A bitter-sweet glimpse into what Jerusalem might have been

Sarah Irving The Electronic Intifada 25 February 2014

It is no overstatement to say that the appearance of The Storyteller of Jerusalem (Olive Branch Press) — Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs in English — is a very significant event.

This is not because Jawhariyyeh was a major figure in Palestinian history or that he had great political influence. Quite the reverse.

It is Jawhariyyeh’s lack of status that makes his memoirs so unusual, revealing new facets of Palestinian life before the Nakba — the ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s establishment — and challenging many preconceptions and stereotypes.

He grew up in an era when education was just starting to spread through society, so the vast majority of personal accounts come from the upper classes, often from members of well-known families such as the Husseinis and the Khalidis.

Indeed, another recent ground-breaking publication in English was that of Anbara Salam Khalidi’s memoirs, one of the first accounts of life from a pre-Nakba woman, albeit one from Lebanon who married into the Palestinian elite.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh was not from those elite families but his father was associated with the Husseinis, performing administrative jobs for the family alongside his activities as a merchant and silk farmer.

According to Wasif’s account, his father was a close and trusted advisor to Salim al-Husseini and his son Musa Kazem.

This association with a well-off family meant that, although the Jawhariyyehs’ financial situation was sometimes precarious, gifts from his father’s patron ensured that Wasif and his siblings rarely noticed.

The descriptions of his childhood center around a large house shared with tenants, situated around a courtyard and with communal facilities.

“If you entered the house on a Sunday,” writes Jawhariyyeh, “you would find families and relatives of both sexes with their children, some playing cards or backgammon, others singing or playing music with their friends, some smoking argileh [water pipe], or telling stories and anecdotes… . Our Muslim neighbors, both men and women, used to join us at times of sorrow or joy alike. On the… first night of Lent, we would all dress up — men and women.”

This is a rare glimpse into “middle-class” life in Jerusalem at the end of the Ottoman period, where the important things are food, family and getting an education, not palatial homes and political goings-on.

Talented musician

Wasif, however, was found at a young age to be a talented musician, playing instruments such as the oud and the rababah or rebeck. This ability gives his autobiography an extra perspective, because he often worked as a personal musician to members of the Jerusalem elite, including men of the Husseini and Nashashibi families.

We may be used to seeing these names in history books, making decisions which affected the political fate of Palestine.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh, however, played his oud in the bachelor pads — called odas — of the young men of elite families, and in the cafes they frequented, and taught music and singing to their mistresses.

Jawhariyyeh’s access to the upper echelons of Jerusalem society, as well as his formidable memory for anecdotes, also deliver personal insights into Britain’s colonial governors.

They include the “cunning” Ronald Storrs and the eccentric Edward Keith-Roach, who cycled round the roof of the government building in his pyjamas and locked his beloved cat in to protect her from the advances of felines from the neighboring Morcos Hotel.

Vibrant nightlife

Far from being an austere, religious place at the heart of political events, Jawhariyyeh’s Jerusalem is a city with a vibrant nightlife, performances by famous musicians from Cairo and Beirut, songs satirizing contemporary events and personalities and partygoers dabbling in recreational drugs.

Jerusalem in the 1920s, it seems, was less the traditional backwater depicted in some accounts of the British Mandate, and more a city whose affluent cultural scene was a smaller version of that to be found in other cosmopolitan capitals in the region and across Europe.

As well as this unique insight into the leisure lives of the upper classes, Jawhariyyeh’s depictions of late Ottoman and Mandate Jerusalem give us eyewitness accounts of the diverse society destroyed by the establishment of the State of Israel.

Here, Muslims, Christians and Jews not only lived alongside one another, but participated in each other’s religious festivals and cultural celebrations, drawing no meaningful distinctions between one community and another.

According to these descriptions, the Jewish festival of Passover and Christian Easter were celebrated almost as one huge event in Jerusalem, with participants from the highest ranks of Muslim officials.

The Jewish festivities included a procession from Jerusalem to the shrine of Moses near Jericho, which was also the destination for Muslim pilgrims during the Islamic festival of Nabi Musa.

Sense of darkness

Perhaps there is an element of nostalgia to Jawhariyyeh’s reminiscences of the earlier years of his life. Even allowing for this, there is a growing sense of darkness throughout the latter part of his memoirs, as political events — Zionist immigration and growing discrimination against the local population by the British Mandate authorities — start to impinge on everyday life.

Music — including technological innovations such as radio — remained central to Jawhariyyeh’s professional and personal existence but even this was touched by the impending crisis.

Jawhariyyeh recounts, for example, how a Jewish musician who had represented his home country, Iraq, at the 1931 Arabic music conference in Cairo went to play in a new orchestra, separate from the Palestinians, after political clashes split the artists.

With the exception of a few minor inconsistencies in transliteration, this is a book about which one can be unequivocally enthusiastic. For those with background knowledge of Palestine under Ottoman and Mandate rule, it will be source of fresh perspectives and details.

For those new to the period, the book — edited by Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar, and translated by Nada Elzeer — provides a highly readable, intimate account of life for urban Palestinians.

And for all readers, its portrayal of a diverse, vibrant society is a bitter-sweet glimpse into what Palestine might have been, in a world without European and Zionist colonialism.

Sarah Irving worked with the International Solidarity Movement in the occupied West Bank in 2001-02 and with Olive Co-op, promoting fair trade Palestinian products and solidarity visits, in 2004-06. She is the author of a biography of Leila Khaled and of the Bradt Guide to Palestine and co-editor of A Bird is not a Stone, a collection of contemporary Palestinian poetry in translation. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

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Comments

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Issam Nassar replied on

As the co-editor of the book, I am happy to see this excellent review. Just one correction regrarding the nabi Musa procession during easter. This was a Muslim, not Jewish events.

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Amr Tamimi replied on

Excellent review. I need to move the Arab version I have from Lebanon so I can read it properly.

I haven't read the part in question, but I'm fairly certain that the Cairo Congress on Arabic Music, in which there was an almost exclusively Jewish Iraqi delegation (the sole exception was the singer, Muhammad al Gubbanchi), was in 1932, not 1931.

Most of the delegation did end up in Israel in the fifties.

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Millar replied on

Fascinating. I did a course at University on the Arab Israeli conflict, what it lacked was a systematic articulation of Palestinian culture. I did a bit of reading around and discovered that there was a thriving icon industry in Palestine that had existed since the Byzantine Empire. There is a vital need to propogate Palestinian heritage and culture, to show the world that Palestinians are a people of heritage and not just the victims of fate. It would be great if online sources, like for example, Electronic Intifada could publish more articles and links to sites that explore the culture of Palestine. Thankyou.

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Paul replied on

I think this might be what you are looking for: http://btd.palestine-studies.org/

"Before Their Diaspora is a visual journey into Palestine before 1948. Every important aspect of Palestinian society comes to life in the nearly 500 photographs, carefully selected from thousands available in private and public collections throughout the world. Descriptive, analytical texts, introduce each of the five historical periods into which the book is divided. Carefully researched, captions identify the time, place, personalities and context of each photograph."

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Alec replied on

"The chief rabbi of the Jewish Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem, (1930) Rabbi Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld, often referred to the Zionists as "evil men and ruffians" and claimed that "Hell had entered the Land of Israel with Herzl." Sonnenfeld did not want the Orthodox Jewish community to become subject to secular Zionist authority.

The spokesman for the anti-Zionist Ashkenasi community in Jerusalem, Dr Jacob Israël de Haan, endeavoured to form an alliance with the Arab nationalist leadership and hoped to reach an agreement that would allow unrestricted Jewish settlement in Arab lands in return for the relinquishment of Jewish political aspirations. In June 1924, de Haan was assassinated by the Haganah after having conveyed his proposals to King Hussein and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah." ....Wikipedia

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Anthony Shaker replied on

While you have most of your facts straight, your interpretation is nonsensical. In fact, the early Jewish colonists served a precise purpose--to prepare the ground for the seizure of Palestine by violent terrorists imported from the Pale, Eastern Europe and Western states. This went hand-in-glove with a strategy of lies by Great Britain and France with regard to the "Arabs," a new tribal fiction invented by the West and swallowed whole by an Arabic speaking world pocked by the Saudi Wahhabism, a plague whose consequences we are witnessing today.

Those early colonists infiltrated Palestinian society and tried hard to create "relations" where it suited them; they learned how to survive in a land unsuited for large citied populations and which hadn't infinite resources, especially water. They built their "agriculture' right in the midst of this growing mayhem. And then the calamity.

A faceless little man called Harry Truman, the nearest thing to a black hole and the man who nuked Japan, was instrumental to getting Israel recognized as a state. But he stood on the shoulders of others in the UK, France and last but not least that little friend of Israel's, Lester Pearson, a Canadian. All drew their inspiration from a monster from England, Winston Churchil, who developed the use of carpet bombing on German cities in WWII and insisted on compliance by the US, who later applied this experience to Southeast Asia.

Clearly, we can see what it took to establish the Zionist race colony people still call "Israel." Lies, theft and murder on a grand scale. Those peachy local arrangements which the early Zionists sought with the Palestinians, just before their ruin, have been too well documented for journalists to go on babbling about how it might have been in Jerusalem.

Just state it clearly: the concept Israel is based on a forged biblical document and a craven decision by the West to exculpate itself by imposing a tribal order in the Middle East they hope might stem the collapse of its short-lived Western empires.

The West established a vicious colony of terrorists with genocide on their minds to carry out their work. This is why it is the end of the road for Israel as a race state. The whole design, imposing a tribal order on the region just to safeguard Israel is going up in smoke. Israel as a Zionist concept has no future and certainly no rosy past to cheer about, for heaven's sake!

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Jason Thompson replied on

I "like" how your comment has NOTHING to do with the content of the post, which doesn't mention Ashkenazi Jews AT ALL. What a completely random, ranting digression. There's absolutely zero in the post that serves as a justification or defense of the crappy modern apartheid state of Israel, but regardless, you just open up some canned rant attacking general targets in "the West," exactly as some lame-ass white American CNN commentor might hijack a post that has some vague Islam/Arabic connection, in order to deliver an Islamophobic rant.

In short: thank you for contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.

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Deïr Yassin replied on

"Those early colonists infiltrated Palestinian society and tried hard to create "relations" when it suited them"

Miguel Littin, the famous Chilean film director of Palestinian origin, made a film "La Ultima Luna" (Arabic/Spanish) that describes the deceit of some of the early Zionists. The final scenes are worth the whole film
www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcXKT_...

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Deïr Yassin replied on

Sorry, that was a reply to the comment made by Anthony Shaker.