קונפליקציוניזם וחלל ציבורי בירושלים העות'מאנית והמושבתית

Confessionalism and Public Space in Ottoman and Colonial Jerusalem
Salim Tamari
For many observers, Jerusalem epitomizes a “city of identities”; an ultimate ge­ography defined by sharp ethnic and religious divisions, where distinct social groups worship and live in separate quarters.1 While the city does contain a plethora of holy sites worshiped by the three Abrahamic traditions, civic identities and spa­tial logics have not always fallen into such broadly cast categories drawn around religious lines. An examination of the early twentieth century transition from the Ottoman Empire to the British Mandate yields a complex local narrative of seem­ingly increased fluidity of agency and norms, and the simultaneous beginning of a profound redefinition and administration of space and society. As sovereignty arrangements shifted and the incoming British sought to legitimize and consoli­date their governing authority, colonial administrators continued the process of institutional and secular modernization begun under the Ottomans. But they also took significant legal, physical, and conceptual steps which recast citizen­ship and the physical form of the city into larger and less flexible categories of re­ligion and ethnicity.
In particular, through physical planning and municipal regulations, the Brit­ish Mandate authorities projected a modernist discourse that was heavily framed by orientalist and biblical narratives, leading to a process of what I call here con­fessionalization of public discourse. In contrast to the Ottomans, whose modern­izing schemes focused on the provision of public institutions and secular civic spaces throughout the city, the British newcomers viewed the city as two sepa­rate and opposing pieces: the old city, home to key religious sites and monuments, and the modern perimeter. Because of its historic value, as seen through colo­nial eyes at least, a key objective for British administrators was to preserve the old city and its built environmental character in terms of its pre-Ottoman “bibli­cal” past. Physical manifestations of the old city’s religious and symbolic identity were the sole important characteristics to be conserved for visitors and pilgrims, while residents in both old and new parts of the city—and the logic of urban plan­ning practice more generally—were themselves subject to divisions based on the newly asserted primacy of ethnic and religious groupings as a marker for Jerusa­lem’s larger identity and importance as a world historic city.
This chapter examines the colonial transition from Ottoman Empire to Brit­ish colonial rule and how it manifests in the physical spaces of Jerusalem and the confessional identities of its residents. Drawing on biographic narratives of the city’s transformation during this crucial juncture, the analysis fleshes out details of urban planning practice and citizen response, supplementing a more institu­tional history of Jerusalem during the Mandate period. In contrast to traditional portrayals of transition in the city from Ottoman to Mandate administration, which suggest a clean rupture occurring in 1917, this chapter shows that the co­lonial process did not follow the guidelines of a single master plan, but one with multiple actors navigating through spaces of ambiguous negotiability. In mak­ing this argument, the chapter draws directly on primary resources dating to the transition period, particularly the diary of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, a local artist and civil servant. In addition to adding nuance and detail to the analysis, Wasif’s diary shows that he benefitted from a somewhat inadvertent proximity to key ac­tors in the Mandate period, creating a view that is at once subaltern while main­taining proximity to the world of power-holders.2 The diary thus accommodates the subjective experience of an urban resident living through the transition as well as an interpretation of urban life as seen through the lenses of both the ruler and the ruled.
Three Crucial Decades
One often forgets that the British Mandate over Palestine occupied barely three decades of the country’s modern history. In scholarly literature and Palestinian popular imagination, the Mandate has acquired a colossal, if not mythical, im­pact on the formation of modern Palestinian society and perceptions of its des­tiny. A quick list of the Mandate’s oft-cited achievements (and disasters) drives home this point: the creation of modern institutions of government, including a new civil service and police force, and the centralization of the national bureau­cracy in Jerusalem; the modernization of the land code and the taxation system; the creation of a legal corpus to replace (and supplement) the Ottoman code; the conduct of a national census (1922 and 1931), and the creation of the popu­lation registry; the creation of the rudimentary features of citizenship and icons of unfulfilled sovereignty (currency, stamps, passports); a modern secular educa­tional system; and finally an infrastructure of roads and communication system, including a broadcasting authority (the Palestine Radio in 1931). A major con­sequence of these administrative changes was the separation of Palestine from greater Syria. All this happened in thirty years (less if we deduct the years of ini­tial military rule). But the Mandate is also remembered—retrospectively—for one major accomplishment: laying the grounds for partition and the creation of the state of Israel (Wasserstein 1995, 29–41).
Between the surrender of Jerusalem to General Allenby’s victorious army by the Ottoman Governor Izzat Bey and Mayor Hussein al Husseini (December 1917) and the commencement of the British Mandate (1920), Palestine witnessed three years of administrative and legal flux. Although British intentions for the country were already defined by the commitments to their French allies, through the Sykes Picot Memorandum, and to the Zionist movement with the Balfour Declaration, these formal policy statements did not translate into clear policies on the ground. The bulk of the British military establishment in Palestine, including General Moony, the first military governor, were either hostile to the prospects of a Jewish national home, or ambivalent toward it, on the grounds that it violated British promises to Sherif Hussein and his Syrian allies, or—more importantly— because it provoked Palestinian-Syrian yearning for independence, and made the control of the street problematic (Huneindi 2003, 42–66). Many local adminis­trators and field officers clearly opposed the idea of a Jewish national home, like Brigadier General Clayton, Allenby’s chief political officer, and Sir Walter Con­greve, who commanded the British troops in Egypt and Palestine. A legion of philo-semites and supporters of Zionism stood against their position, including Louis Bols, Palestine’s chief administrator, General Storrs, Military Commander of Jerusalem, and the first High Commissioner, Herbert Samuel.
Inside the larger framework of contested visions of sovereignty, the British are also remembered for laying the foundation of urban planning in Palestine, and hence for creating the modernity of urban space. The memoirs of Ronald Storrs (1881–1955) based on his letters and diary, are elegant, informed, and highly per­ceptive of Palestine’s Ottoman and Islamic heritage, and constitute an excellent exposition of the ideology behind the liberal colonial hegemonic discourse. The memoirs also crisscross fruitfully with Jawhariyyeh’s witty comments on the ac­tivities of the Pro-Jerusalem Society—Storrs’s pet program for the preservation of the city’s public monuments and architecture. The two narratives, Jawhariyyeh’s and Storrs’s, present us with two divergent discourses—native and colonial—on Jerusalem’s modernity.
The conventional wisdom is that the Ottomans had no contributions to urban planning in the Levant, and that it was the British who introduced it to Palestine. Ruth Kark suggests:
Until the end of the Ottoman period, there was no overall planning of the built-up area in Jerusalem. The Sublime Porte and the local authorities limited their operations to supervision. For security reasons a law prohibited the construc­tion of any edifice beyond a distance of 2,500 cubits (about 1.4 km) from the wall of a city. Because of this restriction, Acre failed to expand beyond its walls until the turn of the century, and had the law been strictly obeyed in Jerusalem as well, the fate of that city would have been similar. (Kark 1991, 58–59)
However, spatial planning and regulation was a local priority to late Ottoman rule of the Syrian Provinces (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Transjordan), and these general laws were not strictly applied as suggested above. The main provin­cial centers of the Ottoman Levant (Damascus, Beirut, Jaffa, and Aleppo) all had degrees of planning of their public spaces. Jerusalem received planning guide­lines of sorts after the passage of the Ottoman Municipalities Law in 1877, which regulated building permits, building material, and height of buildings (Khamaisi and Nasrallah 2003, 298). Historian Hala Fattah notes how
the increased attention paid to the urbanization of Jerusalem, the spread of communications and the growth of the population forced the Ottomans’ hand, so to speak. In the middle of the 19th century, the administrative redevelop­ment of Jerusalem was a key aspect of the Ottoman centralization of Palestine. As a result of the institution of municipal and administrative councils, Jerusa­lem’s political life was revitalized. (Fattah 1999, 1)
A symbolic feature of Ottoman public monumental planning for the period was the creation or expansion of public squares to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s ascension to the throne in 1900–1901. These plazas with their iconic watchtowers became central public spaces in re­gional cities like Izmir, Tripoli, Jaffa, and Jerusalem. The Hamedian clock tower in Jerusalem became the subject of considerable controversy later when the Brit­ish military government had it forcefully removed from the Jaffa Gate plaza for “aesthetic reasons,” as we shall see.
Aside from Ottoman municipal buildings and takaya (soup kitchens), the first important urban buildings were established inside the old city by English and German Protestants in the 1840s, and outside the city walls with the comple­tion of the Russian compound in the late 1850s. According to Alexander Scholch these three schemes triggered the urban modernization of Ottoman Jerusalem, “the new construction, alterations, and expansion of churches, monasteries, hos­pices, schools, hospitals, hotels, and consulates subsequently continued unabated” (Scholch 1993, 121). This was followed, in the 1870s, with the creation of neigh­borhoods for Muslim notables outside the walls, in Sheikh Jarrah and Bab al Sahira, and by Jewish residential suburbs in Yemin Moshe and Me’ She’ arim (Scholch 1993, 121–122).
Ottoman urban expansion schemes and city building regulations did exist, but were either haphazard or overwhelmed by construction activities undertaken by autonomous religious endowments, private construction, or foreign public proj­ects. Kark suggests that even though “overall plans for the city of Jerusalem did exist during the Ottoman period . . . they were not implemented, even partially, until 1920” (Kark 1991, 59). But it was on the basis of that Ottoman vision that many successive planning schemes were carried out during the transitional pe­riod of the OETA3 and the early Mandate (Khamaisi and Nasrallah, 296).

Spatial Foundations for Identity Shifts
Planning by the British, however, took a more aggressive approach to restruc­turing the city into two distinct zones, each with separate areas for the different religious groups. Against the backdrop of Ottoman planning, Ronald Storrs in­troduced a scheme in 1918 for urban renovation and preservation, through a con­fessionalized elite appointed to the Pro-Jerusalem Society. The Society’s declared aims were “to preserve the city’s antiquities, develop modern cultural functions such as museums, libraries, theatre, etc., and foster the education and welfare of the city’s inhabitants” (Gilter, n.d., 31). Storrs was able to assemble an impressive array of the city’s ruling elite to constitute the society’s administrative board, in­cluding the Mayor of Jerusalem, Musa Kazim al Husseini; the British Director of Antiquities; the Mufti, Kamil al Husseini; and eventually Haj Amin; the two Chief Rabbis; the Orthodox, Latin, and Armenian Patriarchs; the Anglican Bishop; and other leading members of the community (Storrs, 322). One is struck again here by Storrs’s vision of Palestinian society as composed of confessional elements added to the local aristocracy (a’yan)—a perspective which clashed head-on with the emerging national movement and its secularized intelligentsia.
Although Storrs was the key figure behind the new idea for the city and its exe­cution, a discussion of the early planning of Mandate Jerusalem cannot be com­plete without including the participation of two innovative urbanists, William MacLean and Charles Ashbee. The first, MacLean, then the town planner of Al­exandria and Khartoum, was invited by Storrs in 1918 to design the first modern master plan for Jerusalem, which he accomplished in a record two-month pe­riod. Followed by later ground-breaking achievements, his plan “. . . prohibited new construction within the boundaries of the Old City, mandated that the area around the walls be kept clear, and ordered the leveling of structures abutting the wall from the outside. New buildings, permitted only to the west and north of the Old City, would rise to a maximum height of eleven meters so as not to compete with the skyline of the Mount of Olives. Jerusalem was to be built of stone; indus­trial structures were banned” (Roman 2001, 24). Almost all of these regulations were Ottoman in origin and British in implementation.
In terms of a conceptual paradigm for an urban future, however, it was Charles Ashbee who provided the bifurcated vision of the new/old Jerusalem. A disciple of William Morris, Ashbee belonged to a generation of socialist romantic thinkers finding themselves in the service of the British colonial enterprise. Although he was brought in by Storrs to survey and revive local handicrafts, his work stretched be­yond his original charge (Storrs 1937, 323–326). Officially, he held the position of Civic Advisor to the City until 1922. In addition, he served as the Secretary and the primary coordinator of the Pro-Jerusalem Council, the Society’s administrative board. Given his close association with the powerful Storrs, Ashbee made signifi­cant contributions of his own in proposing solutions to “the city’s modern prob­lems while conserving its ancient holy sights and unique character” (Gitler, n.d., 31).
Ashbee took pains to reconcile his dual conception of the city—the romantic-visionary, and the conservationist-revivalist. He resolved this contradiction, ac­cording to Inbal Gitler, by dividing the city into two zones of future redemption: one was the city within the walls, which he saw “in a secular way as an historic monument marked for archeological preservation”; and the new city, which was marked for modern expansion and development (Gitler, n.d., 45–46). The link­age between the two cities relied on a networking of landscaping schemes, which surrounded the city walls and utilized concepts of the English garden combined with a series pavilions invoking an “Oriental style.” One of Ashbee’s original con­tributions was an attempt at uniting the city with its rural and agricultural hin­terland. This was achieved by “planting endemic natural vegetation, and by leav­ing part of the park area in state of wilderness or under development by local agrotechniques”(Gitler, n.d., 40). Ashbee’s planning of Jerusalem was a labor of love and contradiction, in which he tried, through imaginative landscaping and revived local crafts (which he had introduced as an employment scheme), to syn­thesize an orientalist vision of the holy city.
By sheer coincidence Wasif Jawahriyyeh, who was toilingat the same period in the Central Registry of the Military Government, caught the attention of Colonel Storrs. Wasif’s performances on the oud (a stringed instrument) brought him close to the Governor, who was fond of oriental music from his long stay in Egypt.
Storrs seconded Jawahriyyeh to work as an assistant to Ashbee in the newly estab­lished Pro-Jerusalem Council.
In his position as secretary to Ashbee, Jawahriyyeh relates the first incidence of conflict between the architectural vision of the Pro-Jerusalem Society and the Jerusalem Municipality. In 1901 the Ottomans had constructed a clock tower in­side Jaffa Gate during the tenure of Mayor Faidallah al Alami to commemorate the twenty-fifth Anniversary of Sultan Abdul Hamid’s reign (see above). Jeru­salem architect Pascal Affendi Sarofim, the municipal architect at the time, de­signed the tower in the Baroque style (Jawhariyyeh Memoirs manuscript [here­after Jawhariyyeh ms.], 49). When Ashbee became secretary of the Pro-Jerusalem Society he took a decision to remove the clock tower, since, according to Wasif “it did not fit well with the image of the historical wall.”4 The tower was removed overnight despite protests from the Municipality. Jawahriyyeh, however, con­curred with Ashbee’s aesthetics. “The design was an elaborate hybridity of styles, and reminded me of Abdel Wahhab’s Franco-Arab music, although I must say that it should have been moved to another location, perhaps in the vicinity of the new municipality by Barclays Bank” (Jawhariyyeh ms., 49). Years later Jawahriy­yeh had a wooden model of the removed clock tower and the adjoining plaza, de­stroyed by Storrs, made for the benefit of those who wanted to see what Ottoman Jerusalem looked like on the eve of the Mandate (Jawhariyyeh ms., 50).5
Jawhariyyeh spent months accompanying both Ashbee and Richmond in their field trips on renovation work at al Aqsa compound, and in the restoration of the city’s ancient wall. Of these trips he said:
As secretary to Mr. Ashbee I was privileged to observe the restoration work in al Haram area, and in other archeological sites of the city. The famous archi­tect George Shiber, who later became renowned, was also involved in the reno­vation of al Haram as a technical expert under Mr. Richmond. Unfortunately I was not to stay long with Ashbee. One winter evening I was considerably drunk when I entered the Registry, and started teasing my colleagues. I climbed on the desks and was clowning around on the worktables just as Mr. Ashbee entered the room and began staring at me.
“Well Hello. Hello Mr. Ashbee,” I shouted. Everybody was laughing their bellies off, except Ashbee, who went to his office and wrote an angry memo on my behalf. That was the end of my career with him. I must say however, that I benefited greatly from working under Ashbee, which increased my knowledge of Jerusalem historical and architectural heritage. (Jawhariyyeh ms. 2–48)
Wasif goes out of his way to indicate that his expulsion by Ashbee did not di­minish his admiration for his work. He also makes a clear distinction between Storrs the “colonial-orientalist,” and Ashbee the architect and planner (Jawhariy­yeh, 48).
These diaries also help us to rethink the changes in the urban landscape of Jerusalem not only as a lived experience by a contemporary observer, but also in an alternate narrative challenging the idea of a clean rupture between Turkish rule and English rule. It undermines the notion that the Ottoman regime and the British regime were opposites, one representing oriental despotism and the other modernity. Jawhariyyeh reminds us that many of the celebrated reforms of the Mandate Administration were already in place during and before World War I. But the tragedies of the war, and disastrous consequences of conscription (safar barlik) in poisoning the relationship between the Turkish rulers and the subject Arab population in Syria and Palestine wiped out the memory of these features of Ottoman modernity from Palestinian collective memory.
Here, by contrast, the presumed creation of these institutions of colonial mo­dernity are seen not as an innovation over the “decrepit” Ottoman system, but as an elaboration on the foundations already introduced by Ottoman reforms, such as secular education, the civil service, constitutional reform, and urban planning. In certain areas the British political plans constituted retrogression over the Ot­toman system.
This was the case, for example, with the confessionalization of quarters in the old city. The four-quarter scheme, mentioned in abundance in European travel literature to the holy city, now became an official administrative boundary of the city. The quarters replaced the mahallas, the smaller unit of governance employed by the Ottomans, and further enhanced religion as a marker of national identity (Tamari 2002).

Underwriting the Confessionalization of the City
From the beginning of the Mandate, the British began a series of actions to cre­ate a new base, disassociated with pilgrimage, for the city’s economic activities, and to reinsert religion as the primary source of social identity. Jerusalem differed from many of the other provincial centers in that its economic base was consider­ably based on religious charities and endowments as well as services to pilgrims. Sharing the fate of many medieval holy cities, such as Canterbury and Lourdes, religion in late Ottoman Jerusalem had become the main commodity of the city, and was seen as the source of livelihood. In spite of this permeation, or perhaps as a result of it, religion was not taken as seriously as a guide to behavior or a norma­tive form of governance. According to Ashbee, the city “maintained a large para­sitic population—priests, caretakers, monks, missionaries, pious women, clerks, lawyers, and a crowd of riffraff—who all had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo” (quoted in Roman 2000). Despite the antisocial texture of this state­ment, it seems that Ashbee, given his populist credentials, was expressing here a negative assessment of the lopsided occupational base of the city’s economy, rather than outright prejudice.
Ashbee combined a romantic vision of the “oriental ideal” of the city with a practical, down-to-earth approach to the unique predicament of Jerusalem. In the 1920 annual report of the Society he defined the city’s unproductive base (“riff­raff and priests,” described above) as the main problem facing the planner. He at­tempted to overturn this “parasitic” occupational structure through the revival (and introduction) of the traditional crafts in the city’s building trades: weaving, tiling (with Armenian ceramic experts brought in from K.tahya), and glasswork from Hebron. Among the projects undertaken and finished in this period were the renovation of the cotton market, Suq al Qattanin, in the old city, the tiling of the Dome of the Rock along with the authorities of the Waqf, or religious endow­ment, the restoration of the ancient wall ramparts built by Suleiman al Qanuni, and the Citadel of the City. All of these projects involved the establishment of ap­prenticeships based on the guild system. Storrs set up an annual academy of fine arts at the Citadel where exhibitions on Muslim art, Palestinian crafts, and town planning were held (Storrs 1937, 326–327).
The honeymoon with the colonial authority did not last long. One of the first government acts was to conduct the General Census (1921) in which Palestinians were divided into the three confessional categories of Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The Jerusalem leadership of the national movement saw the census not as part of the planning instrument as it was heralded, but as a prelude to the real­ization of the National Jewish Home project. A call to boycott ensued, but was not entirely successful.6
In the later part of the Mandate, public ceremonials became the lynchpin of confrontation with the British, in contrast to the situation in the late Ottoman pe­riod, when the authority was the main sponsor (and patron) of these ceremonials. The main focus of clashes between demonstrators and the military government was the procession of Nebi Musa, or Moses. These clashes began in the spring of 1919 and intensified over the following two years.
Colonel Storrs, in his capacity as the new military governor of Jerusalem, began to regulate the Nebi Musa processions and place them under government supervision—partly as a measure to control the crowds, but also as a plan to regu­late religious ritual within the new civil administration of Palestine. In this effort he was acting in collusion with Haj Amin al Husseini, the rising star of the na­tionalist movement (who in this regard also saw himself as a successor of Salah al Din, who liberated Jerusalem from the Crusaders in the twelfth century) and re­cently appointed Mufti of Jerusalem. Both the nationalist movement and the Brit­ish saw in the control of religious ceremonials a mechanism for realizing their ob­jectives.
Along these lines, the Nebi Musa processions, which under the Ottomans had been one of many syncretic public celebrations, suddenly became an offi­cial festival sponsored by the colonial authorities. Haj Amin himself also played a critical role in “nationalizing” the Nebi Musa celebrations under his authority as the Mufti (Jawhariyyeh ms., 131). Similarly, Easter Sunday and the rituals of Good Friday and Fire Saturday were also given state sponsorship. All of these ac­tions were part of the process of confessionalization of popular religious ceremo­nies that conceived of Palestine as a land of three ancient religious communities, rather than a national community freeing itself from communalism.
Storrs, the orientalist who played a crucial role in inventing this tradition, was succeeded by the fiercely anti-Arab commander Edward Keith-Roach. Jawhariy­yeh knew both governors personally and contrasted their personal style of ad­ministration, in favor of the wily and cultured Storrs. But he is also fully aware of Storrs’s conscious manipulation of religious celebrations, as can be seen in this description of early clashes with the police in 1921:
The army brought a large armed contingent and placed them at Jaffa Gate, re­inforced by heavy cannons and tanks. Sir Ronald Storrs riding his horse in full military attire headed the force. All were facing the great procession of Nebi Musa arriving from Hebron, with the objective of diverting the crowds from clashing with the Jews. . . . It took fully six hours for the procession, which in­cluded singing bands, sword players, musical bands with drums, and horsemen representing each village in Mount Hebron with their banners, to arrive from the Sultan’s Pool to the edge of Jaffa Gate.
I was standing there with the throngs when the procession found the gates to the old city blocked by the army. With a signal by Storrs half the procession moved east towards Jaffa Road, but then in a sudden move the leaders of the procession turned back and attacked the British troops defying the machine guns and the tanks. It was an unforgettable sight. And what did Sir Ronald Storrs do on this occasion? He suddenly sprung out as a Qahtani Arab, and addressed the crowds in eloquent Arabic: “Greetings to the heroes of Nebi Musa . . . I welcome you according to the honoured tradition which dictates that you go through the gate of the old city towards the Haram.” By doing this he avoided a bloody clash with army. The processionals in turn did not clash with the soldiers when they saw that Storrs himself was greeting them, which is exactly what he had aimed at—namely, to re-route the procession inside the walls away from Jaffa Gate. (Jawhariyyeh ms., 20–21)
Keith-Roach, however, lacked both the finesse and the cunning of Colonel Storrs. He described the Palestinians as “a naturally indolent people . . . pleas­ant to live among [with] their long loose garments covering a multitude of sins” (quoted in Segev 2000, 168). But by that time (1926) it is also more likely that clashes between the national movement and the Zionists became too severe to be contained through logistic manipulations as described in the incident attributed to Storrs.

Local Responses to Deprivation
The period of transition to the Mandate, in essence a time of military rule, is a neglected phase in scholarly studies. The nature of this transition was charac­terized by political and legal ambivalence, and most Palestinians were not yet committed in their political allegiances. For Jerusalemites in particular, it was a time of constant adjustment, repositioning, and new formulations of future plans based on an evolving present. Over time, however, the broader “communitarian” and localist affiliations began to dwindle, and the new, religion-based national­ism grew.
Palestine in particular was one of the provinces in which anti-Ottoman sen­timents were least pronounced at the turn of the century. Even after the proc­lamation of the Constitution of 1908, when separatist movements in the Arab regions began to add their weight to Greek and Armenian movements assert­ing themselves against Istanbul, the Palestinian street remained relatively pro-Ottoman. Adil Mana# notes that Palestine was distinguished among the Syrian provinces by its lack of enthusiasm for the constitutional reform. In Nablus and other northern areas, the street demonstrated for the Sultan, and against the re­formers (Mana# 2003, 243–244). Only in Jaffa and Jerusalem was the Movement of Union and Progress able to attract limited support (ibid., 243 and 249). It was only after Union and Progress began their Turkification program, following the removal of Sultan Abdul Hamid from power, that Palestinians began to join Arab nationalist groups en masse (ibid., 247).7
Naturally the British administration is recalled as the conscious instrument (through the Balfour Declaration) which laid the foundation for the displace­ment of the Palestinians in 1948, and much of Jawhariyyeh’s narrative is perme­ated with this foreknowledge (since he was writing in a later period). It explains to a large extent his ambiguity about the liberation of Jerusalem from the Ottoman yoke, even as Jerusalemites were dancing in the street and as he and his brother Khalil were burning their Turkish military uniforms (Tamari and Nassar 2002, 253–254).
The years preceding the fall of Jerusalem were particularly harsh. Major social dislocations and ruthless suppression of the urban population in the major cit­ies of the region accompanied the devastation of war. The last three years of Ot­toman rule were also the years of famine in Syria and Palestine. But hunger was not induced by draught or any other natural cause, but through the confiscation and forced diversion of wheat supplies to the Fourth Army, under the command of Jamal Pasha (Tannous 1988, 35). To compound these disasters Palestine was subjected in the middle of 1915 to a severe attack of locust swarms that compelled a massive relocation of coastal populations inland (Mana# 2003, 84-85). Lebanon was first hit by famine in the spring of 1916, and the famine soon spread to the other urban centers of Syria and Palestine. In his memoirs, Dr Izzat Tannous, a Jerusalemite medical student (and later officer) in the Ottoman army, described the devastating impact of the famine when he was stationed in Beirut:
Walking from Ras Beirut down to the Burj, the centre of town, it was a com­mon affair to step over ten or fifteen dead bodies lying on the sidewalks for the municipal cart with one horse to pick them up and bury them. I fretfully stepped over these corpses many a time but it became routine. Children cried day and night: “Jou#an!” (hungry), and rushed at every garbage can for any­thing to eat. . . . babies were left at hospital gates at night to be taken in the morning to be fed. (Tannous 1988, 36)
In Jerusalem the scarcity of food supplies was associated in the people’s mind with the conscription. In his sardonic way Jawhariyyeh composed a ditty revolv­ing around popular obsessions with missing dishes. He jointly wrote the lyrics with Omar al Batsh—his teacher and oud master in the Ottoman army:

An Ode to Hunger
Tripe tripe, stuffed with rice, Eggs eggs, eggs in the oven
Fish. Oh fish fried in batter. Pour the wine, drink, sing and be happy
Be daring and drink, For being high is the only way
Refrain
Qabwat, qabwat fried Kubbeh, kubbeh cooked with yogurt
Carrots, carrots oh stuffed carrots. Come and settle in my stomach
Zucchini with meat, kishk with lard
Aubergine ala yakhni with fluffy rice
Refrain
Oh Kunafeh, do not desert me. Oh pudding you are my destination
Almond hariseh you come first. The queen of deserts after the stuffings
Pistachio cracking, taqqish faqqish. Fill you narghileh and get stoned
After the qatayif, pick your teeth
After all these helpings you will need a bath  (Jawhariyyeh 2005: 29–30)
Wasif first performed this song at the table of the Mutassarif (Governor) of Jerusalem and his Turkish officers as evening entertainment. “I kept thinking all the time of how my family and friends outside were not only deprived of these foods, but did not even have the chance of looking at them” (Jawhariyyeh, 2:30). Paradoxically this macabre “ode to hunger” had a hallucinatory effect and spread like wild fire in Jerusalem. Masses of people sang it as a way of invoking the fa­mous “stuffed” (mahashi) dishes of the city that had disappeared from their lives. But as the wording shows, it went beyond the evocation of food toward adopting an attitude of licentiousness and abandon. It continued to be a popular ballad for years after the war.8
And despite the devastation, or perhaps as a result of it, several writers were able to look back at those years as signaling a major restructuring of Palestinian and Syrian society. A contemporary observer refers to the radical impact of the movement of population and the war economy on the normative aspects of daily life: villages coming to the city on a regular basis, women going to school and re­moving their veils, the emergence of caf. culture, and the decline of religiosity in Nablus and Jerusalem (al Barghouti 2001, 192–193). The decline of religiosity, it should be added, went along with the rise of confessionalism, as we also wit­ness for Lebanon in the same period. A derivative development of these norma­tive changes was the decline of local affinities and the strengthening of Syrian and Arab nationalism.
The space opened by the transition allowed, at least briefly, for new local agency, in political as well as individual and social life. Jawhariyyeh recalls the three years of transition as the days of chaos—both in the country as a whole and in his private life, as if one condition mirrored the other. But the “chaos” here is also seen here as a period of “creative anarchy.”
In his personal life, those were the “precious” years of bachelorhood before he got married and settled down. They were also ushered by the death of his patron, the mayor of Jerusalem, Hussein Effendi al Husseini. He describes his condition then as one of “vagabondage” (tasharrud):
I roamed around the city as if in a trance. I would spend all night partying, and then sleep all day, then spend another evening in neighboring villages of Jeru­salem. I paid no attention to anybody or anything, and would only go home to change my clothes, sleeping mostly at my friends’ homes until my body was completely depleted from intoxication. One day I am celebrating in the Bab Hatta neighborhood, and in the next morning I am having a picnic with the families of the top notables (a’yan) in the city. Then I would have a “ses­sion” with some of Jerusalem’s gangsters (zuran and qabadayat) in a city alley. (Jawhariyyeh ms., 23)
But these episodes of hedonism, which lasted most of 1918 and part of the next year, reflected a mood that engulfed the city as a whole. Jawhariyyeh provides us with numerous episodes of public celebrations of freedom in the streets of the Old City, marked by musical processions and open consumption of alcohol. In one such fantasia involving hundreds of revelers, the celebrants started in Damas­cus Gate, moved out of the old city through Musrara, to the Russian Compound, back into the old city from Jaffa Gate, to the Austrian Hospice and ended in the Sheikh Rihan neighborhood of Mahallat al Saadiyya (Jawhariyyeh ms., 40–46). “Why did we have these orgies of celebration the likes of which we have not seen since then?” asks the author. He proceeds to answer himself: “The people were hungry for a moment of release, after the years of humiliation, disease, hunger and dispersal during the war and Ottoman despotism. When the British arrived we began to have a breath of freedom. Unfortunately our joy was short lived, for they brought us catastrophe which was several times more disastrous than the Turkish yoke.” (Jawhariyyeh ms., 41–42)
These outbursts of street merriment soon found an outlet during the years of military government through the mushrooming of local caf.s and caf.-bars.9 They were places where Jerusalemites could meet at leisure, listen to gramophone music, drink araq and cognac, and smoke an arghileh. Two outstanding caf.s from this period were Maqha al arab in Ain Karim (owned by Abu al Abed Arab) which stayed open all night, and the Jawhariyyeh caf.-bar—which featured live entertainment by visiting musicians from Cairo, Alexandria, and Beirut (Jaw­hariyyeh ms., 44–45).
The departure of the Turkish troops also encouraged some of the secret anti-Ottoman societies that had been active as literary or sports organizations to sur­face. Most notable among those associations were the Society for Arab Amity (Jamiyyat al ‘al Arabi), established in Istanbul in 1908 after the proclamation of the new constitution; The Arab Forum (al Muntada al arabi) (1909), with branches in many Syrian cities; the Arab Maiden (al Jamaiyyah al arabiyyah al Fatat), 1912, based in Beirut; the Qahtani Association (al Jam’iyya al Qahtaniyya), and The Green Flag Society (Jam’iyyat al ‘alam al Akhdar), both in Istanbul in 1912 (Sidqui 2001, 196–197). Among these quasi-secret groups in Palestine was the Literary Club (al Muntada al Adabi), whose membership included Fakhri al Nashashibi (who became later the leader of the Defense Party militia against the Husseinis and the Palestine Arab Party), Saliba al Juzi (brother of Bandali, the Marxist his­torian), Khalil Sakakini, Musa Alami, and Is’aaf al Nashashibi (Jawhariyyeh ms., 26 and 86–87; Sakakini 2004, 128). Sakakini’s Vagabond Party (Hizb al Saaleek) was an early precursor of the literary club and his circle included leading figures from Jaffa and Jerusalem intellectual circles such as Nakhleh Zureiq, Adel Jaber, and the Issa brothers (founders of the Filasteen newspapers in 1909). The Literary Club became the nucleus of the Christian-Muslim Associations during the Mili­tary Government. We have a record of a mass rally held in early 1918 just outside Jaffa Gate in which the main speakers were Fakhri Nashashibi and Saliba al Juzi; both spoke against the Balfour Declaration and in favor of Syrian unity (Jaw­hariyyeh ms., 26).

Urban Chaos, Liminal Space, and Military Rule
Local political actors also enjoyed greater agency during the transition period. The Jawhariyyeh memoirs shed significant light on the critical postwar years dur­ing which much political ambiguity about the future direction of Palestine pre­vailed. These were the years of cultural liminality in Palestine, when questions of sovereignty still prevailed because the colonial system was not yet ushered in— despite the military collapse of the Ottoman system. “We lived in a state of igno­rance” Colonel Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem, later confessed—“and my word was the law” (Storrs 1937, 272–273). Under the administration of General Moony all civil laws were suspended in favor of the military administration. Sud­denly in Palestine, according to Mandate historian Bayan al Hut, there were no lawyers, no judges, no courts, and no newspapers (al Hut 1981, 66). The northern part of Palestine was still under Turkish control in 1918, and the British were mo­bilizing resistance in the name of Sherif Hussein against the fledgling Ottoman army. But even after the defeat and final consolidation of British rule over the country, the borders between Transjordan, Lebanon and Syria with Palestine re­mained “Ottoman,” with fluid boundaries and a common cultural outlook.
While the legal vacuum was filled in the countryside by a reversion to com­mon law (al qanun al urfi) and tribal law, the situation in the big cities allowed appointed judges and senior administrators—both British and Palestinian— considerable leeway to exercise their discretion in applying the law at the local level. These discretionary powers are illustrated by a number of recorded cases in 1919 at the Jerusalem Court of Appeals, presided over by Judge Muhammad Yusif al Khalidi, widely known for both his eccentricity and fairness. In one of those cases a well-known Old City prostitute was brought before him on charges of “disturbing the peace.” Judge Khalidi apparently had been drinking heavily the night before, and was still in a daze when the woman was ushered screaming into the court.
Judge Muhammad al Khalidi: “Shut up, you whore (ya sharmuta), and con­trol yourself. “ Prostitute: (enraged by the insult) “My lord, I may be a prostitute at home, but here I am a citizen in the court of the state.” Judge Khalidi: (sobering and taken aback) “You are absolutely right.”
The proceedings were temporarily halted and the judge addressed the court sec­retary Jamal al Salahi:
“Write this down: In the new case of slander, brought by the plaintiff fulaneh the daughter of fulan (i.e. so and so),10 against the accused, Judge Muhammad Yusif al Khalidi, the court judges for the plaintiff. I hereby fine the accused [my­self] five Palestinian pounds.”
He then took five pounds from his wallet, handed it to the court secretary, who issued him with an official receipt. The judge then entered the case into the court protocols, and apologized to the prostitute; he then proceeded with the original charges against her (Jawhariyyeh ms., 13–14).11
Another feature of both cultural and sovereign liminality was the porousness of the new borders with Lebanon, Transjordan, Syria, and Egypt, which still re­flected the old domains of Ottoman greater Syria. In the summer of 1922 Wasif goes on an excursion with his brother Khalil to Syria and Lebanon through the northern borders. Khalil had spent three years of the war as an Ottoman soldier stationed in Beirut. The passage through Ras al Naqura, which within ten years had become a formidable frontier post, is hardly recorded in the memoirs, as if one passed from one district to another (Jawhariyyeh ms., 30). Three years later Wasif repeats the same trip with his wife Victoria, passing again with hardly any formal procedures (Jawhariyyeh ms., 161). The two stories illustrate the fluidity of frontier areas on the eve of the British and French protectorates delineating the borders of new states in a move that consolidated notions of citizenship, exclusion and separation. The new Mandate regulations ended when northern Palestine and southern Lebanon were constituted subdistricts of Bilad al Sham (greater Syria), which, under Ottoman rule, had open borders and shared cultural and social affinities.
Another important realm where citizenship became increasingly confession­alized was the new Mandate bureaucracy. One example of this was the civil ser­vice and land registry. The phasing out of border fluidity and the establishment of a new, more circumscribed territorial unit for administration corresponded to the growth and consolidation in Palestine of the governing apparatus of the colonial state: the army, the police force, the civil service, and the corpus of the new legal system. As such, these spatial and administrative developments derived from and reinforced British efforts to consolidate their sovereign authority, even as they led to changing relationships with the citizenry. But in establishing sover­eignty and citizenship, colonial authorities were equally hamstrung by prior ef­forts to confessionalize the city, and their spatial and social consequences. This is clear with a closer look at civil service activities and the land registry. Within ev­ery sector of the new state, the British had to balance a system of appointments that took into account the representation of the native Palestinian population and the emigrant Jewish population. But while native representation was individual and direct, taking into account social status and confessional considerations, Jew­ish representation was mediated through protracted negotiations with the Jew­ish Agency and Zionist Executive. During the crucial formative stage of British rule, when the new civil administration was installed in 1920, Jewish represen­tation was overwhelming, even though they constituted less than twelve percent of the population. Segev writes: “The Palestinian Jews in senior positions were prominent principally during Samuel’s tenure. Together with the British Zionists, they held key positions in his administration, complained Lieutenant Colonel Percy Bramely, the director of public security in Palestine. In fact, Bramely wrote, Samuel’s was a ‘Zionist-controlled government’” (Segev, 167).
Jawhariyyeh himself was a direct witness to and participant in the formation of the new civil service. Within the latter Wasif became a senior staff member in the National Registry (Qism al Tahrirat) and then (in 1919) in the Land Registry, whose main task was to complete the codification and commercialization of the land tenure system that was initiated by the Ottomans in 1858. He was later pro­moted to the position of director of the financial section in the Land Registry, and became head of the Property Committee and a member of the Appeals Commit­tee (for people who felt they were assessed unjustly) (Jawhariyyeh ms., 2:21). The memoirs constitute a rich record of this transformation in his time. In the sum­mer of 1920 he made this entry: “The core of the new civil administration is made up of the heads of security, education, finance, customs, justice, and agriculture— all English; the heads of the departments of Immigration, Passports, and Land Administration are British and Jews. Mr. N. Bentwich, a Zionist, was appointed as legal advisor to the government. Is this the initial implementation of the Bal­four Declaration in Palestine?” (Jawhariyyeh ms., 2:21).
His work in the Land Registry for over two decades (with Sami Hadawi and Stephan Hanna—both of whom later became prominent writers in their own right), provides us with a detailed record of the manner in which the new laws were geared to facilitate the transfer of urban and rural property to the Zionists. This process included the abolition of the tithe and the werko.12 Both were Ot­toman land taxes that were aimed at bringing in state revenue from landowners without regard to its quality or productivity; the institution of the new graded land-tax based taxation on use, location, and quality. Finally, it included the ex­pediting of the Land Settlement, whose main objective was a comprehensive ca­dastral registration of land plots to enhance and simplify the operations of the Tapu (Land Registry).
As with efforts to recast and divide confessional identities in space, Mandate changes in bureaucratic structuring and policy were not automatically internal­ized and reproduced by Jerusalemites. It is paradoxical, given their later nation­alist credentials, how Sami Hadawi and Jawhariyyeh were critical instruments in this process of land alienation, initially unaware of its significance, and certainly unwilling to perform these tasks. But Jawhariyyeh’s rendition of the process is typical of the early hedonistic years in Jerusalem: passive resistance through de­laying work, bureaucratic sabotage, and creating a jovial atmosphere of idyllic celebration in one of the most critical departments of the colonial government. While his colleagues, Jews and Arabs, were struggling with the intricate book en­tries of the new land registration system during Keith-Roach’s administration, he composed the following ditty lampooning the system of recording agricultural statistics:


Homage to Double Bookkeeping Worst of all is to establish these Rules We are going mad with these calculations: barley, and wheat and fava beans Tithes and Werko all year round . . . round and round till September ends Go to the books and enter the numbers, for public accounts and personal liabilities Imports and Exports past and present And converting Egyptian Lira to the impossible Palestinian Pound Deleting mistakes and animal census From where we come, we grin and bear it.  (Jawhariyyeh ms. 4–59)
These mundane anecdotes, satirizing the daily routine of the colonial bureau­cracy during the period of the military government, draw a cumulative broad pic­ture of an emerging liminal identity. A legal vacuum filled by administrative fiat defined this period, along with a hedonistic street culture that celebrated the loss of tyranny, but filled it with new uncertainties, and porous borders that still re­tained the texture of an older sense of a continuous Levantine (Shami) culture. What “cemented” these three elements together was a strong sense of the local— of Jerusalem being the center of the country’s shifting boundaries, and an anchor against the schemes engineered by the new colonial enemy, which drove many Palestinians into nostalgia for the “accursed” Ottomans.
In addition to the use of processions for protest as described above, another striking turn within the nationalist discourse related to the manner in which British by now openly posed as sponsors of the scheme for a Jewish National Home, and the reversal of their early promises for Syrian independence. This made people—initially exhilarated by the end of Turkish rule—nostalgic toward the Ottoman era, and even toward the “Turanic” regime of Mustafa Kamal Ata­turk, despite his openly anti-Arab credentials. Wasif narrates a performance by the Egyptian-Jewish composer Zaki Murad (the father of singer Leila Murad) in which he sang a tribute to Ataturk in 1921, which became widely popular in Jeru­salem:

Ode to Ataturk The heart beckons to you in adoration and the eyes are cast towards your beauty Royalty seeks your concord the soul is enlivened by your presence [... ] Nobody is your equal Nobody radiates in your brilliance (Jawhariyyeh ms. 84–85)
Although the song was ostensibly composed for King Fuad the First by Ibrahim Qabbani, it was nevertheless seen in Syria and Palestine as a tribute to Ataturk’s victory over the allied troops. The record of this song was in constant demand for some time after the war, especially when Palestinians began to feel “the perni­cious objectives of British rule.” The Abu Shanab Music store in Damascus Gate, the main importer of Egyptian records, could hardly keep up with popular de­mand (Jawhariyyeh ms., 84–85).

New Public Spheres
Beyond the new confessionalization of space and society, war and social disloca­tion created new conditions of individualistic urban lifestyles and practices on the eve of the British Mandate in Palestine. Famine, disease and exile contributed to the disruption of the social fabric of whole communities. In Jerusalem, as well as in other cities in the area, both new public spaces and new behavioral patterns began to emerge. A substantial state sector gave rise to an enlarged civil service, and investments in the national economy invigorated the mercantile strata in the coastal regions. The urban changes included the extension of residential commu­nities outside the old city walls. Secular education, caf.s, social clubs and recrea­tional centers catered to the growth of new bourgeois tastes and sensibilities, and private writings of this period reflect a sense of individualism and escape from fa­milial and communitarian bonds.
City planning during the Mandate period, drawn by MacLean, Geddes, and Ashbee—and local architects such as George Shiber—contributed to the devel­opment of these urban sensibilities. At the heart of Ashbee’s garden landscaping schemes, which separated the old walled Jerusalem from its new suburbs was the creation of a designated route through a sequence of experiences that elicited dif­fering emotions and aroused varied associations. According to Gitler, the new scheme was specifically planned “to arouse in its visitors emotional or religious sentiments for the city and its walls, which bear so many centuries of evocative history. Similar to the English picturesque garden, benches were also added in lo­cations offering both rest and enjoyment of the view” (Gitler, 39). To what extent did these intentions succeed in evoking these subjective associations, while cre­ating a sense of privacy in public space? The answer is difficult to ascertain, ex­cept for those limited candid disclosures in the narratives of contemporary na­tive writers.
Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs, in common with a large number of Arab auto­biographies, are infused with the spirit of individualism that prevailed in Arab literature of the late nineteenth century, but suffer from an absence of personal intimacy. This judgment may sound paradoxical given the detailed disclosures Wasif offers about the private lives of himself and his contemporaries. The mem­oirs are especially valuable because they expose, ridicule and celebrate the con­ventional, the hidden, and the unmentionable. These include the insular goings-on of the Jerusalem upper classes, the foibles of Ottoman and British military and political leadership, and the hilarious heroics and scandals of ordinary people. It dwells on the mundane and helps us to see it with fresh eyes. Nevertheless these events are more anecdotal and expository of human foibles than they are intimate.
Once set in motion, confessionalization as both a social and spatial process appears to have been almost impossible to reverse. In the case of Jerusalem, as in the country as a whole, the manner in which British planning and adminis­trative policies contributed to the enhancement of confessional identity made it very convenient for Zionism to create a secular nationalism—ultimately based on the principle of a putative Jewish ethnicity. Palestinian nationalism also was fed by contradictory secular and religious motifs. On one hand, a secular streak em­phasized “Muslim-Christian brotherhood” as a central component of national identity, while on the other, a religious component used Islamic affinities as a mobilizing factor in building a revived Palestinian (that is, non-Syrian) nation­alism. With confessionalization acting as a critical factor in British governance and urban planning practice, the religious motifs of Jerusalem became the gal­vanizing iconography of opposing nationalist movements, rather than the source of syncretic celebrations, as in prior periods. This in turn changed the nature and goals of struggles over sovereignty. The historic dichotomy between a secular Zi­onism hostile to Jerusalem as Judaism’s central cultural domain and a conserva­tive Jewish orthodox tradition that was Jerusalem-centered gave way to a new na­tionalist split between Jewish and Arab Nationalisms. In this struggle, the “holy city” of “parasites and beggars” became the most important symbolic contested territory.
In the case of the Palestinian national movement, despite its secular character, exemplified by the political platforms of its main parties (Istiqlal, Palestine Arab Party, Defense Party, and the Communist Party) and the secular ideological per­suasion of its leadership (perhaps with the exception of the followers of ’Iz ad-Din al Qassam in the north of Palestine), religious motifs had become essential in formulating its outlook. This can be seen in the uses of religious ceremonials, such as Nebi Musa processions, in nationalist mobilization—which had hitherto been a syncretic folk festival; and the location of religious sites (the Wailing Wall/ Buraq and al Aqsa) as loci of clashes between Arabs and Jews. It is also exempli­fied by the increased use of religious language in nationalist slogans and exhorta­tions, for example, “Seif ed-Din al Haj Amin!” (“Haj Amin [Husseini], the sword of religion!”). For Jews both secular and religious the loss of the old city in 1947 was a loss of Zion, and the capture of Jerusalem became a rallying cry for secular Zionism.
Notes
1.
This essay is a modified version of an earlier essay entitled “Years of Delicious An­archy.” I am indebted to Bernadette Baird Zars and Diane Davis for their critical reading and helpful editorial suggestions.

2.
Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs contribute significantly in conveying the spirit of emancipatory anticipation that engulfed Jerusalem (and Palestine) during the critical three years of military rule. Wasif himself was maturing as a musical performer, and reached an age where he was able to reflect on the future of Palestine and Jerusalem from the momentous events that he witnessed. He also occupied a strategic vantage point in these events: as an entertainer to members of the city’s notable elite, as well as his en­hanced position in the nascent British civil service in the capital of the country.


3. The Occupied Enemy Territories Administration (1917–1920).
4.
Henry Kendall, in his Jerusalem City Plan, refers to the incident as “permission was tactfully obtained to remove a hideous clock tower with dials showing the time accord­ing to both Western and Arab reckoning.” He claims that the tower was erected to com­memorate the thirty-third anniversary of Abdul Hamid’s reign, not his twenty-fifth.

5.
Fifteen years later Prof. T. F. Meisel, the Hebrew University archeologist, visited Jawhariyyeh and wrote glowingly about this model in an article published in the Pales­tine Post, on 10 August 1945.

6.
In Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs the national movement was already divided on the issue of census boycott, with Fawzi Nashashibi—a cousin of Raghib and a future leader of the opposition (pro-British) faction—already counseling support for the census.

7.
Mana# notes also that considerable differences exist between Palestinian historians (e.g., Bayan Nweihid al Hut) and Israeli ones (e.g., Y. Porath) on the degree of Palestinian support for Arab anti-Ottoman groups, with the latter emphasizing its limitations. Al-Hut suggests that Palestinian representation in Arabist groups was considerably higher than their demographic weight in the Arab provinces (see Mana# 2003, 248). But these dif­ferences are more likely to be due to their stress on different time periods.

8.
Although we have the words for this ballad, unfortunately the melody is lost. Jaw­hariyyeh never studied the musical notation system and therefore did not record it.

9.
For a description of these caf.-bars and their clientele, see my “The Vagabond Caf. and Jerusalem’s Prince of Idleness.”

10.
Her name is withheld, presumably because her status as a prostitute is not certain.

11.
 This case is among several court cases cited by Jawhariyyeh, ms. section 3: 13–14.




12. The werko was originally a land and real estate tax levied on Za#amat (sipahis, or feudal estates). With the abolition of feudal estates the werko became a land tax imposed by the state, together with the tithe. For details, see Doukhan 1938, 98–99.

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Jawhariyyeh, W. 2005. al-Quds al-intidabiyah fi al-mudhakkirat al-Jawhariyah: al-kitab al-thani min mudhakkirat al-musiqi Wa.sif Jawhariyah, 1918–1948, ed. S. Tamari and
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התמודדות עם אוטו- עות'מניזם בימי מלחמה: ירושלים במהלך המלחמה העולמית מבעד לעיני תושב מוסלמי מקומי

Int. J. Middle East Stud. 40 (2008), 69–88. Printed in the United States of America DOI: 10.1017/S0020743807080099
Abigail Jacobson
NEGOTIATING OTTOMANISM IN TIMES OF WAR: JERUSALEM DURING WORLD WAR I THROUGH THE EYES OF A LOCAL MUSLIM RESIDENT
In August 1915, in the midst of World War I, a young Muslim resident of Jerusalem wrote the following in his diary:
Will I go to protect my country [watan¯.]? I am not an Ottoman, only in name, but a citizen of the
.
world [muwatani al-– ¯
alam] ...Had the state [dawla] treated me as part of it, it would have been worthwhile for me to give my life to it. However, since the country does not treat me in such way, it is not worthwhile for me to give my blood to the Turkish state [al-dawla al-Turkiyya]. I will happily go [to fight in Egypt?] but not as an Ottoman soldier ... 1
.
The writer, who served as a soldier in the Ottoman army and was based in Jerusalem, wrote these lines as he considered his service to the Ottoman cause and the extent of his willingness to die fighting an Ottoman war. Here he expresses profound frustration and anger at the way the Ottoman Empire, which he perceived as his state, treated him. This entry reflects a deep sense of dislocation and alienation from the collective to which he belongs.
The question of multiplicity of identities and the processes surrounding the negotiation among Ottomanism, Arabism, and local national identities at the end of the empire have been widely discussed in the literature.2 This article attempts to analyze such negotiations at a microlevel by closely observing how one individual, who belonged to the Arab– Ottoman elite circles of Jerusalem, articulated and struggled over these issues.3 Through the reading of this diary and other sources, and by exploring the diarist’s depiction of local and regional developments, this article examines how Ottoman identity and affiliation to the Ottoman collective were negotiated and conceptualized in Jerusalem during World War I. Analysis of this diary and comparison to other sources illuminates the multilayered levels of people’s identities and the ways they played out at this time of crisis.
In the context of Jerusalem, as viewed through the diary, this “identity crisis” was provoked by the arrival of Cemal Pas¸a, minister of the navy and commander of the
Abigail Jacobson is postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, and teaches at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel; e-mail: abigail. jacobson@gmail.com
© 2008 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/08 $15.00
Fourth Army, to the city and by his harsh treatment of the local population—Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. Shortly after his arrival, Cemal Pas¸a fired some local Ottoman administrators, such as the military commander, Zeki Bey, as well as the local Muslim mayor, Hussein Selim al-Husayni. Those local bureaucrats, I argue, understood the city’s sensitivities and the dynamic of intercommunal relations, and hence were more sensitive to the needs of Jerusalem’s inhabitants. Cemal Pas¸a’s arrival; the hangings, arrests, and deportations that followed (as they did in Beirut and Damascus); and the acute economic and social crisis in the city accelerated the sense of crisis and gave it urgency.4
The diary discussed here contributes to the existing literature on late Ottoman and World War I Palestine on several levels. It allows us to glance at how ordinary people in Jerusalem experienced and lived through this period of acute crisis and viewed the transformations taking place around them. Moreover, it enables us to follow the growing feelings of detachment, anger, and even betrayal among a group whose experiences of the war are rarely documented, as well as the process of negotiation over identity and affiliation to the Ottoman collective. Given the scarcity of sources that document the Arab experience of wartime Jerusalem (and Palestine in general), this diary is remarkable evidence. It demonstrates the way diaries and autobiographical sources may be treated as sources for microhistorical research.
OTTOMANISM AND ARABISM IN PALESTINE BEFORE AND DURING WORLD WAR I
How did the notions of Ottomanism and Arabism play out in Palestine during the last few decades of Ottoman rule? What were the effects of World War I on these orientations? It is essential to ask these questions before delving into the case study discussed here.
The complex and multilayered nature of identities held by members of the Arab– Ottoman elite during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire has been discussed in several studies.5 As demonstrated by Rashid Khalidi, Ottomanism and Arabism lived side by side and allowed a wide and flexible range of identifications in the Ottoman context. Before 1914 Arabism in general did not imply Arab separatism and did not conflict with loyalty to the Ottoman state. Arabs saw themselves as belonging to the empire, and the differences between Ottomanists and Arabists were issue specific rather than ideological. Arabism at that time did not stand for Arab nationalism, and both Arabists and Ottomanists perceived themselves as Ottoman patriots.6 Many of the urban notables Khalidi discusses in his work, a cadre to which the writer of the diary belonged as well, combined loyalty to the empire with emerging local patriotism.
How did the war affect this complex identity? Several studies have discussed the effects of World War I on the consciousness of local inhabitants in Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, and on their sense of belonging to the empire. Tarif Khalidi, for example, suggests that the public hangings of Arab nationalists in Beirut and Damascus caused people to start questioning their affiliation to, and identification with, the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman wartime policies provoked sentiments of anger, resentment, and horror that were directed at Cemal Pas¸a.7 Khalidi also identifies widespread apathy among the populations of Syria and Lebanon, which he attributes to the physical vulnerability of people subjected to famine and disease, as well as to a decline in religious belief.8 In this, Khalidi echoes George Antonius, who, in The Arab Awakening, points to Cemal Pas¸a’s acts against the Arabs—in particular the trials and executions of Arab nationalists— and considers them the immediate reason for Sherif Hussein’s declaration of the Arab revolt.9
In his discussion of the formation of Palestinian identity, Rashid Khalidi also credits the war. He attributes the collapse of Ottomanism as transnational ideology (and as a focus of identity) both to the defeat of the Ottoman army and to the withdrawal of Ottoman forces from Arab-speaking lands in 1918. He also discusses the war’s traumatic effects on the local population and claims that the two events that had the most profound impact in Palestine were the Balfour Declaration and Trotsky’s revelation of the Sykes– Picot Agreement.10 Regarding the war years after 1914, Khalidi further argues that the attitudes and identities of the local population in Palestine were transformed rapidly, but he does not further develop this argument.11
The case of Jerusalem during the war, as discussed in a microlevel here, will integrate as well as demonstrate the arguments of all these scholars, but it will also complicate them. The diary I analyze was written by a member of the Arab–Ottoman elite, to borrow Toledano’s terminology, and the process described in the diary portrays the confusion, disorientation, and loss that took place during the war years in Palestine, just before the demise of the Ottoman Empire.12 The actors who took part in this process of change and negotiation among various possible conceptions of identity and affiliation were the writer and his social group, as well as Ottoman administrators and officials, both local and “external.” The local ones were officers who served in Jerusalem and became familiar with the city’s sensitivities and its inhabitants. The external Ottoman administrators, represented first and foremost by Cemal Pas¸a, replaced some of the local Ottoman administrators and signaled the stage at which some of the local population began feeling alienated from the Ottoman collective.
The process of confusion and alienation that I wish to analyze with the help of the diary had two dimensions. Wartime economic and social crisis, exacerbated by atrocities against the local population and changes in Ottoman administration of the city, intensified resentment toward the Ottoman government and its representatives. In some cases this increasing criticism of the government led to a growing feeling of detachment from the Ottoman collective, as seen in the diary analyzed here. This feeling signaled what Rashid Khalidi refers to as the decline of Ottomanism as a uniting transnational ideology. In order to further demonstrate this identity crisis, I will also refer to other autobiographical sources.13
THE DIARY AS A HISTORICAL SOURCE
Who was the writer of this diary? What is the value of one diary as a piece of historical evidence? The identity of the diarist is somewhat mysterious. The cover of the diary identifies “Muhammad –Adil al-Salih, from Jerusalem” as the writer, a man who appears to have left no other record of his life in that city under this name. However, repeated attempts to locate any traces of al-Salih have led to the assumption that the writer was actually Ihsan Tourjman, the son of a clerical family who served in the Ottoman civil service and as translators in the Islamic court of Jerusalem. Tourjman served as a soldier in the Ottoman army under the command of Rus¸en Bey and was based in the Jerusalem headquarters in the Notre Dame compound.14
The 192-page handwritten diary was written in Jerusalem over a period of two years from 1915 to 1916, when Tourjman was in his early twenties. Records indicate that he died in 1917, before he reached the age of twenty-five. Several leads in the diary identify Tourjman as a member of the Arab–Ottoman elite of late-Ottoman Jerusalem. He was related to the Khalidi family on his maternal side.15 His social circle included such well-known Palestinian figures as Khalil al-Sakakini, who was his teacher and mentor, as well as Is–af Nashashibi, Musa al-–Alami, Omar al-Salah (al-Bargouti?), and various members of the Husayni and Khalidi families.16 Al-Sakakini, a well-known educator and intellectual, is frequently mentioned in the diary. Tourjman studied in al-Sakakini’s school, al-Dusturiyya, in 1909, and al-Sakakini became his mentor and close friend. The writer seems to have spent much time with him, in his house, in school, and elsewhere in Jerusalem. Al-Sakakini’s diary writing may have been Tourjman’s inspiration in writing his own.17 Tourjman’s social milieu, then, was the Jerusalem Arab intellectual elite.
Although this diary represents the testimony of a single individual at a specific interval, I do not see it as merely a personal account, but rather as a source that can shed light on the larger social group to which the writer belonged. Because he acted in a specific social and political context, his personal views and dilemmas may reflect his larger environment as well. Such treatment of the diary is methodologically consistent with prevalent academic practice that regards personal narratives and autobiographies as sources for social history. The site of narration represents a moment in history, a sociopolitical space in culture.18 Sidonie Smith, for example, argues, “Consciousness is contextualized, rather than privatized.”19 Amos Funkenstein expresses the same idea when he writes, “Even the most personal memory is not inseparable from its social context ... My own personal identity was constructed by relating to [these] social objects.”20 Such treatment of the diary is similar to the microhistory approach, which focuses on the small-scale unit and serves to expand the knowledge of the historian about a larger unit of analysis. It gives the historian a sense of what it was like to live in the reality of the larger unit of analysis.21
As mentioned previously, Tourjman’s diary is all the more remarkable given the lack of documentation on the Arab experience of wartime Jerusalem. It provides a very rich and vivid description of Jerusalem and the events that took place not only in the writer’s life, but also in the urban environment. Here I will focus on the writer’s process of identity contemplation as it unfolds throughout the diary by examining three central themes: wartime conditions in Jerusalem as experienced by residents, the condition of women and their treatment by Ottoman officials, and political changes that took place in the region and how they affected the writer and his sense of affiliation to the empire. In order to connect the diary to its broader context, I will briefly compare Tourjman’s diary and the picture that it paints to al-Sakakini’s diary. Such a comparison shows that the issues that consumed and upset Tourjman occupied the minds of other members of his community and were not unique to him.
JERUSALEM DURING WORLD WAR I
On the eve of the war, Jerusalem was the largest city in Palestine and its political and cultural center.22 Jerusalem served as a junction for religious, social, cultural, economic, and governmental activities in which Muslim, Jewish, and Christian residents, as well as foreigners, participated. The inhabitants of Jerusalem almost immediately felt the impact of the Ottoman state’s declaration of war at the end of October 1914. The wartime economic crisis, the diminishing supply of gold, the closure of most banks and foreign institutions, and the city’s disconnection from the outside world following the termination of foreign postal services were only the first signs of a larger and prolonged crisis that caused much suffering and hardship for city residents.23 The shutting down of most Palestinian newspapers, both in Hebrew and Arabic, at different times during 1914 and 1915 added to the local population’s growing feeling of disconnection and separation from the outside world.24
When the sea blockade started in 1914, Palestine, which had an economy heavily dependent on international trade, was cut off from its supply lines. The price of flour began to rise as soon as the Ottoman government entered the war.25 The stocks of grain on hand were quickly depleted, and famine started to be felt throughout cities in Palestine and Greater Syria. According to Justin McCarthy, the overall population of Palestine declined by more than six percent during the war, as a result of famine, disease, war casualties, and deportations.26 The harvests during the war years were poor, and in 1915, locusts caused great damage to what was left of the crops and exacerbated the famine.27
On 1 October 1914, even before officially joining the war, the Ottoman government announced the cancellation of the Capitulations, the privileges that foreign subjects en­joyed in the Ottoman Empire. Soon after this, Ottoman authorities tried to reassure people holding foreign citizenship that they need not leave the country. Despite this attempt to create confidence among foreign residents, various countries soon recommended that their citizens and representatives in Palestine (and elsewhere) leave the country. The British consul in Jerusalem, for example, left the city even before the official Ottoman entry into the war. The American consul, Dr. Otis Glazebrook, who stayed in the city throughout most of the war, became the representative of British interests and took care of the belongings of some British subjects. Most of the other foreign consuls, apart from the Russian consul, were deported in November 1914. There was much speculation about whether the government would deport foreign residents in Palestine.28
Military conscription also created great distress and affected life in Jerusalem during the war. The increase in the number of conscripts was gradual, and Ottoman treatment of potential draftees became gradually more severe. In Jerusalem, the first stages of mobilization won the support of most communities in the city, as they viewed army service as a sign of loyalty to the empire. Before the Ottoman Empire officially entered the war, declarations of support for the empire and calls for joining the army were published in various newspapers and posted on walls and billboards throughout the city. In August 1914, for example, on the first day of mobilization of Jewish soldiers into the army, a big parade of drafted soldiers took place in the streets of Jerusalem. Some soldiers reportedly addressed Zeki Bey, the military commander in Jerusalem, saying how proud they were to serve the Ottoman homeland. In turn, Zeki Bey thanked them and ordered the military band to accompany them in the parade. Jews and non-Jews alike were reported to have walked behind the parade, cheering the soldiers and the empire.29
Pressure to enlist grew after the Ottoman Empire joined the war, however, especially after Cemal Pas¸a arrived in Jerusalem, in January 1915, to command the attack on the Egyptian front. It is during this time that the population’s resistance to forced
–
conscription intensified. Although some were able to avail themselves of the badl askar.¯,
–
the exemption fee open to non-Muslims, the badl askar.¯was so high that it created socioeconomic divisions between those who could afford to pay it and those who could not.30 Attempts to escape from military service are described (by locals) as extremely difficult. In his diary Khalil al-Sakakini describes at length his attempts to change his conscription order in order to perform his military service in Jerusalem. He describes his failed attempts, as well as those of Mayor Hussein Selim al-Husayni, to negotiate this issue with Commander Rus¸en Bey.31
Ottoman authorities in Jerusalem did whatever they could to find those avoiding military service. Military policemen searched on foot for draft dodgers and deserters. People hid in attics, basements, synagogues, mosques, and churches, hoping that the police would fail to find them. Some also managed to escape the city and hide elsewhere. The mukht¯
ars and official representatives of different neighborhoods of Jerusalem played an important (and problematic) role in this process, as they were sometimes bribed to keep policemen away from hiding places. Some draft evaders managed to hide throughout the war and came out only when the war was over. Those who were caught were brought to the military court and usually convicted without a trial. The usual punishment was flogging.32 Indeed, mobilization in the army, safarbarlik, seems to be one of the most traumatic experiences of individuals during this time of crisis in Jerusalem, as elsewhere in Greater Syria.33
In short, following the outbreak of war and the involvement of the Ottoman Empire, the inhabitants of Jerusalem began facing different challenges, including a socioeconomic crisis, threats of conscription, and a general feeling of isolation from the outside world. How did people living in the city perceive this new reality at a microlevel?
LIFE IN JERUSALEM THROUGH THE EYES OF A LOCAL RESIDENT
Tourjman describes at length the impact of the war and the hardships it brought to the city. The diary often refers to food shortages and harsh treatment at the hands of some government officials. In his 24 April 1915 entry, for example, the writer reports that he and Khalil al-Sakakini learned from a baker that bread is no longer available. At the end of May, he writes that there are hardly any vegetables in the market—only a few tomatoes and cucumbers.34 His diary reflects a direct connection between the shortage of food and the hardships of the war. It also protests the Ottoman government’s neglect of its subjects. This connection is very clear in a December 1916 entry:
I have never seen such a day in my life ...All [supply] of flour and bread stopped. When I walked to the headquarters [manzil] this morning, I saw many men, women, and children in Bab al-– Amud [looking] for some flour... . I see that the enemy gets stronger than the fellahin ... How poor these people are ...but all of us are miserable these days... . Two days ago we ran out of flour. My father gave my brother – Arif one dirham to buy us bread. He left the house and looked for bread but could not find any. In the end he received some bread for our relatives ...The flour has finished in our country, and it is its main source [of food] ...Isn’t our government committed to [maintaining] the quiet life [well-being] of citizens?35
The writer is very aware that the burden of hunger and misery falls most heavily on the poor. He claims that rich families have stocks large enough to last them a year or longer and asks about the fate of the poor. Yet, he addresses his most vehement blame to the government: “Wasn’t it the duty of the government to store flour so that it would be able to sell it during these difficult days to the poor? ... The government should wake up before the people revolt [against it].”36
Indeed, these signs of dissatisfaction, anger, and frustration at the government’s neglect of the people during this time of crisis are very prominent throughout the diary.37 The writer’s frustration with the government’s policies translates later into a growing animosity, not only toward the government and its representatives, but also toward Ottoman rule as a whole. This frustration leads him to question his own affiliation and solidarity with the empire.
The writer takes an even dimmer view of the corruption and the immoral behavior of some Ottoman officials in the city. During the war, Jerusalem served as a rear base for Ot­toman military forces, mainly for those on their way to the Egyptian front.38 The presence of soldiers, mainly Ottomans and Germans, had an impact on city life at different levels. At various sites throughout the city, Ottoman officials organized parties and celebrations, which involved music, women, and alcohol.39 The writer describes these celebrations very critically and points to them to demonstrate the extent of Ottoman corruption and immorality.40 What he sees as immoral behavior in these celebrations reinforces, as well as reflects, his frustration and growing antagonism toward the government.
On 26 April 1915, the writer describes a celebration that took place in Jerusalem in honor of an unspecified holiday (–¯.d)41:
The city today is decorated in the most beautiful way. All the shops are lighted up in celebration of this holiday. Wouldn’t it be better if the government didn’t do that [the celebration] and [instead] mourned together with its subjects? Wouldn’t it be better to spend this money on the poor and the miserable? This evening, many beautiful women [jami¯– a al-sayyid¯.l¯
at al-jam¯at] from Jerusalem participated in the celebration. There were beverages [mashru¯bat¯] [probably alcoholic] for everyone and music ...but that wasn’t enough, because they invited the prostitutes of Jerusalem [mu¯mis¯
at al-Quds] to attend this celebration. And I was told that there were more than fifty known prostitutes [present] that night. Every officer or amir or pasha took either one or two or more women and walked in the garden ...The men are telling the secrets of the state to these women without noticing, because they are drunk. ... The days of happiness change to sadness, and the days of sadness change to happiness ...when we are happy we think about our brothers the Turks in the Dardanelles front.42
Such parties were not uncommon during the war. Other writers refer to similar events (some of which probably took place in al-Manshiyya, Jerusalem’s large public garden), where alcohol (and hashish) were often available.43 Some of these celebrations aimed to mark Ottoman victories (or claimed victories), some to collect money for charity, and some to promote the government authority. The writer, however, views these parties as decadent and immoral, especially in a time of war, and they raise his ire. His reference to prostitutes appears elsewhere in the diary and is also significant, as will be discussed later.
The writer’s attitude toward the government in light of such celebrations is noteworthy. The celebration of April 1915 happened to coincide with a locust attack on Jerusalem, which may explain his bitterness, anger, and frustration. These complaints regarding the government’s uninterest in the poor are repeated in other places in the diary and grow harsher as the war continues. Yet, despite his alienation from the government, he sympathizes with the Ottoman soldiers fighting on the front; after all, he was a soldier. Later in the diary, as his resentment toward the empire grows, he no longer refers to his fellow soldiers in such a sympathetic way.
Another example of Tourjman’s criticism of the government appears in an entry on 27 July 1915. While referring to German victories in the war and the Ottoman government’s celebration of them, he writes,
Whenever Germany wins we are happy, but we [the Ottoman forces] never win. It is always our allies, the Germans [who win], and whenever they win we are happy. When the Germans win, the government decorates the streets and celebrates. This time the streets are even more decorated than [they were] the day we entered Egypt. Instead of being happy we should cry, and we should be aware of what is good for the nation [umma] and the country. Instead of celebrating we should think about something that will bring success back to us and improve our situation in the world. We should think about the social situation these days and the condition of the poor. That night [of the celebration] we have spent all this money while the poor need help and support. Instead of wasting our money on candles and fireworks, we should have spent the money on charity. But who should we complain to? We should cry and weep about our problems and hardships.44
Here again, Tourjman’s anger at the way the government spent money on celebrations at the expense of its obligations toward the poor is very clear. The first priority of the government was not the well-being of its subjects, he laments. His frustration is aggravated by the fact that government officials celebrated German rather than Ottoman victories. Again, there is some ambivalence in his approach. On one hand, he harshly criticizes the government, but on the other, he still refers to himself as part of the Ottoman collective. He uses the first plural form in his writing (“we,” “us”), which suggests that he still views himself as a loyal subject, part of the Ottoman collective.
PROSTITUTES, WAR, AND THE CITY
As the description of the party indicates, the situation of women was another issue that bothered Tourjman and contributed to his ongoing frustration with Ottoman authorities. Women are yet another undocumented group in the history of wartime Jerusalem and wartime Palestine in general, and hence Tourjman’s contribution on women’s condition, even if he focuses mainly on the phenomenon of prostitution, is important.
As Elizabeth Thompson indicates in her own research, gender, as an analytical cate­gory, helps tie aspects of social and economic change directly to political developments. Gender-related issues connect tensions at home, in the private sphere, to those in society as a whole and could easily mobilize mass sentiments, as was the case in postwar Syria and Lebanon. When analyzing the effects of World War I on future developments of what Thompson calls “the colonial civic order,” she demonstrates how the war had shaken paternal authority and challenged the definitions of family and community as people knew them.45 Indeed, some of the same effects were evident in Jerusalem.
One issue that Tourjman mentions in his diary is prostitutes and their poor condition. The existence of prostitutes in Jerusalem is not surprising considering that there were so many military forces in the city at a time of poor economic conditions. However, their presence seems to have created discontent among residents. Their presence was very obvious in the city, judging by Tourjman’s reflections and descriptions in his diary. As Jens Hanssen argues regarding prostitutes in late 19th-century Beirut,46 in Jerusalem, too, they were considered social outcasts.
The deteriorating condition of women, and the existence of prostitutes in Jerusalem, was for Tourjman yet another factor in his estrangement from the government and the empire. He discusses prostitution on several occasions, in the context of celebrations and also in relation to the war’s effects on women and on gender roles in the family and the community. Moreover, he describes the way in which war and economic hardship brought dishonor, rape, and prostitution to poor women and young girls.47 In September 1915, he writes,
I see women begging for money while carrying their children with them. My heart breaks. Some respectable women gave up their honor in order to help their children. Our condition now is the worst in terms of hunger. The men are in war, and this is one of the hardest times.48
For the writer, prostitution was a direct result of the hardships of war. The draft only worsened the economic situation of women, who were left alone to support their families. Prostitution was the only means of survival for some of them.49 As the writer mentions several times in his diary, some prostitutes were Jewish, but there were Muslim and Christian prostitutes as well. At one point the writer mentions rumors that Cemal Pas¸a is about to marry a Jewish woman from the “private prostitutes,” possibly a woman named Leah Tenenbaum from Jerusalem. He criticizes Cemal Pas¸a for this and says he is not worthy of leadership.50 In the description of the party that took place in Jerusalem, Tourjman mentions drunken officers who reveal secrets to the prostitutes who accompany them. Perhaps some prostitutes were employed by the British to spy on their clients, many of who were military officials.51
The writer is greatly concerned with the situation of women and particularly with their low status. He criticizes men for their ill treatment of women and writes about the importance of women’s education. For example, on 1 April 1915, after describing the Nebi Musa celebrations in Jerusalem, he mentions women who were not able to buy food and clothes as was customary at this time of year, due to the economic crisis. He continues,
I feel sorry for the Muslim women. I feel that all women on earth are humiliated, especially Muslim women, but even European and American women. Thank God for not being born a woman! I don’t know what would have happened if I was born a woman ... 52
In another entry, at the end of the month, Tourjman again expresses the importance of women, and of women’s education, to society in general. The hijab is a barrier (m¯)
ani –
to women’s progress and has to be taken off gradually, not suddenly, he writes.
How can we [Arab society] progress while our second half, the women, is j¯
ahil [ignorant, uneducated]? How can we live when part of our body is paralyzed? We have to teach her, teach her, teach her and then we will be able to reach modernization. It won’t do us any good if only men are educated and women are uneducated. Before teaching our children we have to teach
53
our women.
Tourjman’s concerns focus not only on the condition of women due to the war crisis, but also on their status in society. Regarding the latter, he expresses a dual position. On the one hand, Tourjman openly criticizes his own male-dominated society for its treatment of women. He blames Muslim Arab society for being indifferent to women’s conditions and especially to women’s lack of education. He views women’s education as a key to the progress of the entire society.54 On the other hand, when it comes to his own life, while expressing his wish to marry his beloved girlfriend, Tourjman also admits that he is looking for an educated Muslim woman who would also be able to handle housework. In his words, “I don’t want someone who can play the piano but doesn’t know how to handle housework.”55
The diary allows us a glimpse into the challenges that women faced during the war. Some issues discussed in the diary, in particular the ways women were abused and dishonored in times of war, have been widely addressed in the literature on the European experience of World War I and the effects of the war on the civilian population. In particular, the connection between gender, national identity, and war’s effects on women is a subject prominent in research. The fate of women is usually associated with the nation’s future, and atrocities against them in times of war are viewed as a means to hurt the enemy.56 In the case discussed here, the writer uses the poor condition of many women in Jerusalem in general, and the existence of prostitution in particular, not so much to discuss the nation’s future but to castigate the government for its failure to protect women and other vulnerable members of society. The woman’s abused body represents a grave insult not only for the woman herself, but also for society at large. For the writer, the condition of women and their treatment by the government were yet other reasons to castigate the Ottoman state.
“BY GOD THE NATION DIED ...”
The writer’s criticism of the government became even more pronounced as the war progressed and as Cemal Pas¸a’s treatment of the local population became increasingly severe. After hearing that the Ottoman government had arrested “our Christian brothers” on the pretext that they were discussing politics and endangering the state, Tourjman writes that he does not understand what the government was trying to achieve by this and whether it was just looking for revenge.57 While discussing the effects of war on Jerusalem residents and the inefficient ways in which the government was handling the acute crisis, he goes so far as to criticize “the despotic, cruel, and stupid government which does not know how to handle and manage the life of its citizens.”58 Relating to his own condition as a soldier, he mentions that some of his relatives were killed in the war and condemns the ways Jews and Christians were humiliated in their service in Ottoman-army labor battalions. He argues strongly against the morality of war and against military commanders who were taking advantage of soldiers and citizens to fulfill their own ambitions.59
Later in the diary, the writer distinguishes between Arab and Ottoman nations and gradually distances himself from the Ottoman one. He talks about the tribulations that “my race, the patriotic (or nationalist) Arab” (jins¯.al-– Arab al-wataniyy¯.n) was going through and wonders why people are so tolerant of the Turkish government. People are slaves and are allowing the government to “play” with them, he claims.60 People were
.
continuing to be silent even when the government was doing everything it could to harm them, such as threatening to expel those who tried to escape military service or those involved in local politics. He goes on to censure his fellow citizens for not revolting against the government, although, to be sure, he did not publicly defy the government either. On the contrary, he continued to serve as a soldier, albeit not as a combatant. At the same time, he registers in his diary his private moments of defiance. Returning to the subject of the government, he again distinguishes between the Ottoman and Arab nations:
Aren’t the disasters [waylat¯] that this government caused the Arab and Ottoman nations [li-l­umma al-– Arabiyya wa-li-l-umma al-– aniyya] enough? They [the Ottomans] claim that the
Uthm¯homeland [watan] is in danger, but [in fact] it is in danger because of them [the Ottomans] and
.
their actions [toward us].61
Here his criticism becomes more charged as he accuses the government of putting the nation and the citizenry in danger. The writer’s language indicates that he distances himself from the Ottoman government but also continues to distinguish between the government and Ottoman subjects, saying that the latter are victims of their own gov­ernment.
Following the hangings of Arab nationalists in Beirut in 1915, the writer disengages himself completely from the empire:
The government killed eleven people, but they were worth more than 11,000 people. They were killed because they demanded reforms, they were killed in Beirut, which is “the mother of the Arab country” [umm al-bilad al-¯– Arab¯.], but no one said a word—people were afraid for their lives. The government killed the best of our young men [shababin¯a¯]. By God the nation died [wall¯
ahi al-umma m¯...
atat] ... You [the dead] should know that the Arab nation will not forget you The death of these people will be repaid. The government claimed that you are traitors, but you are not. You are loyal to your nation, country, and family.62
By now his orientation is clear: he strongly supports the Arab national cause and refers to the men who were hanged as “our young men.” He expresses deep despair at the impact of their deaths on the Arab nation (“the nation died”), promises to remember those who died, and swears to avenge their deaths. None of this, however, prevents him from criticizing the “people,” his fellow citizens, for their failure to rise against the empire.
On 15 September 1915, out of great anger and frustration the writer directly addresses Enver Pas¸a and Cemal Pas¸a:
Enver and Cemal ...the homeland is in danger [al-watan fi al-khatar], and you are dreaming! ...
..What do you want from this war? Do you want to rule the world and occupy it [tumliku al­
– ¯a], or do you want to return to your old glory [amj¯.m]? You have
alam wa-taftahuh¯adkum al-qad¯
. brought disaster to your homeland [wayl li-watanikum], which you claim that you want to free ...
.
––
Germany cheated you ... Greetings to you and your country [fa-sal¯alaykum wa-al¯
am a bil¯
adkum].63
Again, it is important to notice the words that the writer uses: “homeland” (watan) and,
.later, simply “country” (bil¯
ad). He is very cynical when asking if the Ottoman rulers want to rule and occupy the world. Again, his distance from the government is clear when he writes “your country” and not “our country.”
Toward the very end of his diary, on 10 July 1916, the writer voices his harshest criticism toward the government in support of Arab nationalism, specifically toward the “men of the Hijaz.” In a very angry and impulsive tone, he writes,
The Ottomans killed our sons, offended our honor—why would we like to remain under it [the empire]? ...Every Arab is zealous for his race. It is enough for us! The silence of this state while facing what is happening to us shows its weakness. It [the government] hanged people in the streets. When they did that, they believed that they would weaken the hope of the Arab nation, but they didn’t know that there are men behind them [those who died] who will protect the Arab nation. It was their best opportunity for revenge. Yes, they died, and the Palestinians and Syrians
–
didn’t say a word [lam yanbatbint shif a] ... The Arabs will harass the Ottoman government
. until it gets out of the Arab countries [al-bil¯Arabiyya], humiliated as it got out of any other
ad al-– place... . God bless you, Sharif Hussein, and hurt those who try to hurt you. You Arabs proved to the world that you are men who refuse to be humiliated and proved to God that you are the sons of Arab ancestors. You proved that you protect your Arab nation in your life for ending up [nukhlis] the barbaric Ottoman nation [al-umma al-barbariyya al-– aniyya].64
Uthm¯.
The writer does not mince words here in expressing his feelings toward the Ottoman state and his admiration for Sharif Hussein, who led the Arab revolt. Despite the criticism that he voices repeatedly against his fellow citizens (here he mentions specifically Syrians and Palestinians), he expresses great respect for “the Arabs” who would rebel against the Ottoman state, or as he calls it, “the barbaric Ottoman nation.” Particularly interesting are the national distinctions the writer makes here. Not only does he distinguish between Ottomans and Arabs, but he also treats Syrians and Palestinians as a separate category. His mention of Palestine is not surprising considering that a separate Palestinian national identity had already begun to take shape in the years preceding the war.65 Throughout the diary he refers to Palestine as an entity separated from Syria and Egypt and does not view it as part of Greater Syria.66 Hence, he seems to be developing a local Palestinian identity but criticizes Palestinians for not rising against the Ottomans. Simultaneously, he also refers to himself as part of “the Arabs.”
The trajectory of Tourjman’s perceptions outlined here—distancing himself from the Ottoman state and moving toward overlapping Arab and local (Palestinian) foci of identity—goes hand in hand with Rashid Khalidi’s analysis of the different stages through which Palestinian identity has evolved. According to Khalidi, in the first stage, before World War I, a unique Palestinian identity competed and overlapped with other foci of identity, such as Arabism and Ottomanism. After the war, many Arabs shared a sense of common Palestinian identity.67 This article has attempted to scrutinize this transition and transformation—to look into the war years as a critical moment during which those foci of identity began to conflict and crystallize, and to demonstrate how a young man from Jerusalem gradually moved away from Ottomanism and began to identify with Palestinian and Arab nationalism.
TOURJMAN AND AL -SAKAKINI COMPARED
In order to contextualize the views and feelings expressed in Tourjman’s diary, it is important to expand the analysis by viewing how other writers dealt with the issues bothering Tourjman. One example I have mentioned briefly throughout the article, Bahjat and Tamimi’s report on their 1916–17 journey in the province of Beirut. A comparison with Bahjat and Tamimi is somewhat problematic, however, because their report focuses on a different locale (the province of Beirut), was written for a special purpose (an official report to the Ottoman governor), and is different in nature from a diary. The most obvious source for comparison is Khalil al-Sakakini’s diary, both because of its structural similarity (diary, autobiographic writing) and the geographical and social position of the writer (Jerusalem, Arab elite). Al-Sakakini is mentioned extensively in Tourjman’s diary. He was both Tourjman’s mentor and personal friend and served as a source of inspiration. Al-Sakakini kept a diary for many years, but during the war years the diary was not full; there are no entries between 4 April 1915 and 1 November 1917.68
Al-Sakakini’s humanist writing expresses his great concern about religious tensions in the empire following the declaration of jihad. Al-Sakakini questions his own identity and position within the Ottoman collective, as well as national affiliation in general, but his writings on these issues do not express the same level of anger and frustration as those of Tourjman.
An interesting example of al-Sakakini’s perception of nationalism appeared on 26 March 1915, when he was convinced that he was about to be deported from Jerusalem after his failed attempt to pay the redemption fee. This statement resembles Tourjman’s (being a citizen of the world), but al-Sakakini’s is more influenced by his humanist approach. Al-Sakakini writes,
What is my crime? I think that I am guilty of two things: first, being a Christian, and as far as they [the Ottoman authorities] know, Christians are supportive of England, France, and Russia; and secondly, because I am the director of a school in which I preach according to the national spirit.... It is very possible that they want to deport me so that I will stop [being the director of] my school and by this will be punished for being a Christian and an Arab ... The only things I can say here are as follows: I am not Christian and not Buddhist, not Muslim and not Jewish. Just as I am not Arab, or British, not German and not Turkish. I am just one among humankind [an¯ad hadhihi al-ins¯
a fard min afr¯aniyya] ...I was derived to live in this society, and I strive to awake it ... If nationalism means to love life—then I am a nationalist. But if it means to prefer one religion over the other, one language over the other, one city over the other, and one interest over the other—then I am not a nationalist, and that’s all.69
On 20 November 1917, after three years of war, al-Sakakini reflects on the meaning of national affiliation during wartime, as well as on his own location/position in the war. He criticizes himself for too much concern with his own well-being. More importantly, he writes that he does not like the war and that he would like to be on the side of justice—not to support the Ottomans because he is Ottoman or to support the British because he admires them. He expresses anger about the role that national affiliation plays in wartime, especially in relation to the treatment of injured and captive soldiers. They need to be treated well regardless of their nationality, he writes, and despite his hatred of war, he needs to help them, as a human being.70 This is another example of al-Sakakini’s humanist approach. He attempts to differentiate between belonging to a certain collective and higher obligations of humanism.
One issue that greatly upsets al-Sakakini is the religious tension that resulted from the empire’s declaration of jihad.71 Al-Sakakini expresses this concern even before the call for jihad, on 17 September 1914, remarking that one of the biggest problems of war in Palestine was the weakening of the relationship between Muslims and Christians.72 When the Ottoman government declared jihad, al-Sakakini writes that this call arouses old sentiments and feelings.73 A few days later, on 9 November, he adds that the war created animosity between Muslims and Christians and that this animosity would remain for generations to come.74
His strongest statement about the impact of jihad on religious tensions in the country appears on 18 November 1914. The call for jihad would have been justified had the Ottoman Empire been forced to enter the war, he writes. However, it entered the war voluntarily, just to help Germany and Austria–Hungary. It fought together with Christian states, and its Muslim soldiers fought side by side with Jewish and Christian soldiers.
–
The call for jihad was meant only to help the Turkish race ( unsur) and to strengthen its
.
rule, not to defend Islam. This jihad would harm the Muslim world more than it would help it, because Christian nations would call for a similar war and give neutral countries a reason to enter the conflict.75
The Ottoman Empire’s policies are clearly criticized here. However, in general, al­Sakakini’s views toward the empire and its policies seem to change over time. At the beginning of the war, al-Sakakini reflects on his own affiliation to the empire. He praises the Turks (not Ottomans) and the support they received from the people, while criticizing the Arabs, who had no hopes.76 However, as the war progressed, and especially after realizing that the government falsely claimed victories, he starts doubting all the news that reaches him, calling it rumors and false information. He writes, “There is no doubt that a nation that allows itself to do that [spread fake news] is a despised nation and has lost its mind and is limited in vision [umma munhat.a mukht.alat al-shu –u¯rqa¯sirat al-nazar].”77
.
.
In his diary al-Sakakini expresses frustration toward the government, the war, and its effects on the empire and especially on intercommunal feelings. However, his criticism is different from Tourjman’s, less explicit and less firm. This probably stemmed from several differences between the two: al-Sakakini, a Christian intellectual, belonged to a religious minority, and Tourjman, a young Muslim, fell in the majority. In addition, Tourjman served as a soldier and al-Sakakini did not. Despite these differences, the comparison between Tourjman and al-Sakakini demonstrates the sort of contemplations about identity taking place at this critical time within Arab–Ottoman elite circles in Jerusalem.
CONCLU SION
Through a microanalysis of the diary written by Ihsan Tourjman during World War I, this article has highlighted and analyzed how people who belonged to the Jerusalem Arab–Ottoman elite experienced and viewed the war and how they perceived their own positions within the Ottoman Empire. I have focused mainly on the ways multilayered levels of identity were negotiated and debated following internal and external changes at the time.
The diary here serves as a unique and valuable testimony that sheds light on life in Jerusalem at a critical period of the city’s (and region’s) history. It reveals how the economic and social crises affected people living in the city and delves into the hardships of women and the phenomenon of prostitution. It scrutinizes how political changes, as well as Ottoman policies and treatment of the local population, affected how people viewed their own positions within the context of the empire. It also alludes to ways socioeconomic and religious differences in the context of war affected people’s experiences of the crisis. Moreover, it may serve as a case study for examining a larger process of transformation that took place at the time, both in people’s affiliation to a larger collective and with regard to future dramatic political developments.
The war, I suggest, was a central event in the history of Palestine and Greater Syria. As Elizabeth Thompson suggested about Syria and Lebanon, in Palestine the war was crucial not only politically, but also socially, changing dynamics among Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The discussion of the diary may hence serve as a starting point for a broader discussion of the various impacts of World War I on Palestinian society.
As mentioned, I view the diary as more than one individual’s account. It is a source that highlights the experience of one particular group in Jerusalem, the Arab elite, at this particular moment. In order to strengthen this testimony, I briefly compared it to a similar source written by a member of the same group, the diary of Khalil al-Sakakini, who experienced and contemplated similar issues, although his emphasis was slightly different. Unlike Tourjman, for example, al-Sakakini was troubled by interreligious tensions in the empire caused by the war, probably due to his own position as a Christian Arab intellectual. However, he, too, dedicated much of his writing to questions of identity and affiliation to the empire, as well as to meanings of national affiliation.
The analysis of this diary, as well as of similar sources, demonstrates the ways identities were negotiated and debated at the demise of empire. People’s affiliation to the Ottoman collective allowed for multilayered, blurry, and flexible foci of identity to exist side by side. For some people, however, wartime trauma and the empire’s treatment of its subjects created a deep, personal “identity crisis,” during which they began questioning their affiliation and loyalty to the empire.
In the case discussed here, affiliation with and connection to the Ottoman Empire were challenged and negotiated in light of other possible foci of identity, such as feeling Palestinian or part of Greater Syria. The diary may demonstrate, in the Palestinian context, the same transition from identification with a “local-Ottoman” elite to a “local elite” that Toledano analyzed in relation to Egypt. This brings back the question of continuity and change in the context of World War I, and the impact of the demise of the Ottoman Empire on people’s sense of citizenship and connection to a larger unit of identification. Using an autobiographical source such as a diary allows us an intimate glance into the lives and personal contemplations of people over such crucial and intimate questions, in a dramatic and difficult period in their lives as well as in the history of the Ottoman Empire.
NOTES
Author’s note: I thank the four anonymous IJMES reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank Rashid Khalidi, Holly Shissler, Salim Tamari, Najwa al-Qattan, Ela Greenberg, and Mira Tzoreff for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. A version of this article was presented at The Roots of Liberal Thought in the Eastern Mediterranean Conference, in Erlangen, Germany, in 2005.
–
1Yawmiyat Muhammad Adil al-Salih min Ahl al-Quds, 1915–1916, Jewish National and University Library– Manuscript Collection (JNUL-M), AP Ar. 46, 132–133 (10 August 1915). All translations of the diary entries are mine. In the following I refer to the diary as Yawmiyat.
2The debate on the origins and development of Arabism and Ottomanism began after George Anto­nius’s important book, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab Nationalist Movement (Philadelphia, Pa.:
J. B. Lippincott, 1939). A critical review of the state of research on the subject can be found in Rashid Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature,” American Historical Review 96 (December 1991): 1363–73. See also Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). The debate over the Ottoman heritage in the history and historiography of the Arab Middle East is an ongoing discussion, and reflects an attempt to uncover the history of the region by using local, both Ottoman and Arabic, sources, while emphasizing the Ottoman background of the Arab provinces. See Albert Hourani, “The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East,” the third Carreras Arab lecture of the University of Essex, delivered on 25 November 1969. For a critique of what he calls “the Localist–Arabist version of Ottoman provincial history,” which underemphasizes the Ottoman context of the Arab Middle East, see Ehud R. Toledano, “The Emer­gence of Ottoman–Local Elites (1700–1900): A Framework for Research,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas: A History from Within, ed. Ilan Papp´
e and Moshe Maoz (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), 145–62.
3In referring to the social group that the writer belonged to, and to the process of negotiation of identity and sense of connection to the Ottoman Empire, I borrow the idea of “Arab–Ottoman elite” suggested by Ehud Toledano in relation to Egypt. This concept highlights the links between the local (Arab) and the larger (Ottoman) context of the period under discussion. In the case of Egypt, when analyzing the amnesia regarding Egypt’s Ottoman past, Toledano describes a process of transition from an Ottoman–Egyptian elite (with a strong connection to the empire but also a sense of local Egyptian solidarity) to an Egyptian–Ottoman elite toward the beginning of the 20th century (when the Egyptian factor became stronger than the Ottoman one, although links to the empire still existed). The demise of the empire turned this group into an Egyptian one, which underplayed and eventually erased Egypt’s Ottoman past. The process that is analyzed in this article is placed at the “junction” of the transition between the “local-Ottoman” to the “local elite.” The writer’s strong links and sense of belonging to the empire begin to be shaken following the war, as will be discussed. See Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman-Local Elites,” and idem, “Forgetting Egypt’s Ottoman Past,” in Cultural Horizons: A Festschrift in Honor of Talat S. Halman, vol. 1, ed. Jayne L. Warner (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 150–67.
4Cemal Pas¸a arrived in Jerusalem in January 1915. His activities as commander of the Fourth Army in Greater Syria had various dimensions. On the one hand, he was deeply invested and involved in reshaping the civil and military infrastructure of Greater Syria through construction of roads and buildings and through creation of educational and cultural institutions. On the other hand, he was known as a cruel leader who was behind the hangings of suspected national activists—Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem—as well as the deportations of foreign subjects or those believed to be a risk to the Ottoman cause. For more on the evaluation of Cemal Pas¸a’s years in greater Syria and Ottoman policy during World War I, see Hasan Kayali, “Wartime Regional and Imperial Integration of Greater Syria during World War I,” in The Syrian Land: Processes of Integration and Fragmentation, ed. Thomas Philipp and Birgit Schaebler (Stuttgart, Germany: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1998), 295–306. There are some brief mentions of Jerusalem in Cemal Pas¸a’s memoir. See Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman, 1913–1919 (New York: Arno Press, 1973),
204.
5See, for example, Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Conscious­ness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Rashid Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria before 1914: A Reassessment,” in Khalidi et al., The Origins of Arab Nationalism, 50–69; and Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1997). For an interesting demonstration of the complexity of identity in the writings of two Arab–Ottoman bureaucrats who reported from the province (wil¯
aya) of Beirut in 1916 and 1917, see Avi Rubin, “Bahjat ve-Tamimi be-Vilayat Beirut: Masa el Toda – atam shel Shney Nos – im Otmanim be-Reshit ha-Me – a ha-Esrim” (Bahjat and Tamimi in Wilayat Beirut: A Journey into the Worldviews of Two Ottoman Travelers at the Turn of the 20th Century) (master’s thesis, Ben Gurion University, Israel, 2000).
6Khalidi, “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria before 1914,” 61–63.
7Tarif Khalidi, “The Arab World,” in The Great War 1914–1917: The People’s Experience, ed. Peter Liddle, John Bourne, and Ian Whitehead (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 293–98.
8Ibid., 298.
9Antonius, The Arab Awakening, 185–91.
10Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 157–60.
11Ibid., 160–61.
12See note 3.
13The diary was written over a period of two years. Hence, the contemplations and doubts discussed in this article are limited to this period, although I assume they represent only the beginning of a longer and deeper process that continued as the war progressed.
14Salim Tamari, from the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, recently identified the writer as Ihsan Tourjman after we failed to locate al-Salih, whose name appears on the title page of the original manuscript. What led Tamari to this discovery, as well as further analysis of Tourjman’s writings, is described in the introduction of the transcribed and edited version of the diary. See Salim Tamari, – Am al-Jarrad (The Year of the Locust) (Beirut: Institute of Palestine Studies, forthcoming). See also Salim Tamari, “The Short Life of Private Ihsan,” Jerusalem Quarterly 30 (2007): 26–58. Following these recent discoveries, for the purpose of this article I will refer to the diarist as Ihsan Tourjman and not as Muhammad – Adil al-Salih.
15Sa – ad al-Din al-Khalidi, Ghalib al-Khalidi, and Muhammad Tawfiq al-Khalidi are all mentioned through­out the text as his uncles on his maternal side, kh¯
al. However, neither al-Salih’s nor Tourjman’s name appears in the Khalidi family tree, perhaps because maternal relations were often not fully documented.
16Musa al-– Alami was born in 1897 to a notable family in Jerusalem. After completing his law degree at Cambridge University, he held several important positions in the British Mandatory administration and was very active in Palestinian political life in the 1930s and 1940s. Is – af Nashashibi was born in Jerusalem in 1882 and received his education in Beirut. After World War I, he was a leader of al-Muntada al-Adabi, one of the Arab national and literary organizations that were established after the war. A writer and an intellectual, he wrote many books and articles and also served in the Department of Education of the British Mandatory government in Palestine.
17Tamari, – Am al-Jarrad, 15–16.
18Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 56. For an example of such a use of autobiography, see Mira Tzoreff, “Fadwa Tuqan’s Autobiography: Restructuring a Personal History into the Palestinian National Narrative,” in Discourse on Gender/Gendered Discourse in the Middle East, ed. Boaz Shoshan (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2000), 57–77.
19Sidonie Smith, “Who’s Talking/Who’s Talking Back? The Subject of Personal Narratives,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18 (1993): 396.
20Amos Funkenstein, Tadmit ve-Toda – a Historit ba-Yahadut ube-Svivatah ha-Tarbutit (Perceptions of Jewish History from the Antiquity to the Present) (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1991), 14.
21Iris Agmon, “Women, Class and Gender: Muslim Jaffa and Haifa at the Turn of the 20th Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 30 (1998): 481, as quoted in Rubin, “Bahjat and Tamimi in Wilayat Beirut,” 23. Rubin uses the episodic microhistory approach in his analysis of writings about and impressions of Bahjat and Tamimi.
22See more on Jerusalem during these years in Alexander Sch¨olch, “Jerusalem in the 19th Century (1831– 1917 AD),” in Jerusalem in History, ed. K. J. Asali (New York: Olive Branch Press, 2000), 228–33; Donna Robinson Divine, “Palestine in World War I,” in The Middle East and North Africa: Essays in Honor of J. C. Hurewitz, ed. Reeva S. Simon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 71–94. Estimates of the population in Jerusalem (and Palestine) during this period vary between 49,000 and 70,000. See more on population figures in Yehoshua Ben Arieh, “The Growth of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 65 (1975); Uziel Schmelz, Ukhlusiyat Yerushalayim: Tmurot ba
–
Et ha-Hadasha (Modern Jerusalem: Demographic Evolution) (Jerusalem: The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 1988), 17; Justin McCarthy, The Population of Palestine: Population History and Statistics of the Late Ottoman Period and the Mandate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 10–24; David Grossman, Ha-Ukhlusiyah ha-– Aravit ve-ha-Maachaz ha-Yehudi: Tifroset ve-Tzfifut be-Eretz Israel be-Shalhey ha-Tkufa ha-Othmanit u-Bitkufat ha-Mandat ha-Briti (Arab Demography and Early Jewish Settlement in Palestine: Distribution and Population Density during the Late Ottoman and Early Mandate Periods) (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2004).
23See more on the effects of the war on Jerusalem in Zvi Shiloni, “Mashber Milhemet ha-– Olam ha-Rishona ve-Hashpa – ato – al ha-Ma – arach shel Yerushalayim ve-ha-Yishuv ha-Yehudi Ba” (The Crisis of World War I and its Effects on the Urban Environment in Jerusalem and its Jewish Community) (master’s thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1981). On the effects of the war on the Jewish community in Jerusalem and Palestine, see Mordechai Ben-Hillel Hacohen, Milhemet ha-– Amim 1914–1918: Yoman (War of the Nations: an Eretz Israel Diary, 1914–1918) (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben Zvi, 1981); Avraham Elmaliach, Eretz Yisrael ve-Suriyah bi-Yemey Milehemt ha-– Olam (Eretz Israel and Syria during the First World War) (Jerusalem: ha-Solel, 1928).
24The Arabic newspaper al-Karmil, for example, was shut down in December 1914, and its editor, Najib Nassar, was arrested because of the anti-Ottoman and Arab nationalistic views that the newspaper expressed, according to Ottoman authorities. Hebrew newspapers, such as ha-Ahdut and ha-Po – el ha-Tza – ir, were shut down as well—ha-Ahdut in December 1914 and ha-Po – el ha-Tza – ir in November 1915. They were accused of Zionist propaganda and of publishing anti-Ottoman articles. The only Hebrew newspaper that continued to operate until 1917 was ha-Herut, a newspaper affiliated with Jerusalem’s Sephardi community. It continued to operate until 1917, when its editor, Haim Ben »Attar, was arrested by the Ottoman authorities and died.
– ––
On Ben-– Attar and ha-Herut see Yitzhak Betzalel, “ Al Yihudo shel ha-Herut» ve-al Haim Ben-– Attar ke-– Orkho” (On the Significance of ha-Herut and on Haim Ben-– Attar as its Editor), Pe – amim 40 (1989): 121–47.
25One can learn about the steep increase in prices from a report published by Otis Glazebrook, the American consul in Jerusalem, in November 1915. This report sums up the economic situation in the district of Jerusalem following the sea blockade, the famine, and the locusts. Glazebrook provides a list of articles and demonstrates the increase in their prices. For example, the price of rice increased by 598 percent from 1914 to 1915, the price of sugar by 858 percent, and the price of potatoes by 427 percent. See Otis Glazebrook to the U.S. State Department, “Increase in Cost of Living Caused by War,” 3 November 1915, consular correspondence, American consulate in Jerusalem, record group 84, vol. 72, National Archives at College Park, College Park, Md. (NACP).
26McCarthy, Population, 26.
27On the effects of famine in Greater Syria, see Linda Schatkowski Schilcher, “The Famine of 1915–1918 in Greater Syria,” in Problems of the Modern Middle East in Historical Perspective: Essays in Honour of Albert Hourani, ed. John Spagnolo (Dryden, N.Y.: Ithaca Press, 1992), 229–58.
28Bertha Spafford Vester, Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City, 1881–1949 (Jerusalem: Ariel, 1992), 194–95; Ben Hillel Hacohen, Milhemet ha-– Amim, 32–37. The Spanish consul stayed in the city as well and was in charge of other countries’ interests.
29As reported in ha-Herut, 7 August 1914.
30Gad Frumkin, Derekh Shofet bi-Yerushalayim (The Way of a Judge in Jerusalem) (Tel Aviv: Dvir, 1954),
180. According to a report in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram from 18 September 1914, the government made a profit of around 100,000 Turkish lira just from the badl – askar.¯. Otis Glazebrook reported on the badl
–
askar.¯to Henry Morgenthau, the American ambassador in Istanbul, saying that the amount required by the authorities, heavy on the local population in ordinary times, was next to impossible under current conditions. See Otis Glazebrook to Henry Morgenthau, 10 August 1914, consular correspondence, American consulate in Jerusalem, record group 84, vol. 69A, NACP.
31As described in Akram Musallam, ed., Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakakini, al-Kitab al-Thani: Al-Nahda al-Urthuduksiyya, al-Harb al-– Uzma, al-Nafi fi Dimashq (Jerusalem and Ramallah: Khalil al-Sakakini Cultural
.
Center and the Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2004), 150–58.
32Ya – akov Yehoshua, Yerushalayim Tmol Shilshom: Pirkey Havay (Jerusalem in Days of Old) (Jerusalem: Reuven Mass, 1977), vol. 3, 42–43; Frumkin, The Way of a Judge, 180–82. Frumkin represented in the military court some of those who were caught.
33The centrality of mobilization in people’s minds is demonstrated in Najwa al-Qattan’s article, through historical–linguistic analysis of the term seferberlik, the Ottoman term for mobilization to the army (in Arabic, safarbarlik). In addition to its original meaning, the term gained many more connotations: bounty hunters who roamed city streets to catch young men evading the draft, forced civilian migration, wartime dislocation, and political exile. Used as a reference to the Great War, this term symbolized a local civilian catastrophe and a war at home, and is associated with hunger and misery. Najwa al-Qattan, “Safarbarlik: Ottoman Syria and the Great War,” in From the Syrian Land to the States of Syria and Lebanon, ed. Thomas Philipp and Christoph Schumann (Beirut: Beiruter Texte und Studien 96, 2004).
34Yawmiyat, 36 (24 April 1915); 97 (31 May 1915).
35Ibid., 154 (27 December 1916).
36Ibid., 155. The issue of hoarding food is also mentioned by Schatkowski Schilcher in relation to Beirut. 37Somewhat similar criticism and frustration toward the Ottoman government, mainly its local representa­tives in the province of Beirut, is expressed by Bahjat and Tamimi in their report on the neglect of the population,
the victims of the war, and the corruption of the local Ottoman bureaucrats. However, unlike Tourjman, they continue to express unconditional loyalty to the Ottoman Empire and to the Ottoman framework, even after viewing the effects of the war on the local population. Among the multiple identities that they held, the Ottoman component was probably the most dominant. For an analysis of this aspect in Bahjat and Tamimi’s writing, see Rubin, “Bahjat and Tamimi in Wilayat Beirut,” 35–41.
38The number of soldiers in the city varied according to developments at the front lines. However, the military presence was felt in the city throughout the war. Ottoman authorities in the city confiscated properties, such as convents and hospitals, that belonged to enemy countries and used them for military needs. Most of these buildings were located around the Russian compound, the municipality, and the Jaffa Gate.
39The public space in Jerusalem changed tremendously during the war. The area around the Jaffa Gate, Bab al-Khalil, for example, was used for political demonstrations and parades, mainly in support of the empire. This is also where people suspected of acting for the Arab national movement were hanged in 1915, on the orders of Cemal Pas¸a. The public garden, al-Manshiyya, which was located near the Russian compound, served as another central public site. Demonstrations, parties, and political and social gatherings took place in this garden, which had a two-story caf´
e. See mentions of the garden and its uses in Yehoshua, Yerushalayim Tmol Shilshom, part II, 33–36.
40See more on similar parties in Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar, eds., al-Quds al-– Uthmaniyya fi-l-Mudhakkirat al-Jawhariyya 1904–1917 (Ottoman Jerusalem in the Memoirs of Jawhariyya, 1904–1917) (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2003).
41April 1915 is when the Ottomans entered Egypt, so maybe this is the – ¯.d he refers to here.
42Yawmiyat, 47 (26 April 1915).
43See, for example, Tamari and Nassar, al-Quds al-– Uthmaniyya, 231, when Jawhariyya describes the party held for the completion of the port on the Dead Sea.
44Yawmiyat, 124–25 (27 July 1915).
45Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 1–38. In research on World War I in Palestine, or elsewhere in the Arab lands, the connections between gender and nationalism are rarely discussed. Thompson’s study is an important exception. Thompson devotes the first chapter of her book to the war and discusses how this traumatic experience affected civil society.
46Jens Hanssen discusses the presence of prostitutes in 19th-century Beirut, examining their social role and location in the city. He claims that the majority of prostitutes were social outcasts in the city despite their geographically central location within it. Hence, they exercised “social marginality in the center.” See Jens Hanssen, “Public Morality and Marginality in Fin-de-Siecle Beirut,” in Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, ed. Eugene Rogan (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), 195–99.
47Yawmiyat, 37 (24 April 1915).
48Ibid., 147 (15 September 1915).
49Prostitution plays out differently in times of crisis and conflict than in times of peace. See a discussion on prostitution in Victorian England and the ways class, family, and economic factors played a role in women’s work as prostitutes, in Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
50Yawmiyat, 93 (27 May 1915). See more on Leah Tenenbaum in Tamari, – Am al-Jarrad, 33. From the way Tourjman refers to her as a “private prostitute” we can assume that there were different groups and statuses of prostitutes. The “private prostitute” likely served the more important clients. The writer’s criticism here probably has more to do with the fact that his supposed wife was dishonored and less with the fact that she was Jewish. A Muslim man can, of course, marry a non-Muslim woman but is expected to have an honorable wife. It is reported that in late 1919 there were 500 prostitutes in Jerusalem, most of them Jewish, and that many brothels were under Jewish management. The brothels mentioned are located mainly near Jaffa Road, in the Jewish Nahlat Shiva – a neighborhood. See Ya – akov Gross, ed., Yerushalayim 1917: Hurban, Nes, Ge»ula (Jerusalem 1917/1918: Destruction, Miracle, Redemption) (Jerusalem: Koresh, 1993), 417–20; ha-Herut, 16 October 1915. To read more on Jewish prostitutes in Jerusalem following World War I, see Margalit Shilo, “The Blight of Prostitution in the Holy City (1917–1919): Male and Female Perspectives,” Jerusalem and Eretz Israel 1 (2003): 173–96.
51Yawmiyat, 47 (26 April 1915). See more on the possibility of using prostitutes for espionage during the war in Eliezer Tauber, trans., Mod – in ve-Rigul be-Levanon, Suriyah ve-Eretz Israel be-Milhement ha-– Olam (1913–1918): Aziz Bey ( – Aziz Bey: Intelligence and Espionage in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine during the
World War) (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar Ilan University, 1991), 129–52, mainly 135.
52Yawmiyat, 7 (1 April 1915).
53Ibid., 48 (28 April 1915). Here he echoes ideas published and discussed at the turn on the century by Qasim Amin.
54Tourjman may have been influenced by Khalil al-Sakakini in his critical views regarding women’s education and liberation. For example, in one of his meetings with al-Sakakini they discussed the writings of Qasim Amin. Ibid., 44 (25 April 1915). See also Tamari, – Am al-Jarrad, 28.
55Yawmiyat, 11 (10 April 1915).
56For more on this, see, for example, Susan Grayzel, Women’s Identity at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); miriam cooke and Angela Woollacott, Gendering War Talk (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993); Billie Melman, ed., Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930 (New York: Routledge, 1998). For a good historiographic introduction to the state of research on gender and war, see Billie Melman, “Introduction,” in Borderlines, 1–25.
57Yawmiyat, 32 (22 April 1915).
58Ibid., 48 (28 April 1915).
59Tamari, – Am al-Jarrad, 33, 38.
60Yawmiyat, 64 (7 May 1915).
61Ibid., 67 (8 May 1915).
62Ibid., 126–28 (1 August 1915). Secondary sources provide different dates and locations for the hanging. See, for example, Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, 193, where he writes that on 21 August 1915, eleven Beiruti leaders were executed in the town square. According to Michael Assaf, in contrast, the first hanging took place in Damascus, on 21 August 1915. See Michael Assaf, Toldot Hit – orerut ha-– Aravim be-Eretz Israel ve-Brihatam (History of the Awakening of the Arabs of the Land of Israel and their Flight) (Tel Aviv: Tarbut ve-Hinukh, 1967), 69.
63Yawmiyat, 148 (15 September 1915).
64Ibid., 182–86 (10 July 1916).
65See Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, esp. 145–75.
66At the very beginning of his diary, the writer mentions that he would like to discuss the destiny (nas¯.b)of
.
Palestine. He predicts that Palestine would either become independent or join Egypt. It is interesting that he does not consider Palestine joining Greater Syria. Yawmiyat, 1 (28 March 1915). For more on this issue, see Yehoshua Porath, Tzmichata shel ha-Tnu – a ha-Leumit ha-– Aravit ha-Falastinit 1918–1929 (The Emergence of the Palestinian Arab National Movement 1918–1929) (Jerusalem: Hebrew University 1971), 7.
67Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian Identity, 193.
68The following section is based mainly on the new and more complete edition of al-Sakakini’s diaries, edited by Akram Musallam. This is a more complete version of the diaries that had already been published in Kadha Ana Ya Dunya and edited by al-Sakakini’s daughter Hala in 1955. See Musallam, Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakakini, vol. 2, mainly 95–160.
69Ibid., 157–58 (26 March 1915).
70Ibid., 172–73 (20 November 1917).
71Al-Sakakini’s Christian minority status is important in this context.
72Musallam, Yawmiyat Khalil al-Sakakini, 98 (17 September 1914).
73Ibid., 118 (4 November 1914).
74Ibid., 123 (9 November 1914).
75Ibid., 132–33 (18 November 1914).
76Ibid., 142 (25 December 1914).
77Ibid., 154–55 (7 February–8 March 1915).