Toxic waters: Ibrahim Hazboun and the struggle for a Dead Sea concession, 1913-1948

In 1930, the British Colonial Office signed a formal agreement with Moshe Novomeysky, a Jewish Russian mining engineer from Siberia and committed Zionist, creating Palestine Potash Ltd (PPL). This company was given exclusive rights over the extraction of mineral salts from the Dead Sea for a period of 50 years and was the predecessor to today’s Israeli enterprise, the Dead Sea Works (DSW). Reading through Novomeysky’s memoirs, as well as the handful of Israeli histories of the Dead Sea industry, the concession appears as a hard-fought Zionist victory in the face of stiff opposition within British parliamentary circles. From this point, the formation and subsequent success of PPL is described as an important early stage in the attempt to build up a national chemical industry in the state of Israel. Arab Palestinians are almost entirely invisible in this story, save for Novomeysky’s occasional mention of PPL’s ‘friendly relations’ with Arab communities in the area. Focusing on the story of Ibrahim Hazboun, a Catholic merchant trader from Bethlehem, this article retells the story of the Dead Sea concession from a local Arab perspective, employing a variety of sources, both written and oral, to fill in the gaps left by the colonial and Zionist archives. Contrary to the claims of British and Zionist officials, it is shown that Arab Palestinians had been intensely interested in exploiting the riches of the Dead Sea since the end of Ottoman rule, and they continued to express their interest throughout the Mandate period. Weaving Ibrahim’s personal story into the bigger picture of national opposition to the Dead Sea project, it is argued that this neglected historical episode can serve as a window onto the wider problems facing the Arab merchant classes during the transition from Ottoman to British rule in Palestin

Exporting the Holy Land: artisans and merchant migrants in Ottoman-era Bethlehem

This article explores an aspect of Arab migration in the nineteenth century that is often retold in popular memory but rarely discussed in academic work: that of Bethlehem merchants and the “Holy Land” wares they sold. Beginning roughly in the 1850s, these travelling salesmen established trading connections in all corners of the globe, constituting one of the earliest manifestations of the wider movement of Arabic-speaking people away from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To properly contextualize the emergence and significance of this merchant activity, the article firstly offers an account of how Bethlehem came to be the manufacturing center of a global industry in religious souvenirs. It then turns to the nineteenth-century merchants themselves, exploring their multi-directional trajectories in the nineteenth century. Through these twin dynamics of production and circulation, the article questions some of the commonly held assumptions about the nature of the nineteenth-century “Arab diaspora” or mahjar

Return migration and the rise of the Palestinian nouveaux riches, 1870-1925

This article examines the figure of the returning émigré in late Ottoman and early Mandate Palestine. The wave of Palestinians who emigrated in the pre–World War I period did not, for the most part, intend to settle abroad permanently. Hailing largely from small towns and villages in the Palestinian hilly interior, they moved in and out of the Middle East with great regularity and tended to reinvest their money and social capital in their place of origin. The article argues that these emigrants constituted a previously undocumented segment of Palestinian society, the nouveaux riches who challenged the older elites from larger towns and cities in both social and economic terms. The discussion focuses in particular on their creation of new forms of bourgeois culture and the disruptive impact this had on gender and family relations, complicating the assumption that middle-class modernity in Palestine was largely effected by external actors

Return migration and the rise of the Palestinian nouveaux riches, 1870-1925

This article examines the figure of the returning émigré in late Ottoman and early Mandate Palestine. The wave of Palestinians who emigrated in the pre–World War I period did not, for the most part, intend to settle abroad permanently. Hailing largely from small towns and villages in the Palestinian hilly interior, they moved in and out of the Middle East with great regularity and tended to reinvest their money and social capital in their place of origin. The article argues that these emigrants constituted a previously undocumented segment of Palestinian society, the nouveaux riches who challenged the older elites from larger towns and cities in both social and economic terms. The discussion focuses in particular on their creation of new forms of bourgeois culture and the disruptive impact this had on gender and family relations, complicating the assumption that middle-class modernity in Palestine was largely effected by external actors

Dragomans, tattooists, artisans: Palestinian Christians and their encounters with Catholic Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the presence of European Catholic actors in the Ottoman empire dramatically increased, particularly in the Palestinian provinces. The city of Jerusalem and its surrounding hinterland, referred to here by its Arabic name, Jabal al-Quds, witnessed a particularly intensive Catholic presence owing to its sanctified religious status. This article examines the ways in which the local Arabic-speaking Christian population of Jabal al-Quds interacted with these European Catholic actors. It situates these encounters within the wider scholarship on missionary encounters and cross-cultural interactions in the Mediterranean world, arguing that global historians need to pay greater attention to the inequalities embedded in many of these relationships and the frequent episodes of violent conflict they gave rise to. By inverting the standard Western gaze on Jerusalem and looking at these encounters from the inside out, the article seeks to restore local actors as important players within the global Counter-Reformation, albeit within a context of subjugation, conflict, and stymied mobility

1981: One or Several Aesthetics?

Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation (1981), proposes a theory of aesthetic experience that prioritizes the material depths of sensation over stable, identifiable forms. Deleuze’s key references in The Logic of Sensation to playwright Antonin Artaud arouse the suspicion that Artaud’s schizophrenic experience of language, wherein words are reduced to phonetic ramblings, illuminates how Deleuze interprets this chaos of sensation in Bacon’s art. My work therefore calls back to The Logic of Sense (1969) and the first section of his book on Masochism (1967) to explore the waves of consistency between Deleuze’s understanding of language and the body, which is also to say between literature and painting. Yet while The Logic of Sensation may read like an exhaustive theory of art, Deleuze subtly indicates in this text that his system has its limits. Along with the molecular, material depths of sensation, Deleuze alludes to a cosmological, immaterial function of art. He observes this to exist almost exclusively in music and its force of floating time. Rather than turning solely to Plateau 11: Of the Refrain, I also adopt his earlier writings on Proust to explore a Deleuzian musicology. This Proust-music aesthetic schema (which I coin the musical pole) contrasts sharply with that of Bacon-Artaud (the painterly pole). Through an examination of the painterly and musical poles and to what extent the two can be synthesized, my work examines the enthralling disjunction in Deleuze’s aesthetics

Saint Marie-Alphonsine and the resurrection of Jubra'il Dabdoub

In 1909 two worlds collided in Bethlehem. A successful and cosmopolitan merchant from the town was brought back from the dead by a local nun who had never left Palestine. This article presents an experiment in biographical writing by reconstructing the miracle and the lives that unfolded around it. At first glance, the two protagonists could not appear more different. The merchant, Jubra’il Dabdoub (1860−1931), was among Bethlehem’s ‘pioneer’ generation of merchant migrants − young men who boarded steamships setting sail from Jaffa in the 1870s and 1880s, to travel all over the world in a bid to make their fortunes. The nun, Marie-Alphonsine (1843–1927), born in Jerusalem, was a fiercely devout woman who embraced a life of poverty and founded a religious order, the Congregation of the Rosary Sisters (still active today), devoted to serving local Arab girls and women. In 2015 she and Mariam Bawardi were canonized by Pope Francis as the first Catholic Palestinian female saints.Despite the apparently divergent biographies of these characters, they were both products of the same local society. The article below attempts to place the reader within the world views of Jubra’il Dabdoub and Marie Alphonsine, rather than argue through a detached, analytical style of writing. More specifically, it employs a magical realist mode of storytelling to create a mood in which supernatural occurrences are experienced as routine events while the manifestations of global capitalism are looked upon with wonder and trepidation. As a literary genre, magical realism constantly seeks to destabilize the reader’s sense of the mundane and the extraordinary, the illusory and the real. As such it has much to offer historians interested in adapting their writing to mirror subjects who seem unfazed Jerusalem Quarterly 73 [ 11 ] by supernatural events while simultaneously living through great social, political or economic upheaval. In the case of Bethlehem, as with Palestine more broadly, profoundly unsettling changes were occurring at the turn of the twentieth century. The article seeks to capture these upheavals through the eyes of the local inhabitants, especially in terms of migration, technology, and the pull of Arab identity, while asserting the sense of magic and piety that underpinned people’s experiences of these changes. To achieve consistency in style, I have at times embellished historical sources by drawing on wider research to imagine how a person might have experienced a given event. This is particularly the case with Jubra’il Dabdoub who left behind no written reflections on his life, but only fragments of sources relating to his activities as an itinerant merchant. I have indicated clearly in the endnotes where I have gone beyond the empirically available evidence. Jubra’il Dabdoub is also the subject of a monograph I am currently writing that will explore in more depth the potential of fictional and folkloric narrative techniques to capture the lives of these types of historical actors

Mobile homes: the refashioning of Palestinian merchant homes in the late Ottoman period

This article is about movement and the role it has played in shaping Palestinian homes. The article looks at merchants from Bethlehem as a case study of how mobility produced new types of homes in the late Ottoman and mandate periods, both materially and conceptually. It documents how the merchants' newfound economic success transformed Bethlehem's urban landscape and in turn produced a kind of “mobile home” as they adopted increasingly transient lifestyles, moving between multiple locations across the globe. These trends are explained within a framework of nineteenth century globalization, the birth of corporate identities, and shifting gender relations