Jerusalem: The Biography

At the end of the Ramadan fast, all the religions celebrated with a feast and a fair outside the walls, with merry-go-rounds and horseraces, while vendors exhibited obscene peepshows and sold Arab sweets, Maidens Hair and Turkish Delight. During the Jewish festival of Purim, Muslim and Christian Arabs dressed up in the traditional Jewish costumes, and all three religions attended the Jewish Picnic held at the tomb of Simon the Just north of the Damascus Gate. Jews presented their Arab neighbours with matzah and invited them to the Passover Seder dinner, while the Arabs returned the favour by giving the Jews newly baked bread when the festival ended. Jewish mohels often circumcised Muslim children. Jews held parties to welcome their Muslim neighbours back from the haj. The closest relations were between Arabs and Sephardic Jews. Indeed the Arabs called the Sephardis ‘Yahud, awlad Arab

– Jews, son of Arabs’, their own Jews and some Muslim women even learned Ladino. During droughts, the ulema asked the Sephardic rabbis to pray for rain. The Sephardic, Arab-speaking Valeros, the city’s leading bankers, were business partners with many of the Families. Ironically, the Arab Orthodox Christians were the most hostile to Jews, whom they insulted in traditional Easter songs and lynched as they approached the Church.

Although Baedeker warned tourists that ‘there are no places of public amusement in Jerusalem’, this was a city of music and dancing. The locals met in the coffee houses and cellar bars to smoke narghileh water pipes, play backgammon, watch wrestling matches and belly dancing. At weddings and festivals, there was circle-dancing (dabkah

), while singers performed such love songs as ‘My lover, your beauty hurt me’. Arab love songs alternated with the Andalusian Ladino songs of the Sephardis. Dervishes danced their zikr wildly to the mazhar drums and cymbals. In private houses, music was played by mixed Jewish and Arab musicians on the lute (oud

), fiddle (rabbaba) double clarinets (zummara and arghul

) and kettledrum (inaqqara). These instruments echoed through the six hammam bathhouses that were central to Jerusalem life. The men (who used them between 2 a.m. and midday) enjoyed massages and had their moustaches trimmed; the women dyed their hair with henna and drank coffee. The brides of Jerusalem were led by singing, drumming girlfriends to the hammam where all their body hair was festively removed using zarnikh, a pitch-like syrup. The wedding night itself started at the baths, then the groom and his party collected the bride from her home and, if this was a wedding of the Families, they walked under a canopy held by servants, illuminated by torches and followed by a drummer and a band of pipers, up to the Temple Mount.

The Families were the apex of Jerusalem society. The first municipal leader was a Dajani, and in 1867, Yusuf al-Diya al-Khalidi, aged twenty-five, became the first mayor of Jerusalem. Henceforth the post was always held by the Families – there would be six Husseinis, four Alamis, two Khalidis, three Dajanis. Khalidi, whose mother was a Husseini, had run away as a boy to attend Protestant school in Malta. Later he worked for the liberal grand vizier in Istanbul. He regarded himself first as an ‘Utsi’ – a Jerusalemite (he called Jerusalem his ‘homeland’) – second as an Arab (and a Shami, an inhabitant of Shams al-Bilad, greater Syria), third as an Ottoman. He was an intellectual, one of the stars of the nahda, the Arab literary renaissance that saw the opening of cultural clubs, newspapers and publishers.^* Yet the first mayor discovered his was a fighting as well as municipal job: the governor despatched him with forty horsemen to suppress fighting at Kerak, perhaps the only mayor of modern history to lead a cavalry expedition.