Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture

253 Pages·2008·1.169 MB·English

by  Salim Tamari

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Mountain against the Sea
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Mountain against the Sea
Essays on Palestinian Society
and Culture
Salim Tamari
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley . Los Angeles . London
University of California Press, one of the most distin-
guished university presses in the United States, enriches
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tivities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by
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stitutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2009 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tamari, Salim.
Mountain against the Sea : essays on Palestinian so-
ciety and culture / Salim Tamari.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn: 978-0-520-25129-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Palestinian Arabs—Intellectual life—20th cen-
tury. 2. Palestine—Social life and customs—20th
century. 3. Palestine—Civilization. I.Title.
ds112.t36 2008
956.9405—dc22 2008021097
Manufactured in the United States of America
17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains
50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum
requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
For Anton Shammas
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Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction: Palestine’s Conflictual Modernity 1
2. The Mountain against the Sea? Cultural Wars
of the Eastern Mediterranean 22
3. From Emma Bovary to Hasan al-Banna:
Small Towns and Social Control 36
4. Bourgeois Nostalgia and the Abandoned City 56
5. A Musician’s Lot: The Jawhariyyeh Memoirs as a
Key to Jerusalem’s Early Modernity 71
6. Lepers, Lunatics, and Saints: The Nativist
Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and His Circle 93
7. Sultana and Khalil: The Origins of Romantic Love
in Palestine 113
8. The Last Feudal Lord 133
9. Ishaq Shami and the Predicament of the Arab Jew
in Palestine 150
10. The Enigmatic Bolshevik from the Holy City 167
11. The Vagabond Café and Jerusalem’s Prince of Idleness 176
Notes 191
Bibliography 215
Index 223