Jerusalem in the Age of Possibilities

Jerusalem 1900: The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities by Vincent Lemire. Translated by Catherine Tihanyi and Lys Ann Weiss. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017

There has been a misleading historiographic tendency to describe Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century as a backwater town in a declining Ottoman Empire. Vincent Lemire’s Jerusalem 1900 decisively and masterfully debunks that assessment by examining records in the Ottoman archives of Istanbul, as well as contemporaneous reports from foreign diplomats and Jerusalem municipal officials. He offers a renewed appreciation for a city that was much more than the site of religious monuments and timeless pilgrimages; it was a dynamic city with an informed and engaged citizenry who actively identified with it and celebrated policies designed to improve their lives. One cannot help but imagine a lively city undergoing rapid change during a dramatic historical juncture—a far cry from the city’s tortured present state.

Historian Vincent Lemire has written other books about Jerusalem reviewed in Jerusalem Story; he is also the director of the European Union-funded project Open Jerusalem, a database that makes archival records about Jerusalem available to the public. He explains that the topic of this book came to him in a somewhat indirect manner. While conducting research for his dissertation on hydraulic systems, he came across references to wells, cisterns, and springs in Jerusalem, which struck him as an indication that Jerusalem was anything but a backwater. Following 15 years of research on documents he located in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul with the help of a Turkish historian, Lemire found a treasure trove of administrative material that weaves a nuanced view of a dynamic Jerusalem during the final two decades of the empire.

The first three chapters of the book describe aspects of Jerusalem as a “dreamed city”—through maps, as a biblical museum, and in terms of structured religious memory. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss Ottoman administration of the city and the local elites who worked with the municipality to create “a genuine shared public space.”1 The last two chapters take up the topic of public debate that was not drawn on religious lines, and the emergence of two parallel identities, one associated with Palestinian nationalism and the other with Zionism. The lasting impression is of a city at a crossroads whose grim trajectory was by no means predetermined. By the end of the book, the reader not only has a nuanced appreciation for the rich history of Jerusalem but also a deep sense of loss.

The population of Jerusalem, the administrative capital of the Ottoman province of Filastin, was more than 20,000 in 1870, but less than 70,000 in 1914. It included Muslims, Christians, and Jews, as well as some Europeans due to the establishment of European consulates in the city starting in the 1840s. By the end of the 19th century, the municipality had autonomous institutions, and almost half the population lived beyond the walls of the Old City. Lemire notes that there existed

While economic woes and political suppression certainly weighed heavily on many Ottoman subjects at the turn of the 20th century, Lemire’s nuanced history offers that to be a resident of Jerusalem at the time must not have been all that bad. For many, the future would have looked open and full of possibility.

Yet, this is not the impression one gets from reading many historical accounts of the city at the turn of the 20th century, accounts that often dismiss it as a dusty, ancient space valued for its religious significance to pilgrims and their camels. As Lemire makes clear, one of the reasons for this historiographic misconception has been the difficulty of accessing sources from the time period. There is a wealth of material about these years housed in Turkish archives, but they are in Ottoman Turkish and only became available in the 1990s due to “the transformation of Turkey’s relationship to its Ottoman legacy and the rise of Ottomanist historians, more and more of whom are able to decipher the archives of the old empire.”3 Until they became accessible, historians relied on Westerners’ memoirs, travel narratives, and consular records—in other words, the views of outsiders who bring with them Orientalist biases and even outright contempt for their surroundings. Under a Western gaze, the city was “asleep” or “frozen,” it exemplified “Ottoman negligence” or “Oriental laziness,” and it was lacking in modernity.4

Another cause for the misconception might relate to historians’ own biases about the city, leading them to rely on the same sets of Western sources and regurgitate the same Orientalist tropes. As one example, Lemire cites historian Ruth Kirk, who states categorically that, in Jerusalem, “it is very difficult to find evidence of the inhabitants’ identification with the city.”5 Regrettably, she was not an outlier. And if you are convinced that there is no such thing as urban governance in the Muslim world, as she expresses in her writing, why look for evidence to the contrary?

This biased reading of history is prevalent among many ideologically driven scholars. For many Israeli and Zionist historians, the narrative of a backward Jerusalem was convenient and entirely consistent with the Zionist “land without a people” justification for ethnically cleansing Palestine in 1948 and establishing a Jewish state. And as Lemire observes, even Arab historians had fallen into that mindset, believing that the harshness of the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which ended in 1909, indicated a time of stagnation. Thankfully, historians who studied the origins of Palestinian nationalism helped bring about a reevaluation of this late period of Ottoman rule and the lively civic and political discussions of that time.

As Lemire explains in chapter 1, the mapping of the Old City into quarters was the brainchild of a British cartographer who visited Jerusalem in the mid-19th century. This ahistorical and unnatural delineation of the city’s interconnected neighborhoods has been used ever since by outsiders, but the city’s indigenous residents know how nonsensical it is to think of that square mile in terms of neatly compartmentalized quarters whose members knew their places and stuck to them. The “four quarters” concept papers over the rich diversity, linkages, and social realities within and among the confessional and ethnic groups of the Old City, such as the shared Arabic language of most residents, or the Russian origin of some Christians and Jews, or the influx of families from other parts of the Ottoman Empire, such as Armenians during World War I. In reality, the so-called quarters were more porous than the description suggests.

Why and how did this notion of a quadripartite division of the Old City arise? Lemire posits that it was

It gained traction, from one tourist and one pilgrim to another.

Another explanation is that the division was intended to help religious travelers find their way, but the map confused people with places. The focus was on religious monuments, because that is what users of the map traveled to Jerusalem to see. This, too, helps explain why some maps show only two mosques and one madrasa in the Old City, despite it being a Muslim-majority space with many other Muslim monuments. But then, the intended users of the maps were largely not there to visit mosques.

Is there an alternative to the four quarters schema? In fact, there is, and it was developed in the 15th century. The map devised by Jerusalemite jurist Mujir al-Din, described by Lemire as “the best known and most complete,”7 recounts 19 neighborhoods, only 3 of which were named for ethno-religious communities. In censuses taken at the end of the 19th century, the Old City was divided into seven regions (Bab Hutta, Sa‘diyya, Bab al-Amud, Nasara, Sharaf, Silsila, and Wad), only one of which referred to an ethno-religious community (Nasara).8 These seven designations are the ones that residents use today.

In Jerusalem’s New City, built north and west of the city walls starting in the late 19th century, census records refer to 25 neighborhoods, only 4 of which have ethno-religious designations: Bukhariyya, the neighborhood of the Bukhari Jews; Habash, the Ethiopian neighborhood; Yahudiyya, the neighborhood of the Jews; and Isra’iliyya, the neighborhood of the Israeli Knesset. Most refer to functional elements or other descriptors, such as Masabin, which refers to soap (sabun) factories, and Talbiyya carries the name of the property owner, Talib. Some names are still in use, like Talbiyya and Musrara, but most were replaced with Hebrew names after 1948. Lemire states emphatically that in the mixed neighborhoods of the New City, families lived side by side, irrespective of religion.

Within 16 years, the percentage of Jerusalem’s population outside the Old City walls jumped from 6 in 1881 (2,000 people) to almost 50 in 1897 (25,000 people). They came from all denominations and did not have the same rights as residents of the Old City. For example, New City residents paid real estate taxes, while residents of the “holy city” did not.9

In chapter 2, Lemire describes how Western travelers to Jerusalem had little interest in getting to know the living, breathing city they were in. Instead, they searched for and lamented the Jerusalem of pictures and prints that they could imagine as a place Jesus might have walked.

One has to marvel that these religious visitors traveled vast distances at considerable cost and discomfort and then couldn’t really come to terms with what they saw. Lemire maintains that European travelers to Jerusalem “no longer recognized” the city, because it did not conform to the biblical Jerusalem of their imaginations.10 That sense gave rise to the Western archaeological missions that began in the second half of the 19th century with the goal of reconstituting Jerusalem as it was believed to be during the time of Jesus Christ. And so, the work of memorialization, explored in chapter 3, began. By 1900, Jerusalem had been transformed “into an open-air biblical museum.”11

The work to discover and memorialize Christian and Jewish sites was carried out by Europeans. The relatively small size of Jerusalem’s Christian community might have prompted Western Christians to action. Lemire posits that because they were in the majority demographically and politically, Muslims did not seem to have bothered much with this. Another explanation might be that the “Islamic worldview [was] less attached to places than to texts.”12 Lemire also reminds us that

Lemire describes the identification of the locations of the Garden Tomb and the City of David to demonstrate the focus and energy Western Christians put into identifying biblical locations for religious tourism.

The relatively recent declassification of Ottoman archival records in Istanbul has allowed for a new and rich reading of social and administrative life in Jerusalem at the turn of the 20th century. In chapter 4, Lemire argues that Jerusalem was one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Ottoman Empire, comparable to Alexandria, Beirut, and Salonica, and that it experienced a “social and cultural flowering” from 1880 to 1910.14

The first train station in the city was built in 1892, connecting it to Jaffa and sea travel in just a few hours. British consul John Dickson described the inauguration as “an event of world historical import” that “caused the greatest of sensation [sic] and the most extreme excitement among the inhabitants of Jerusalem.”15

In 1896, the municipality moved to a new building near Jaffa Gate, which, straddling the Old City and the new one, “helped reinforce the centrality of the Jaffa Gate neighborhood, the beating heart of the rapidly expanding modern city.”16

The municipality opened the first state high school in Jerusalem in 1868. By 1901, the Jerusalem district had 374 schools that educated 30,000 children. “For a population of 300,000 (including all generations), this represented the best performance in the empire in terms of schooling.”17

The Ottoman sultan took personal interest in the city, and officials regarded postings to Jerusalem as a promotion. The governor of Jerusalem answered directly to the Porte in Istanbul, which means he wielded substantial authority in his own right. Civil and military functions were handled separately. Judicial authority was handled by a judge who oversaw civil and religious tribunals. Twenty-three administrators handled Islamic waqf, property registration and taxation, travel documents, the municipality, and other departments—quite a large staff for a nondescript little town!

European diplomatic staff reported positively on Jerusalem municipal administrators, describing them in references as reform-oriented and committed to improvements in the city. For example, a British diplomat describes measures taken by authorities to prevent the spread of cholera in 1903. Moreover, conditions for voting in municipal elections were comparable to many European countries regarding age, ownership of property, and male gender.

Lemire summarizes what the record shows about Jerusalem’s governors:

Print journalism expanded in Jerusalem beginning in the 1880s; religious printing had been available since the 1930s. To communicate administrative news to residents, the government began publishing newspapers in Arabic and Ottoman Turkish in 1905 and distributing them in all villages of the district. People waited eagerly for the delivery and read them collectively. The number of newspapers grew markedly after the 1908 revolution.19

The city’s governors took pains to ensure that drinking water was equitably distributed to all residents, and they communicated their plans to residents who took a keen interest in city plans. Sultan Suleiman had installed a piping system and distribution network in 1540, which were maintained and modernized. The renovation of the hydraulic system in 1901 with imported pipes brought the city residents together in celebration.