Jerusalem 1900: The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities

JERUSALEM 1900

JERUSALEM 1900

The Holy City in the Age of Possibilities

VINCENT LEMIRE

Translated by Catherine Tihanyi and Lys Ann Weiss

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

www.centrenationaldulivre.fr

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

Originally published in France as Jérusalem 1900. La ville sainte à l’âge des possibles, by Vincent Lemire

© Armand Colin, Paris, 2013

ARMAND COLIN is a trademark of DUNOD Editeur, 11 rue Paul Bert, 92240 Malakoff

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18823-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-18837-9 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226188379.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lemire, Vincent, 1973– author. | Tihanyi, Catherine, translator. | Weiss, Lys Ann, translator.

Title: Jerusalem 1900 : the Holy City in the age of possibilities / Vincent Lemire ; translated by Catherine Tihanyi and Lys Ann Weiss.

Other titles: Jérusalem 1900. English

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Translation of: Jérusalem 1900 : la ville sainte à l’âge des possibles. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033493 | ISBN 9780226188232 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226188379 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Jerusalem—History—19th century. | Jerusalem—History—20th century. | Urban anthropology—Jerusalem. | Municipal government—Jerusalem.

Classification: LCC DS109.925 .L4613 2017 | DDC 956.94/42034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033493

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Robert Ilbert, citizen of the Mediterranean

When history tries to rebuild, to reconstitute what in the past was the way of life, the way of perceiving the world, the way of living relationships with others, one must keep in mind that the people of the past had a future that may be called the future of the past, which forms part of our own past. Yet a great part of the future of the past was never realized. People of the past had dreams, desires, utopias that make up a reservoir of unrealized meaning. An important aspect of the rereading and revision of the transmitted traditions thus consists in discerning the promises not fulfilled by the past. The past is not only events, what happened and can no longer be changed (a very inadequate definition of the past), but something that remains alive in memory, thanks to what I might call the arrows of the future that were not shot or whose trajectory was interrupted. In this sense, the unrealized future of the past perhaps makes up the richest part of a tradition.

—Paul Ricoeur, Identité narrative et communauté historique, Cahiers de politique autrement (October 1994)

CONTENTS

List of Maps and Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Translators’ Note

Introduction: The Year 1900, the Age of Possibilities

Forgotten History

A Moment to Delineate, a Period to Define

The Causes of Failure

The Causes of Forgetting

Why Remember?

An Itinerary

1. The Underside of Maps: One City or Four Quarters?

A Rough-Cut Cartography

External Boundaries, Internal Fractures

Language, Citizenship, Property: Some Useful Concepts

Inside and Outside City Walls

The Four Quarters: A Late and Exogenous Topography

The New City: Mixed Neighborhoods and Jewish Neighborhoods

Summary: Of People and Places

2. Origins of the City as Museum

Turning One’s Back on the Modern City

Lament over the Tomb-City

A City Becoming Unreadable

From Scholarship to Archaeology

Reconstructing Christ’s Jerusalem

Toward an Intimate History of Archaeology and Pilgrimage

Biblical Archaeology: No Return Inventions

3. Still-Undetermined Holy Sites

Maurice Halbwachs as Advance Scout

Localization and Designation

How to Construct a Holy Site: The Example of the Garden Tomb

Global and Structural Uncertainty

Original Hybridity

4. The Scale of the Empire

Ottomanism: A Defense against Fracturing Identities?

The Seraglio People: Imperial Administration in Jerusalem

Countering the Image of the Turk’s Head: A Gallery of Portraits

September 1, 1900: Imperial Jubilee in Jerusalem

The Road Network: A City Opened Up, a Region Ottomanized

The Railway: A Jewish Contractor, French Capital, and Muslim Inauguration

Ottomanism and Shared Urbanness: Drinking Water for All

5. The Municipal Revolution

Origin of the Municipality: An Urban Community?

Garbage Collection and the Municipalization of Urban Powers

Elected Council Members: Citizens, City Dwellers, and Property Owners

Yussuf Ziya al-Khalidi, the Founding Mayor

At the Heart of Municipal Action: The Defense of Public Space

Urbanites All? Public Health, Leisure, and Municipal Finances

6. The Wild Revolutionary Days of 1908

What Time Was It in Jerusalem?

The Wild Days of August 1908: Jerusalem’s Forgotten Revolution

Unexpected Fracture Lines

New Vectors of Lively Public Opinion

Underneath Communities, Classes?

7. Intersecting Identities

Albert Antébi, Levantine Urbanite

An Arab Awakening in the Chaos of Battle

Jerusalem and the Parochialism of the People of the Holy Land

Jerusalem, the Thrice-Holy City, and the Municipium

Conclusion: The Bifurcation of Time

The Bird People

Ben-Yehuda, the Outsider

Toward a Shared History

Notes

Bibliography

Index

MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

TABLE

FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew out of a course taught to undergraduate history majors at the University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée between 2008 and 2010. My warm thanks to these students for their willingness to listen and for the unexpected questions they asked, which helped move this research forward. Thanks also to Frédéric Moret, Valérie Theis, Fabienne Bock, Geneviève Bührer-Thierry, Loïc Vadelorge, and to all my colleagues in the seminar Comparative Analysis of Powers (ACP / EA 3350), who supported this project throughout. In Jerusalem, the hospitable team of the Centre de Recherche Français à Jérusalem (CRFJ / CNRS-MAE USR 3132) made it possible for me to regularly spend time on the ground and in the archives. I am especially grateful for the support of its successive directors, Dominique Bourel, Sophie Kessler-Mesguich, Olivier Tourny, and, currently, Julien Loiseau, and also to Lyse Baer and Laurence Mouchnino, who extended such a gracious welcome to visitors.

Thanks to the first editor of this work, Caroline Leclerc, who made it possible that my manuscript became the book published in French by Armand Colin (2013). Thanks to Priya Nelson for welcoming this work to the University of Chicago Press, which will give it a larger audience in the English-speaking world. Thanks to Catherine Tihanyi and Lys Ann Weiss for translating the book into English. Thanks to Lys Ann Weiss and Ellen Kladky for their outstanding editorial work on the English version. Thanks to Robert Ilbert, my dissertation supervisor, who continues to inspire our way of thinking about the notion of urbanity, between Alexandria and Jerusalem. And thanks to Patrick Boucheron for his loyal and demanding friendship, which, over the last twenty years, has been irreplaceable.

While writing is a solitary pursuit, research can only be conducted through encounters, supports, involvements, helping hands, and encouragement. Thus I would like to cordially acknowledge those with whom I crossed paths over the last twenty years at my lectures, reflections, and conversations, and also those who helped me in Jerusalem to walk as peacefully as possible on the sometimes perilous slopes of that sacred city. Although there are many, everyone must be named: Katell Berthelot, Vincent Azoulay, Charles Enderlin, Pierre-Yves Saunier, Jean-Luc Pinol, Khader Salameh, Maurice Sartre, David Kessler, Esther Benbassa, Christian Ingrao, Valérie Hannin, Gadi Algazi, Marius Schattner, Marie-Armelle Beaulieu, Ronnie Ellenblum, Rashid Khalidi, Dan Bitan, Taline Ter Minassian, Emmanuel Laurentin, Denis Charbit, Johann Büssow, Haïfa Khalidi, Yusuf Natsheh, Helena Rigaud, Philippe Artières, Benjamin Barthe, Denis Bocquet, Anouk Cohen, Elias Sanbar, Salim Tamari, Issam Nassar, Michael Mahler, Leïla Shahid, Jean-François Pérouse, Meron Benvenisti, Adel Budeiri, Hanna Borne, George Hintlian, Daniel Rivet, Quentin Deluermoz, Michelle Campos, Laurence Américi, Serguey Loktionov, Katerina Stathi, Frédéric Abécassis, Nora Lafi, Roberto Mazza, Marie-Alpais Torchebœuf, Abla Muhtadi, Jean-Pierre Filiu, Serife Eroglu, Manea Erna Shirinyan, Jonas Sibony, Gaëlle Collin, Marie-Christine Bornes-Varol, Guillaume Vareilles, Jens Hanssen, Gudrun Krämer, Mahmoud Yazbak, Arman Khachatryan, David Labude, Henry Laurens, Françoise Lemaire, Menachem Klein, Jean-Michel de Tarragon, Mohammed Safadi, Abigail Jacobson, Dominique Trimbur, Samer Melki, Agathe Brillet, Elena Astafieva, Emmanuelle Giry, Raed Bader, Lucette Valensi, Bérangère Fourquaux, François Dumasy, Musa Sroor, Irène Salenson, Aurélia Smotriez, Huda al-Imam, Hervé Barbé, Philippe Bourmaud, Alain Dieckhoff, Sonya Mirzoyan, Beshara Doumani, Efraïm Levy, Lora Gerd, Bernard Heyberger, Manoël Pénicaud, Menachem Levin, Béatrice Hérold, Joseph Confavreux, Jonathan Rokem, Hassan Ahmed Hassan, Yaron Ben-Naeh, Emeline Rotolo, Erkal Unal, Amnon Cohen, Nufan al-Sawariah, Emre Uçaryigit, Anne Leblay-Kinoshita, Guy Stroumsa, Flavia Ruani, Stefania Ruggieri, Agamemnon Tselikas, Merav Mack, Önder Bayir, Chloé Rosner, Amos Reichman, Moti Ben-Ari, Dario Ingiusto, Vanessa Guéno, Mohammed Adnan al-Bakhit, Reuven Amitaï, Raja Khalidi, and Anne Kazazian. Each and every one of these people has crossed the path of this research, from Paris to Jerusalem and beyond; each has nourished this book by giving tips for reading, criticisms, instructions, invitations, requests, and shared experiences.

The core team-members of the European Research Council project Open Jerusalem (Opening Jerusalem Archives, for a connected history of ‘Citadinité’ in the Holy City, 1840–1940) have considerably nourished this research with their advice and suggestions. Thus, thanks to Stéphane Ancel, Yasemin Avci, Leyla Dakhli, Angelos Dalachanis, Abdulhameed al-Kayyali, Falestin Naïli, Yann Potin, and Maria-Chiara Rioli. Without a doubt, the results of this large, collective, sincere, fluid, and itinerant investigation will allow the contemporary history of Jerusalem to be further renewed and disclosed in the years to come (www.openjlem.hypotheses.org).

TRANSLATORS’ NOTE

Quotations in the text are drawn, wherever feasible, from published English-language editions; where no English-language edition was available, the translations are our own.

INTRODUCTION

The Year 1900, the Age of Possibilities

Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures. In one of them, I am your enemy.

—Jorge Luis Borges

When setting out to discover an unknown city, you have to travel light. You need to shed your preconceived notions and stereotypical images in order to perceive another reality. To set out on the discovery of Jerusalem 1900, the bare minimum of baggage you need to carry can be summed up in just a few lines: At the end of the nineteenth century, Jerusalem was a part of the Ottoman empire. Since 1872 it had been the administrative capital of a district called Kudüs-i Sherif or Filastin in the imperial archives. It had 20,000 inhabitants in 1870 and 70,000 on the eve of World War I. The walled part of the city was barely one square kilometer; perched at an altitude of roughly 760 meters atop the Palestinian ridge that runs across the region from north to south. The first European consulates opened up in the 1840s, and Western pilgrims became numerous from the 1880s on. Jerusalem was the common cradle of the three monotheistic religions and contained major holy sites for the faithful from all over the world. Its inhabitants were Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but also shopkeepers, teachers, engineers, and stone cutters. The Zionist movement was officially founded in Basel in 1897, and Jewish immigration to Jerusalem quickly increased. At the end of the nineteenth century, the city modernized and established autonomous municipal institutions. For the holy city, it was the age of possibilities, a moment largely forgotten today, buried under the rubble of wars and the noise of ideological quarrels.

FORGOTTEN HISTORY

This 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.¹ 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. This period was not a magical parenthesis, because history does not unfold in parentheses. It was anything but a golden age, because a golden age is essentially a gilded age as told by earnest chroniclers. In fact, this history has been largely forgotten, as no one remembers or wants to remember. For the historian, then, it is no more than an age of possibilities, but one that we must take account of as a tipping point in the chronology, a pivotal moment when, for some years, the horizon was still open.

This short and subtle entre-temps, or interval, allows us to tell another history of the holy city, one based on still little-known municipal archives, on figures that had remained in shadow, on some surprising episodes that belie the image of a holy city that was essentially immobile, in conflict, and fragmented.² If it was really a between-time, then we ought to be able to distinguish it from what preceded and followed. In the years around 1900, Jerusalem was not just a collection of disparate and disputed holy places, and it was not yet a field of maneuvers for nationalist struggles or for the interests of the great powers. During its ephemeral Belle Époque, Jerusalem was not merely an open-air biblical museum, a mosaic of sanctuaries more or less solidly anchored to sacred texts, and it had not yet reached the tipping point into the geopolitical chronicle of its fixed battles. From this point of view, this book aims to set itself apart from a teleological vision of Jerusalem’s history: the kind of telephone history in which an unbroken phone line links the era of the Crusades to the territorial partition of the city in 1948 and all the way to today’s rifts. This traditional history of the holy city was a deterministic history, pointing to its own ending and told by stringing together mechanical causalities like beads on a necklace. Yet, by placing ourselves on the balancing point of the years around 1900, we find nothing to show that the tragedy was already under way and the city’s fate already determined. Between the sanctuary city and the battleground city there was another city, and this fleeting period has left its traces. This history sketched itself out in the uncertainty of a troubled time, but archives exist that bear witness to this forgotten moment.³

A MOMENT TO DELINEATE, A PERIOD TO DEFINE

It is hard to capture this historical moment within the safe boundaries of chronology. Of course, the moment in question does not simply balance on the thin line that separates two centuries: Jerusalem 1900 is not limited to the year 1900. Rather, this historical moment lasted several years, or perhaps several decades, depending on whether it is defined with greater or less precision. Digging deep, we can see the first indications of an urban consciousness with the early establishment of a municipal institution in Jerusalem in the mid-1860s, on the initiative of members of the local elite. Following this institutional chronological timeline, we can fix its endpoint halfway through the British Mandate when, in 1934, the breakup of the municipal council into two distinct entities, one Jewish and the other Arab, marked the unrecognized but decisive preamble to the 1948 territorial partition of the city. This is the chronological frame of this history in its broadest version: from the mid-1860s to the mid-1930s, thus for about seventy years, a functioning, inter-community municipal institution administered the common affairs of all the inhabitants of the holy city.⁴ This historical fact, largely ignored in the historiography, is worth reporting on its own merits. The sharing of municipal responsibilities was obviously not perfect, but it did indeed exist, and it resonates strangely today, at a time when the splitting up, or sharing out, of Jerusalem lies at the heart of discussions on the future of the Middle East.⁵

If we constrain the chronology in order to examine the phenomenon more closely, and to give it greater density and coherence, we may note that the 1880s provide us with municipal archives that are thenceforth continuous, and which reveal a holy city spreading out from behind its ancient walls. Outside the walls a new city was emerging, whose modernity contrasted with the closed-in image of the old city. By the end of the 1890s almost half the population resided outside the walls, in contrast to barely 10 percent two decades earlier. At the other end of the chronology, we must remember that the taking of Jerusalem by General Allenby in 1917 and the establishment of the Mandate in 1922, far from encouraging the expression of a shared urban consciousness, instead favored the splintering of religious identities, especially as a result of administrative regulations for individual religious assignment imposed by the Mandate authorities.⁶ These four decades, from the 1880s to the beginning of the 1920s, were indeed a time of another history of Jerusalem, for at that time the dividing lines of urban society moved away from traditional community identities in favor of other solidarities and other conflicts.

As we come even closer to our chronological target, a whole series of events draws our attention. First, an inventory in the style of Jacques Prévert—that is, one neither exhaustive not exhaustively analyzed—may stir our imagination. Let us begin with the 1890s. The opening of the first train station in the holy city in 1892 was a decisive event in the city’s history and its relationship with the world: the new rail line put Jerusalem only a few hours away from Jaffa and the Mediterranean, thus eliminating long days of travel by camel or horse-drawn carriage. Two years later, in 1894, after thirty years of debate, English Protestants created the Garden of the Tomb, an alternative, open-air Holy Sepulcher intended to compete with the one traditionally consecrated by various Catholic and Orthodox churches. This episode, among many others, evidenced the uncertainty that still surrounded most holy sites in Jerusalem.⁷ In 1896, the move of the municipal offices to a brand-new building, on the boundary of the old city and the new, bore witness to the rise in power of the municipal institution and helped reinforce the centrality of the Jaffa Gate neighborhood, the beating heart of the rapidly expanding modern city.⁸

This process accelerated over the next decade. In 1900, during the jubilee of the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, several new public buildings were opened by an urban community that was becoming increasingly visible. The following year, in 1901, the renovation of the hydraulic canals was likewise the occasion for numerous ceremonies in which all the inhabitants of the city participated, whatever their religious affiliation.⁹ In 1907 the installation of an enormous, four-sided clock made it possible to display from then on a shared and secularized time beyond the rhythms of each community’s prayers. In 1908, at the time of the Young Turks revolution, the scenes of popular rejoicing and countless speeches that accompanied the reestablishment of the Ottoman constitution also gave a picture of a city in motion, open to the flow of ideas running through the world at that time. Finally, in 1909, building on the enthusiasm of the preceding year, entrepreneurs from all the city’s communities set up a Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Jerusalem. Reading the monthly bulletins published by this new institution, we find repeated appeals to fellow citizens of Jerusalem and to the city’s taxpayers, but also to good citizenship, the vital interests of the population, and public opinion—a vocabulary we might not have expected to find blooming on the sanctified pavement of the holy city.

THE CAUSES OF FAILURE

Before venturing on the study of this forgotten page of the city’s history, we must first address some major objections that might seem persuasive to readers. The first of these presents as a historical enigma: if Jerusalem enjoyed such harmony during those years, how can we explain its fall, from the end of the 1920s on, into the chaos of intercommunal conflicts? First, we must emphasize, right from the start, that there is no question of painting an idyllic portrait of a peaceful city blessed with a web of respect and mutual consideration between its inhabitants. Jerusalem around 1900 was, like all urban societies, a place crisscrossed by conflicts, competition, and power relations.¹⁰ The aim of this book is not to mask these antagonisms but to show that these conflicts did not yet happen along the fracture lines between communities that we see nowadays. The strength of Christian anti-Judaism, the complex positioning of the various Jewish communities regarding the Zionist project, the fundamental ambiguity of Ottomanized Arab elites toward the authorities in Istanbul, and the porosity of identity structures that were as yet poorly defined: all these facts, very often ignored or underestimated, show an urban society that was not necessarily peaceful but where the distribution of power opened up a wide range of historical possibilities.¹¹

This objection, which views the deterioration of the situation in the 1920s as evidence of an essential fragmentation natural to Jerusalem’s urban society, reveals profound blindness on the part of some researchers. In the face of the political disaster that has engulfed the holy city today, it is difficult to avoid a deterministic reading of the events. To open our eyes to a truly contemporary history of the years around 1900 in Jerusalem—that is, a direct history, as far as possible unaffected by the magnetic fields of later events—we must shed the mechanistic vision of history. A history in the present tense, one without tomorrow: this forms the substance and the fragility of this thing that I call, for want of a better term, Jerusalem 1900. Some historians recently have taken up the techniques of uchronia, a counter-factual or alternative history, by attempting to write and rewrite history with ifs and unexpected bifurcations.¹² This is not the intent here,