This article tackles a gap in our understanding of holy cities by proposing an approach that accommodates both the centrality of these cities in a religious sense and their socioeconomic peripherality from state-capitalist system perspective. Through the combined use of urban survey and ethnographic fieldwork in the case of the holy city of Safed, this article understands “center” and “periphery” not as dichotomous notions but as relational concepts that are mutually constitutive by Avodat Hamakom, a Hebrew-language concept with a double meaning that turns on the two different meanings of the word Makom—that of “place” and one of the many names for God in the Jewish tradition. So the performance of “God’s work” is the work of urban place. Avodat Hamakom strengthens the city as a religious center and simultaneously limits the ability of individuals to enter the labor market, so it brings the city to be a peripheral city in the socioeconomic sense. Adopting a critical way of thinking, this article aims to enrich our understanding of the notion of “work” and its dialectical impact on the construction of urban space.
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