TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Year 1900, the Age of Possibilities
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0001
[urbanity;identities;Borges;uchronia;Catherine Nicault;Henry Laurens;Tom Segev]
"Jerusalem 1900" is a historical moment is difficult to define without falling into nostalgia and the trap of legendary history. Yet there are some pathways to it. The period was marked by a degree of equilibrium within the urban community of Jerusalem, a measure of harmony among its inhabitants, a sort of urbanity that linked the different segments of the city’s population. This moment flourished in the context of Ottoman imperial rule, which began in Jerusalem in 1517 and lasted until 1917, when it gave way to occupation followed by the British Mandate. It was also a time of some secularization in the urban life of the three-times-holy city, a process fed by a greater porosity of identity affiliations and the relative plasticity of religious sites of memory. Identities, territorial markers, and borders were not frozen as they are today. All of this outlines an urban society that was more fluid, more open, with looser traditions that, thanks to their ambiguous nature, were less offensive.
1. The Underside of Maps: One City or Four Quarters?
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0002
[maps;cartography;neighbourhoods;boundaries;walls;intramuros;Adar Arnon;Mishkenot Sha’ananim;quadripartition]
“How many parts to Jerusalem?” This is often the general reader’s reaction to current works on the holy city, which, even before discussing its location and history, begin by splitting it up into four pieces, presenting the reader with four rectilinear segments, painstakingly drawn as if they were four apple slices neatly arranged on a dessert plate (“Jewish,” “Christian,” “Muslim,” and “Armenian” quarters). Each of these presumed quarters is drawn in a different bright color. The choice of colors might vary, but the intention is always the same: the city is compartmentalized, and care is taken so as not to go over the supposedly inherent dividing lines. Jerusalem, the object of the study, even barely broached is already dismembered. The rhetoric is always the same, artful but misleading: to grasp the “complexity” of the three-times-holy city, we are told, we must first understand its “diversity.” In reality, however, this praiseworthy statement of intent is followed by the opposite process: the complexity of population dynamics in the different parts of the city is set aside to give way to a simplistic classification resembling a childhood puzzle in four colors.
2. Origins of the City as Museum
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0003
[archeology;George Williams;Felix de Saulcy;Pierre Loti;Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand;Edward Robinson;patrimonalization]
The uneasiness in the face of a city that had become unreadable was the real driving force of the archaeological and missionary movements that began in the second half of the nineteenth century. To understand this state of mind, we must keep in mind that reconquest of the holy city through scholarship and archaeology began late in the nineteenth century. Chateaubriand in 1806, Lamartine in 1832, and all their fellow travelers in the first half of the century could only lament a topography that had become ungraspable; they were unable to act. The very first visits by scholars of biblical studies only began in the 1840s with Edward Robinson, who published his first Biblical Researches in Boston in 1841, and with the British clergyman George Williams, who published his Historical and Topographical Notices on Jerusalem in 1845. Félix de Saulcy, arriving at Jerusalem for a first inspection tour at the end of 1850, only produced, like his colleagues of the time, some descriptions of places based on observations of sites and reading of the holy texts.There was as yet no expedition with the means and the required permits to undertake any archaeological work—that is, to dig below ground.
3. Still-Undetermined Holy Sites
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0004
[Maurice Halbwachs;Holy Sites;Garden Tomb;Lithostrotos;Conder;Hybridity;Golgotha;Holy Sepulchre;Gihon]
Historians have not yet taken the full measure of Halbwachs’s Legendary Topography in understanding how the construction of holy sites functioned in Jerusalem. Indeed, this work is rarely listed in the bibliographies of the city’s history. Yet Halbwach’s work on the logics of memorial stratification, of topographic localization, and of confessional designation does offer valuable keys to understanding the contemporary physiognomy of the city, which was stabilizing precisely at the turn of the twentieth century. We must note that Halbwachs helps us grasp two distinct but complementary processes in the construction of holy sites: on the one hand, a process of localization that tends toward the gradual specification of the geographic location of given biblical events; on the other hand, a process of designation that tends to polarize the confessional attribution and identity of a holy site. In other words, Halbwachs sheds light on both how the holy sites came to be located within urban space and how they came to be organized within the various faiths existing in the city—all of which, as we know, draw from the same Old Testament texts.
4. The Scale of the Empire
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0005
[Tanzimat;Ottomanism;Mutessarif;Pacha;Cadi;Mehmed Tevfik Bey;Olivier Bouquet;Johann Büssow;Joseph Navon]
Today there are many young researchers using local administrative sources to propound a new vision of Jerusalem’s Ottoman history. In Turkey itself, the present crisis of secular Kemalism and the return to favor of the Ottoman legacy have made possible, over nearly two decades, somewhat of a renaissance of Ottoman studies, and especially a renewal of university training in Arabic script and Ottoman paleography, both indispensable for conducting research in the kilometers of records preserved in the imperial archives of Istanbul, where authorized access has been considerably eased since the 1990s. It is now possible to set Jerusalem back into the Ottoman fabric of which it was a partbetween 1517 and 1917, particularly at the end of the nineteenth century, when the imperial administration was modernizing by leaps and bounds. This historiographical breakthrough is shedding precious light on the Ottoman legacy, largely ignored until now and yet so relevant today for the Mediterranean basin. Such research is particularly indispensable in the specific case of Jerusalem. Only the Ottoman context enables us to understand how the different communities of the holy city were able to live together relatively harmoniously until World War I.
5. The Municipal Revolution
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0006
[Municipality;Yussuf al Khalidi;mazbata;David Yellin;Aref el-Aref;Emanuel Gutmann;Ruth Kark;Public Space]
The history of the Ottoman municipality of Jerusalem is not just a matter of scholarly interest. In the previous chapter, by placing ourselves at the scale of empire, we were able to show that Ottoman Palestine at the end of the nineteenth century was anything but “a distant province, without law or administration.” Now we must delve deeper and tighten the focus of the analysis so as to discern the local and endogenous social dynamics. We speak here of a “municipal revolution” because, for the first time in the history of the holy city, a common administrative institution was charged with representing all the inhabitants without regard to their ethnic and religious differences. The municipal revolution was thus also an urban revolution, so true is it that in Jerusalem as elsewhere, “urban identity” was constructed on a municipal scale—that is, on a certain “living together” involving the whole of the city and its specific potentialities.If the imperial scale served to highlight those who were “citizens of the empire”, the municipal scale makes it possible to distinguish the people who were also “urban dwellers of Jerusalem” since the founding of the municipal institution in the 1860s.
6. The Wild Revolutionary Days of 1908
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0007
[Young Turks;Revolution;Ali Ekrem Bey;Clock Tower;Rouhi al Khalidi;Ali Subhi Bey;Jawhariyya;Abdul Hamid]
On August 7, 1908, at day’s end, thousands of people converged toward the Jaffa Gate and assembled at the foot of the clock tower that had been completed the previous year, to celebrate the reestablishment of the Ottoman constitution.Since these revolutionary days really did happen, they can be used as an observation platform for the urban society of the time. To this end, we must avoid oversimplification and instead take into account the intrinsic complexity of these events. This revolutionary episode, in fact, modified relations between the inhabitants and the central power, the inhabitants’ views of each other, and also the religious, cultural, and national representations that took on a new configuration with regard to Ottoman imperial power. There is no question here of painting a sugarcoated portrait of this forgotten revolution: in Jerusalem, beyond the collective rejoicing, fracture lines were already appearing or reappearing in the urban community; however, as we will see, these conflicts were not structured according to the present-day binary schema of “Jews versus Palestinians.” Because it unsettles hackneyed analytic frameworks, the 1908 revolution in Jerusalem is unquestionably a revelatory historical event.
7. Intersecting Identities
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0008
[Albert Antébi;Neguib Azoury;Theodor Herzl;relational history;identities;Elias Sanbar;Alliance Israélite Universelle]
As we reach the close of this inquiry, now that we have a more complete and more complex image of Jerusalem in the years around 1900, it is time to ask the fundamental question: what can we finally say about the identities, the relative positioning, and the contrasting views that the city dwellers of Jerusalem had of each other? The difficulty of the answer lies in the incongruity of the question, as these mutual gazes have to be sought in the diversity, complexity, and probably the fluidity of urban identities that interweave to fabricate the singular identity of the holy city in these years around 1900. Drawing on the historiographical gains of relational history, which seeks to analyze the effects of mutual interactions between social groupings, we can make progress toward an “urban” history of Jerusalem, one that takes into account the three essential dimensions of urban “living-together”: proximity, diversity, and interaction. To pursue this, in our last chapter, we must think about both intercommunity relationships and intracommunity relationships, and we must do so from various observation points.
Conclusion: The Bifurcation of Time
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.003.0009
[Eliezer Ben Yehuda;Gilles Deleuze;Lucien Febvre;British Mandate;urbanness]
Contrary to what some might think, this book is not a voice crying in the wilderness, it is not an isolated viewpoint. For the last twenty years or so, following the hopes raised by the defunct “peace process”, many historians have become conscious of the fundamental importance of a new history of Jerusalem in the years 1870–1930. Conferences, group publications, occasional monographs have gradually enriched this “other history” of Jerusalem, even though these historiographical renewals too often remainconfined to the limited sphere of specialists and academics. Young Palestinian,Israeli, European, and American historians meet at conferences, exchange their viewpoints in more or less friendly manner, share their discoveries and archives, but these advances have a hard time reaching the public at large, perhaps left ignorant for fear of triggering controversies and misunderstandings. And yet, the role of history is to help enlighten public debate. It is this book’s ambition to be a point of departure for a genuine shared history of Jerusalem.
