Jerusalem: The Biography

Many of the Arab middle class, Muslims and Orthodox, worked for the Mandate. They lived in pink stone villas in the Ottoman world of Sheikh Jarrah, Talbieh, Bakaa and Katamon, the suburbs of what Amos Oz called ‘a veiled city, heavy with crosses, turrets, mosques, and mysteries’ and filled with ‘monks and nuns, qadis and muezzins, Notables, veiled women and cowled priests’. When Oz visited a well-off Arab family, he admired the ‘moustachioed men, jewelled women’ and ‘charming young girls, slim-hipped, red-nailed with elegant hair-dos and sporty skirts’.

‘Sumptuous parties, lunches, dinners and receptions, the year round’ were held by the historian George Antonius, an aesthetic ‘Syrian patriot with the lucidity of a Cambridge don’, and his ‘charming, beautiful’ and irrepressible wife, Katy, daughter of a Lebanese proprietor of Egyptian newspapers.^*

Their Sheikh Jarrah villa, which was owned by the mufti and filled with 12,000 books, was the social headquarters for Arab grandees, British elites and celebrity visitors, as well as a political salon for Arab nationalists. ‘Pretty women, delicious food, clever conversation: everyone who was anyone was there at the best parties in Jerusalem,’ remembered Nassereddin Nashashibi, ‘and they always had the most delightfully louche atmosphere’. Their marriage was said to be open and Katy was notoriously flirtatious, with a taste for Englishmen in uniform: ‘She was naughty, curious about everything,’ recalled an old Jerusalemite; ‘she would start gossip; she was always matching people up.’ Antonius later told his daughter about a party with a dance band given by a local socialite where he shocked and thrilled the other guests by proposing a swinging Jerusalem party game of his own: he would invite ten couples but each person would bring a member of the opposite sex who was not their spouse – and then they would see what happened.

The cooling of British enthusiasm for Zionism increasingly alienated the Jews. Perhaps High Commissioner Sir John Chancellor was typical when he complained that Jews were ‘ungrateful people’. Each Jewish neighbourhood belonged in a different country: Rehavia, home of secular German professors and British officials, was the most desirable suburb, civilized, calm and European; the Bokharan Quarter belonged in Central Asia; the Hasidic Mea Shearim was shabby, impoverished and redolent of seventeenth-century Poland; Zikhron Zion was heady with the ‘poor Ashkenazi cooking smells, of borscht, garlic and onion and sauerkraut,’ recalled Amos Oz; Talpiot was ‘a Jerusalemite replica of a Berlin garden suburb’, while his own home was in Kerem Avraham, built around the old house of the British consul James Finn, which was so Russian ‘it belonged to Chekhov’.

Weizmann had called Jerusalem ‘a modern Babel’ but all these different worlds continued to mix, despite spasms of violence and clouds of foreboding. That cosmopolitan Jerusalem, wrote Hazem Nusseibeh, was ‘one of the most exhilarating cities in the world to live in’. Cafés opened all the time, enjoyed by a new class of intellectuals, boulevardiers, and flâneurs, funded by family orange groves, newspaper articles and civil service salaries. The cafés presented respectable belly-dancing, as well as the saucier suzi

version, cabaret-singers and traditional balladeers, jazz bands, and Egyptian popular singers. During early Mandate years, just inside the Jaffa Gate next to the Imperial Hotel, the flamboyant intellectual Khalil Sakakini held court at the Vagabond Café, where over puffs of nargileh water pipes and shots of Lebanese arak

firewater, this soidisant ‘Prince of Idleness’ discussed politics and expounded his hedonistic philosophy, the Manifesto of Vagabonds – ‘Idleness is the motto of our party. The working-day is made up of two hours’ – after which he indulged ‘in eating, drinks and merriment’. However, his indolence was limited when he became Palestine’s inspector of education.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh, the oud-player with the municipal sinecure, had long embraced laziness: his brother opened the Café Jawhariyyeh on Jaffa Road by the Russian Compound where a cabaret and band performed. One regular denizen of the nearby Postal Café recalled ‘the cosmopolitan clientele; a Tsarist officer with a white beard, a young clerk; an immigrant painter, an elegant lady who kept talking about her properties in Ukraine, and many young men and women immigrants’.

Many of the British enjoyed this ‘real blend of cultures’, not least Sir Harry Luke, who presided over a typical Jerusalem household: ‘The nanny was from south England, the butler a White Russian,^*

the servant a Cypriot Turk, Ahmed the cook was a rascally black Berber, the kitchen-boy was an Armenian who surprised us by turning out to be a girl; the housemaid is Russian.’ But not everyone was so charmed. ‘I dislike them all intensely,’ said General Sir Walter ‘Squib’ Congreve. ‘Beastly people. The whole lot are not worth a single Englishman.’