Sephardi Entrepreneurs In Jerusalem

Here is the fascinating story of one of Jerusalem's founding families.

Each generation of the Amzalak family is traced, from Joseph Amzalak's arrival in Palestine to their exodus due to World War I.

In Ordinary Jerusalem, Angelos Dalachanis, Vincent Lemire and thirty-five scholars depict the ordinary history of an extraordinary global city in the late Ottoman and Mandate periods. Utilizing largely unknown archives, they revisit the holy city of three religions, which has often been defined solely as an eternal battlefield and studied exclusively through the prism of geopolitics and religion. At the core of their analysis are topics and issues developed by the European Research Council-funded project “Opening Jerusalem Archives: For a Connected History of Citadinité in the Holy City, 1840–1940.” Drawn from the French vocabulary of geography and urban sociology, the concept of citadinité describes the dynamic identity relationship a city’s inhabitants develop with each other and with their urban environment.

This book is a collection of narratives collects from family archives, interviews, and published memoirs. They tell the stories of everyday people living a conflict-ridden world, emphasizing individual interaction, introducing marginal voices alongside more renowned ones, defying "typical" definition of Israelis and Palestinians.

Jerusalem without God leads the reader through the streets, malls, suburbs, traffic jams, and squares of Jerusalem's present moment, into the daily lives of the men and women who inhabit it. Caridi brings contemporary Jerusalem alive by describing it as a place of sights and senses, sounds and smells, but she also shows us a city riven by the harsh asymmetry of power and control embodied in its lines, limits, walls, and borders. She explores a cruel city, where Israeli and Palestinian civilians sometimes spend hours in the same supermarkets, only to return to the confines of their respective districts, invisible to each other.

Led by General Allenby, British troops entered Jerusalem in December 1917, thereby ending Ottoman rule and opening a new and important era in the history of Jerusalem. This historical moment has often been described as the beginning of a period of great change and transformation, depicting the British as the real modernisers of Jerusalem. In this study, Mazza does not offer just another history of Jerusalem. He focuses on the often neglected transition from Ottoman rule to British administration, examining the impact of the First World War and considering the socio-political changes which occurred as a result of the transition. He also considers the impact of these changes on the local population and how they, in turn, could act as agents of change in this formative period. He discusses the role of the British in Jerusalem as well as reactions to the occupation in Britain. Through the extensive use of case studies and unpublished archival material from Spain and Vatican archives, Mazza takes a fresh approach to this period of Jerusalem's history; focusing on a previously overlooked area and opening the field to new perspectives and research.

Annie Edith (Hannah Judith) Landau (1873Ð1945), born in London to immigrant parents and educated as a teacher, moved to Jerusalem in 1899 to teach English at the Anglo-Jewish AssociationÕs Evelina de Rothschild School for Girls. A year later she became its principal, a post she held for forty-five years. As a member of JerusalemÕs educated elite, Landau had considerable influence on the cityÕs cultural and social life, often hosting parties that included British Mandatory officials, Jewish dignitaries, Arab leaders, and important visitors. Her school, which provided girls of different backgrounds with both a Jewish and a secular education, was immensely popular and often had to reject candidates, for lack of space. A biography of both an extraordinary woman and a thriving institution, this book offers a lens through which to view the struggles of the nascent Zionist movement, World War I, poverty and unemployment in the Yishuv, and the relations between the religious and secular sectors and between Arabs and Jews, as well as LandauÕs own dual loyalties to the British and to the evolving Jewish community.

Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years. Most books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict see events through the eyes of policy-makers, generals or diplomats. Menachem Klein offers an illuminating alternative by telling the intertwined histories, from street level upwards, of three cities-Jerusalem, Jaffa, and Hebron-and their intermingled Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants, from the nineteenth century to the present. Each of them was and still is a mixed city. Jerusalem and Hebron are holy places, while Jaffa till 1948 was Palestine's principal city and main port of entry. Klein portrays a society in the late Ottoman period in which Jewish-Arab interactions were intense, frequent, and meaningful, before the onset of segregation and separation gradually occurred in the Mandate era. The unequal power relations and increasing violence between Jews and Arabs from 1948 onwards are also scrutinised. Throughout, Klein bases his writing not on the official record but rather on a hitherto hidden private world of Jewish-Arab encounters, including marriages and squabbles, kindnesses and cruelties, as set out in dozens of memoirs, diaries, biographies and testimonies. Lives in Common brings together the voices of Jews and Arabs in a mosaic of fascinating stories, of lived experiences and of the major personalities that shaped them over the last 150 years.