Kerosene Nights: Light and Enlightenment in Late Ottoman Jerusalem*

Abstract

Abstract: Street lighting was first introduced into Ottoman cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, unlike in larger Ottoman cities, where coal gas was used, in Jerusalem it was kerosene that served as burning material, creating the distinct nocturnal reality that is here called the ‘kerosene night’. This reality was the result and, simultaneously, one of the most glaring manifestations of Jerusalem’s economic, administrative and infrastructural peripherality. Between the early 1890s and the First World War, kerosene allowed the Jerusalem municipality an affordable means to respond to inhabitants’ expectations for more light. Both public expectations and municipal action were fanned by a discourse that associated street lighting with Enlightenment, order and progress. Yet, kerosene illumination also set the limits of nocturnal conviviality and frustrated the very expectations it kindled. Measured against larger metropoles, the relative darkness of Jerusalem heightened among residents feelings of provinciality and governmental neglect — feelings that the kerosene lamps, paradoxically, brought to light.