Jacob Norris

This is the fantastical, yet real, story of the merchants of Bethlehem, the young men who traveled to every corner of the globe in the nineteenth century. These men set off on the backs of donkeys with suitcases full of crosses and rosaries, to return via steamship with suitcases stuffed with French francs, Philippine pesos, or Salvadoran colones. They returned with news of mysterious lands and strange inventions—clocks, trains, and other devices that both befuddled and bewitched the Bethlehemites. With newfound wealth, these merchants built shimmering pink mansions that transformed Bethlehem from a rural village into Palestine's wealthiest and most cosmopolitan town. At the center of these extraordinary occurrences lived Jubrail Dabdoub.

The Lives and Deaths of Jubrail Dabdoub tells the story of Jubrail's encounters, offering a version of Palestinian history rarely acknowledged. From his childhood in rural Bethlehem to later voyages across Europe, East Asia, and the Americas, Jubrail's story culminates in a recorded miracle: in 1909, he was brought back from the dead. To tell such a tale is to delve into the realms of the fantastic and improbable. Through the story of Jubrail's life, Jacob Norris explores the porous lines between history and fiction, the normal and the paranormal, the everyday and the extraordinary.

Drawing on aspects of magical realism combined with elements of Palestinian folklore, Norris recovers the atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Bethlehem: a mood of excitement, disorientation, and wonder as the town was thrust into a new era. As the book offers an original approach to historical writing, it captures a fantastic story of global encounter and exchange.

Histories of Palestine in the pre-1948 period usually assume the emergent Arab-Zionist conflict to be the central axis around which all change revolves. In Land of Progress Jacob Norris suggests an alternative historical vocabulary is needed to broaden our understanding of the region's recent past. In particular, for the architects of empire and their agents on the ground, Palestine was conceived primarily within a developmental discourse that pervaded colonial practice from the turn of the twentieth century onwards. A far cry from the post-World War II focus on raising living standards, colonial development in the early twentieth century was more interested in infrastructure and the exploitation of natural resources.

Land of Progress charts this process at work across both the Ottoman and British periods in Palestine, focusing on two of the most salient but understudied sites of development anywhere in the colonial world: the Dead Sea and Haifa. Weaving the experiences of local individuals into a wider narrative of imperial expansion and anti-colonial resistance, Norris demonstrates the widespread excitement Palestine generated among those who saw themselves at the vanguard of progress and modernisation, whether they were Ottoman or British, Arab or Jewish. Against this backdrop, Norris traces the gradual erosion during the mandate period of the mixed style of development that had prevailed under the Ottoman Empire, as the new British regime viewed Zionism as the sole motor of modernisation. As a result, the book's latter stages relate the extent to which colonial development became a central issue of contestation in the struggle for Palestine that unfolded in the 1930s and 40s.

Historians and social scientists have long found material objects to be a fruitful source for exploring the ways diasporic communities remember and re-enact their collective identities. In the Palestinian case, numerous studies have discussed the importance of objects in fashioning an identity of diasporic exile, as well as in maintaining strong emotional ties to the homeland, whether formulated as a national space or more localised attachments to town or village. While shedding important light on the contemporary Palestinian condition, these studies pre-suppose that objects such as keys, dresses, books and photographs have only acquired significance in the wake of the enforced exile of 1948. They are described purely as facilitators of memory and nostalgia rather than as possible routes into the past itself. This paper suggests objects have a much longer and more multi-faceted role in the history of the Palestinian diaspora. As historians are well aware, the Palestinian diaspora, or mahjar as it was largely referred to before 1948, has its roots deep in the nineteenth century. But unlike the movements produced by the nakba of 1948, the earlier history of this diaspora was spurred largely by opportunity and choice. At least until the mid 1920s, migrants were able to move in and out of Palestine with relative ease, meaning more circular patterns of movement developed. In this context objects play a different role. They are catalysts of movement itself and they become invested with a complex series of meanings that revolve less around imagining the past and more around the here and now of migrant experience. They allow us unique insights into the worldview and economic strategies of the people who laid the foundations of the Palestinian diaspora.

In the year 1880 a young man named Elias Kattan arrived in the city of Kiev. He had travelled alone from his native town of Bethlehem, leaving behind his newly-wed wife, Negme, and extended family. He had made the long journey to Kiev, via Istanbul and across the Black Sea to Odessa, in order to assess commercial opportunities in the Russian Empire. The trip would prove a great success. Elias quickly opened a shop selling religious objects on Petchersk Nicolskaia – one of the streets in the major Orthodox pilgrimage site known as the “Cave Monastery”. In the ensuing years Elias and his sons would establish a permanent presence in Kiev, paving the way for a small but thriving Palestinian Christian community in the city.

Five years after Elias arrived in Kiev, his cousin Yaqub appeared on the other side of Europe, in Paris. Along with three other merchants from Bethlehem, Yaqub’s name appears in a petition submitted to the French Foreign Ministry requesting permission to open a Greek Catholic (or “Melkite”) church. The campaign was eventually successful and in 1889 the ancient Parisian church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was consecrated as a Melkite place of worship, complete with a  priest appointed by the Melkite Patriarch in Damascus. Today Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre still thrives as a Melkite church, serving a sizeable parish of Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians.

The curious thing about these two episodes is that the cousins were neither Orthodox nor Melkite. Rather they were Roman Catholics, baptised and confirmed in the Latin rites. What had led these two men to Kiev and Paris, and how did they thrive in religious communities to which they did not belong? In the tradition of the microstoria of the 1970s and 80s, this essay recounts the experiences of one merchant family as a means of reassessing the role of denomination in the lives of Ottoman Christians.

Intellectuals of the Arabic nahda are well-known for their fascination with notions of progress and modernisation, taqaddum and taḥdīth, as well as their accompanying interest in Darwinian theory and its social applications.  For most of these men of letters, history was moving forwards and upwards – the question was how to ensure their own societies did not miss the train. Much of the historiography to date has examined this strand of thought within the context of political reform, examining the various solutions (liberalist, egalitarian or nationalist), put forward to remedy the ills of a ‘backward’ Arab society. This chapter argues there was an equally strong, economic aspect to this reformism that has hitherto been understated in the literature.  A firm belief in the need for the modernisation of infrastructure and the exploitation of nature for economic profit was a consistent feature in the writings and pronouncements of Arab reformists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The chapter explores the enthusiasm for this type of development/taṭwīr in the context of Palestine through the late Ottoman and British periods of rule. On the one hand, it will offer a discussion of the writings and pronouncements of prominent Palestinian intellectuals and public figures on this subject. Men such as Ruhi al-Khalidi, Najib Nassar and ‘Awni ‘Abd al-Hadi, as well as local Jewish reformers like David Yellin and Shimon Moyal, were deeply interested in economic modernisation and their thought cannot be separated from wider currents of Ottoman reformism and Islamic modernism. On the other hand, the chapter describes a particular episode of this type of taṭwīr ¬– the development of the Dead Sea for mineral extraction. Although interest in gaining a Dead Sea mineral concession stretched back into the Ottoman period, it was only under British rule that the lake’s waters began to be exploited on an industrial scale. The chapter tells the story of one particular individual from Bethlehem, Ibrahim Hazboun, who was initially given a role in this process by the British mandatory government, only later to be removed in order to make way for a Zionist enterprise. Through this case study the chapter  argues that the disenfranchisement of a generation of Arab developers-in-waiting constituted a major element of Palestinian opposition to the British Mandate.

In 1930, the British Colonial Office signed a formal agreement with Moshe Novomeysky, a Russian-Jewish mining engineer from Siberia, creating a British-Zionist company, 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 the massive industries found today on both the Israeli and Jordanian sides of the lake. From a British perspective, the Dead Sea industry proved to be one of the few success stories of the Palestine Mandate, although it remains virtually unexamined by historians. The project embodied much of the interwar emphasis on colonial development – construed at that time as the more intensive exploitation of natural resources found in imperial domains. The barren and seemingly lifeless quality of the landscape around the Dead Sea provided an irresistible piece of symbolism for those extolling the transformative capacity of Britain’s colonial presence in Palestine. The lake’s status in religious scripture as a sinful wilderness rendered this symbolism all the more powerful. To turn this hostile and cursed body of water into a thriving site of industrial modernity was to demonstrate everything that European colonial development was capable of in the new ‘Middle East’.

At the same time, however, the Dead Sea development was built upon much older foundations laid during Europe’s period of ‘rediscovery’ of the Holy Land during the long nineteenth century. This chapter will therefore examine the creation of the Dead Sea industry as a product of a gradually encroaching western colonialism in Palestine that far predated the assumption of formal British rule in 1917. Over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a kind of canon of expertise on the Dead Sea was compiled by western scientists and explorers, establishing the lake as a site of potential improvement and economic exploitation. In this body of work, only westerners were held capable of such a transformation as they were considered the only people able to view the natural environment from a detached, empirical perspective. The chapter will assess these claims in a critical light, demonstrating the extent to which sentimental attachment to the lake continually blurred the boundaries between science and religion, objectivity and subjectivity. So often in histories that examine the western ‘rediscovery’ of Palestine in the nineteenth century, the consequences for the period of direct British rule in the twentieth century are left untouched. This chapter will attempt to bridge these two historiographical domains, showing that the Dead Sea’s status in the interwar years as one of Britain’s largest ‘undeveloped estates’ was heavily dependent on the years of exploration and discovery in the nineteenth century.

Arabic-speaking migrants from the Ottoman Empire embarked on mass migrations across the Atlantic in the late 19th century. Large numbers traded and settled in the Caribbean region, forming the nucleus of communities that still thrive in the early 21st century. Although underplayed in the existing historical literature on the Caribbean and modern Middle East, these Caribbean migrations were a vital part of the creation of an Arab diaspora across the Americas. In the early years of emigration out of the Ottoman Empire, mostly Christian Arabs utilized their preexisting trading bases in the ports of Western Europe to launch new exploratory ventures across the Atlantic. In many cases, the Caribbean islands were their first ports of call where they found ideal conditions for peddling small consumer goods they imported from Europe and North America. From these initial bases, they fanned out across the region, often using the Caribbean islands as stepping stones toward ventures on the mainland. A pattern developed whereby migrants sought out boomtowns around the Caribbean region where fast-expanding export economies (particularly in bananas and sugar) offered lucrative opportunities for peddlers and small-scale retailers. In cities like San Pedro Sula (Honduras), San Pedro de Macorís (Dominican Republic), and Barranquilla (Colombia), Arab traders played central roles in the rapid growth of the local economy. Taken collectively, these case studies speak of an “Arab Caribbean”—a regional sphere of migration and trade that transcended national boundaries, encompassing both the islands and the Caribbean coasts of Mexico, Central America, and South America. Despite their frequent persecution in their new places of residence, Arab migrants in the Caribbean proved remarkably resilient, utilizing their region-wide networks to regroup and adapt to the changing economic and political landscape.

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.

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.

Arab intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are well-known for their fascination with notions of progress and modernisation. Much of the historiography to date has examined this strand of thought within the context of political reform, examining the various solutions (liberalist, egalitarian or nationalist), put forward to remedy the ills of a ‘backward’ Arab society. This paper argues there was an equally strong, economic aspect to this reformism that has hitherto been understated in the literature. A firm belief in the need for the modernisation of infrastructure and the exploitation of nature for economic profit was a consistent feature in the writings and pronouncements of Arab reformists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The paper explores the enthusiasm for this type of development in the context of Palestine through the late Ottoman and British periods of rule. If firstly discusses the writings and pronouncements of prominent Palestinian intellectuals and public figures. It then moves on to describe a particular case: the debates over the development of the Dead Sea for mineral extraction. Through this case study the paper argues that the disenfranchisement of a generation of Arab developers-in-waiting constituted a major element of Palestinian opposition to the British Mandate.

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 a...

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.

In April 1936 growing unrest among the Arab community of Palestine led to the outbreak of a sustained revolt that would pose the most serious threat to British rule thus far experienced by the mandate government. Initially manifesting itself as an urban-led campaign of civil disobedience directed against the Zionist presence in Palestine, the second phase of the rebellion developed into a far more violent and peasant-led resistance movement that increasingly targeted British forces. Britain's response to this unrest has been the focus of much historical research, but few studies have examined the realities of the counterinsurgency at ground level or the relevance of this to the internal fracturing and collapse of the rebel movement in 1939. This article investigates the interplay between the colonial forces and the rural Arab population, highlighting Britain's resort to more heavy-handed military violence during the second phase of the Revolt, and situating these tactics in the wider issue of British abuses perpetrated during states of emergency.