“I am no skilled writer, famous historian, or experienced traveler. I am simply a civil servant who was forced out of school by the First Great War. But I feel compelled to document situations, surprises, and incidents which emerged in my life during the Ottoman and the British periods in my country of Palestine, some of which are amusing” (1).
With these words, Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1897–1972) begins his memoirs, translated here into English for the first time. The figure of Jawhariyyeh—musician, civil servant, partygoer, and collector, with a keen eye for satire and social commentary—will already be familiar to some English-readers from the work of Salim Tamari in Mountain against the Sea (University of California Press, 2009). The present volume is an English translation of Tamari and Nassar's two previous edited volumes of Jawhariyyeh's memoirs from the late Ottoman and British Mandate periods, previously published in Arabic by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut.
Jawhariyyeh's memoirs paint a vivid picture of urban life in Jerusalem during a period of vast social and political change. The Jawhariyyeh family spanned a range of social networks: Wasif's father was a municipal councilor and mukhtar of the Eastern Orthodox Christian community in the Old City, while other family members undertook manual work. Family and neighborhood networks were strong, and freely crossed the confessional and religious borders that so often frame scholarly work on Jerusalem life. Yet even within this fluid environment, Jawhariyyeh was exceptionally socially mobile, a fact he attributes to two aspects of his life: First, the patronage and support of the Husseini family for Jawhariyyeh's musical talent that allowed him to move fluidly between social locations and classes, from learning music from peasants working the fields of far-flung villages to mixing with Jerusalem's elites. Second, as a civil servant in the British Mandate government, Jawhariyyeh headed the committee for the evaluation of the city's properties, a job that gave him unusual access to Jerusalem's urban fabric.
As the title suggests, however, the joy of reading The Storyteller of Jerusalem is not only in the stories Jawhariyyeh tells but also in his prodigious capacity to tell them. He is an exceptional raconteur, introducing Jerusalem through a mixture of family anecdote and political observation that sometimes recalls Mahfouz's descriptions of Cairo. Sometimes the stories selected by the editors are as poignant in their juxtaposition as in the information they convey. In 1918, as the British banned Muslims from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and Christians from the Haram al-Sharif, Jawhariyyeh recalls a Sunday morning drinking session with a group of Muslim friends; after visiting two bars, they stuffed their pockets with green almonds and headed to the courtyard of the Dome of the Rock for a picnic. Unexpectedly, guards had been stationed at the gates of the Haram al-Sharif, but with mischievous pride Jawhariyyeh reports that he, son of Jiryis Jawhariyyeh, managed to convince the guards he was indeed a Muslim—yet his fair-haired, blue-eyed friend Muhammed al-Zardaq was left fuming outside. If this anecdote illustrates the small-town politics of the British mandate's early attempts to assert control, the following report of the east Jordanian and Jericho refugees who arrived in Jerusalem in the winter of the same year fleeing the Turks and the Germans plunges us back into a wider, tumultuous regional context. Other stories document the gradually changing social fabric of Jerusalem—and Palestine more widely—as Jawhariyyeh attends traditional religious celebrations, goes to the new Dusturiyyeh National School, hangs out with friends in oda bachelor apartments, mixes with foreign officials, and meets Ashkenazi Jewish girls.
Music lies at the center of Jawhariyyeh's life and memoirs, which serve as a rare record of Palestinian urban musical life before the Nakba. As a young child he recalls building his own makeshift musical instrument out of a paint can, quickly replaced by a tanboor built for him by Hajj Salim el-Husseini's Moroccan grain-keeper—soon to be joined by other instruments. As an adult, Jawhariyyeh was an accomplished oud player and musical authority who kept company with some of the most distinguished musicians from the Arab world, and whose expertise was sought after by both Arab and Jewish musical institutions. Jawhariyyeh was dedicated to traditional tarab music and did not read Western musical notation (he invented his own notation for oud music). At the same time, he vigorously resisted German-Jewish musicologist Robert Lachmann's assertions that all Arab musicians should follow this traditional model of oral transmission. Jawhariyyeh defended the use of Western notation as a vital tool in the propagation and transmission of Arabic music.
As a chronicler, Wasif Jawhariyyeh was highly aware of the changing times in which he lived and sought to preserve and display Jerusalemite culture. During the Mandate period, he focused on material culture, building and curating a private collection of art and antiquities, including seventy-two musical instruments. He saw the Jawhariyyeh Collection as “a kind of national museum” (171), which he displayed with pride to visiting dignitaries. When his narrative comes to a halt with the family's flight via Jericho to Beirut in 1948, Jawhariyyeh's collection had been entrusted to the French consulate. In a poignant coda written in Beirut, we find the great collector and musician reduced to renting an oud from a local grocer. While he does not state so himself, it seems that in his memoirs, redacted in exile in Beirut, Jawhariyyeh sought to rebuild his collection, this time turning to personal recollections of Jerusalem with the modest aim that his own son, Jiryis, should be able to unlock his family heritage.
Writing for his son, Jawhariyyeh speaks in an intimate voice and diligently preserves a historical present: he avoids excessive use of hindsight. Rather, the reader is immersed in historical events as Jawhariyyeh experiences them. Unlike much writing on Palestine, periods of war and the impending tragedy of the Nakba do not overly shape the narrative. Indeed, Jawhariyyeh's realization that he will leave the unbearable reality in Palestine for Beirut does not come until the final sentence of the main text. Nor does Jawhariyyeh affect a distance from those who later fell from political favor. Rather, he writes with bittersweet good will and striking honesty about socializing with Jewish friends and British officials, dancing in Tel Aviv and praises the good qualities of Ronald Storrs, military governor of Jerusalem, despite his support for Zionism.
While Jawhariyyeh's stories largely speak for themselves and are presented without editorial interruption barring the occasional footnote, the two introductions by Salim Tamari and Issam Nassar helpfully frame the memoirs with contextual discussion of urban Palestinian culture and social history in Jerusalem (Tamari) and Arab politics in the late Ottoman period (Nassar). Both editors highlight the importance of Jawhariyyeh's memoirs as a rare account of daily life during this period and as a counter to the dour religious and sectarian Jerusalem that too often dominates the academic imagination. Much credit is also due to translator Nada Elzeer, who preserves an easy fluidity in the text that makes this a highly readable book which should appeal well beyond academic audiences. One small fault is the lack of reference tools: an index would have been helpful to scholars seeking to follow particular themes or personalities through the book. Likewise, while a number of illustrations are included, a rudimentary map of the neighborhoods of Jerusalem's Old City might help readers. Nevertheless, these are minor issues in a book that should be on the bookshelf of any scholar of Jerusalem.
This volume has already rightly received wide acclaim by readers and reviewers who note its importance as a Palestinian social and musical history, including the important challenge it offers to descriptions of the city that overstate the social significance of the four “quarters” through which the British administered the holy places and sought to control the city. Equally importantly, between the lines, the translation of The Storyteller of Jerusalem into English elegantly states the importance of the ethnographic ear, of hearing Palestinian voices in their wide variety, to the enterprise of narrating Palestinian history. Too much English-language work on Palestine privileges colonial voices and narrow political narratives—either by focusing on texts in European languages or by tacitly allowing the social and administrative categories expressed in official documents to trump the lived experience of Palestinians. Here we meet a rather different Jerusalem: colorful, cosmopolitan, immersed in its Ottoman past, and in which Palestinian subjectivities are not constrained by the boundaries of Western imagination. One can only hope that Jawhariyyeh's voice will challenge further historians, sociologists, and ethnographers to think beyond these conceptual borders—both in writing Jerusalem's past and, perhaps, in imagining its future.
