It was small. It was poor. Not near an ocean or river, it was a town geographically out of the way, politically and economically insignificant and placed on unfruitful land.

And it became the center of the world.

“Everything really militated against Jerusalem being this city of such great importance,” said Rabbi Pamela Barmash.

This tiny settlement’s unlikely rise to become a crux of monotheism for millions of worshippers will be Barmash’s topic during a weekend scholar-in-residence program at Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel (BSKI) late this month. Set for March 25-26, the event will include three sessions. Friday night’s gathering will examine how a seemingly insignificant town became a symbol of hope and holiness while a Saturday lunch will cover “Jerusalem in the Imagination of Rabbis.” The topic will wrap up with an exploration of the hidden treasures and aspects of the famous city on Saturday evening.

“We live on the other side of Jerusalem’s history,” said Barmash. “To us, of course it’s an exalted city. Of course it’s a city to which people long for. To us, it seems obvious. But if you look at it with a historian’s eye, you are perplexed because it was a small town that was poor. It was in an agriculturally difficult area. It was part of the smaller of the two kingdoms that existed during Biblical times.”

The topic is one that Barmash warms to easily. As director of Jewish, Islamic and Near Eastern Studies at Washington University, Jerusalem is central to what she does. The Shaare Zedek Synagogue congregant has headed the program since 2005 but she’s been at Wash U. for a decade. A professor of Hebrew Bible and Biblical Hebrew, Barmash clearly enjoys her work.

“This is a very exciting place to be,” she said. “It’s also a very exciting way of making a living. When you work with students, it’s something that’s renewing and refreshing, their ideas and their enthusiasm. As a scholar, it’s also wonderful to have interaction with other scholars internationally.”

Barmash said her passion for knowledge began when she attended an unusual Hebrew high school where teachers lit her desire for more knowledge on spiritual issues.

“Many of them were graduate or rabbinical school students who were repeating on Sunday what they had learned during the week and I found that tremendously inspirational,” she said. “Also at the time, my parents took me to Israel and we stayed in Jerusalem for a month. We weren’t your tourists who rush through and try to do the entire city in two-and-a-half days. It was really something where we got a feel of what it was like to be in that city. It really changed my life.”

Today, she heads a program featuring hundreds of students taking classes, dozens of whom are majors in the field. Some are even able to study abroad. She said the university’s program is unique in that those majoring in it must take courses in both the Jewish and Islamic portions of the discipline. Students are drawn both from within the communities the program focuses on and from outside of them. Either way, they can be exposed to worlds to which they might otherwise have no access.

“We have students who come in with a high level of Hebrew who start Arabic. We have students who come in with a high level of Arabic and start Hebrew,” she said. “It’s really a wonderful cross-fertilization between two civilizations.”

Barmash said her studies touch on a nexus where history, books, religion and linguistics meet.

“There are people who consider themselves to be just a historian or just someone who deals with languages or literature,” she said, “but in order to truly understand the past and how it continues to be vibrant today, you can’t just look at literature or history or texts or anthropology or political science. You have to take a wide variety of approaches to understand something that is multifaceted.”

Some of her work deals with the history of law, something Western religious traditions have had a big impact on. She is the author of a book on homicide in the ancient world. Other books are presently in the pipeline, she said.

Barmash believes that a variety of events boosted Jerusalem’s image in the popular imagination including a little-noted but impressive military victory in which the town held off the Assyrians, a superpower of the ancient world.

“That sense of something so unlikely, so unprecedented, became a celebrated event,” she said. “That really propelled Jerusalem to the idea that it would be a city never violated. It would be a city exalted. It would be a city to which others would stream to worship God and to learn the ways of God.”

She found the town’s experiences particularly interesting given the staying power their aftereffects held. Even today, she noted that Jerusalem is a common dateline in newspapers.

“There are many cultures from the past that are dormant or that quite frankly, nobody cares very much about,” she said. “It’s amazing how this culture from the past lives so vibrantly and shapes our thought today.”

Barmash’s presentation is sponsored by the Adult Education Committee at BSKI. Richard Gavatin, co-chair of the scholar-in-residence weekend, said the Richmond Heights synagogue hosts scholarly events about every 18 months or so. Barmash was recommended by the previous scholar-in-residence Rabbi Neil Gillman in November of 2009.

“We wanted to have a local person and we wanted to have somebody with her connection to Washington University which is very important,” he said.

Reservations are required for the Friday night dinner at 7 p.m. The cost is $15. There is no charge for the Saturday luncheon set for noon. Saturday night’s program begins at 8:15 p.m. Call 314-725-6230 or log on to www.e-bski.org for more details.