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Unmixing the Holy City: Religion, Politics, and Neighborhood Segregation in 19th-20th Century Jerusalem
Michelle Campos is Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Pennsylvania State University. The author of the award-winning Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth Century Palestine, she is currently completing a book on neighborhood life and intercommunal relations in 19th and early 20th century Jerusalem. Campos has just completed co-editing the translated memoirs of a Maghrebi Jewish public figure in Jaffa-Tel Aviv, and she is co-directing an NEH collaborative research project on “Reimagining Jewish Life in the Modern Middle East.”
In the late 1920s, the Jerusalem Jewish Community Council undertook a project it called “Operation Concentration of the Jews in Jerusalem.” The aim of the campaign was to reorganize the city’s residential spaces by concentrating the city’s Jews in a contiguous, Jewish-owned territory. Simultaneously, Jewish urban leaders advocated the partition of the city into separate “Hebrew” and “Arab” municipalities. This talk examines this early moment of deliberate demographic and political “unmixing” against the backdrop of the longer history of Jerusalem, its residents, and shifting intercommunal relations in the city. Starting from Ottoman census and shari’a court records that offer a portrait of an entangled urban landscape, the lecture will shift to look at the roles of religious officials, ideological movements, colonial policy, and urban violence to explore the breakdown of municipal governance and a shared civitas.