Context and Historical Significance
Some of the oldest world maps place Jerusalem at the center. These are called mappae mundi, and their most recognizable form is the medieval T-O map. The Hereford Mappa Mundi, for instance, depicts Jerusalem as the umbilicus mundi, the navel of the world.1
This cartographic tradition of a circle, O shape, and inner lines, T shape, visualized a sacred worldview, showing how Christians in the Middle Ages imagined reality itself.
This model gave me the rationale to try a hub-and-spoke research methodology.
At right. A T-and-O world map entitled “Etimologías – Mapa del Mundo Conocido” 2
The hub in my design is not only a place but also a time, Jerusalem in April 1933. Most people understand how a city functions as a hub, but it requires more explanation to show how a specific month and year can also serve as a hub. I see my hub-and-spoke research method as both a continuation and a departure from von Ranke’s ideas. Like him, I start with primary sources. My “hub” is usually a central document, and the “spokes” extend out to other records that help me reconstruct events from different angles. This lets me build history from the evidence itself.3
Where I differ is in the structure. Ranke preferred a linear story, moving step by step in a dramatic sequence. I tend instead to map connections across sources. That also creates a more wagon-wheel-like picture of the past.
In this model, the hub holds together many spokes of past, present, and even future, converging
in one place, Jerusalem, and time, April 1933.
The historical significance of April 1933 is clear. That month, communities in Jerusalem and beyond were responding to the early months of Nazi power in Germany, the policies of the British Mandate, and ongoing regional religious and political tensions. Pilgrimage organizations were adjusting their activities, archaeologists were presenting discoveries, and communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims were actively interpreting these developments in light of their own traditions. April 1933 thus serves as a charged moment temporal hub.
Professional Discourse
The hub-and-spoke methodology emerges as a [insert word here] of linear historiography. Linear time is a timeline for a measured sequence, a line across which causation is traced. I always had mental question marks about this because our universe is orbital. Temporality, however, is something else. It is the lived and sacred experience of time as cyclical, or, better, as a helix.
“Jewish Time Wheel,” digital image of limited edition giclée print 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.
At left. The original cover of Misaviv: “Jewish Time Wheel” by Federico Parolo. 4
Indigenous and tribal communities provide important insights into this. Liturgical re-enactments collapse temporal distance, making ancestral events immediate in the present. Even more striking are rituals that act out hoped-for futures, ceremonies intended to help preferred futures come into being. These sacred actions rely on tangible material culture such as architecture, art, music, and liturgy, to produce intangible cultural artifacts.5
Applied to April 1933, the hub-and-spoke model insists that research must demonstrate repeated and provable connections among the spoke-level case studies and the hub city and timeframe. Each spoke represents a distinct case study that holds its own chapter. Each chapter must spotlight one knowledge community. Therefore, perspective-taking and intrinsic ways of knowing shape the analysis. The hub retains overall priority, but the spokes ensure depth and diversity. Together, the spokes are correlated and interwoven through the “wheel rim,” which symbolizes how communities related to each other.
This model also highlights how communities communicated their worldviews in more than words. Speech and writing recorded what people remembered, what they neglected, and what they emphasized. But behavior itself functioned as a kind of nonverbal communication. People make their own history by where they care to go.
What I Hope to Uncover and Analyze
By framing April 1933 in Jerusalem as both spatial and temporal hub, I hope to uncover how communities simultaneously remembered, interpreted, and envisioned. Each community approached memory differently. Each also chose what to forget or minimize. This stress on selective forgetting was muted in my earlier blog post, but I have now emphasized it as a key research finding.6
The challenge, and the promise, of this methodology is to show how the same hub moment generated radically different experiences depending on community perspective.
At right. Heinrich Bünting, Die ganze Welt in einem Kleberblat: Welches ist der Stadt Hannover meines lieben Vaterlandes Wapen (Helmstedt: 1581), woodcut map.7
I aim to reveal the tensions between remembering and forgetting, between different rankings of what counted as urgent, and between divergent imaginations of the future. The same diversity appears in their prioritization of contemporary events. Some groups stressed international politics, others emphasized local disputes or economic survival.
Most importantly, they differed in their visions of the future. Some worked toward practical futures like improved security or access to sacred sites. Others sought spiritual futures. These were not only ideas but lived commitments, shaping daily behavior and community projects.
By applying a hub-and-spoke methodology to Pilgrimage Studies, my goal is to advance the twenty-first century historiographical turn toward the sacred. This method respects communities’ own ways of knowing, avoids flattening diversity into generalization, and yet holds everything together through the shared hub.
- 1. Hereford Cathedral, Hereford Mappa Mundi, c. 1300, vellum, 1.59 × 1.34 m (5′ 2″ × 4′ 4″), Hereford Cathedral, Hereford, England; digital image accessed via “The Largest Medieval Map | Mappa Mundi Hereford,” The Mappa Mundi, https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/ (primary source). ↩︎
- 2. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, primary source, originally composed circa 623, first printed at Augsburg by Günther Zainer in 1472, presenting a T-and-O world map entitled “Etimologías – Mapa del Mundo Conocido,” reproduced in a modern photographic reproduction by the University of Texas at Arlington’s Foundations of Western European Cartography in Texas Collections, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Etimolog%C3%ADas_-_Mapa_del_Mundo_Conocido.jpg. ↩︎
- 3. Irwin Halfond, “Ranke Develops Systematic History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research,” EBSCO, 2023, https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/ranke-develops-systematic-history; Janelle Scott and Huriya Jabbar, “The Hub and the Spokes,” Educational Policy 28, no. 2 (January 30, 2014): 233–57, https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904813515327; Ender Ricart, “Rapid & Large-Scale Research: Hub-and-Spoke Model for Data Collection,” Medium, July 16, 2022, https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/rapid-large-scale-research-hub-and-spoke-model-for-data-collection-154b2e59057c. ↩︎
- 4. Misaviv: “Jewish Time Wheel” (limited edition giclée print, 12 × 12 in.), original cover art by Federico Parolo; published by Deuteronomy Press, Afton, Va.; accessed via “Jewish Time Wheel (Limited Edition Print),” Deuteronomy.com, , https://deuteronomy.com/product/5776-misaviv-cover-limited-edition-print/ (primary source); Saul Sudin, “Approaching Time as a Flat Circle,” Hevria, August 24, 2017, https://hevria.com/saul/approaching-time-flat-circle/. ↩︎
- 5. Tyler D Jessen et al., “Contributions of Indigenous Knowledge to Ecological and Evolutionary Understanding,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 20, no. 2 (November 15, 2021) 93–101, https//doi.org/10.1002/fee.2435. ↩︎
- 6. Jenna Kemp, “Forgetting to Remember: Theorizing the Role of the Forgotten in the Production of Biblical Text and Tradition,” Biblical Interpretation 31, no. 4 (August 11, 2022): 415–39, https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-20221591. ↩︎
- Heinrich Bünting, Die ganze Welt in einem Kleberblat: Welches ist der Stadt Hannover meines lieben Vaterlandes Wapen (Helmstedt: 1581), woodcut map, 27 × 34 cm. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Digital copy available at Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Die_ganze_Welt_in_einem_Kleberblat.jpg. Primary source. ↩︎
Bibliography
Halfond, Irwin. “Ranke Develops Systematic History | Research Starters | EBSCO Research.” EBSCO, 2023. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/ranke-develops-systematic-history.
Jessen, Tyler D, Natalie C Ban, Nicholas Xemŧoltw Claxton, and Chris T Darimont. “Contributions of Indigenous Knowledge to Ecological and Evolutionary Understanding.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 20, no. 2 (November 15, 2021): 93–101. https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.2435.
Kemp, Jenna. “Forgetting to Remember: Theorizing the Role of the Forgotten in the Production of Biblical Text and Tradition.” Biblical Interpretation 31, no. 4 (August 11, 2022): 415–39. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685152-20221591.
Ricart, Ender. “Rapid & Large-Scale Research: Hub-and-Spoke Model for Data Collection.” Medium, July 16, 2022. https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/rapid-large-scale-research-hub-and-spoke-model-for-data-collection-154b2e59057c.
Scott, Janelle, and Huriya Jabbar. “The Hub and the Spokes.” Educational Policy 28, no. 2 (January 30, 2014): 233–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904813515327.