Jerusalem's Ottoman Modernity

"I was born on Wednesday morning the 14th of January 1897, according to the Western calendar, which happened to be the eve of the Orthodox New Year. At the moment my father was preparing a tray of knafeh for the occasion as was customary then in Eastern Orthodox households. I was named Wasif after the Damascene Wasif bey al-'Adhem who was then my father's close friend and the sitting judge in Jerusalem's Criminal Court."^[2] Thus opens the memoirs of Wasif Jawhariyyeh, one of Jerusalem's most illustrious citizens: composer, 'oud player, poet, and chronicler.

Jawhariyyeh's memoirs span a period of sixty years (1904-1968) of Jerusalem's turbulent modern history, covering four regimes and five wars. More significantly it marks the transition of Palestinian society into modernity and the break-out of its Arab population beyond the ghettoized confines of the walled city.

His father, Jiryis (Girgis), was the mukhtar of the Eastern Orthodox community in the Old City (1884) and a member of Jerusalem's municipal council, serving under the Mayors Salim al-Husseini and Faidy al-Alami. Trained as a lawyer he was well versed in Muslim Shari' law and commanded several languages, including Greek, Turkish and Arabic. He worked briefly as a government tax assessor, but later turned to private business, becoming a successful silk farmer in Ezariyyeh and proprietor of a public café over the Jraisheh River. He was also a skilled icon maker and amateur musician—which accounts for his encouragement of Wasif to take on the 'oud early in his youth.

His mother, Hilaneh Barakat, descended from a leading Orthodox family from what later became known as the Christian Quarter. Having lived in the Barakat family compound before he moved to Haret al-Sa'diyyeh, his father Girgis became friendly to Hilaneh's father, and when the latter died at an early age, the young Jawhariyyeh took care of the two Barakat children—marrying Hilaneh, who was considerably younger than him, when she reached puberty.

Where do we place the Jawhariyyehs in the social hierarchies of Jerusalem at the turn of the nineteenth century_ The material provided by the author is somewhat confusing. On the one hand, the father and grandfather seem to have occupied important public positions in both the Ottoman civil service and in the city's institutions. As mentioned, Jiryis (also known as Girgis) was also a prominent member of the Orthodox Christian community and a delegate to the City Council. But the rest of the family seemed to have passed through a number of more modest occupations. At one point he refers to his grandfather as a shoemaker or tanner. His elder brother Khalil was initiated as a carpenter's apprentice before he was conscripted into the Ottoman army. Wasif himself worked in a number of odd jobs including, briefly, as a barber's assistant before he turned into an itinerant 'oud player and singer in wedding parties; his main income initially came from employment in the Ottoman and British civil service. It is not clear whether he was paid for his early employment—certainly the family was not happy with his career as a musician and wanted him to settle in a more respectable job. Later on, the family's fortunes improved significantly with the father becoming a prominent lawyer and bailiff. Khalil owned a successful café near Jaffa gate, and Wasif joined government service. We can say with some certainty that the family members occupied that precarious space between artisanal work and the middle ranks of the civil service. From the detailed description of the ceremony accompanying Girgis's funeral it becomes evident that the family had achieved social prominence in the Old City just before the Great War. In any case they were solid urbanites and held a remote, though benevolent, attitude to the peasantry of the neighboring villages with whom both father and son were to have substantial dealings.

It is impossible, however, to understand the Jawhariyyehs placement in pre-Mandate Palestine without relating to their critical bonds as protégés of the Husseini family in Jerusalem: feudal landlords and patricians of the city's inner circle of 'ayan (notables). Jiryis spent part of his early career looking after the Husseini estates in Jerusalem's western villages, particularly in Khirbet 'Amro. Wasif was "adopted" by Hussein Effendi, later mayor of Jerusalem, after the death of his father. Hussein Effendi set Wasif up in a number of jobs in the city and ensured that he was treated well in the Ottoman army. The family was on such intimate terms with their patrons that Wasif was entrusted with the welfare of Hussein Effendi's mistress, Persephone, when she became ill.

Wasif's vivid rendition of daily life in Haret al-Sa'diyyeh (situated between Bab al-Sahira and Via Dolorosa) during the first decade of last century marks one of the most valuable records of Palestinian urban life that exists anywhere. The account provides a first-rate primary source for the social historian and the ethnographer. Shifts towards the bourgeoisification of domestic living arrangements are periodized and described in detail:

Jawhariyyeh's cognitive map of Jerusalem's neighborhoods and the identification of communal boundaries prevalent in his youth reinforce the view that the division of the city into four confessional quarters was a later development. The new boundaries were demarcated by the British for purposes of preserving equilibrium between the city's populations on the basis of creating a modern sectarian balance between the four ancient communities. The basis of this balance was the preservation of the status quo in the administration of the holy sites carefully negotiated during the late Ottoman period and elaborated and codified in the early Mandate rule over the city.

The diaries implicitly challenge this notion of quarters, based on the regulation of relations between Jerusalemites in terms of their religious and ethnic habitat.^[5] In his rendition of daily life in the alleys of the Old City, we are struck by the weakness of this conception in two respects: one suggests that there was no clear delineation between neighborhood and religion; we see a substantial intermixing of religious groups in each quarter. The boundaries of habitat, furthermore, were the mahallat, the neighborhood network of social demarcations within which a substantial amount of communal solidarity is exhibited. Such cohesiveness was clearly articulated in periodic visitations and sharing of ceremonials, including weddings and funerals but also active participation in religious festivities. These solidarities undermined the fixity of the confessional system from a pre-modern (perhaps even primordial) network of affinities.

But the confessional boundaries were being undermined also by the rise of the nationalist movement in Palestine: initially in the context of the constitutional Ottoman movement at the turn of the century when secular intellectuals like Pandeli Jozi and Khalil Sakakini began to desert their religious affiliations and identify with the larger Arab nation. It was further strengthened after the 1908 coup, which received a lot of support among intellectual circles in Jerusalem; and later in the anti-Turkish trends within greater Syrian nationalism. These shifts can be gleaned in these memoirs in a haphazard and selective manner. Jawhariyyeh—who was not involved in any political party but was an Ottoman patriot, and later a Palestinian nationalist—clearly believed that the move towards modernity (and presumably post-Ottoman nationalism) was linked to the move outside the city by the rising middle classes.^[6] Already members of the notable clans had established bases in Sheikh Jarrah to the north and in Wa'riyyeh to the south by the mid-nineteenth century.^[7] Within the Jewish population a similar move took place in the construction of the new neighbourhoods of Mea Shearim and Yemin Moshe, signaling a separation of ways between modern Palestinian Arab nationalism and Jewish communal consciousness—even before the entrenchment of Zionism among the city's Jewish population.^[8]

Jawhariyyeh's relationship with the Jewish community of Jerusalem is more complex. His narrative is no doubt colored by retroactive memories of the clashes of the twenties and of 1936 with the Zionist movement, and with a vision mediated by the events of the 1948 war. But he is also aware of a different era when as a teenager he used to participate in the events of Purim (which he describes in great detail, including the costumes he used to wear with his brother Khalil), and in family picnics in the spring to the shrine of Shimon al-Siddiq in Wadi al-Joz. He also mentions a number of Sephardic families with whom his family was on intimate terms, including Elishar, Hazzan, Anteibi, Mani (those from Hebron) and Navon. Wasif himself performed or became acquainted with a number of Jewish musicians—including Shihadeh, Badi'a Masabni's 'oud player.^[9] He also mentions the prominent role played by groups of Aleppo Jews known as Dallatiyyeh who resided in Jerusalem. These were Sephardic choral musicians who performed Andalusian music at weddings of Jerusalem Arabs.^[10] Before the onset of the Mandate Wasif used to play in a number of Jewish communities surrounding Jerusalem.^[11] In one such episode he accompanies on his 'oud an Ashkenazi choral group at the house of Khawaja (master) Salmon the Taylor [sic] in Montifiore (i.e. Yemin Moshe), performing what appears to be oriental music. Their Arabic rendition of a well-known piece at the time ("Na'im Na'im hal-Rihan") was so convoluted that Wasif assumed it was "a new Ashkenazi ballad." His mock-Ashkenazi version of this song became a popular item in his comical repertoire, which he often performed. "This," he adds sadly, "was before the onset of the cursed Balfour Declaration."^[12]

The Growth of the Modern City

For the social historian the Jawhariyyeh diaries also provide a contemporary record of the growth of the city outside the city walls. Although Sheikh Jarrah, Yemin Moshe, and Wa'riyyeh were established before his time, Wasif narrates the growth of Musrara and the Mascobiyyeh neighborhood along Jaffa Road in his boyhood, followed by Talbieh and Katamon in the 1930s. He witnessed the inauguration of the new road linking the Old City to Musrara under the patronage of Mayor Faidy Alami in 1906. This expansion—and a similar one which preceded it in Baq'a—saw the move of hundreds of families (many of them individually named here) to modern tiled buildings and mortar fortified by iron railings. All these new dwellings had rain-fed water reservoirs in their courtyards to sustain them in the long dry summers of Jerusalem. It was in these neighborhoods that the implements of modernity were also introduced: electricity (first in the Notre Dame compound just opposite the New Gate); the automobile on Jaffa Road; the cinematograph; and, above all, the phonograph, which introduced Jawhariyyeh to the world of Salameh Hijazi and Sayyid Darwish.

The memoirs devote an extended section to musical and artistic life in Jerusalem during the Ottoman period. He includes a long list of 'oud makers, 'oud players, dancers and singers. Many of these performed as family teams at local weddings and later—during the Mandate—in cafés and cabarets outside the walled city. In combination with his special compendium on the typology of musical traditions that prevailed in Palestine at the turn of the century, Jahariyyeh's observations provide us with an original and unique source on the modernization of Arabic music in Bilad al-Sham and the influence of such great innovators as Sheikh Yusif al-Minyalawi and Sayyid Darwish on provincial capitals like Jerusalem.^[13] In his musical notebook, written before the end of the war, he devised a notation procedure to convert the Arabic-Ottoman quarter-note system for the 'oud into the Western system of musical notation.^[14]

Wasif himself grew up in a household whose members were either amateur musicians, 'oud players, or sophisticated listeners ("only my brother Khalil was unable to distinguish a good note from a bad one"). His father Jiryis treated Qur'anic incantations as a form of music and taught his children to distinguish good adhan (calls to prayer) from bad ones. In one episode Jiryis leads a delegation from Haret al-Sa'diyyeh to the Awqaf Department to request the replacement of a local Imam whose voice he could not stand. When the official in charge questioned Abu Khalil's credentials as a Christian to request the removal of the mu'adhen, he responded in verse that was replete with double entendre:

When it was pointed out to him that the mu'adhen was a poor orphan who had a large family to support, the elder Jawhariyyeh suggested that they relocate him to the mosque by the American Colony (Sa'd wa Sa'eed), where fewer people would suffer from his voice.^[15] The Awqaf people were so amused by this outrageous attitude that they obliged Jawhariyyeh and replaced the Sheikh.

A self-taught chronicler and musician, Wasif had a photographic memory, which enabled him to recall not only the dramatic (the entry of Jamal Pasha and later Lord Allenby to Jerusalem), but also the quotidian thrill of the seemingly mundane. Accompanying his father—a trained solicitor, who served as an administrator for Salim Affendi al-Husseini's rural estates in Khirbet Deir 'Amro and its environments—he was able to observe firsthand the links that tied Jerusalem's feudal aristocracy with the surrounding villages and their peasant population. As he grew up in the shadow of his father, Wasif was able to forge for himself a local reputation as a foremost 'oud player and composer. Playing in the mansions of Jerusalem's urban notables he recorded—with great wit and satire—the musings and tribulations of the city's patricians and paupers.

What comes out of this is an intimate portrait of Jerusalem's Ottoman modernity at the very moment when Zionism was about to clash with an emerging Palestinian nationalism. He recounts the introduction of the phonograph and cinematograph to the city's cafés in 1910, and the wonderment he experienced as he saw the moving images for the first time in the Russian compound ("the entry fee was one Ottoman bishlik, paid at the door"). In 1912 at the municipal park by Jaffa Street, he saw for the first time a horseless car ("a Ford" driven my Mr. Vester of the American Colony). In the summer of 1914 he rode a donkey with his father to Baq'a in Jerusalem's southern suburbs to watch the landing of an Ottoman military airplane: "The city was deserted from its inhabitants on this hot summer day. Peddlers made a fortune selling water." Unfortunately the plane crashed in Samakh (Tiberius), and its two Turkish pilots, officers Nuri and Isma'il, were killed. Wasif composed a special eulogy in their honor, which—he claims—was sung throughout the country. In the autumn of that year he did manage to see the landing of his first airplane in Upper Baq'a, manned by German and Turkish officers.

Deeply involved in the affairs of the Arab Orthodox community, Wasif nevertheless exhibits a unique affinity to the Muslim culture of his city. His narrative compels us to rethink the received wisdom about Jerusalem's communal and confessional structure in Ottoman times. Endless stories—many of them scandalous and satirical—draw a picture of profound triadic co-existence of Christian and Jewish families in the heart of what came to be known as the Muslim Quarter. This was not the tolerant co-habitation of protected dhimmi minorities, but the positive engagement in the affairs of neighbors whose religion was coincidental to their wider urban heritage. There is also no doubt that the Jawhariyyeh family, though deeply conscious of its Orthodox heritage, was also immersed in Muslim culture. Girgis made his sons read and memorize the Qur'an at an early age. When he died in September of 1914, he was eulogized by Khalil al-Sakakini ("with the death of Jawhariyyeh the era of wit has come to an end"), followed by Sheikh Ali Rimawi, his close companion: "I cannot believe that Jawhariyyeh's soul will remain in Zion [cemetery]. For tonight surely it will move to Mamilla [referring to the Muslim cemetery]." Such an attitude clearly went beyond the current normative rules of coexistence at the time, and Wasif notes how spinsters of the Orthodox community started to mutter: "Yawh…Did you hear that ladies_ All his life he kept the company of Muslims, now they have christened him a Muslim in death."

As in the freethinking reflections of Khalil al-Sakakini from the Mandate period (particularly in Kadha Ana Ya Dunia), many of Jawhariyyeh's anecdotes challenge social and religious taboos whose exposure, or at least verbal transgression, would appear unthinkable in today's puritanical atmosphere. Few of them are printable even today, either because they are potentially libelous, or because they adopt an outrageous attitude towards religious sensibilities. An example is this anecdote titled "a dog's religion":

These numerous references to his father's wit actually have the unintended result of delineating the critical changes that engulfed Jerusalem during the generational span that separates the two Jawhariyyehs. This is particularly valuable when we listen to the father's description of Jerusalem's geography outside the city's gates:

How did Wasif obtain these recollections from his father_ Were they based on an earlier diary kept by Girgis the elder, or was he simply recording from memory_^[19] I was unable to ascertain the answer. Whatever the case, we have here a juxtaposed layering of two succinct generational narratives, a diary within a diary, that guides us skillfully from the mid-century of the Tanzimat period to the commencement of World War I. The result reveals a city on the verge of a great transition from the confinement of a relatively closed confessional community within the city gates to a sudden opening of external cityscape which allowed scores of Old City families to invade the western and northern New City neighborhoods in Musrara, Maskobiyyeh, Mea Sha'arim, and Baq'a (Talbieh and Qatamon were still in their embryonic stage). The tempo and nature of this expansion is mirrored in the evolution of Wasif's own character as he grows into early adulthood.

Endnotes

¹This essay is based on Wasif Jawhariyyeh's hand written memoirs (three volumes). The manuscript is being edited and will be published in Arabic as Oud wa Barood: The Jerusalem Diaries of Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904-1948), ed. Issam Nassar and Salim Tamari (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies, 2001). This essay deals only with the first volume of the diaries. I would like to thank Mr. George Jawhariyyeh (in Athens) and Ms. Aya Jawhariyyeh Shaker (in Jerusalem) for making Wasif's manuscripts and photographic collection available to the Institute and for their invaluable help during the editing of the manuscript. return
²Wasif Jawhariyyeh began writing his memoirs systematically in 1947 in Jericho at the Agricultural Development Society in Jericho on the basis of earlier notes he had in his possession. He continued writing in Beirut during the sixties. That he began writing in the 1940s can be gleaned from his comment on the Mascobiyyeh neighborhood during the Ottoman period, where he mentions in passing "today these quarters serve as the center of British intelligence" (p. 220). In a communication from his son, George Jawhariyyeh, however, he informs me that his stepmother Karimeh (Wasif's second wife, now eighty-five), who now lives in Peru, insists that Wasif wrote the whole diary late in his life from memory: "He had total recall and a photographic memory for details." This claim, however, contradicts the various references in the diaries to places and events that indicated that he was writing about them during the Mandate. In addition to the three-volume manuscript, he has left a collection of musical notes and notations, a compendium of poetry, and a large collection of popular proverbs and their interpretation. His late daughter Yusra Arnita (died March 2000) used the latter collection in her book on Palestinian folklore, Al-Funun al-Sha'biyya fi filasteen (Beirut: The Palestine Research Centre, 1988). return
³Wasif Jawhariyyeh MS, vol. 1, p. 11. All subsequent page references refer to volume one of the diary manuscript. return
⁴Ibid., p. 11. return
⁵See, for example, Yoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: The Old City (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1984), pp. 155-166 (for the Muslim Quarter); pp. 219-237 (for the Christian Quarter); and pp. 315-332 (for the Jewish Quarter). return
⁶Although he was clearly a protégé of the Husseini family, he does not indicate that he was a sympathizer of the Palestine Arab Party, which they led at a later date. When his patron Hussein al-Husseini died, he allied himself with Ragheb al-Nashashibi, the opponent of Haj Amin, without identifying himself with the Defense Party. These shifts should not be read as a mark of opportunism in Jawhariyyeh's attitude, especially since both families conceived of Wasif as an artist and musician and had no political expectations from him. George Jawhariyyeh wrote to me from Athens, however, that Wasif was an enthusiastic supporter of Haj Amin as well as the commander Abdul Qadir al-Husseini. Later on in his life he became a Nasserite. He was also on good terms with both Fakhri and Raghib al-Nashashibi—although he was very critical of their pro-British policies (letter from Athens, 7 July 2000). return
⁷See Rochelle Davis, "Ottoman Jerusalem," in Jerusalem 1948: The Arab Neighbourhoods and their Fate in the War (Jerusalem: Institute of Jerusalem Studies & Badil, 1999), pp. 10-29. return
⁸Yehoshua Ben-Arieh, Jerusalem in the 19th Century: Emergence of the New City (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi, 1986), pp. 152-172. return
⁹Jawhariyyeh MS, p. 64. return
¹⁰Ibid., p. 155. return
¹¹Ibid., p. 327ff. return
¹²Ibid., p. 328. return
¹³Wasif Jawhariyyeh, musical notebook, untitled, undated, and unpublished, 576 pages. This handwritten manuscript, dedicated to the Ottoman Sultan and signed "Wasif Jawhariyyeh - Quds Sharif" was clearly written in the Ottoman period. It is divided into five sections: 1) Muwashahhat and Anashid (choral pieces); 2) Madhahib and Adwar (theatrical roles), 3) "Love Songs," 4) Balads and Quartets, 5) Taqatiq and Erotic Songs. return
¹⁴Musical notebook, "Tarkib al-Nota al-Ifranjiyya 'ala Awtar al-'oud," pp. 9-10. return
¹⁵Jawhariyyeh MS, p. 162. return
¹⁶Ibid., p. 197. return
¹⁷He is probably referring to the location of the Palestine Museum in Bab al-Sahira, which became the Rockefeller Museum after 1967. return
¹⁸Jawhariyyeh MS, p. 201. return
¹⁹Mr. George Jawhariyyeh kindly provided me with a copy of a diary kept by his grandfather Girgis in which he noted events from the nineteenth century. However, this manuscript is basically a family logbook in which he recorded births, marriages, christenings, and deaths, and contains almost no social observations of the kind attributed to him by Wasif here. return

Jerusalem Quarterly File

Issue 9, 2000