Mimeo

On 23 August 1929, a mob of Muslim Arabs stormed the Jewish neighborhoods outside Jerusalem’s Old City walls, north of Damascus Gate. During the events that were later remembered as the Riots of 1929, dozens of Jewish civilians were killed and numerous buildings set on fire. Among the deadliest sites of the violence was the Gurji quarter, where Jews of Georgian origin had clustered since the end of the nineteenth century. The neighborhood, officially called Eshel Avraham, saw many of its inhabitants murdered throughout the rioting, its victims making up as much as a third of the overall Jewish fatalities in the entire city. Amidst the havoc, the local Georgian synagogue was burnt down. Worship could not be resumed even after the violence had ceased.

The efforts to restore the Georgian synagogue shed new light on contemporary reactions to the bloody events. After the riots, a member of the Georgian congregation named Aharon Tanurishvili was appointed by the chief rabbinate as the synagogue’s guardian. In this capacity, he approached the Jewish national institutions in Palestine requesting that the burnt synagogue be repaired. A special fund set up by the Yishuv’s leadership to aid victims of the riots consequently agreed to bear the costs of the building’s restoration, so long as it was approved by the rabbinate and by Va’ad ha-’Ir – a city council representing the Jewish national institutions. Since the synagogue was a communal religious endowment, the condition was that the repair would serve the Georgian congregation.

Tanurishvili supervised the restoration of the synagogue. To the Georgian community’s dismay, however, the renovated building was eventually rented out to Arabs. In a letter to the city council, communal leaders complained that Tanurishvili had made a commitment to put the building at the congregation’s disposal, as it had been for forty years, yet he »delivered it to the Arabs« instead. Consequently, the city council sent its representative to visit the building, and the latter indeed reported that he had found in the women’s section of the former synagogue »an Arab sheikh and schoolbooks«. A carpenter’s bench and wood material suggested that the previously sacred space was being used as an Arab vocational school.

In response to this breach of agreement, the fund that had financed the synagogue’s restoration demanded the rabbinate to sue Tanurishvili in criminal court for betraying his appointment as guardian of the religious endowment. At the same time, it sought to act cautiously vis-à-vis the new Arab tenants of the building to avoid »sharpening« the tense relations between Arabs and Jews.

Renting out a synagogue building to be used as a public educational institution for Jerusalem’s Arab population stood in stark contrast to the general atmosphere after the riots. In those days of high tension and deep distrust, Jewish initiatives rather called for the segregation of Jews and Arabs, for example by confiscating merchandise from Arab merchants or prohibiting the letting of shops to Arabs.

The case of the Georgian synagogue’s repurposing thus appears to reflect a strange social and political reality, in which two modes of Arab-Jewish interaction persisted simultaneously: on the one hand, a public discourse of nationalist and segregationist character, which found expression in official correspondence, public campaigns and in the press, and which largely shaped later Israeli historiography – both classic and revisionist. On the other hand, a local and unofficial discourse that reflects a business-as-usual, civil routine and emphasizes the continuity over the rupture.

This duplicity was voiced even by leaders of the Yishuv. In a letter from Moshe Attias to Yaakov Thon, two prominent figures of the Jewish National Council (Va’ad Leumi), the former described the post-riot reality with a hint of sarcasm: While life in Palestine appeared to have returned to normal and Arabs and Jews were again sharing the public transportation as »two lovebirds«, he wrote on 17 September 1929, persistent rumors forecast an imminent renewal of the violence.

Civil initiatives similarly reflected this parallel discourse. The official establishment of Mahaneh Yehudah market makes a case in point. As Jewish merchants and clientele were reluctant to resume business in Jerusalem’s mixed Old City after the riots, merchants organized to set up shops in the newly founded Mahaneh Yehudah market. They similarly applied for aid from the Jewish city council, which again stipulated that new shops would not be let to Arab merchants – in contrast to the practice that had prevailed before the riots, when Jewish and Arab vendors sold their merchandise side by side.

Yet in Mahaneh Yehudah too, many of those Jewish merchants who relied on the city council’s assistance in fact violated their pledge to keep Mahaneh Yehudah a »Jewish market«. Like Tanurishvili with the Georgian synagogue, the Jewish vendors in Mahaneh Yehudah sought to allow Arab women to sell vegetables at the new shops. It was better to rent out shops to Arabs, their argument went, than to leave them vacant: »We find it to be to the market’s benefit«, they wrote.

Both the Mahaneh Yehudah market and the Georgian synagogue demonstrate contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, both institutions relied on material assistance offered by the city council, which, on the face of it, suggests a growing affinity between Jerusalem’s local Jewish population and the national leadership and an increasing trickling down of segregation practices. On the other hand, in both cases the persistence of local norms that were rooted in Jerusalem’s old multiethnic history and that stood in opposition to the national leadership’s policies eventually prevailed. This contradiction reflects the two discourses that coexisted in Jerusalem after the riots: a national-political and a local-civilian one.

The Riots of 1929 are considered a momentous watershed of the British Mandate era in Palestine. Studies have identified the bloody events as »year zero of the Arab-Israeli conflict« (Hillel Cohen) and a dramatic turning point in Arab-Jewish relations from both the Palestinian and Zionist perspectives. The religiously and ideologically charged violence, and the lasting trauma it incurred, is said to have set the groundwork for the crystallization of two separate national communities in Palestine. People who had not formerly identified as part of a national project increasingly made clear-cut decisions for either the Jewish or the Arab cause.

In light of such interpretations, the story of the Georgian synagogue and the Mahaneh Yehudah market can offer another perspective, one that highlights continuity over sharp rupture. These cases point to the persistence of civil neighborliness, which had its roots in the long history of shared life in the mixed city. A close reading of civil life in Jerusalem from 1929 to 1948 allows us to trace the transition from the Ottoman multiethnic period to a homogenous nation state.

Tal Chenya is a research fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on Jerusalem’s Jewish community during the Ottoman and British Mandate periods | tal.chenya@mail.huji.ac.il.

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