Jeff Halper - Between Redemption And Revival: The Jewish Yishuv Of Jerusalem In The Nineteenth Century

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Between Redemption and Revival

Between Redemption and Revival

The Jewish Yishuv of Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century

Jeff Halper

First published 1991 by Westview Press, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 1991 Taylor & Francis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Halper, Jeff.
Between redemption and revival: the Jewish yishuv of Jerusalem in
the nineteenth century / Jeff Halper.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8133-7855-9 (hardcover)
1. JewsJerusalemHistory19th century. 2. JerusalemHistory.
3. PalestineHistory17991917. 4. JerusalemEthnic relations.
I. Title.
DS109.925.H35 1991
956.9442dc20 90-46092
CIP

ISBN 13: 978-0-367-01350-9 (hbk)

To Shosh, Efrat, Yishai, and Yair, and the Halper and Fried grandparents

Contents

Guide

1. TABLES
2. FIGURES
3. PHOTOGRAPHS (center of book)

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the following for their generous financial support: in New York, the Jewish Memorial Foundation, and in Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Center for Anthropological Studies and Michael Lockman. I would also like to thank my colleagues and friends who discussed the work and read parts of the manuscript: Samuel Heilman, Stanley Newman, and Patricia Dolenz, as well as Marty and Muriel Isaacs, who not only shared with me their knowledge and (before the computer age arrived in my life) their electric typewriter but also encouraged me. I am grateful to Mordechai Beck, who read and edited the manuscript and prepared the maps, and the librarians and archivists at Yad Ben-Zvi, the Manuscript Department of the National Library, and the Jerusalem Municipal Archives for their assistance in finding the necessary documents and photos.

I must express my gratitude to the many participants in my walking tours of Jerusalem sponsored by the Jerusalem Branch of the Society for the Protection of Nature and in my courses on Jerusalem at the Popular University. If Levi Eshkol was right when he commented that he was one prime minister over a nation of prime ministers, then I am certainly one ethnographic historian in an entire city of historiansand because of their comments and criticisms I have confidence in this book's soundness.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to my editors at Westview Press, who have helped me produce a much better book. Finally, I would like to thank my historian-wife, Shoshana, for her critical contributions to this work, as well as for her patience and forbearing when I was not around to do the dishes, and my son Yishai, who grudgingly but understandingly allowed me access to the computer.

Jeff Halper
Jerusalem

[The Old Yishuv is] a lifeless body.... The Jewish community in Jerusalem is degenerating in idleness and, beggary, drowning in illiteracy, chaotic, splintered and ruled by a band of hypocrites and cheats, unschooled rabbis and ignorant scholars.

David Ben-Gurion (1910)

BEGINNING IN THE EARLY 1880s, when secularized proto-Zionists immigrated from Russia and Romania to the Land of Israel and established their presence in Jaffa and the rural settlements that they built in the countryside, the Yishuv, as the Jewish population of Palestine before 1948 was commonly called, was divided into two components: the secularized newcomers, who received their political and financial support from "parent" groups back home and who saw themselves as part of a "New" Yishuv based on productivity and settlement of the rural areas of the country; and the inhabitants of Jerusalem, who had preceded them to the country, the religious-based Sephardis, Ashkenazis, and Middle Eastern Jews, whom, out of disdain for their conservatism and the fact that they received haluka (alms) from abroad, the newcomers took to calling "the Old Yishuv."

And indeed, if political independence and national revival are the measures of historical significance, the Old Yishuv was less important than the New. No one would argue that the State of Israel could have arisen from the Old Yishuv. On the contrary, unlike the New Yishuv, which envisioned a new society, engendered its own "Hebrew" culture, and eventually achieved political independence, the Old Yishuv of Jerusalem was limited in scope with respect to time, place, size, and ideological goals. Essentially, it pursued its destiny within the confines of its own communal boundaries and religious aims.

The Sephardis, like the other Jews of Middle Eastern origin, religiously observant but politically nonideological, went about their lives preoccupied primarily (and justifiably) by the problems of eking out a livelihood in the city's harsh economic climate. Having little or no exposure to European nationalism, they were content with merely residing in the Holy Land. The ultraorthodox Ashkenazis, and particularly the group known as the Prushis, possessed a vision of their own no less grand than the Zionists' program of national revivalnamely, to hasten through prayer and settlement God's Redemptionbut that aspiration found expression primarily within the precincts of Jerusalem and the other Holy Cities (Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron). And when there appeared, in the final decades of the nineteenth century, a handful of maskils, secularized followers of the European Haskala, or Jewish "enlightenment," with an eye to settling the countryside outside Jerusalem and developing a Yishuv-wide economy, they did so by joining the New Yishuv, into which they gradually became incorporated and disappeared. Indeed, most books dealing with Israeli history hardly touch on the Old Yishuv except to note how insular and conservative it was.

Still, as we shall see presently, the Old Yishuv was a significant social entity, both in Yishuv history and as a unique Jewish communityeven if it eventually became incorporated into the rising New Yishuv. Before suggesting why its role and character should be reexamined, I shall first attempt to define this stigmatized and neglected part of Yishuv society. Much ink has been spilled among Israeli historians trying to find a hard-and-fast definition that holds for a highly pluralistic and dynamic community over a period of more than a century. As the sociologist Hanna Herzog pointed out, every attempt at defining the Old Yishuv leaves out an important element: the Sephardis, more moderate in their religious views than the ultraorthodox Ashkenazis and eager for material advancement, are often excludedor are lumped uncomfortably with the secularized and nationalistic settlers of the New Yishuv; similarly, the maskils are detached from the Old Yishuv and placed with the New, even if many of them retained their religious orthodoxy and their Jerusalem residence and refrained from embracing or even criticized many of the essential elements of New Yishuv culture.

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