Until their defeat in 1917, the Turks ruled Palestine, often with an iron first. The American Colony photographers maintained a photo album of the last years of the Turkish control. Of this man, Hassan Bey, the album bore this caption: "The Tyrant of Jaffa."
Hassan Bey the Tyrant of Jaffa
The opinion was shared by the Jews of Palestine who were often rounded up and in many cases expelled from the country. Turkish rulers were particularly harsh against "Zionists" who were often viewed as "separatist" agents for foreign countries like Russia.
In 1921, the Zionist Organization of London presented a report, entitled "Palestine during the War," to the Twelfth Zionist Congress.
Jaffa mosque (circa 1915) According to the report,The harshest and most cruel of all the Turkish officials was the Commandant of the Jaffa district, Hassan Bey. He was the very type of an Oriental satrap. It would suddenly come into his head to summon respectable householders to him after midnight, and hours after they would return to their expectant families with an order to bring him some object from their homes which had caught his fancy or of which he had heard — an electric clock, a carpet, etc. Groundless arrests, insults, tortures, bastinadoes [clubs] — these were things every householder had to fear.
Hassan Bey also had an ambition to beautify the towns. For this purpose he suddenly had whole rows of houses pulled down without offering any reason, and forced the owners to sign legal documents stating that they gave up all claim to their property. Both they and the other inhabitants were compelled to provide building materials and money. He forced the laborers under threat of the lash to give work without payment.
Hassan Bey continually demanded from the Jewish institutions money for and active participation in the execution of public works (building of a mosque in Jaffa, erection of the Mohammedan schools founded by him, etc.). The Jewish communal committees particularly excited his wrath. When Hassan Bey presented a demand to a colony, he usually reinforced it with a threat to attack the colony with his soldiers and wipe it out if his request was not fulfilled.
Marble grave stones used by the Jaffa
Tyrant Hassan Bey to build the mosque
The mosque referred to is the Hassan Bey (also known as the Hassan Bek) Mosque between Jaffa and Tel Aviv. Hassan Bey intended to limit the growth of Tel Aviv southward, so he placed the new mosque north of Jaffa.
The Hassan Bek mosque today (courtesy)
Repeatedly interceding on behalf of the Jews of Palestine in 1914 were the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Sr., and the American Consul General to Jerusalem, Otis Glazebrook. When the American naval cruiser, the USS North Carolina, was dispatched to Jaffa to bring $50,000 to the desperate Jewish community. Morgenthau lobbied hard to block Hassan Bey's attempts to steal the money.
The American Colony photographers clearly loved to take pictures of Jewish children as they traveled around the Holy Land 80-100 years ago. Most of their pictures are group shots of children in the "New Yishuv," the settlements established by the Zionist movement after 1880. Many of these pictures have appeared in these pages in the past.
"Little boy, Moshe & Shlomo go to Wailing Wall with their father" (1934)
But their collection also includes pictures of children of the "Old Yishuv," the Jewish communities of Eretz Yisrael, predominantly ultra-Orthodox Jews, who lived in the holy Jewish cities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Safad and Tiberias. Some of them are descendants of Jews who lived in Palestine over the centuries.
See previous posting on the children of the Bukharan Jewish community in Jerusalem. The Sephardi community moved to Jerusalem from the area of Uzbekistan in the 1890s.
Orthodox Jew with 2 youngsters, on
Sabbath walk to Wailing Wall
Jewish boys on Sabbath, trying to avoid
being photographed (1934). See also hereMany of the Library of Congress pictures were taken on the Sabbath as the Orthodox Jews were walking to and from the Western Wall. The Jews did not want to be photographed and many tried to hide their faces from the photographer.Click on a picture to enlarge. Click on a caption to view the original. Receive a Daily Picture by subscribing in the right sidebar and clicking "submit."
Jerusalem children on a balcony The Library of Congress collection contains this picture (left) of children on a Jerusalem balcony, dated sometime "between 1925 and 1946."
Blowing Sabbath Shofar 
Batei Rand (courtesy) But wait, elsewhere in the vast Library collection is this picture (above right) of an "Ashkenazi Jew blowing Sabbath shofar" to announce the beginning of the Sabbath. The picture is dated 1934-1939. Yes, it is the same balcony, even some of the same children.Where was the picture taken? The architectural style suggests the Batei Ungarin complex built in 1891 outside of the confines of the Old City for Hassidic Jews from Hungary. But then as today, the neighborhood was known for its insularity and xenophobia, and not likely to allow photographers to take pictures.Another, more likely choice is the Batei Rand complex built in 1910 by a Hassidic Jew from Poland. Note the lintels, windows and security bars on the windows in the shofar blower's picture and this modern photo.0Add a comment
- SEP12
The Arab Revolt in Palestine, Part III The Railroads, Defending against Arab Attack 1936-1939
Derailed locomotive, 1936 New picture added of hostage on railroad tracks. (January 2012)
The Arab attacks against the Jews and British in Palestine were frequently directed against motor vehicles and railroads. These pictures from the Library of Congress-American Colony collection show the extensive damage to the trains and the special measures taken by the British, including armed escorts.
Derailed train, 1936
The British government's annual reports on the Administration of Palestine and Transjordan lists monthly attacks against the rail system. According to the 1936 report, for instance,"During June 1936 there were twelve acts of sabotage on the railway, and on two occasions trains were wrecked, one of the derailments near Lydda on the 26th June causing four deaths and considerable damage to the line and rolling stock. In consequence of this act of sabotage, which followed closely upon an organized attack on the Civil Airport at Lydda, a curfew was imposed on the town of Lydda."
British army guards with machine guns riding in a special
armored rail car
British marines guarding the trains
At one point the British army even put Arab hostages on a flatbed in front of a rail car as they checked the rails for mines.
Arab hostage on flatbed in front of vehicle checking the
tracks for mines. (This photo was miscaptioned in the
Library of Congress collection)
Arab hostages sitting in a rail cart as
British troops patrol the train
tracks (1936). Not from the Library
of Congress collection0Add a comment
The Shiloah Village outside of the Jerusalem Old City walls dates back to biblical days. Its famous Shiloah spring was utilized for Temple libations.
A Yemenite Jew looks at his village in Silwan (circa 1901) The caption on this Library of Congress photograph reads, "The village of Siloam [i.e. Siloan, Shiloah, Silwan] and Valley of Kedron, Palestine." But whoever wrote the caption, perhaps 110 years ago, missed an important fact. The man standing above his village is a Jew from Yemen.The most famous Jewish Yemenite migration to the Land of Israel took place in 1949 and 1950 when almost 50,000 Jews were airlifted to Israel in "Operation On Eagles Wings -- על כנפי נשרים" also known as "Operation Magic Carpet."But another migration took place 70 years earlier in 1881-1882 when a group of Jews of Yemen arrived by foot to Jerusalem. They belonged to no "Zionist movement." They returned out of an age-old religious fervor to return to Zion.The new immigrants settled on Jewish-owned property in the Shiloah Village outside of the Old City walls of Jerusalem.
A Jewish Yemenite family (circa 1914) The gentleman in the photograph above wears the distinctive Jewish Yemenite clothing of the time, according to a Yemenite expert today.The photo collection also contains portraits of Yemenite Jews, such as this family portrait from the early 1900s. Look at the picture, presumably of three generations. And realize that if that baby were still alive today, 100 years later, he would be the family elder of another three or four generations of Jews in the Holy Land.The Jews of Shiloah were the targets of anti-Jewish pogroms during the anti-Jewish riots in 1921 and again during the 1936-39 Arab revolt when they were evacuated by the British authorities.Jewish families returned to Silwan/Shiloah after Israel reunited the city of Jerusalem in 1967.PS. I have already had an interesting response from a descendent of a resident from the Shiloah village:לעניות דעתי התמונה של הגבר על רקע הכפר היא של יהודי חבאני ( יהודי חבאן היו גבוהי קומה) ושל המשפחה נראה שהיא משפחה שעלתה מצנעאIn my humble opinion, the man in the picture with the [Shiloach] village in the background is a Jew fom Habani (the Jews of Hamani were tall) and the family looks like a family that made aliya from Saana.1View comments
Tuesday, August 18, 2015
Who Is this Man, and Why Was He So Hated? Hassan Bey, Turkish Commandant of Jaffa, 1914 - picture a day
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