A bitter-sweet glimpse into what Jerusalem might have been

It is no overstatement to say that the appearance of The Storyteller of Jerusalem (Olive Branch Press) — Wasif Jawhariyyeh’s memoirs in English — is a very significant event.

This is not because Jawhariyyeh was a major figure in Palestinian history or that he had great political influence. Quite the reverse.


He grew up in an era when education was just starting to spread through society, so the vast majority of personal accounts come from the upper classes, often from members of well-known families such as the Husseinis and the Khalidis.

Indeed, another recent ground-breaking publication in English was that of Anbara Salam Khalidi’s memoirs, one of the first accounts of life from a pre-Nakba woman, albeit one from Lebanon who married into the Palestinian elite.

Wasif Jawhariyyeh was not from those elite families but his father was associated with the Husseinis, performing administrative jobs for the family alongside his activities as a merchant and silk farmer.




“If you entered the house on a Sunday,” writes Jawhariyyeh, “you would find families and relatives of both sexes with their children, some playing cards or backgammon, others singing or playing music with their friends, some smoking argileh [water pipe], or telling stories and anecdotes… . Our Muslim neighbors, both men and women, used to join us at times of sorrow or joy alike. On the… first night of Lent, we would all dress up — men and women.”


Talented musician

Wasif, however, was found at a young age to be a talented musician, playing instruments such as the oud and the rababah or rebeck. This ability gives his autobiography an extra perspective, because he often worked as a personal musician to members of the Jerusalem elite, including men of the Husseini and Nashashibi families.





Vibrant nightlife







Sense of darkness

Perhaps there is an element of nostalgia to Jawhariyyeh’s reminiscences of the earlier years of his life. Even allowing for this, there is a growing sense of darkness throughout the latter part of his memoirs, as political events — Zionist immigration and growing discrimination against the local population by the British Mandate authorities — start to impinge on everyday life.










As the co-editor of the book, I am happy to see this excellent review. Just one correction regrarding the nabi Musa procession during easter. This was a Muslim, not Jewish events.


Excellent review. I need to move the Arab version I have from Lebanon so I can read it properly.

I haven't read the part in question, but I'm fairly certain that the Cairo Congress on Arabic Music, in which there was an almost exclusively Jewish Iraqi delegation (the sole exception was the singer, Muhammad al Gubbanchi), was in 1932, not 1931.

Most of the delegation did end up in Israel in the fifties.


Fascinating. I did a course at University on the Arab Israeli conflict, what it lacked was a systematic articulation of Palestinian culture. I did a bit of reading around and discovered that there was a thriving icon industry in Palestine that had existed since the Byzantine Empire. There is a vital need to propogate Palestinian heritage and culture, to show the world that Palestinians are a people of heritage and not just the victims of fate. It would be great if online sources, like for example, Electronic Intifada could publish more articles and links to sites that explore the culture of Palestine. Thankyou.


I think this might be what you are looking for: http://btd.palestine-studies.org/



"The chief rabbi of the Jewish Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem, (1930) Rabbi Joseph Hayyim Sonnenfeld, often referred to the Zionists as "evil men and ruffians" and claimed that "Hell had entered the Land of Israel with Herzl." Sonnenfeld did not want the Orthodox Jewish community to become subject to secular Zionist authority.



While you have most of your facts straight, your interpretation is nonsensical. In fact, the early Jewish colonists served a precise purpose--to prepare the ground for the seizure of Palestine by violent terrorists imported from the Pale, Eastern Europe and Western states. This went hand-in-glove with a strategy of lies by Great Britain and France with regard to the "Arabs," a new tribal fiction invented by the West and swallowed whole by an Arabic speaking world pocked by the Saudi Wahhabism, a plague whose consequences we are witnessing today.

Those early colonists infiltrated Palestinian society and tried hard to create "relations" where it suited them; they learned how to survive in a land unsuited for large citied populations and which hadn't infinite resources, especially water. They built their "agriculture' right in the midst of this growing mayhem. And then the calamity.

A faceless little man called Harry Truman, the nearest thing to a black hole and the man who nuked Japan, was instrumental to getting Israel recognized as a state. But he stood on the shoulders of others in the UK, France and last but not least that little friend of Israel's, Lester Pearson, a Canadian. All drew their inspiration from a monster from England, Winston Churchil, who developed the use of carpet bombing on German cities in WWII and insisted on compliance by the US, who later applied this experience to Southeast Asia.

Clearly, we can see what it took to establish the Zionist race colony people still call "Israel." Lies, theft and murder on a grand scale. Those peachy local arrangements which the early Zionists sought with the Palestinians, just before their ruin, have been too well documented for journalists to go on babbling about how it might have been in Jerusalem.

Just state it clearly: the concept Israel is based on a forged biblical document and a craven decision by the West to exculpate itself by imposing a tribal order in the Middle East they hope might stem the collapse of its short-lived Western empires.

The West established a vicious colony of terrorists with genocide on their minds to carry out their work. This is why it is the end of the road for Israel as a race state. The whole design, imposing a tribal order on the region just to safeguard Israel is going up in smoke. Israel as a Zionist concept has no future and certainly no rosy past to cheer about, for heaven's sake!


I "like" how your comment has NOTHING to do with the content of the post, which doesn't mention Ashkenazi Jews AT ALL. What a completely random, ranting digression. There's absolutely zero in the post that serves as a justification or defense of the crappy modern apartheid state of Israel, but regardless, you just open up some canned rant attacking general targets in "the West," exactly as some lame-ass white American CNN commentor might hijack a post that has some vague Islam/Arabic connection, in order to deliver an Islamophobic rant.

In short: thank you for contributing absolutely nothing to the discussion.


"Those early colonists infiltrated Palestinian society and tried hard to create "relations" when it suited them"

Miguel Littin, the famous Chilean film director of Palestinian origin, made a film "La Ultima Luna" (Arabic/Spanish) that describes the deceit of some of the early Zionists. The final scenes are worth the whole film


Sorry, that was a reply to the comment made by Anthony Shaker.