In keeping with the theme for the 2010 meeting, my paper will examine gender and sexual roles in family albums from the late Ottoman and British Mandate Jerusalem. It will investigate both the albums as sources for the study of social life in the city at the time, as well as the agency of the albums as objects with social life of their own. While the former goal is self explanatory, the latter appears paradoxical in light of the common wisdom in which agents and objects are dichotomously contrasted. Drawing on recent research in fields like archeology, history and representation relating to material culture, my paper will counter such an assumption about the dichotomy between people and things as it argues that inanimate objects come to be "socially alive" in certain historical contexts. More specifically, the paper will examine a number of albums preserved in family collections of Palestinians who lived in Jerusalem during the period in question. They include the photographic albums of musician Wasif Jawhariyeh, of Julia and George Lucy, and of the Salti, Sahhar, and Theodory families, among others. Although the bulk of the photographs in the albums represent family life as depicted in personal portraits, quite a few of the pictures in the albums deal with travel, picnics, social activities, family occasions and political events. One album in particular depicts the trip taken by five young Palestinians from Jerusalem in 1936 to attend the Olympics in Berlin. The seven albums of Jawhariyeh depict public figures and political events from the period. Photographic albums are archives of memory and visual records of family and personal lives. As they are viewed, and shown, by various people, the process begins whereby they read into them not only--or maybe not at all--what the owner of the album intended, but what they can or chose to see through the coloring of their own knowledge, expectations, background and ideological orientation. Thus, with each "viewing" a new set of meanings is assigned to the album and the pictures it contains. Examining the ways in which such albums were transmitted, sold on eBay or by antiquarians, preserved in archives--familial or national--and viewed by later generations can also inform us of how these albums, and the family structures, and gender roles they depict came to be seen by intervening generations.

In December 1917 the British occupied Jerusalem and in few years established a Mandate to rule Palestine. During the First World War British policy makers made several contradicting promises to different actors in relation to the Middle East, the most dramatic to the Zionist movement with the Balfour Declaration promising the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. When the Balfour Declaration became public knowledge in late 1917 the attitude of local Arab Christians towards the Jews changed, as they felt threatened by Jewish immigration. This paper aims to show how the war had a major impact on the local Christian communities through the renegotiation of local alliances and on the de-marginalisation of the Christians, who subsequently became an active part of the emerging Arab nationalist movement. Local Christian notables in Jerusalem joined their Muslim counterparts in political, cultural and literary associations which opposed Jewish immigration. One of the main problems of these associations was the political vision of their Muslim members concerning the future of Palestine. Some local Muslim leaders encouraged Palestinian Christians to convert to Islam, as some Muslim leaders viewed Christian faith closely intertwined with European interests in the region and therefore corrupted. This paper argues religions were not transformed in their doctrines, but allowed some exchanges due to the contingency of the situation and political reasons. The zenith of this renegotiation of alliances took place in April 1920 when in occasion of the Nebi Musa celebrations, an Islamic religious festival whose purpose was to create a bond between various parts of country, riots broke out. Several were the outcomes of the riots, the most important a change in the perception of identity from religious to national. In this paper I will also argue that violence and trauma experienced in the region were embedded into political ideologies which 'inevitably' came to include seeds of violence. Due to the trauma of the Balfour Declaration and the violent struggle that emerged between Zionists and Arabs, violence became part of the local political vocabulary marking permanently the local identities of Jerusalem and a major shift from the Ottoman era.

This paper argues that the relationship of Palestine's indigenous Jewish communities with Zionism, the Ottoman state and Arab Palestinians has been obscured by the historiography, which has presented a simplistic dichotomy between the Jewish "Old Yishuv" (orthodox and traditional) and the "New Yishuv" (Zionist and modern). The historiography has also misrepresented important distinctions between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews, while more recently the romanticized category of the "Arab Jew" does not capture the historical realities for Jews in Palestine. This article seeks to problematise these issues through the memoir of Justice Gad Fromkin, an Ashkenazi Jew who was born in the "Muslim Quarter", educated in Istanbul, appointed by the British to Palestine's Supreme Court and finally dismissed from service by the first Israeli government. The paper will follow the uneasy path of Frumkin from Ottoman integration to Zionist segregation under British rule. Underused by historians outside Israel, Frumkin's memoir proves the rich potential of Jewish and Hebrew published sources to the history of modern Palestine. The memoir provides striking evidence of links between Ashkenazim and Arabs; it shows the ways in which Palestine's indigenous Jewish population - regardless of its sympathies - was swept aside by Zionism and the foundation of Israel; and finally, Frumkin's account of his political attempts to negotiate a "bi-national" state shed new light on the debate which is currently attracting growing attention.