheel” by Federico Parolo, on high quality paper in bright colors, featuring the six days of Creation and Shabbat in the center wheel, followed by the mazalot (constellations) and the banners of the tribes and finally a pictorial summary of the Torah portions of the year. A key insight from Orthodox Jewish practices is the centrality of Jerusalem as a stable hub to which the spokes of tragedy connect, regardless of how far away in time and space the trauma occurred. The stability of Jerusalem as a central idea in Orthodox Judaism reveals insight different from the shifting borders and place names.
Having examined where this research fits, a microhistorical approach brings a strategy that focuses on one event and uses that event to understand larger systems.[8]
One dedication ceremony on April 18, 1933 opens a discussion of the whole structure of Mandate Palestine, American religious influence, and rising European fascism. In turn, these insights may speak to ongoing concerns with safeguarding pluralistic access to holy sites and mitigating politicized uses of heritage that inflame intercommunal conflict.
[1] Kenneth Scott Latourette, World Service: A History of the Foreign Work and World Service of the Young Men’s Christian Associations of the United States and Canada (New York: Association Press, 1957); YMCA of the USA, International Division, “Records of YMCA International Work in Palestine and Israel: YMCA Historical Library and Kautz Family YMCA Records,” 2003, accessed September 9, 2025, https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/7/resources/929; Benjamin Akzin, “The Palestine Mandate in Practice,” Iowa Law Review 32 (1939): 32, https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/ilr25§ion=10; Richard J. Evans, “Towards the Seizure of Power,” in The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 231–308; Bradley J. Gundlach, “The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism, ed. Gary Scott Smith and P. C. Kemeny, 2019, 96–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190608392.013.11.
[2] League of Nations, “Mandate for Palestine,” 1922, https://www.gov.il/en/pages/the-mandate-for-palestine; Bradley J. Gundlach, “The Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy,” in The Oxford Handbook of Presbyterianism, ed. Gary Scott Smith and P. C. Kemeny, 2019, 96–115, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190608392.013.11; Richard J. Evans, “Towards the Seizure of Power,” in The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2005), 231–308.
[3] Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45, no. 1 (February 1, 2006): 30–50, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2006.00347.x.
[4] YMCA of the USA, International Division, “Records of YMCA International Work in Palestine and Israel: YMCA Historical Library and Kautz Family YMCA Records,” 2003, accessed September 9, 2025, https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/7/resources/929.
[5] Klemens Kappel et al., “On The Epistemic Significance of Convergence in Ethical Theory,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, October 28, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-025-10524-w.
[6] Archibald Clinton Harte, “Sermon in Stone,” YMCA Hall of Fame Inductee Nomination and Biographical Information, ca. 1947–2007, Box 20, Series 02, Folder 07, Kautz Family YMCA Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, MN; Inbal Ben-Asher Gitler, Architectural Culture in British-Mandate Jerusalem, 1917-1948 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).
[7] David M. Potter, “The Historian’s Use of Nationalism and Vice Versa,” The American Historical Review 67, no. 4 (July 1, 1962): 924, https://doi.org/10.2307/1845246; Cecilia González-Andrieu, “The Immigrant’s Journey Is Also a Pilgrimage: The Pilgrim and the Refugee Seek Shelter, in Trust That Hospitality Will Be Offered—and Hospitality Is a Requirement of Christian Faith,” U.S. Catholic, October 16, 2025, Peace & Justice section.
[8] Sophie Ahava, Nicholas Buccella, and Olivia Mason-Lucas, “The Power of Human Experience Within Sacred Space,” ed. University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, VA and Caitlin Finlayson, Sacred Spaces: An Open Introduction to the Geographic Study of Religions and Belief Systems, June 2022, https://pressbooks.pub/opengeo/chapter/the-power-of-human-experience-within-sacred-space/; Katie Day, “The Construction of Sacred Space in the Urban Ecology,” CrossCurrents 58, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 426–40, https://doi.org/10.1353/cro.2008.a782428.