From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem between Ottoman and British Rule

Abstract

ABIGAIL JACOBSON, From Empire to Empire: Jerusalem Between Ottoman and British Rule (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011). Pp. 262. $34.95 cloth.Abigail Jacobson makes an important contribution to a topic that until recently was not sufficiently studied. Although the last years of Ottoman rule and the first years of British occupation in Jerusalem have been dealt with before, they were studied mostly through events relevant to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rarely from the perspective of social history. Jacobson focuses on a period that saw such grave events as the Great War, the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine, the issue of the Balfour Declaration and an intense Zionist activity in Palestine. On a political level, it was, no doubt, a very significant period that represented the end of an imperial era and the start of a colonial one. Still, to reduce it solely to the political changes that took place misses the complexity of the period altogether, for this was also a period in which the people of Jerusalem, and of Palestine in general, faced new challenges in real life as well as realpolitik. The rise of Zionism and the immigration it brought to Palestine for one, brought new kinds of to the country. Though this was a political problem in itself, for the native population, including native Jews, it represented a new challenge. Similarly, there were the transformations in the Ottoman lands since the Young Turks' ascent to power in 1908 and the freedoms that became available as well as the hardships that were affecting social and communal affairs and in the city in new ways. The start of British rule itself also presented the people of Palestine with new challenges, and the partition of Palestine from the rest of Syria brought about others.Jacobson provides the reader with a sort of social history of Jerusalem that tackles these issues. She utilizes what, Zackary Lockman, after the work of Perry Anderson, termed which attempts to narrate the interdependence between communities rather than the history of conflict between them. In her book, Jacobson questions the national binary between and and moves on to examine the history of interaction between and within each of group. Her relational approach takes into account the complex web of economic, political, social and cultural interaction and relations between the two groups sharing one space. In fact, she challenges the very premise that in the late Ottoman period they were distinctly two separate communities. By doing so, Jacobson manages, largely, to examine the social histories of the Jerusalemites from within the city as one community. Although such a premise is revolutionary and is a muchneeded approach to this particular history, Jacobson still appears at points to use the terms Jews and Arabs as if they were exclusively different communities and often describes people she mentions with their respective religious affiliation. …