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TRADING SECRETS: CONSTRUCTIONS AND CONTEXTS OF TWO MIDDLE EASTERN JEWISH GUARDS IN THE EARLY PETAH TIKVA AGRICULTURAL COLONY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2019

Liora R. Halperin
Liora R. Halperin*
Affiliation:
Liora R. Halperin is an Associate Professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and the Department of History, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash; e-mail: lhalper@uw.edu
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Abstract

Two Arabic-speaking Jewish guards worked in the European Jewish agricultural colony of Petah Tikva soon after its founding, northeast of Jaffa, in 1878: Daud abu Yusuf from Baghdad and Yaʿqub bin Maymun Zirmati, a Maghribi Jew from Jaffa. The two men, who worked as traders among Bedouin but were recruited for a short time by the colony, offer a rare glimpse of contacts between Ashkenazi and Middle Eastern Jews in rural Jewish colonies established in the last quarter of the 19th century, colonies that are often regarded as detached from their local and Ottoman landscape. The article first argues that Zionist sources constructed these two men as bridges to the East in their roles as teachers of Arabic and perceived sources of legitimization for the European Jewish settlement project. It then reads beyond the sparse details offered in Ashkenazi Zionist sources to resituate these men in their broad imperial and regional context and argue that, contrary to the local Zionist accounts, the colony was in fact likely to have been marginal to these men's commercial and personal lives.

Keywords

JewsOttoman EmpirePalestinesettlementZionism
Type
Article
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 51 , Issue 1 , February 2019 , pp. 65 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

NOTES

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31 Smilansky, Perakim be-Toledot ha-Yishuv, 2:98.

32 Ibid., 97.

33 Raab, Ha-Telem Ha-Rishon, 67.

34 Ben-Ur uses this term to describe the experience of Levantine Jews who came to America and found that the denial of shared ethnicity cost them jobs and led Sephardi immigrants to found new newspapers and institutions to serve their needs. This recognition failure was real (not simply a result of prejudice): Ashkenazi Jews genuinely did not recognize their coreligionists as Jews. Ben-Ur, Aviva, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 108–9Google Scholar.

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59 Vaʿad ha-Yedidim le-Hotsaʾat Zikhronot shel Avraham Shapira, Letter to religious Jewish community institutions, 13 February 1939, Petah Tikva Archive 003.002/12.

60 One of the earliest uses of this term in Hebrew comes from 1903, Y. Goldfarb, “Wilad al-Miyetah,” Ha-Tsofeh, 18 Nisan [15 April] 1903, p1. It becomes standard in authoritative Zionist accounts about the history of Jewish settlement and the development of militaristic Jewish organizations. See, for example, Slutsky, Yehuda, Kitsur Toledot ha-Haganah (Jerusalem: Misrad ha-Bitahon-ha-Hotsaʾah la-Or, 1978), 11Google Scholar.

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74 Harizman, Gevurat Rishonim, 105.

75 Shva, Ho ʿIr, Ho Em, 148.

76 Constanze Kolbe, “Crossing Regions, Nations, Empires: The Jews of Corfu and the Making of a Jewish Adriatic, 1850–1914” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2017), 105–53.

77 Harizman, Gevurat Rishonim, 105.

78 Ibid., 148.