Nineteenth-century Palestine Research Articles

Nineteenth-Century Palestine and the British Imperial Imagination: James Silk Buckingham and the Politics of Private Dissent

This article studies the account of travels in Palestine by one of the most controversial travel writers in early nineteenth century Britain, James Silk Buckingham, whose life, career, and writings sparked a political storm. Buckingham criticised British imperial and missionary activities in the East through his journalism and travel books which reached large audiences. He was the first writer in nineteenth century Britain to use a travel narrative about Palestine as a medium to develop and express liberal, anti-colonial attitudes at a time when Britain’s imperial stock in the Middle East was on the rise. While in Palestine, Buckingham uncovered evidence that confirmed and justified his liberal views. He exposed the hypocrisy of missionary activities and undermined the rising calls in Britain for restoring the Jews. He did not call for possessing the land and reconstituting it anew; nor did he see it, as his countryman the Earl of Shaftesbury did, as an empty land needing the restoration of its original Jewish possessors. Yet the fact that he saw the land as a repository of religious fanaticism to which all religions contributed indicate his limited understanding of the diverse communities of Palestine. As this article shows, Palestine, in Buckingham’s travelogue, constituted a test case, a laboratory for testing anti-colonial and liberal ideals rather than a land of invested identities and ways of life of equal worth to those in Europe.

Muslims and Jews in Nineteenth-Century Palestine in the Mirror of Evangelical Missionary Reports

Alessandro Di Meo, L’area Siro-Palestinese nel contesto geopolitico Ottocentesco in una prospettiva globale (1798–1840) Gianfranco Armando, La Questione d’Oriente e la Guerra di Crimea Attraverso gli articoli della Civilta Cattolica Jutta Faehndrich, A Map, the Beauty, and the Beast. The Three Palestines of Lieutenant van de Velde Barbara Haider-Wilson, Jerusalem’s Place in the Relationship between the Orient and the Occident Anastasia Keshman, Walking in the Footsteps of Christ in Latin, Greek or Russian. On the Various Ways of the Via Dolorosa in 19th Century Jerusalem Bernhard Kronegger, Imperial Pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Journeys of Franz Joseph I and Wilhelm II. between Religious Tradition and Political Calculation Lily Arad, Gifts Fit for a King. Jerusalem, the Old Yishuv and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchs Giorgio Del Zanna, Pellegrinaggi italiani in Palestina tra XIX e XX secolo. Pellegrinaggi in Oriente nella prima ‘globalizzazione’ Konstantinos Papastathis, The Jerusalem Orthodox Patriarchate on the Holy Places Question from the Crimean War to the British Mandate 177 Yali Hashash, Muslims and Jews in Nineteenth-Century Palestine in the Mirror of Evangelical Missionary Reports Florian Martin Muller, Briefe aus Jerusalem. Aus meinem Tagebuch. Der Aufenthalt des Tiroler Franziskanerpaters Innozenz Ploner im Heiligen Land 1903–1904.

The Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine: evidence from the Montefiore censuses

Initial findings from five recently transcribed censuses of the Jewish community in nineteenth century Palestine, commissioned by Sir Moses Montefiore. This article discusses each census and presents uncorrected population figures. It describes how the Jewish community was rapidly changing: the population increased almost fourfold between 1839 and 1875, primarily due to immigration from Ashkenazi countries. The Jewish community was majority Ashkenazi by 1875. Analysis of the census data gives us detailed information about the community, such as the fact that Ashkenazim were significantly more likely than Sephardim to be engaged in full-time Torah study, whereas individuals who had immigrated to the land of Israel were slightly less likely. It also suggests that immigrations occurred at all ages, although the average age of an immigrant when they came to Palestine was 36.

A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden

Reviewed by: A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden by Menachem Mendel Frieden David B. Levy Menachem Mendel Frieden. A Jewish Life on Three Continents: The Memoir of Menachem Mendel Frieden. Translated, edited, annotated, and with an introduction and afterword, by Lee Shai Weissbach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Pp. 520Cloth $60. ISBN 978-0-8047-8363-7. The memoir of Menachem Frieden (1878–1963) makes a significant scholarly contribution to the study of a tumultuous era influenced by Haskalah, nation building, mass migration from Eastern Europe to America, and the creation of the modern Jewish homeland in Israel. He depicts life in the shtetl, and the scope covers several generations of family history, his early years in a Lithuanian village, schooling and the life of yeshiva students, courtship, marriage, tensions between Hasidic elements of his family and anti-Hasidic Mitnagdic members, travel and the readjustment that comes with migration, his business experience as a peddler in the south of the United States and entrepreneurship in Norfolk, Virginia, and settlement in Palestine in 1921 through the middle of the twentieth century. While Frieden’s memoir seeks to transmit his own family memories, one of its strengths is that it also aims to place those events in historical context. Thus, for example, we learn through this deeply personal story aspects of the impact of the Arab riots of 1929, and of the functioning of early charity organizations in nineteenth-century Palestine. The memoir offers a window on the generation of Jews who lived through great transformations of Jewish life. Frieden’s identity is grounded by his refusal to forget his roots in the old country, and the folkways of Ashkenazic Jewry. His identity is not that of a self-hating Jew, as identified by Sander Gilman in On the Origins of Jewish Self Hatred (2012), but Frieden is rather outspokenly proud of his Jewish heritage. He openly bemoans the choices he made that took him away from Jewish tradition, and chooses to record his memoirs so that others may learn from his mistakes and avoid making them too. His voice is jaded; with the sadness of [End Page 195] abandoning his yeshiva studies and his admiration, valorization, and respect for learned rabbis, which meant the most to him. He clearly was a devoted family man, dutiful son, loving husband, and concerned and caring father but in the end, being a part of something greater than the self, being a part of a living tradition, is what Frieden values. He confesses that he regrets not accepting an offer to lead one of Norfolk’s synagogues, which he speculates might have led to his children being educated differently. Yet he states that he has no “Nietzschean” regrets about marrying a second time or making aliyah. His memoir also sheds light on the many Jews who came to Palestine but did not take up agricultural development. Frieden worked in banking, seeking to bring American “know-how” to help establish an urban entrepreneurial infrastructure in the Yishuv. He identified as a strong Zionist. Thus Frieden’s identity as family patriarch often gives him a pedagogic voice and role, to transmit to familial memories of religious rituals and customs that he wishes his heirs to remember. Some readers may be challenged in identifying individual personalities of his times, the geographic locations in eastern Europe, his allusions to rabbinic commentators such as the Maharsha, and his references to Yiddish novelists like Shomer that were a part of the common culture of the East European Jew. Frieden’s identity is informed by the concept of “yerida” (descent), which holds that each generation is of a lower stature than the previous one. Thus he takes on pedagogic goals: to transmit and keep alive the religious fervor, culture, and folkways of past generations for Jewish continuity. Frieden’s frequent moments of introspection about turning points in his life sheds light on his identity and what he valued in life: to take the best of the new but not forget the good of the past. He at times bares his soul so that readers may learn from his life experience. The fact that Frieden chose...

Reconstructing nineteenth century landscapes from historical maps—the Survey of Western Palestine as a case study

Geographic information systems allow the extraction and quantitative analysis of information from historical maps. The aims of this research were to examine the completeness of information represented on the 1881 Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) map, to quantitatively reconstruct the landscape of nineteenth century Palestine and to explore whether spatial patterns in land cover/land use can be partially explained statistically by physical and human factors. Using historical aerial photos, we concluded that most of the major past landscape features were indeed shown on the PEF map, with an average overall correspondence of 53%. Forests and Mediterranean maquis were more abundant at distances greater than 2 km from towns and villages. Specific land cover/land-use types were associated with certain soil types, topographic regions and rainfall thresholds. In conclusion, the 1881 PEF map can serve as a reliable reference for understanding the land cover/land-use patterns of nineteenth century Palestine.

Land Privatization in Nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine

This article examines land privatization in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine through the extension of possession in miri lands, on the one hand, and its transformation into fee-simple property through change in land category classification (i.e., miri to mülk), on the other. Using primary sources, particularly Ottoman documents and correspondence of the German Consulate in Jerusalem, we analyze this process, as reflected in several cases involving foreign subjects and Ottoman authorities. We argue that privatization began as informal violations of the law, proceeded with the struggle of landholders against authorities who tried to reverse the process, and ended in victory for the landholders after the state ceded to their demands, inter alia, as a result of pressure from foreign nations and their consuls. Thus did de facto land privatization become de jure privatization.

Quantifying the completeness of and correspondence between two historical maps: a case study from nineteenth-century Palestine

ABSTRACTReconstructing past landscapes from historical maps requires quantifying the accuracy and completeness of these sources. The accuracy and completeness of two historical maps of the same period covering the same area in Israel were examined: the 1:63,360 British Palestine Exploration Fund map (1871–1877) and the 1:100,000 French Levés en Galilée (LG) map (1870). These maps cover the mountainous area of the Galilee (northern Israel), a region with significant natural and topographical diversity, and a long history of human presence. Land-cover features from both maps, as well as the contours drawn on the LG map, were digitized. The overall correspondence between land-cover features shown on both maps was 59% and we found that the geo-referencing method employed (transformation type and source of control points) did not significantly affect these correspondence measures. Both maps show that in the 1870s, 35% of the Galilee was covered by Mediterranean maquis, with less than 8% of the area used for permanent agricultural cropland (e.g., plantations). This article presents how the reliability of the maps was assessed by using two spatial historical sources, and how land-cover classes that were mapped with lower certainty and completeness are identified. Some of the causes that led to observed differences between the maps, including mapping scale, time of year, and the interests of the surveyors, are also identified.

The Architectural Metamorphosis of the Israeli-Arab Kitchen: Social Structures, Cultural Patterns, and Gender Identities in a Spatial Perspective

AbstractThis essay focuses on the relationship between form and culture. It demonstrates how architectural evidence can be used in the historical reconstruction of social and cultural processes. In this research, the architectural metamorphosis of the kitchen in the Palestinian Arab society in Israel is outlined from the end of the Ottoman rule to the late twentieth century. Beginning in late nineteenth-century rural Palestine, when preparation of food was an integral part of the agricultural way of life, this essay traces the kitchen's departure from the interior space during the period of the British Mandate in Palestine and the early years of the State of Israel; its return to the house in the sixties; and the subsequent changes in the design of the kitchen during the last quarter of the previous century. This socio-architectural analysis seeks to examine forms of life in a broad historical context of social, economic, and political transformations, and to carefully draw significant insights about the status of women in the domestic sphere from the architectural history of the kitchen.

John Steinbeck's Promised Lands

John Steinbeck's Promised Lands Kinereth Meyer (bio) Yaron Perry's recent essay, "John Steinbeck's Roots in Nineteenth-Century Palestine," published in these pages, provides fascinating evidence of the persistent interconnection between America and the Holy Land, both in official archival sources and in ideological or religious tracts.1 The settlement of Mount Hope (1853) by German and American Protestants in what is now Tel-Aviv, Israel, is just one strand in an intricate web of historical, political, eschatological, and psychological interrelationships that almost beg for further development. The strands of this complex web are crossed and recrossed by additional strands, including national interest, foundational religion, human behavior, and community dependency. The Mount Hope community described by Perry touches on a variety of contexts: among them, history, cultural rhetoric, and, as we shall see, the psychoanalysis of narrative. First, important parallels can be traced between the activist communitarianism of the Mount Hope group and the larger, equally fervid, expansionist ethos prevalent in mid-nineteenth-century America, an ethos grounded in biblical and millennialist views of America's role in the world. The history of Mount Hope brings to light a component of cultural rhetoric that has endured from the very beginnings of the European settlement of America: the union of the Steinbeck and the Dickson families, their separate journeys from Massachusetts and Germany to the Holy Land and then to the United States, and ultimately—one is tempted to add, "of course!"—California, is almost an allegory of America's primal scene, the search for a [End Page 75] Promised Land, a new world, new earth.2 At the same time, however, Mount Hope is more than an unusual nineteenth-century story of quasi-biblical return to a particular place. It is also the story of the return of ghostly presences within a family history, and of the ways in which these presences may re-turn literary texts and our readings of them. For, as we learn from Perry's detailed account, the first settlers of Mt. Hope, Johann and Almira (Dickson) Grossteinbeck and Friedrich and Mary (Dickson) Grossteinbeck were the grandparents and the great-uncle and aunt of John Steinbeck. I Mount Hope begins, however, with nineteenth-century American historiography and the westward pull of the American continent. The discovery of gold in California, the safety valve of the frontier, the vast spaces of the American continent waiting for successive waves of settlers and immigrants, all comprise a familiar map that seems to draw the eye firmly and unquestionably in one direction only. At the same time, however, overshadowed by both the rhetoric and the fact of western expansion, a simultaneous pull eastward was taking place, a return to an originary Holy Land and to one of America's mythopoetic transformations that has not yet lost its hold on the national imagination. American involvement in the Middle East did not begin, in other words, with the war in Iraq or with the maneuvers of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century texts reveal elaborate metaphorical and typological connections with the Holy Land, further imbued with a millennial belief in America as the new focus of God's activity on earth. Thomas Morton's "New English Canaan" (1634), Thomas Tillam's panegyric "uppon the first sight of New-England" (1638) ("Hayle holy-land wherein our holy lord/Hath planted his most true and holy word"), as well as William Bradford's description of the numerous trials of Plymouth Plantation (1630-1650), all used the biblical account of the Israelites' flight from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land not merely as a rhetorical device but as a way to define the lofty role granted to the new Children of Israel. Eighteenth-century writers extended and intensified the terms of this parallel. In the Magnalia Christi Americana [End Page 76] (1702), Cotton Mather envisioned "Golden Candlesticks" of New England ("our American Jerusalem") as having risen to light the way for "the upright Children of Abraham" (64, 8). "The New Jerusalem...has begun to come down from heaven, and perhaps never were more of the prelibations of heaven's glory given upon earth," declared Jonathan Edwards in "Some...

The Medical Activities of the London Jews' Society in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

L'article retrace les activites medicales de la communaute juive de Londres, venant en aide aux juifs de Palestine et les missions anglaises a Jerusalem qui se traduisait par la construction de structures d'accueil pour les malades. Les archives de ces institutions permettent de faire la lumiere sur leur fonctionnement d'un point de vue medical et pharmacologique.

The Sexual Body of the Young Jew as an Arena of Ideological Struggle, 1821–1948

This article analyzes professional discourse on masturbation to illustrate how child sexuality serves as a site for symbolic ideological struggles. Sex instruction manuals written in central Europe in the nineteenth century Palestine and Israel in the twentieth century are the basis for broader discussions on religious and scientific discourse on child and adolescent sexuality within the Jewish communities. By tracing the development of new forms of expert knowledge, we show how expert discourse on masturbation gradually transformed it from a symbolic moral evil into a medical disease and a psychological problem, before declaring it a legitimized behavior.

MINOR MARRIAGES AND KHIYĀR AL-BULŪGH IN OTTOMAN PALESTINE: A NOTE ON WOMEN'S STRATEGIES IN A PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY

AbstractSharī'a court records (sijills) are legal documents that summarize discussions that took place in the courtroom. They also contain a wealth of detail on various aspects of Muslim society. Drawing on different sijills from nineteenth-century Palestine and fatwās of Khayr al-Dīn al-Ramlī, I examine the phenomenon of child marriage and the practice of khiyār al-bulūgh, literally "option of puberty". If a natural guardian contracts a marriage for a minor child, male or female, the child may not subsequently have the contract annulled. Whereas a boy enjoys the right to divorce his wife through the mechanism of talāq as soon as he reaches his majority, a girl who reaches her majority must approach the court if she wants to dissolve a marriage (faskh), and she may do so only if she was married while a minor by a non-natural guardian. In this case, she may exercise her right of khiyār al-bulūgh immediately upon reaching her legal majority, i.e., at the onset of her first menstruation. But she must make a public declaration of the occurrence of menstruation so that the persons who hear the declaration may serve as witnesses on her behalf.

Palestine and the Palestinians (review)

Book Reviews 135 Palestine and the Palestinians, by Samih K. Farsoun with Christina 'E. Zacharia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 375 pp. $22.00. The need for this general and comprehensive social history of the Palestinian people stems from the fact that there is hardly a single volume which incorporates all the important components of Palestinian political and economic history, internal and external dynamics of the Palestine question, Palestinian resistance to foreign occupations , and the ongoing "peace process." It brings together significant developments affecting the people, their institutions, and society, historically and at the present time. The major concern of the book, prior to the 1948 Catastrophe (al-Nakbah in Arabic), is the political economy ofPalestine. After 1948, the focus shifts to the implications and consequences of the 1948 debacle-the rebuilding ofinsti~tions, coping with dispersal, dispossession and de-development, organizing a national liberation movement, and waging a diplomatic struggle. It ends with an assessment and a critique ofthe Oslo process and its impact on the future direction ofchange for Palestine and the Palestinians. The book deals with Palestine as a society and Palestinians as a people during the past two centuries. Some ofthe existing studies have dealt with the social consequences ofthe changed economic structure ofPalestine in the past century. Others have concentrated on the land tenure system and the socio-economic impact of European penetration . But the nature, structure, and dynamics of Palestinian society and the impact of Europe and the West throughout the past two centuries have not been fully analyzed prior to this study. Conceptualizing Palestinian society before and after 1948 has been an arduous challenge to many authors. A coherent analysis of the vast political transformations caused by the termination ofthe Ottoman Empire, the advent ofBritish colonialism in 1917, the 1948 destruction, the 1967 Occupation ofeastern Palestine (West Bank) and Gaza might have been daunting for a single volume. But in addition to accomplishing that, this book provides a broad formulation of nineteenth-century Palestine and the post-1948 Palestinian communities that links their social transformation to the overall changes in the regional and global environments. It thus tries to identify the conditions and structural factors that shaped Palestinian society in the nineteenth century, during the mandate period, after 1948, and after Oslo. The continuous disruptions ofPalestinian society inflicted by European interventionism since the early medieval Crusades, nineteenth-century imperialism, and the twentieth-century colonial-settler Zionism are analyzed with emphasis on the latter two disruptions. Unlike the first and third, European nin~teenth-century intervention was indirect, economic in essence, and transformative of the economic, social, political, cultural, and ideological structures, not only ofPalestine, but ofthe region, which was, in effect, launched into a process of dependency. This force ofEuropean interventionism is seen as having encouraged the process of European settlement, and having propelled Palestine from a subsistence mode ofexistence into a market economy, and 136 SHOFAR Fa112000 Vol. 19, No.1 later into "dependent capitalist underdevelopment." Accordingly, it is argued, Palestine became ripe for destruction in 1948. While Chapter2analyzesthemajortransformations causedbyEuropeanintervention during the nineteenth century, up to the First World Warperiod, Chapter 3 focuses on the establishment of a "European Jewish collectivity" in the country, and its impact on Palestine and the Palestinians during the interwarperiod. Two structuralprocesses-rapid settler colonialism and colonial capitalist transformation-are shown to have combined together, under British rule, to bring about the demise ofPalestine in 1948. From there, the authors go on to discuss the dynamics of dispossession, of dispersal , the demographic and geographic transition, and the socioeconomic factors that shaped the lives ofPalestinians in the diaspora. Regional factors, such as the oil boom of the 1980s, the erosion of the Pan-Arabist tide, and the rise of the individual state nationalism, have together taken another heavy toll on the already battered Palestinians and their movement. A series of confrontations with Arab states and with Israel were to lead to yet new expulsions, first from Jordan, followed by Lebanon, and later from Kuwait and other Gulf countries after the Gulf War of 1991. The study demonstrates that resistance to "European interventionism" has been an unceasing and ongoing endeavor for a very long time. While that resistance is...

Changing patterns of landownership in nineteenth-century Palestine: The European influence

Long-term changes in landownership patterns and their implications for settlement have been neglected by geographers, both in theoretical and empirical studies. Studies in this field relating to the Middle East are of a very general nature, and are not based on detailed examination of regional trends, their components, and geographic variables. In Israel, most of the published literature on this issue has dealt with the process of land purchase by Jews and has focused mainly on the period of the British Mandate (1918–1948). Misleading statements abound and the roots of the processes which evolved in nineteenth-century Palestine are poorly understood. The middle of the nineteenth century in Palestine marked the end of a quarter of a millenium of neglect and decline. Around 1800 Palestine was a backward province of the Ottoman empire, largely rural and sparsely populated. Both rural and urban economies were traditional and poor. From about 1850, a process of change began which led to a resurgence and development of the country. An important determinant in this process was an increase of European influence within the Ottoman empire in general and Palestine in particular. This paper (part of a broader study on landownership), will discuss the background, characteristics and motivations of Europeans who purchased land in Palestine during the period, their financial sources, their locational preferences and opportunities. The diverse influences of these land transactions on urban and rural development are considered. These processes ar illustrated by two case studies.

Millenarism and agricultural settlement in the Holy Land in the nineteenth century

The pioneers of modern agricultural settlement in the Holy Land were Christians. Foremost among these were several Americans who came in the 1850s and 1860s to settle—ignoring warnings from local experts and from representatives of the United States government. The leaders of the settlers were inspired by millenarist ideas and by faith in the Return to Zion—rife among fundamental Protestant sects in the early nineteenth century. The personal accounts of these visionaries provide insights into what drove them to attempt to migrate to remote and backward Palestine and also throw light on the economic concepts and practical plans for implementing their schemes. Despite their failure, these attempts were very important in the history of agricultural settlement in nineteenth-century Palestine. The settlers maintained a wide range of international contacts through letters, pamphlets, sermons and publicity in the press in America, England, Germany and Palestine. In addition, many people who heard indirectly about these ventures, took an interest in their ideology and practice. Millenarist schemes influenced early preachers and founders of Jewish societies for agricultural settlement in Palestine. The Jewish forerunners of the Hovevi Zion and Zionist movements promoted remarkably similar ideas. Millenarist and Jewish visionaries alike spoke of the hour being propitious for the coming of the Messiah and favourable for settlement in the land of Israel. Both groups established schools to teach the lore of the land and to educate youth in agricultural pursuits. Many years after the disappearance of American settlers from Palestine, their story reverberated in Jewish polemic literature.

The Emergence of Jewish Public Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

The Emergence of Jewish Public Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Palestine

Inflation or Deflation in Nineteenth-Century Syria and Palestine

From the 1830s on Syria and Palestine exported monetary metal to pay for an import surplus. Nevertheless, there is evidence of a concomitant inflationary process. The apparent contradiction is resolved by a theoretical argument and by reference to the dual nature of the Ottoman monetary system. Government-induced inflation in terms of the domestic (token and paper) money reinforced the rising price of full-bodied coins, caused by the adverse balance of trade.