Jerusalem as It Was and What It Could Be Again

Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation, 1917–Present, edited and introduction by Lena Jayyusi (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2015).

                                                                         ***

Jerusalem today is closed off not only to the entire Arab world but also to Palestinians in neighboring towns and cities, its residents hounded, and al-Aqsa Mosque the site of confrontations between worshippers and armed Israeli soldiers and settlers.

It is soothing, then, to imagine the Jerusalem of the early 20th century that the editor describes in the “Introduction” of Jerusalem Interrupted, winner of the Palestine Book Award in 2015. Here we meet Jerusalem the urban, cosmopolitan center connected to other regional capital cities—Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Istanbul—through kinship, commerce, cultural practices, and other activities. It is a dynamic city of the arts, hometown to a host of cultures and ethnicities who lived together as harmoniously as can be expected in any city undergoing rapid change. As editor Lena Jayyusi (also a communications and media expert) explains in the “Introduction,” the natural transformations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries came to an end in 1948. After that year’s war and Palestinian exile, changes that suited foreign political interests would be grafted onto the city.

Not surprisingly, then, this cataclysmic event defines the two parts of the book; there is a before 1948 (part I) and after 1948 (part II). Before 1948, Jerusalemites were involved in creating and responding to changes in the region. After 1948, the city was controlled by nonindigenous forces that single-mindedly focused on redefining the space to make it exclusively and unalterably Jewish. This is a narrow, shabby plan for a city that in the early 20th century was poised for so much more. The final chapter of the book provides a vision of the future with possibilities and alternatives to the current dead end.

Part I begins with a chapter (1) on the development of photography: the tool that will allow Jerusalem’s indigenous people to document how they lived and viewed themselves in their city. The author dates the arrival of photography in Jerusalem to 1839 and the beginning of local photography (as practiced by Arab and Armenian photographers as a career) to the 1860s.

Pioneers include Garabed Kirkorian, who opened the first photographic studio, and Khalil Raad, the first Arab photographer in Palestine to capture landscapes and rural life.

Common themes of photography in the early 20th century were portrait photography (groups of family members or friends posing for photos in a studio); postmortem photography (pictures of deceased people surrounded by relatives); and war photography (men posing in their uniforms before being sent off to war).

Chapter 2 dives into the visual arts, covering almost the first half of the 20th century. Until the establishment of the British Mandate in 1921, Jerusalem artists were very much a part of the art world in other Arab cities—Haifa, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus. Later, from 1921 until the revolt of the mid-1930s, Palestinian artists were influenced by European Renaissance works, only to then became more interested in modernism. The author provides an overview of the work of the city’s main artists in each of these phases.

Music in Ottoman Jerusalem, the theme of chapter 3, begins appropriately enough with the diaries of Wasif Jawhariyya and the wealth of information he provides (including a four-page list of the most admired amateur musicians, many of whom came from the old established Muslim and Christian Jerusalem families). The author describes a mature musical tradition that was integral to the region, from North Africa and Egypt to Lebanon, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.