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Home , Arab Jews, Kamal Salibi, Sami Michael, Sasson Somekh, Wasif Jawhariyyeh

Ishaq al-Shami and the Predicament of the Arab in Salim Tamari

In his retrospective personal memoirs of the 1930s and 40s, Ta’ir 3ala Sindiyanah (Bird on an Oak Tree), the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi discusses two groups of Jewish companions he encountered during his student days during the French Mandate in .1 The first group consisted primarily of -speaking from and , several of whom took a prominent place in Arab nationalist, and anti-imperialist intellectual circles in the 1930s and 40s; the second he identifies as -speaking Jews from Palestine, who exhibited marked Zionist sympathies.2 While the first group blended smoothly with Arab social circles (many of them being middle class and secular in outlook), the second - recollects Salibi - kept to their own, hardly spoke any Arabic, and viewed their host environment with suspicion.3 10 But this assessment does not fairly reflect Shohat). Like most of those writers, Shami the complex composition of Palestinian was never at ease with either his Jewish or Jews during this period. Towards the end of Arab identity. Ottoman rule, native Jewish communities In Palestine, the picture was more lived in the four ‘holy cities’ of Palestine: complicated than that in neighbouring Safad, Tiberius, and . In the Arab countries. At least in , Iraq and first three of these communities Arabic and Syria-Lebanon, the community was largely Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speakers constituted homogeneous in ethnic and confessional a substantial proportion of the Jewish terms, with the internal social diversities that population, perhaps even a majority. Only in were reflected in the Christian population in Jerusalem did Yiddish gain an upper hand, the region: rural and urban, rich and poor. In due to the large pietistic Ashkenazi migration Palestine, Jewish pilgrimage and European 4 from Russia and Eastern Europe. Christian colonial projects (mostly the The life and writings of Ishaq Shami, Templars in the latter category) in the late described by Arnold Brand (perhaps nineteenth century brought a large number of with some exaggeration) as “one of the Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe most significant Palestinian writers of and Sephardic groups from Bulgaria, Turkey the [twentieth century],”5 shed important and North Africa. To these we should add light on one of the most contested of the smaller number of ‘native’ Jews who Levantine identities - that of the Arab Jew. traditionally resided in the four historic holy Or perhaps one should use the term Jewish cities. But ‘native’ Jews were not necessarily Arab - indicating that they were of of Iberian origins. They included also Jewish background, in the same category of substantial Yiddish speaking communities Christian Arabs.6 It is quite indicative that in who had established themselves in Palestine most places today this term is considered an centuries earlier. Language must have oxymoron. It designates a forgotten milieu played a crucial role in the formation of their of those Mashriqi Jews who identified identity. Of turn-of-the-century Hebron and themselves with the rising Arab national Jerusalem, Robert Cooper says this about the movement and its emancipatory programme, spoken languages of the Jewish communities, and who shared language and culture with relying on a report prepared by Luncz in their Muslim and Christian compatriots in 1882: greater Syria, Iraq, and , as early as Leaving aside the Karaites, a small the Ottoman administrative reforms of 1839. Jewish sect which rejected Talmudic The image of the Arab Jew became more , Luncz divided the Jewish poignant, first with the struggle for Ottoman population into Sephardim and decentralization and its accompanying Ashkenazim: the former were emphasis on , and decades subdivided into Sephardim proper, later when began to challenge the who spoke Judaeo-Spanish, and affinities of Jews in Arab countries in favour Moghrabim, who spoke Arabic; the of a separate Jewish homeland. One recalls latter [Ashkenazim] differed from the Egyptian critic and satirical essayist the Sephardim, he said, by ritual and Yaqoub Sanou’ from an earlier period, by the fact that they spoke Judaeo- and Iraqi liberal and leftist writers who German. It is interesting to note that immigrated to and Europe (Shim’on he found this language division to be Ballas, , , the major distinguishing characteristic Nissim Rejwan, and the cineaste Ella 11 of the communities. According to into the Turkish army as adequate reason to Luncz, [in Jerusalem] there were avoid naturalization and leave the country. 7,620 Sephardim, of whom 1,290 were There were rumors that the leaders of the Moghrabim, having come from the had bribed Turkish officials to make Maghreb or North Africa. As a rule, departure difficult and enforce naturalization, they were natives of the city, Turkish for fear that no Jews would remain in subjects, and fluent in Arabic.7 Palestine”.10 This battle for naturalization What appears here is that while the majority was largely lost as the ferocity of the war of native Jews spoke Arabic, there was drove thousands of Ottoman Arabs, including a preponderance of Ashkenazi residents Jews and , to evade service. whose mother tongue was either Yiddish or In his autobiography, Living with Jews, German.8 However in mixed cities like Safad Elie Elyachar suggests that - contrary to or Hebron, Arabic was the common language common perception - it was the Arabic between the Moghrabi, Sephardic and and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) speaking Ashkenazi groups, as well as their essential Ottoman Sephardic families in Jerusalem, link to their fellow Muslim and Christian and not the conservative Ashkenazim, who .9 spearheaded the move for secular education, for living outside the city walls in new By the turn of the century, one of the main modern neighbourhoods, and who mixed dividing factors among the resident Jewish and socialized freely with their Christian communities was the question of Ottoman and Muslim neighbours.11 One of the main citizenship. As long as the capitulations instruments of this integration were the granted Jewish immigrants privileges as Alliance Israelite schools (established in protégés of Britain and other European 1882) which introduced Jewish, and in powers, there seems to have been few some cases Christian and Muslim children incentives for their becoming subjects of the to secular education, and competed with Sultan. Two issues reversed this situation: Russian Orthodox, Anglican, Quaker and regulations stipulating that only Ottoman 12 subjects can purchase land, and the issue of Catholic schools. This view is confirmed loyalty to the regime once Istanbul went to by contemporary Palestinian writers such war in Crimea, and then against Britain and as Omar Saleh al-Barghouti who attended France in . The first issue made the Alliance school with a number of his 13 some of the leading Sephardic families in Muslim compatriots. Another instrument Jerusalem of great asset to the Zionist project was the impact of Nizamiyyah public schools since they were able to act as intermediaries established by the Ottoman authorities in in the purchase of land from Arab absentee the last third of the nineteenth century in owners to the benefit of the Jewish bringing together in one classroom children colonizing activities. On the second issue, who had previously attended separate loyalty to the regime, the central question Qur’anic kuttab, or schools (heder).14 that arose was service in the Ottoman army. On this, the of the Yishuv How Native Jews Ceased to be Arabs was divided, with the Sephardic community favouring naturalization (and implicitly, Writing several decades after the war, service in the army). Elyachar has already adopted the Zionist distinction between Arabs and Jews as if “Most Ashkenazim”, wrote a prominent they were binary ethnic identities. His family Sephardi leader, “regarded conscription 12 Eliahu Elyachar with his family in Jerusalem, WWI. Source: Courtesy of Julia Elyachar. moved to the Western suburbs from the Old seems to be the case. His family moved in City in 1902, and he had this to say about 1902 from the hybrid social atmosphere his mother tongue: “We knew Arabic and of the Old City to the exclusively Jewish conversed freely with our Arab neighbours, neighbourhood of Even Yisrael (and later but Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) was our mother to Beit Ya’akov near Mahane Yehuda).17 tongue. Until the British occupation, many With the exception of the Mea Shaarim Ashkenazim, as well as Arabs, spoke Judeo- neighbourhood, which was comprised of Spanish (Ladino). Hebrew, the holy tongue, a considerable number of Muslim families, was understood by Jews young and old, Jewish neighbourhoods in the New City since it linked Ashkenazi and oriental [i.e. were exclusively Jewish. Jawhariyyeh, who native] Jews in public life and business. Our lived in Mahallat al-Sa’diyyeh in the Old teachers at the Talmud schools would City and wrote in approximately the same explain Hebrew texts by translating them into period, recalls considerable socializing, Ladino.”15 cultural activities, commercial partnerships, and even political alliances (for example in Most city residents experienced the move the Red Crescent Society) between , from the Old City to the new suburbs as 18 a rupture, a move from the communal Jews, and Christians. Elyachar is also confinement of the walled city into the aware of this extensive socializing, but in his retrospective consciousness it appears modernity of the planned neighbourhoods.16 as a formalized ritual between confessional In Elyachar’s narrative however, the opposite 13 groups. This is especially noticeable in his day-long activities of singing and rendition of Passover ceremonials: festivities in the picnic known as the Yehudia. The slopes of Sheikh Jarrah The beautiful custom of exchanging would be teeming with participants, as gifts between Jewish and Moslem well as with peddlers. My brothers and families on the last day of Passover 20 has been preserved to this day. Arabs I never missed this festival. sent their Jewish friends a siniyah - a Living in Haret as-Sa’diyyah, one of the most round copper bowl - laden with fresh traditional neighbourhoods of the Old City, bread, goats’ butter and honey. the musician noted how Jewish and Christian The Jews returned the siniyah by the families interspersed in the local landscape same messenger, with matzot and were involved in a substantial number of home-made jam. My family maintains social and economic exchanges with their Muslim cohorts. His autobiography lists a this old tradition to this day.19 large number of Sephardic and native Jewish A parallel reading of Jerusalem religious (and Christian) households interspersed ritual, during Ramadan, Easter processions, within the Muslim community, rather than in and Passover, as recorded decades later the designated 'Jewish quarter' of Mahallat respectively by Jawhariyyeh and Elyachar, Sharaf. 21 can be very illustrative of how the ideological construction of the quotidian Within the Jewish intelligentsia, distinctions is filtered through the memories of these between ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ as if they were two writers: the first, a libertarian Arab perenial ethnic (and exclusive) categories, nationalist, and the second a Sephardic were not always self-evident, and did not Zionist. Living side by side, in contiguous go uncontested. As the position of European neighbourhoods, in the same period, and Zionist immigrants became privileged under describing the same events, the same ritual the terms of the Balfour Declaration during - it appears as if they are talking about two the Mandate, many native and Sephardic different cities. In his Ottoman memoirs, by Jews (in Palestine, as in neighbouring Arab way of contrast, Jawhariyyeh noted: countries) were placed in an untenable position. Their resistance to the imposition There were two caves in Sheikh Jarrah of Zionist identity was not primarily next to the estates of Abu Jbein which ideological, but cultural. The lure of Jewish Jews believed to be the tomb of Shimon nationalism was also the lure of modernity, the Just. Jewish pilgrims visited this of European liberalism, and of socialism. sanctuary twice a year when they But these attractions also set them apart from would spend the whole day in the olive their Arab and Levantine affinities, and pitted groves. Most of those were Eastern them against the independence movements Jews who kept their Arab traditions. in their own countries. Sociologist Yehouda They had a number of instrumental Shenhav argues that the return to Zion meant musical bands, of which I remember little to them (culturally or ideologically) those led by Haim, the oud and violin since they were already in Zion - in the sense player, and Zaki, the drummer from of the broader . And for those Aleppo. He had a beautiful voice and Jews who lived in Iraq and Syria, the move would sing mostly Andallusian scores. to Palestine (before 1948) was not seen as Jerusalem Christians and Muslims a move to Zion, but a move from one area of would share their Jewish compatriots’ the to another, with no significant

14 connotations in terms of sacred geography. Europe and Russia to the Middle East Even after the war, Mordechai Ben Porat, has significant implications, not only for when asked to describe his relocation from transcending the duality of East and West in to , replied, “I came relating to the historic placement of Jewish from an Arab environment, and I remain in communities in the Arab world, but also constant colloquy with the Arab environment. because such abandonment undermines the I also didn’t change my environment. I just apposition of Arab and Jew as distinctive moved from one place to another within it.”22 categories. In Shenhav’s view: “Acceptance of this [narrative]…shatters the (ostensible) Following the work of Amnon Raz binary polarity between Jewishness and Krakotzkin, Shenhav raises the notion of the Arabness and posits continuity instead. In ‘negation of the ’, through which other words, it proposes a historical model the Zionist project attempted to transcend that is not in conflict with Arabness and the ‘abnormal’ condition of the exile by that contested the de- project of creating the new Hebrew culture. ‘Negation Jewish nationalism.” of the diaspora’ led effectively to the negation of the memory of the galuti (exilic, It is also a model that allows other voices with a connotation of ‘ghetto mentality’) to be heard, such as that of writer Sami Jew, including the , and Michael: “We viewed ourselves as Arabs of simultaneously, of Palestinian memory.23 Jewish extraction, we felt even more Arab than Arabs....We did not feel we belonged to a Among Arab-Jewish writers the concept place but that the place belonged to us”.25 of ‘the negation of the Diaspora’, has also invited a counter-assertion of ‘primordiality’ In Victoria, Michael’s most controversial of Mizrahi Jews in Arab and other Middle novel, we observe the hesitant transition Eastern cultures, thus challenging the basic of the ghettoized identity of the Jewish Zionist tenant that the history of the Jews Baghdadi working class into a Zionist milieu was ‘frozen’ in the years of exile: forged in the Israeli ma’abarots (transition camps for new immigrants) of the 1950s.26 The primordiality thesis obliges us Michael seems to suggest that in their Iraqi to ask whether the Mizrahim [i.e. homeland the Jewish upper and middle ], whose diaspora is not classes were relatively integrated into local negated, need to return to history at Arab society, while their poorer brethren all. The answer is that they do not, - Victoria’s people - were confined to because theirs has been a continuous communal neighbourhoods. As these Jews history. The Jews of the Middle move to Israel, their traumatic encounter East according to this thesis did not with the remnants of the Palestinian Arab go through the history of Europe underclass allows them to enhance their and therefore need not return to it. uncertain status in the new pecking order. This version also disassembles the Their socialization into a reconstructed uniform, shared history of all Jews (a Hebrew culture was achieved at the price conception that entails the denial and of denigrating their Arab cultural roots. repression of other cultures, notably Recently, this process of conversion of ) that is posited by Zionist the Arab Jews into Israeli Mizrahim was historiography.24 described most eloquently by Sasson Deserting the static paradigm of the Somekh: ghettoized Jew projected from Eastern

15 When all were Ottomans Cornerstone ceremony for the Jerusalem Railway, 1890. Front row: The Ottoman Mutasarrif of Jerusalem Rashid Beyk, with Mayor Salim Husseini and the members of the Jerusalem Council and other city notables including Yusif Bey Navon - the grandfather of Elie Elyasher - and other members of the Elyachar family. Source: Courtesy of Julia Elyachar.

Today I am no longer an Arabic Jew, had to accept the norms that were I am 100 percent Israeli, but I came dictated here, and one of them was to Israel at age 17 as a full Arab from that someone who came from an Arab a cultural point of view. I lived in the country had to be a little religious. tent encampments of Tel Aviv and Bat That was the image, and it worked Yam, and after a year, I was recruited on them…. We are Arabic Jews just by the Israeli Air Force. I came as there are American Jews - it’s without knowing Hebrew, because a historical fact. But people did not in my home, there was not even one use that definition, because the Israeli Hebrew book - not even a Torah or society didn’t like it. I am not afraid (Jewish law) books. I grew up to use it, and there are others like me, in a secular, Jewish community - the such as the author Shimon Balas or middle class in Baghdad had begun Prof. Yehouda Shenhav, who do not try to be completely secular. No one in to erase it, but also do not use it too my family went to …. That much.27 situation changed, however, when But ‘use it’ or not, Somekh is aware and they cam to Israel, mainly among the makes us aware, that this Arabness of the ambitious immigrants who wanted Mizrahim was so transformed in the Israeli to get ahead. Anyone who wanted to cultural crucible that there is no easy way be a successful lawyer or accountant 16 to undo the transformation. Therefore, we It was through the Hebrew revivalist circle can speak today of cultural affinities, or that he encountered in Jerusalem, and his a symbiotic past, but a ‘return to the roots’ friendship to S. Y. Agnon and Yitzhaq ben would constitute an ideological project that Zvi that Shami became exposed to Zionist flies in the face of the reintegration of the ideas. Ishaq Shami became one of the few Mizrahim into a new Hebraic culture that Sephardic writers of that period to become implies a different relationship with an Arab active in Zionist circles, and he seems to past. have attracted the attention of David Ben 32 This dilemma of the Mizrahi Jew, subsumed Gurion as an ‘expert’ on Arab society. But into the European culture of the Zionist unlike the well known Jewish experts on project, is at the heart of Itzhaq Shami’s Arab affairs in the Histadrut and the Jewish conflation of identity. Born in 1888 in agency (for example, Yacoub Shim’oni and Hebron to a Damascene silk merchant, Ben Zvi himself), Shami was himself rooted Eliahu Sarwi (known as ‘esh-Shami‘) and a in Arab culture, and it was this dimension of Hebronite Sephardic mother, Rifqah Castel, his cultural identity that continued to torment Shami’s father spoke to him at home in him for the rest of his life. Arabic, while his mother communicated with Zfira Ogen traces Shami’s agony in a series him in Ladino.28 of letters written from Hebron to David Avitzur. The internal struggle became Shami’s formative years in Hebron were increasingly overt as the communal clashes crucial in shaping both his secular Jewish between Muslims and Jews (by this period, identity, and his Arab cultural affinities.29 one can almost begin to identify them Eliahu Shami, according to Hebronite as a conflict between Arabs and Jews) legend, was a strong-willed Arab patriarch intensified throughout Palestine, particularly who married three women - the third, native after the clashes of 1921. Shami seemed to Rifka Castel whom he married when he believe that Hebron was immune from these was 60, gave birth to Ishaq and his two clashes. His father’s death in 1927, however, brothers, Yacoub and Dawood. His textile personalized his political distress: trade brought him in close proximity with the peasant women of Mount Hebron, Now my friend, I can reveal what has from whom Ishaq later derived his intimate been going inside me and expose them knowledge of peasant conditions. For much without masks. One year after his of his youth, Ishaq wore the traditional death I can say that my relationship Khalili qumbaz (robe), and studied both to him was not strong enough. But Hebrew and Arabic at the local religious his death inflamed old wounds that school. Later, as a member of the Hebron I had thought were about to heal. yeshiva, he adopted “heretic attitudes” and Two different worlds! But in death we was asked to leave.30 By the age of 18, he forget everything. Living in poverty, had departed Hebron with lifelong friend need, loneliness and these old walls of David Avitzur, and joined the Ezra German the city, blackened by soot, I feel like teachers’ training college in Jerusalem, a mere insect. All his life was series of apparently against his father’s will. pain. And in his death he was alone, not even his children accompanying In Jerusalem, Shami began to don Western his coffin.33 clothes (franji) and discovered the ideas of the Jewish Enlightenment. He received The ‘two worlds’ referred to here are layered. his teacher’s training certificate in 1909.31 They identify the schism that distanced him 17 Immediately after the 1929 attacks on the Hebron, when the bulk of the community found itself compelled to leave the city, Shami’s despair reached a new nadir. Twice Shami was compelled to leave his Hebron home: first in the early 1920s when his rebellion against conventional religion drove him to seek refuge with a Muslim family in the city, and second during the attacks of 1929 when he took protection in the Mani household. In both cases his despair was expressed in a revulsion; he felt himself the prisoner of the Jewish ghetto.35 But it was typical of him to personalize his tragedy. Rather than blaming the situation on the increased ethnic-religious tensions in the country, he attributed them to his fate: Everything has lost its worth. For what is the use of anything if we are unable to reach our goals?…[This] is the secret of my tragedy - when I look back at my life, I realize that Ishaq Shami after he moved to Jerusalem and began wearing Western clothes. Source: Joseph Zernick. everything was distorted and wrong from the foundation. My very existence was a big mistake beginning with the from his father’s generation, and the wall smallest matters and ending with the that separated him from the orthodox Jewish biggest. Due to my own faults or due to community that he had deserted. But they fate, it does not matter. I have [spent] also mark the walls that separated the world the best eight years of my life in of Hebron from the modernity and freedom Bulgaria. I have not retained a single offered by Jerusalem and the ‘outside’ world. memory that deserves to be rekindled. Summing up this duality in his writings at My life in Jerusalem before that, and the time, the Hebrew writer Yehouda Burla in my birthplace, Hebron, and another wrote: nine years at the bottom - of killing and pillage, and poverty - all are the Shami is a son of Hebron, where Arab same. Here you have a life of dirt and life is exposed to view, intermixed with mud, without my ability to do what it the Jewish street like nowhere else in 36 Eretz Israel - he can provide layers takes. (Letter to David, 1930) of life from the Arab existence like a Shami moved to Tiberius briefly, and then man scooping up a handful of whey or with the family to where he remained cream. The Arabic language, customs, until his death. But at the height of his agony, way of life, all the features of folk and after leaving his birthplace, Hebron literature, are as evident and palpable always loomed in his dreams as the place to to the hand as they are in Hebron which he would return, metaphorically and itself.34 literally. In 1939, the last year of the Arab

18 Rebellion, he was still living in Haifa and a thousand pages and more, made up teaching. of several chapters. Again I dream, but who knows if I can ever realize Torrents of rain falling outside. My this dream. Yes my friend, pain often clothes are wet and my teeth are strengthens us, but sometimes it shattering from cold, and water undermines us and confiscates our flowing like rivers in the street. I am creative powers. (Letter to David, totally fatigued and walking aimlessly 38 looking for a shelter. Suddenly the Haifa, 1932) door opens, and a blinding light shatters the darkness. Around me Sins of the Fathers I hear heavenly music, filling my heart with contentment. I look around It is very hard to categorize Shami as me and there is a huge table flowing a writer, in part because he was an Arab with food, the delicious bounty of this Jew writing about Palestinian themes in late land, set by an elevation of carpets Ottoman Hebrew, (or perhaps one should say and silken pillows on which I saw in early modern Hebrew). He had begun his our elderly Hebronites (khitiyaritna career writing on themes of Arabic literary al Khalayleh), with their long white production, both in Arabic and Hebrew. beards and red cheeks - each one of The early essays that still exist include them holding a golden goblet, full contributions on Jurgi Zeidan historical of wine whose aroma was filling fiction, various tracts on Arab , and the room. I stood by the door for a an essay on the origins of modern Arab moment. Silently they made a place for theatre. The Jerusalem Municipal Archives me, and without stopping the music, also include correspondence in Arabic with they sat me next to them. (Letter to a number of his colleagues, including his 39 David from Haifa, 1939)37 fellow Sephardic writer Yehouda Burla, but apparently none of his Arabic writings are In this dream sequence it is interesting to available in print.40 note that his elderly Khalayleh (he wrote the Arabic expression in Hebrew) have the From a reading of his short stories and combined attributes of Muslim sheikhs novella, one can say that his style is highly (imposing ‘white beards, red cheeks’), and ethnographic, with a strong tendency towards Jewish patriarchs (‘drinking from golden naturalism (recalling Jack London in Call of wine goblets’). They were Muslim Jews. the Wild). The settings in many of his short stories were his immediate environment in To the very end of his life, Shami maintained and around Hebron, in Jerusalem, Jericho one single obsession: to write a major book and in Nablus, and most of the characters about life in Hebron, which to him meant the in those stories are entirely Muslim. It life of the country as a whole. The object of was this nativism which elicited from his hatred was also the source of his love and Anton Shammas singularly exceptional dreams. references to one of Shami’s books: “Shami I will tell you something about my brought into the scene of modern Hebrew dream. Last week I was seized by literature, some seventy years ago, a local insomnia. As I lay awake I began to Palestinian validity that hasn’t been marched, ponder a great book narrating the life or challenged, since ‘Vengeance of the of Hebron. It should be a volume of Fathers’ is the only novel in modern Hebrew

19 literature whose characters, landscapes and go off looking for work in the nearby narrative voice are all Palestinian.”41 Yet in town generally don’t even earn enough this novella there is a disturbing tendency to pay the price of a pita an a night’s to treat religious ritual, processions, tribal lodging at a khan. In bad times, gatherings, as a series of descriptive vignettes when money is scarce and all sorts of for the titillation of an external viewer: an creditors and tithe collectors descend ethnographic, if largely accurate, painting of on the fallah’s neck to such his very an Orientalist tableau. blood and marrow even before his grain is ripe, the best thing is to flee Only on two occasions does Shami deviate to the hills and hide until the storm from this externalizing discourse and become passes. The mukhtars and the sheikhs very subjective. The first concerns the will know their job, and will turn manner in which he contrasts the pecuniary the creditors away with a curt “Go, ways of the coastal plains dwellers and and return when blessings descend their cunning to the basic goodness of the again”.43 mountain people. Here it is clear where Shami’s Hebronite affinities lie, even if we The second departure from his clinical take into account the sarcastic tone: ethnographic style occurs in a very stark and poignant episode in Vengeance where Shami Those of the coastal plain - the describes the fate of Nabulsi women who Prophet will surely forgive them their went to bid farewell to the procession of men errant ways, and not injure the land in the Nabi Musa mawsim (festival) leaving on their account. They after all, have town towards Jericho. Shami’s weaving of a long way to come, and to double the rich details of the fantasia of the dancing work, to till their own plots as well as youth, of horse racings and dabkeh circles the fields and orchards of the Jews. is juxtaposed against the condition of the The Jewish khawajas don’t even pick womenfolk - who were not allowed to their own legumes: they come to the accompany the horsemen and who had to villages and offer high wages for turn around and head back to town. During a day’s work, and even give away the the fantasia, their spirits were lifted and they gleanings. …The sahil-dwellers are felt free to uncover their faces and ululate. shrewd calculators. Sharp, cunning But the moment of temporary elation was bargainers. 42 fleeting. The mountain people, by contrast, were at The celebration had finished so peace with themselves: quickly: the spectacle was over, and …the hill-dwellers can confidently they again felt their enslavement. leave their homes and meager farms Ahead of them stretched a long line to the children and the old folk, and of gray, monotonous working days, go off to join the celebrants [of Nabi with no spark of joy or consolation Musa processions]. A week of little to illuminate them. Again they would work brings in no earnings. When have to close themselves up in their the work season ends in the hills the homes and continue bearing the yoke; fallah [villager] has little to do. Many again they would have to suffer in loaf around idly even when work is silence at the hands of their rivals available. In the hills there is no call and mothers-in-law, to submit to for working hands, and those who having their every movement watched

20 and used as a pretext for hints and But it was precisely this aspect of Shami’s slanderous remarks against them to writing that explains its significance in the their husbands….Sad and dismal… eyes of Palestinian critic Issa Boullata, who they made their ways back mutely notes that it evokes “earlier times free of along the sides of the road. At the town hostilities between and gate they covered themselves properly Arabs” in the early decades of the century.47 again, hid the hand drums under their He points to Shami’s leisurely style, arms, and, dark as outcasts, moved unhurried by the modern pre-occupation on with a groan, slipping away like with speed. Those “who crave action in shadows into the dark narrow alleys of stories may be frustrated by his style but the town.44 those seeking ambience will be rewarded and indeed moved by the deep human interest of In these moving paragraphs Shami displays 48 not only feminist sensitivities, but also each story.” a profound insight into the role of ritual, It is quite intriguing to see how Vengeance carnivals and religious ceremonials in of the Fathers continues to receive such releasing the repressed libido of poor urban contrasting treatment by Israeli writers. women. This is an insight, one is tempted Joseph Zernik refers to this work as to add, that could only be gained from conveying a “blasphemous, macabre close knowledge of, and empathy with, a permutation of the ‘Blessing of the Fathers’ traditional society such as Hebron at the turn - one of the oldest and most central elements of the century. in .”49 Zernik suggests that the Vengeance of the Fathers received highly story implies that the ‘Fathers’ (i.e. Abraham, different interpretations among Shami’s Isaac, and Jacob), the common ancestors contemporaries, and continues to evoke of Muslims and Jews buried in Hebron, do controversy in the current debate about his not constitute a blessing but a curse and status as an early pioneer of nativist Hebrew- a cause of continued bloodshed for their . Hannan Hever suggests45 descendents. In other words, the conflict that the single most devastating factor between the Hebronites and the Nabulsis is a explaining the marginalization of Shami as camouflaged allegory to the Jewish-Arab (or a writer were the series of attacks on him Jewish-Muslim) fratricide. by the critic Yosef Chaim Brenner, who Hannan Hever does not share this view. He dismissed him as belonging to the “stories sees Shami’s story as an internal critique of Eretz-Israeli genre”, 46 in other words of Arab culture by one of its practitioners. that he wrote folkloric ethnographies about While under pressure to produce a new the life of the Jews in their various national universalistic , he was environments - in this case, Palestine. nevertheless keenly aware of his need to The task of the new “Hebrew Literature”, prove himself as a Sephardic Jewish writer in according to Brenner, was to transcend the a Zionist European milieu. In Vengeance of ethnographic in favour of universalistic the Fathers, as well as in many of his other human norms depicting local realities, only short stories with Arab characters, Shami to discover “the manifestation of the inner produced a universalistic critique of Arab life and its essence”. In this task Shami culture from the inside. Hever concludes his failed, according to Brenner, and his failure assessment: was due to his inability to escape the confines [Shami] systematically created of his environment. characters that, while central to 21 his story, were ultimately revealed angel Gabriel had touched him with as unstable, disintegrating figures, his staff, and had filled him with his whose attempts to face conflicts led to spirit until it had proved too much for their own dissolution. The Arab that him, so that he was now pouring it Shami brought to Hebrew literature upon the demons and the goblins who, is on the one hand, what identifies hidden among the bushes and in the his work as Jewish-Arab writing. clefts between the rocks, lie in wait for On the other hand, it also rejects the faithful.51 Arabism as a canonical norm of full The womenfolk in the crowds were and autonomous subjectivity. Shami, particularly agitated. His madness resonated then, solved his own acute conflict by with their anguish: constructing a disintegrating subject.50 Electric charges sparked through their In “Jum’ah the Simpleton”, the most bodies, as with wide eyes they watched ‘Hebronite’ story in the collection (and in Jum’ah’s twitching and listened to his my view, his best work), Shami was able to cries. Every moan of his struck a chord weave his rich knowledge of peasant lore, in their souls, and filled their hearts cropping arrangements, grazing rights, and with a sweet trepidation and a strange, intimate perception into the psychology of astonishment. The well-springs of the shepherd into the plot. Here, unlike in compassion were opened in them to many of his other stories, the ethnographic the point of tears, while some of them material is seamlessly integrated into the were so moved that they tore their hair body of the novel. The author emerges as and groveled on the ground.52 a master storyteller, and the reader feels that a qualitative shift has been gained in his Jum’ah’s derangement has the touch of craft. Shami does not dwell on the nobility of divinity in it, and it is recognized as such. His the lonely shepherd, nor does he glorify the imbecility is blessed and blesses those who peasant’s place in nature, as in other works. come to know him. His death comes after an Here, in contrast to earlier pieces, there is act of redemption - by a brutal kick from the a tendency to enhance the viciousness of hind legs of the very mule he had saved from nature (and the cruelty of children towards his disease. He comes to his end alone in the the weak and the deformed), and the wilderness, surrounded by his flock and the hopeless existence of people at the edge of evening stars, with only Mas’oud the dog left subsistence. But this is delicately balanced to mourn him. with the kindness of the elderly peasants In Jum’ah’s death, Shami celebrates towards those in distress. At one point the profundity of the simple folk, Jum’ah the Simpleton is taunted by the town uncontaminated by the avarice ways of children during an epileptic fit that drives the city, and the corrupting culture of the him to take his clothes off and enter an coastal plains. This genre is not unique uncontrollable rage. For the older peasants, to writers of his generation, or to several however, his madness was a sign of divinity: Arab writers who portrayed village life and For them his fit of insanity was a glorified the peasantry - Abdel Rahman al- visionary seizure, a gracious gift from Sharqawi comes to mind. But Shami’s case . It was plain that the hidden light is doubly unique: first because he is a Jewish of the prophet rested upon Jum’ah at writer who - in this case - was not writing that moment. They believed that the about Jewish life; and second, because his

22 celebration of the peasants did not slip into Western allies.55 sentimental glorification. Rather he placed The demise of Ishaq Shami as a writer it in the context of cruel nature, and the simultaneously signalled the defeat of incessant struggle for survival. a continuing Arab Jewish cultural tradition in Palestine. Unlike Iraq or Egypt, where The Last of the Levantines? there was a literary and artistic milieu to which native Jews could contribute and be David Shasha, writing in the American integrated within, Palestine, immediately Muslim, described the Hebronite writer: after the Great War and the inclusion of the Shami, perhaps the last authentic project for a Jewish National Home in the Levantine writer among Jews of Mandate, was decisively severed in two. the Middle East, is the missing link Not only Zionism was responsible for this between the Genizah of Goitein and rupture, but the social and ethnic composition the of Mahfouz. In his short of the Jewish community in Palestine stories and novella, he explores the precluded Arab Jewish cultural continuity. At everyday lives of simple Levantines, one point it appears that Sephardic-Oriental Jews and Arabs, that bespeak (native) distinctions had meaning within the simplicity and a deeply abiding indigenous communities of the Holy Land. understanding of the rootedness of The fact that many Sephardim spoke Judeo- both peoples in the region. 53 Spanish (Ladino) at home, while Orientals (Yemenis, Iraqis, and Moghrabis) spoke This enthusiastic assessment of Yitzhaq Arabic was one factor. Another had to do Shami’s work has a major problem, common with social status. The Sephardic aristocracy to the vast majority of retrospective maintained a class status and genealogical appreciations of this almost-forgotten claims that appear to have set them apart author. It attempts to place Shami’s work in from all other co-religionists. Soon after the the context of the current conflict between first war, these distinctions began to blur, Arabs and Jews. It is unlikely that Shami partly due to increased intermarriage between would have appreciated the backhanded Sephardis and Orientals (as Elyachar points compliment. Shami wrote in an epoch and a out), and partly because of place where his Jews were Arabs - or at least revivalism. There is no doubt, too, that the we can say that a substantial body of native rise of Zionism was the decisive factor in Jews exhibited an Arabist consciousness. In this transformation, creating a new polity, contemporary narratives of the late Ottoman a new set of relations with the Ottoman period - such as in the autobiographies and later Mandate authorities that dwarfed and diaries of Khalil Sakakini and Wasif the clout and access to power of traditional Jawhariyyeh - native Jews of Palestine were Jewish communities. A new cultural divide often referred to as ‘abna’ al-balad’ (sons of was brooked between the hegemonic East the country), ‘compatriots’, ‘Yahud awlad 54 European Ashkenazim and their poorer Arab’ (Jews, sons of Arabs). The Red Sephardic co-religionists. The new term Crescent Society of Palestine, established “Mizrahim” emerged and subsumed in 1916 in Jerusalem, brought many leading the earlier distinctions between natives, Arab-speaking Jews (Eintabi, Mani and Moghrabis, Kariates, and Sephardis. Elyachar) together with their Muslim and Christian compatriots, with the aim of Within the rising tide of Arab national mobilizing Ottoman Palestinians against the sentiment in Palestine and Syria, there was

23 a clear differentiation between European desperate nativist undertaking. They were his non-Ottoman Jews, and the ‘native attempt to define his own identity in an Arab ’. An anti-Zionist petition signed in culture in which the indigenous Jew could no Jerusalem in November 1918 by a number longer belong without finding himself at odds of Palestinian intellectuals makes the point with his Jewish community. Shami’s tragedy that “it is our wish to live in a satisfactory lies in that it was the same community of manner with our brothers, the Israelites, the native Jews that became the main target of indigenous inhabitants of the country, with populist wrath against Zionism. Communal complete equality between their rights and clashes between Muslims and Jews in Safad, obligations and ours.”56 Y. Porath also refers Jaffa, and Tiberius in the 1920s, and later the to a statement made by the Syrian Congress massacre of Jews in Hebron in 1929, took of 1919, in which a native Jewish delegate place in the context of peasant displacement participated, claiming to represent “all the via Zionist land purchases and a rising tide of Arabs of Syria - Muslims, Christians, and nationalist agitation against Jewish migration. Jews alike”.57 Similarly, the First Palestinian But it wasn’t only the European immigrants Congress meeting in February 1919 issued who were the early target of Palestinian Arab an anti-Zionist manifesto which rejected nationalism. It was particularly those Jewish Zionist immigration while welcoming those communities that were in closest contact Jews “among us who have been Arabicized, with and integrated into Arab traditional who have been living in our province since centres inside the country. In Hebron, the before the war; they are as we are, and their attacks were apparently initiated by peasant loyalties are our own.”58 mobs from the city’s rural hinterlands, and not the Hebronites themselves. And it was Ishaq Shami’s parallel predicament was established Hebronite Muslim families in the to escape the repressive atmosphere of the city who protected the Jews.60 traditional religious environment that he belonged to, while retaining the social bonds In the prevailing atmosphere, these of the community. The Hebronite Arab- distinctions must have become irrelevant Muslim society among whose networks he for someone like Shami who could define was raised, and from which he made an early himself as both as an Arab and a Jew. He escape out of Jewish religious repression was already alienated from the traditional was too closed, and too conventional, to Jewish community and its stifling orthodoxy. offer him any social or intellectual solace. Nevertheless he identified with them as his Coming to his intellectual maturity in people, his Khalayleh. Their tragedy became Jerusalem on the eve of the Mandate, Shami his tragedy in the double sense: he could not was too late to join forces with Palestinian dissociate from them as victims, nor could he secular nationalism - which had within in overcome the shattered hope of reconciliation it a strong religious streak. His adoption of as the two communities were driven down Zionism was far from an embrace of Jewish the path of impending irresolvable nationalist nationalism, which appears in his writings as polarity. an ambivalent phenomenon.59 One might say that Shami’s Zionism was an attempt to break Endnotes away from his Jewishness, and an effective vehicle for bringing him into the modernist 1 I am indebted to Abigail Jacobson for obtaining circles of the Jerusalem literary scene. several documents on Izhaq Shami from the Jerusa- lem Municipal Archives; to Shlomo Hassoun for his Beyond that, Shami’s writings reveal a insightful comments on the native Jewish community 24 of Palestine at the turn of the nineteenth century; and Press, Jerusalem: 1993) 63. particularly to Joseph (Yossi) Zernick, the grandson of Daoud Shami (Yitzhak’s brother), for sharing with me 15 Elyachar, 50. his extensive knowledge and unpublished essay on the Shami family history. I am also indebted to Hisham 16 See for example the description of this move in Wasif Nafa’, in Haifa, for his translations of Hebrew material Jawhariyyeh’s Memoirs, Al-Quds al-Uthmaniyya, Vol- from the Jerusalem Municipal Archives. ume 1, Tamari and Nassar, eds. (Institute of Palestine Studies, : 2002) 2 Kamal Salibi, Ta’ir ala Sindiyanah: Muthakkarat (Dar al Shuruq, : 2002) 121-122, 128. 17 Elyachar, 56-57.

3 Salibi related an exchange of correspondence between 18 Al-Quds al-Uthmaniyya, 200-201. his brother Bahij and Ishaq Elias - a Jewish friend from Baghdad - during the years 1940-1941. Elias expressed 19 Elyachar, 56. openly militant and Arab nationalist views. In the 1950s, Elias migrated to Israel and became a deputy 20 Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Al-Quds al-Uthmaniyya fil foreign minister to Moshe Sharett. Ibid, 128. Mudakkarat al-Jawhariyyah, 1904-1917 (Institute of Palestine Studies, Beirut: 2003) 74. 4 Neville Barbor, Arab Attitudes to Zionism Before WWI (University of California Press, Berkeley: 1976) 63-65. 21 Ibid., appendix 12, 273.

5 Arnold Band, Introduction to Shami’s Hebron Stories 22 Yehouda Shenhav, “Jews from Arab Countries and (Labyrinthos, Lancaster: 2000) xiv. In this essay I use the Palestinian Right for Return: An Ethnic Community both the Hebrew and Arabic transliteration of Shami’s in the Realms of National Memory”, The British Jour- first name, Yitzhaq and Ishaq. nal of Middle Eastern Studies (29, 1, 2002): 27-56.

6 The use of the term ‘Jewish Arab’, in contradistinction 23 Ibid. See also Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, “Exile within to ‘Arab Jew’, was suggested to me by Anton Shammas Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of (correspondence 1 July, 2004). Exile’ in Israeli Culture”, in Theory and Criticism. An Israeli Forum (No. 4, 1993): 23-55, and “Exile within 7 Robert L. Cooper and Bernard Spolsky, The Languag- Sovereignty: Toward a Critique of the ‘Negation of es of Jerusalem (Oxford University: 1991) 49. Exile’ in Israeli Culture” Part II, in Theory and Criti- cism: An Israeli Forum (No. 5, 1994): 113-132 (both in 8 By ‘Native Jews’ I also include who Hebrew). were Ottoman citizens and whose mother tongue was Yiddish or German. 24 Ibid.

9 For an original discussion on Jewish writings in 25 Ibid. Arabic, and the persistence of the use of Arabic as a religious and literary device by Arab Jews see Nissim 26 Sami Michael, Victoria (Macmillan, London: 1995). Rejwan, “Jews and Arabs: The Cultural Heritage”, The Israel Review of Arts and Letters, No. 105 (Jerusalem: 27 Based on an extended interview with Sheri Lev Ari, 1997). “The Last Arabic Jew”, Ha’aretz, 22 December, 2003.

10 Elie Elyachar, Living with Jews (Weidenfeld and 28 Arnold Band, “Introduction” to Yitzhaq Shami’s Nicholson: 1983) 59-60. Hebron Stories (Labyrinthos Book, Los Angeles: 2000) xii. 11 Ibid, 15-16. 29 Most of this biographical material is based on Zfira 12 Ibid, 51. Ogden, “Izhaq Shami: the man and his work”, in Bikorot ve Parshanut (Volume 21, 1986, Bar Illan 13 Omar Saleh al-Barghouti, al-Marahel (Beirut: 2001). University); and from the unpublished introduction to his forthcoming collection of short stories by Joseph 14 David Landau, “The Educational Impact of Western Zernick, Yitzhaq Shami: 1888-1949. Culture on Traditional Society in Nineteenth Century Palestine”, in Jews, Arabs and Turks, (The Magnes 30 Ogen, 37. 25 31 Ibid., 38. 51 “Jum’ah the Simpleton”, in Hebron Stories, 31.

32 Letter dated October 1927 from Ben Gurion to 52 Ibid. Izhaq Shami (in Hebrew) in the Jerusalem Municipal Archives. 53 David Shasha, The American Muslim (January-Feb- ruary, 2003). 33 Letter to David Avitzur, Hebron 1927, Jerusalem Municipal Archives; cited by Ogen, 45. 54 See Khalil Sakakini, Yawmiyyat, Volume 1 (Ramallah: 2003); and Wasif Jawhariyyeh, Al-Quds 34 Letter from Yehouda Burla to David Avitzur, 22 May, al-Uthmaniyyah (Jerusalem: 2003). 1924, quoted by Ogen and cited by Hannan Hever, “Yitzhak Shami: Ethnicity as an Unresolved Conflict”. 55 Jawhariyyeh.

35 Joseph Zernik, , “Yitzhaq Shami, introduction to a 56 Cited by Y. Porath, The Emergence of the Palestin- new edition of his collected stories”, forthcoming, and ian Arab National Movement, 1918-1929 (Frank Cass, correspondence with the author. London: 1974) 60-61.

36 Cited in Ogen. 57 Ibid, 61.

37 Cited in Ogen. 58 Ibid.

38 Cited in Ogen. 59 I was unable to find any traces of Jewish nationalism in his fiction. We are aware of Ben Gurion’s interest 39 Both Yehuda Burla (1886-1969) and Shami, ac- in Shami from the former’s invitation to the writer to cording to Joseph Reznik were marginalized by the consult on the ‘Arab Question’, but little is known of Ashkenazi Hebrew intelligentsia. See Reznik, Ishaq Shami’s actual involvement in the Zionist movement, Shami, 8. if any.

40 Communication to this writer from Joseph Zernick, 60 There are several accounts of the 1929 incidents, 12 January, 2004. mostly from Jewish sources. Most Jewish sources tend to stress the local conditions which gave rise to these 41 Anton Shammas, in Yitzhaq Shami, Hebron Stories, clashes, while Arab sources, such as the memoirs of back cover. Ajaj Nweihid (see below) relate the incidents to the wider clashes between Zionism and Arab nationalism. 42 Shami, “The Vengeance of the Fathers”, Hebron For contrasting views see Neri Livneh, “Hebron Di- Stories, 118-119. ary”, Ha’aretz, Friday, 9 July, 1999, and Shira Schoen- berg, “The Hebron Massacre of 1929”, in The Jewish 43 Ibid, 119. Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/. See also Ajaj Nweihid, “What Happened in Hebron?”, 44 Ibid, 144-145. in his Sittun aman ma al-Qafilah al-arbiyyah (Dar al- Istiqlal, Beirut: 1993) 148-149. 45 Cited by Hever.

46 Hever, 2.

47 Issa Boullata, “Yitzhaq Shami’s Hebrew Fiction: Arabs and Jews before Balfour”, al-Jadeed No. 34 (Winter, 2001): 20-21.

48 Ibid.

49 Joseph Zernik, “Yitzhaq Shami, introduction to a new edition of his collected stories”, forthcoming.

50 Hannan Hever, 10-11.

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