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Modern-Vernacular Housing and Settlement in Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1918 Yael Allweil Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion IIT, Israel

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Modern-Vernacular Housing and Settlement in Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1918 Yael Allweil Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion IIT, Israel Plantation: Modern-Vernacular Housing and Settlement in Ottoman Palestine, 1858-1918 Yael Allweil Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning, Technion IIT, Israel dramatic change unfolded in Palestine’s landscape starting in the 1860s. Within about forty A years, Palestine’s fortified cities spilled beyond their centuries-old walls, and a new milieu of landowners developed a vast new housing and settlement form: the plantation. Historical maps and accounts of Jaffa indicate that some 7500 dunam (750 hectares) of groves were developed around the region between 1858 and 1878, dotted with a large number of structures (fig. 1a-b).1 This new landscape comprised vast fields and orchards, landlord mansions, and small clusters of serf huts. Plantations were sites for a “new” Palestinian society, where all land-related social ties were irrevo- cably transformed, replacing older land-based identities with a modern model of for-profit produc- tion. Modern-vernacular architecture housed new ways of life and conceptions of polity among the newly-expansive lands, vast accumulated wealth, and exploitation of the landless. Plantations were the result of the period of modernization in the Ottoman Empire and its gover- nance, during which land was identified as the Empire’s greatest asset, and leaders aimed to better exploit it.2 The Tanzimat, or reforms, included the 1858 land modernization code, which commodi- fied state lands, annulled cultivation-based ownership, and applied a modern system of legal regis- tration throughout the Empire.3 Consequently, a few local and absentee owners obtained vast lands, while many fellahin (peasants) lost access to land altogether, and with it many other rights as well. It has been argued that the overarching consequences of land modernization marked the beginning of modernization in the Middle East.4 Surprisingly, Western travelers and consuls, members of the local elite, and even Ottoman officials discussed the post-reform built environment as a traditional landscape representative of native or biblical Palestine, often using the Bible itself as a reference, disregarding—knowingly or ignorantly— that it was in fact a modern landscape.5 Palestine’s plantations are an opportunity to recognize the 1 Ruth Kark, Jaffa: A City in Evolution: 1799-1917, Jerusalem: Yad Ben Zvi, 1990; Walid Khalidi, Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic history of the Palestinians, 1876-1948, Washington, DC: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1991; Noa Kadman, Erased from Space and Consciousness: Israel and the depopulated Palestinian villages of 1948, Jerusalem: November Books, 2009. 2 Alexander Scholch, Palestine in Transformation, 1856-1882: Studies in Social, Economic, and Political Development, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1993; David Kushner (ed.), Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period: political, social, and economic transformation, Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi; Leiden: Brill, 1986. 3 Haim Gerber, “A new look at the Tanzimat: The case of the Province of Jerusalem,”in David Kushner (ed.), Palestine in the Late Ottoman Period, op. cit. (note 2), p. 30-46, 1986; Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. 4 Kamel Karpat, “The Land Regime, Social Structure and Modernization,”in William Polk and Richard Chambers (eds.), Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1968 (Publications of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 1); Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914, op. cit. (note 3). 5 George Robinson Lees, Village Life in Palestine: A Description of the Religion, Home Life, Manners, Customs, Characteristics and Superstitions of the Peasants of the Holy Land, with Reference to the Bible, London; New York, NY: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1905; Tawfiq Canaan, The Palestinian Arab House: Its Architecture and Folklore, Jerusalem: abe Journal 9-10 | 2016 1 h Fig. 1a: Jaffa and Environs, 1842. Source: Skyring, Charles Francis, London, 1843. Courtesy of the Jewish National & University Library, Jerusalem. g Fig. 1b: Theodor Sandel map of the Jaffa area, 1878-79. Source: Courtesy of Or Alexandrowicz. Hammed plantation marked with an H by author. abe Journal 9-10 | 2016 2 dynamic and slippery nature of the relation between “modern” and “vernacular.” This study examines Palestine’s post-1858 plantation as a modern-vernacular built environment, where two competing Palestinian publics were consolidated: the plantation-landowner conception of a territorial homeland, where the national elite would replace the Ottoman Empire, and the lan- dless-serf conception of village identity that aligned fellahin of different plantations with the aim of circumventing dispossession from the land. These two political projects did not start with proclama- tions and political action but rather with housing—the formation of two distinct dwelling environ- ments characteristic of the plantation and new to Palestine: the landowner’s multi-room mansion and the serf’s detached hut. Here I present an architectural analysis of these two housing forms as two modern-vernacular alterations to the pre-reform courtyard house. In what follows, I conduct detailed architectural studies of the plantations surrounding Acre and Jaffa. My aims are to (1) extend the discussion of the relationship between vernacular and modern architecture beyond the well discussed, unidirectional appropriation of vernacular forms by moder- nism, and (2) complicate the Manichean relationship between modern-orientalist and vernacular-na- tive that paralyzes research on the vernacular built environment for Palestine and beyond. Vernacular Built Environment: Modern Perspectives There is a rich body of literature on vernacular settings in the context of the modern projects of na- tionalism, colonialism, and post-colonialism, which have often viewed native, vernacular built en- vironments as non-modern. Colonialism distinguishes the vernacular as “other” to modernity and modernist formal vocabulary, requiring modernization as a justification for colonial domination, as shown by Paul Rabinow, Mark Crinson, and others following the work of Edward Said.6 The modern project of nationalism has been using the native and his vernacular landscape and built environment in order to produce and justify national claims to sovereignty as located in native vernacular settings.7 Sibel Bozdogan, Michelangelo Sabatino, Lawrence Vale, and other architectural historians have exa- mined architects’ use of vernacular architecture as a conscious fabrication of the character and history of a nation, articulating and cementing forms and practices as national.8 The postcolonial perspective largely focuses on the modern colonial project and on the watershed appearance of Western colo- nialism, assuming the vernacular as aboriginal, as can be seen in historical and geographical studies of Palestine by Mark LeVine and Derek Gregory.9 Postcolonial scholarship thus tends to disregard the richness of vernacular history, including the phenomena of urban and rural migrations, changes in landed economy, the scale of the territorial homeland (namely, village, region, or nation), and changes in patterns of ownership over a vast historical scope of imperial and proto-national history before the coming of Western colonialism. Syrian Orphanage Press, 1933; Rafiq Al-Tamimi and Muhammad Bahjat, Wilayat Beirut, Beirut: Dar Lahid Khater, [1916] 1979. 6 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1979; Paul Rabinow, French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture, London: Routledge, 1996. 7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, NY: Verso Books, 2006. 8 Sibel Bozdoğan, Modernism and Nation Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2002 (Studies in modernity and national identity); Michaelangelo Sabatino, “Space of Criticism: Exhibitions and the Vernacular in Italian Modernism,” Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 62, no. 3, 2009, p. 35-52; Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity, London: Routledge, 2008. 9 Mark Levine, Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005; Derek Gregory, The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq, New York, NY: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. abe Journal 9-10 | 2016 3 The discipline of architectural and urban history made an important contribution by exploring the Manichean divide between vernacular and modern, and showing how the idea of the vernacular has contributed to shaping built environments that have been considered modern. Mark Crinson terms this the “double end” of modern architecture, capable of projecting the image of Empire while also displaying regional peculiarities and traces of the locality.10 While the vernacular was treated by modernists as an ahistorical “found object,” Michelangelo Sabatino, Francesco Passanti, and others understand the vernacular as defined vis-à-vis modernism in architecture, and thus as a modern construct produced by modern projections of nationalism and colonialism.11 Invoking non-Western modernity and alternative modernities, Duanfung Lu, Timothy Mitchell, and Tom Avermaete
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