עד שיהיו בו אבנים ועצים ועפר
Tzaraat, a spiritual affliction, can infect a house. But how do you define a house? The Sifra establishes one requirement by identifying the standard materials used in domestic architecture at the time: stones, timber, and mortar.
When I purchased Stone Shelters by Edward Allen, I expected it to be a general treatment of stone architecture, perhaps from prehistoric times and onward, which I thought would be interesting. Instead, I discovered that the book was about stone shelters in a specific, obscure region on the heal of Italy, and the fifty-year-old book is all the more fascinating as a result. Though the first paragraph states that it is not intended as a glossy picture book, the volume is mostly populated by photographs of the various stone structures, with brief essays on the history of each building style, in the genre of Bernard Rudofsky's Architecture Without Architects (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964).
Allen identifies three major categories of stone construction: natural and manmade caves, stone structures made by piecing together small rocks into corbelled domed houses (trulli), and buildings vaulted with stone and mortar. The isolation of the region gave each building type the space to evolve independently, based as so often is the case on available materials, expertise, and the unintended consequences of legal decrees. An edict that would tax any new houses led to construction of trulli out of stone without mortar, so that houses could be quickly knocked on the rare occasions when an inspector visited the far off region. (p78. The podcast 99 Percent Invisible dedicated an episode to similar examples of taxes shaping regional architecture.)
 |
| Trulli (wikimedia) |
One need not be an archaeologist to recognize the parallels between these building types and the built environment in ancient Israel. There too we find caves, cisterns, and burial chambers dug into the soft chalk stone, (p.53) though one gets the sense that the people of Apulia did not suffer quite the frequency of destruction that occurred in Israel. Both places had houses with upper chambers as secondary spaces in the houses. Both used cisterns to collect rainwater. Many other similarities exist as well.
Allen describes how a lack of timber forced the locals to develop complex arching techniques to roof their houses with mortared stone construction. Similar forces were at work in Israel, as explained by Yizhar Hirschfeld in The Palestinian Dwelling in The Roman-Byzantine Period (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1995). Hirschfeld writes that the gradual reduction of available wood led to this innovation in Israel as well (p.243). While Hirschfeld states that this type of roofing system is not mentioned in Jewish sources, I have argued that discussions about the requirement of mezuzot on arches refers specifically to this. (See Architectorah p. 487). Stone Shelters does a great job at tracing the architectural development in one region, and one can imagine that the architecture of any other discrete area would have a similar story to tell if only someone were to tease it out.
 |
| Stone arch supporting roof in domestic architecture (Umm el-Jimal Project) |
Comments
Post a Comment